If elections officials told the public, "We're going to count by a secret counting method and we won't tell you how we're going to count; you'll just have to trust us that we picked the right person for the job," the public would burn down city hall. Unfortunately, the public hasn't yet realized that this is exactly what is happening....
Nothing suggests to me that the American public are that concerned to do anything. It barely flinched with the NASA wiretapping incident, and more recently the passing of the bill to expand those powers.
If it eventually ends up that people with more reputation gain an edit advantage over people with none or less, than Wikipedia really becomes a simulation of real-life with the "establishment" and its rebels.
Women in the top positions didn't make it there through motherly-love and baking cookies for their colleagues.
They beat the men at their own ruthless game.
For instance I noticed when they dropped ATRAC3, they did not replace it with another lame proprietary format. MiniDisc, retired (and it was very popular in the UK for a while, as well as pro audio field recording - hardly a failure. Ignorance to call it that.)
As a long abused MiniDisc user I'd like to verify your statements. It is true that ATRAC3 severely handicapped the MD market for almost a decade alongside other sorts of recording limitations (3 upload copies only, live-recordings transferred to desktop sometimes made difficult) and the MP3 format was only allowed on the MD about two years ago, when Sony finally realized that they were screwing themselves over. By then the portable music player market was already saturated with other MP3 players and more recently the iPod.
But the MD isn't dead yet. By the way, it's moved to "Hi-MD", which has a gig of storage per MD. We all at Minidisc Forums suspected as much but Sony actually recently announced one new model this year! And it's very refined. It's the fastest selling Hi-MD model so far and may indicate a slight upturn in the market. The problem is we don't know whether this is the final entry into the Hi-MD market that Sony will make.. Stringer's entry into CEO came with the announcement of streamlining their product line and we still don't know if that means killing the MD market.
Where did your fluffy image of Nintendo come about from? They're not innocent, they want money too -- and bad. I've heard criticism towards Sony as a sequel-maker, but these very same Nintentards ignore the fact that Nintendo are probably the mother of all milkers.
One word: POKEMON. Let's not start on Mario, Zelda, and their various incarnations. "But they're fun!!", you whine. People who bought the sequels on the PS2 found them fun as well.
Calling Penny Arcade "two of most influential personalities in gaming" pretty much seals the deal for sensationalization. The two lads might have a following, but to say that they exert even near the same influence as someone like Hideo Kojima of Metal Gear Solid would be a laugh. Note, the key word is "most".
I'll say that Sony has been in utter shit the past half decade, failing miserably with their MD players because of proprietary formats and narrow-minded planning (I got burned, not investing into LCD TVs early enough and thus falling back against competition, and of course, the recent fracas with the rootkits and exploding batteries. Sony also display the strangest behavior from a corporation that I have ever seen. Instead of feeling the burn, turning back, and coming back to apologise to consumers and put on a nice behavior (on the front at least, anyway) like most other corporations, they try ever so harder to game the consumers and weasel their way into more profits. Seriously. It's like a felon fully habituated and burned into his criminal behavior, trying only harder to foul without detection.
With that said, the bashing on the PS3 is overwhelming. The system will perform better than most people think.
It's not a logical necessity that monopolies are bad for service, or that even competition is good for customer service. Say in a competitive 4-10 player market, it is still possible for the companies set up a (silent) cartel limiting customer service such that they keep their costs down and offer a uniformly bad customer service to consumers. Of course, this is unlikely.
My concern is that it's rather obvious that good customer service is a solid strategy for gaining and RETAINING customers, but companies choose not to do so.. why? I think profit scrimping is one thing, but the other would be the demands of the quarterly-based postings of the earnings of companies. Strategies are now geared for the short-term, and CEOs or whatever people making the decisions squeeze as much as they can and make a name and buck for themselves.
This is tricky with more cutting edge disciplines though. For example, different editions of a neuroscience textbook will probably hold significantly different content, and the most recent, cutting edge material (new discoveries) are likely those which are debated about in class. For the more "stable" disciplines like Calculus, new editions are probably less necessary.
Falsification is a slightly outdated way of approaching the debate, for two reasons. The first is that it was used by Popper as a condition that a scientific must satisfy, and not all creationists care about whether their theories are scientific theories or not. You then lodge an argument against them that they don't even care about. The second is that contemporary philosophers of science do think of falsification as a good "rule of thumb" or a generally good requisite for theories but is not the defining feature. This is because of two reasons which I'll only cite the names of; Quine's "Web of Beliefs" as well as "Underdetermination of a theory by its data".
The best way to put frame creationist theories are that its conclusions are true BY DEFINITION, that is, it possesses a circularity that has no real explanatory power.
I think the concern with alot of posters on this topic is that depression is something worth escaping from (despite its rumored literary-inspirational quality), which is why this research is worthy. Let's conceptualize depression as an extended residence in a state below the "baseline" level of happiness. Most of us humans reside about around the baseline, and the key is whether these special mice reside around (normal) or above the baseline (happy).
If it's above the baseline, then I think what you propose could very likely happen. Permanently happy mice is differently from normal mice. Depression can be theorized as an extreme form of the "sad" emotion, and such negative emotions do have a function in life. They become adversive states that condition your behavior; that is, you may have messed up something and failed, making you unhappy. You resolve to not fail again, and go about working on it. In this sense, failure and more importantly, your reaction to it directs (by that, I don't mean command but point to) your future behavior.
Some permanently happy humans would probably not upset the ecological balance of society. Many, and I have no idea.
The behavior of these fish are interesting; you need to keep a largish school to see the full range. Somewhere around eight or nine fish, suddenly you see a completely different set of behaviors emerge. Clearly they are intelligent fish despite their tiny size, but much of that intelligence comes out when there are enough fish for them to feel comfortable and confident.
If anything, I'd say that the intelligence arises from the complexity that comes with more members and a rich environment. With neighbouring goldfish, the cognitive landscape is changed because you now have a potential competitor (threat) or a potential playmate (benefit). Interaction levels are increased with a wider range of possible actions.. I seriously think you've anthromorphized the fishies for this point.
While it's true that there is a certain cultural bias to work harder in many Asian cultures, one has to question whether it's an inherent trait, or if it's the result of living in a part of the world that is often exploited for the good of wealthier nations.
I just want to point out that you're offering a misleading frame of two alternatives -- strong work ethic as innate character or third-world conditions. It's actually more like the asian culture, or the asian spirit that forges this sort of hard working mentality. However, it's probably true that the poverty, massive lower-class (farmer population) and the dire living conditions select for the dilligent. Then, that sort of mentality is drilled into descendants.
An example of cultural effect would be Japan: Japanese salary men don't live in conditions anywhere near third-world nations; nor are they exploited by first-world nations. Their working hours are legendary, just like their suicide rates. I've heard that it comes from their historical roots in the samurai, always chasing for perfection..
The hard-working stereotype of oriental asians in the West is also explainable by the fact that immigrants or visitors (like students) to the West are only a specific subset of the asian population. Immigrants are usually middle-class or higher, with well-educated parents who likely came through with solid work ethics in their earlier life. Foreign asian students who go over to Canadian/US universities are usually rather bright (or very rich). As a result, the stereotype conceived is probably not at all a close representative of the general asian population.
You are badly mistaken, and I'd advise you to consult any philosopher friends if you have them beside you. The general gist has always been the split between deductive and inductive logic/arguments. Math is deductive, while science is inductive (by virtue of its empirical nature).
Math is "true" via axiomatic assumptions that a particular math is built upon. They form the "premise" which is analogous to deductive arguments. Therefore, when you write and derive mathematical statements, they are "true" as elaborated functions that ride upon the background of axioms. You don't test the validity of axioms in math, they're just there (don't ask me what this means, no philosopher has come up with a widely-accepted theory of numbers, even).
Science, in contrast, is empirical and its findings are not best described as truth, like another poster mentioned, but FACT. Each empirical case adds onto the finding that helps to make the case for a theory, or completely disprove one (because you only need one solid counter-example to disprove a universal assertion, while a universal assertion cannot be proved with finitely large amounts of agreeing data). As such, scientific theories have sometimes been described as "approximations" or "simulations" of physical reality.
You far too easily make the statement that "math is just a specialised and more abstract form of science".. Both of them are vastly different systems, with science incorporating elements of math as tools for theory-building, calculations and in general, empirical work. My guess, and I think many philosophers of science would agree, is that they are not separated by a gray line.
HUH????? Truth is a fundamental concept in science and math. For example all the algebraic manipulation you ever do with equations and inequalities rests on the fact that you've proven a fundamental concept is true and can be applied to transform that expression such that the expression still holds true.
I'd like to see you come up with a similar example for science. The reason why we can do it for math are very special reasons... For example Wittgenstein came to the conclusion that math is essentially a closed system, and you can make "truth" observations in such closed systems because of the token-token relationships.
I'd elaborate more but it'll get fairly technical. It's different with science, which isn't a closed system but a correspondence one (to the world).
It's not really survival of the fittest. In fact, that which survives, survives. And when the environment changes, it stops surviving.
I think you're taking "fittest" in the wrong sense. What it means is not the survival of the strongest, or the most physically fit (healthy) but rather "fit" in the sense of being compatible with the environment. Thus, in evolutionary talk, the use of "evolutionary fitness"..
I'm against the idea of abortion but think it should be legal. I don't like flag burning, but I think an amendment against it is a silly idea. I don't care about gay marraige, it shouldn't be banned, but before we allow it, we need to take a careful look at all the societal and economic consequences.
Do we look at all "societal and economic consequences" before giving equal rights to blacks and females?
By the way, according to Wikipedia, at least 85% of Icelanders are Christians and belong to the National Church of Iceland. Which makes the contrast of the belief ratio between Iceland/America even more dramatic.
.. shows that the tidiness of a person's room is very poorly correlated with his or her tidiness in other areas of life (handwriting on school work, for example). The correlation is about or less than 10% (0.1). Other personality research has shown that a person's behavior across situations is poorly correlated -- what is relatively predictive is her behavior across time for repeated trials of a given situation.
I'm suprised at some of the things expressed in the article, but note that the psychologist is actually quite careful in his proclamation:
"If you keep your inbox full rather than empty, it may mean you keep your life cluttered in other ways," says psychologist Dave Greenfield, who founded the Center for Internet Behavior in West Hartford, Conn. "Do you cling to the past? Do you have a lot of unfinished business in your life?"
Of course, it still remains somewhat sensationalist. But did we expect less?
Actually, basic first year psychology texts describe an even MORE basic (and suprising experiment).
Instead of having mere pictures of eyes and such, they have mirrors placed in front of participants who are isolated in rooms doing tests. They have to stop at a certain time limit by themselves, and it was found that the participants with mirrors placed in front of them "cheated" (by continuing to work on the test after the time limit) less than participants with no mirrors in front of them.
The drawn conclusion is something along the lines that the mirror provides continual access to explicit self-monitoring -- you wouldn't even want to see yourself cheating.
Well, to be fair, you never made that explicit in your original post. Your explanations now seem to be post-hoc confabulations than anything else, but it would be better in the future to post such caveats when you're making your post.
Slashdot Mirror
If elections officials told the public, "We're going to count by a secret counting method and we won't tell you how we're going to count; you'll just have to trust us that we picked the right person for the job," the public would burn down city hall. Unfortunately, the public hasn't yet realized that this is exactly what is happening....
Nothing suggests to me that the American public are that concerned to do anything. It barely flinched with the NASA wiretapping incident, and more recently the passing of the bill to expand those powers.
If it eventually ends up that people with more reputation gain an edit advantage over people with none or less, than Wikipedia really becomes a simulation of real-life with the "establishment" and its rebels.
Women in the top positions didn't make it there through motherly-love and baking cookies for their colleagues. They beat the men at their own ruthless game.
As a long abused MiniDisc user I'd like to verify your statements. It is true that ATRAC3 severely handicapped the MD market for almost a decade alongside other sorts of recording limitations (3 upload copies only, live-recordings transferred to desktop sometimes made difficult) and the MP3 format was only allowed on the MD about two years ago, when Sony finally realized that they were screwing themselves over. By then the portable music player market was already saturated with other MP3 players and more recently the iPod.
But the MD isn't dead yet. By the way, it's moved to "Hi-MD", which has a gig of storage per MD. We all at Minidisc Forums suspected as much but Sony actually recently announced one new model this year! And it's very refined. It's the fastest selling Hi-MD model so far and may indicate a slight upturn in the market. The problem is we don't know whether this is the final entry into the Hi-MD market that Sony will make.. Stringer's entry into CEO came with the announcement of streamlining their product line and we still don't know if that means killing the MD market.
Thank god all these online communities predicted success for Snakes on a Plane.
One word: POKEMON. Let's not start on Mario, Zelda, and their various incarnations. "But they're fun!!", you whine. People who bought the sequels on the PS2 found them fun as well.
I'll say that Sony has been in utter shit the past half decade, failing miserably with their MD players because of proprietary formats and narrow-minded planning (I got burned, not investing into LCD TVs early enough and thus falling back against competition, and of course, the recent fracas with the rootkits and exploding batteries. Sony also display the strangest behavior from a corporation that I have ever seen. Instead of feeling the burn, turning back, and coming back to apologise to consumers and put on a nice behavior (on the front at least, anyway) like most other corporations, they try ever so harder to game the consumers and weasel their way into more profits. Seriously. It's like a felon fully habituated and burned into his criminal behavior, trying only harder to foul without detection.
With that said, the bashing on the PS3 is overwhelming. The system will perform better than most people think.
My concern is that it's rather obvious that good customer service is a solid strategy for gaining and RETAINING customers, but companies choose not to do so.. why? I think profit scrimping is one thing, but the other would be the demands of the quarterly-based postings of the earnings of companies. Strategies are now geared for the short-term, and CEOs or whatever people making the decisions squeeze as much as they can and make a name and buck for themselves.
This is tricky with more cutting edge disciplines though. For example, different editions of a neuroscience textbook will probably hold significantly different content, and the most recent, cutting edge material (new discoveries) are likely those which are debated about in class. For the more "stable" disciplines like Calculus, new editions are probably less necessary.
The best way to put frame creationist theories are that its conclusions are true BY DEFINITION, that is, it possesses a circularity that has no real explanatory power.
I think not. You are probably referring to another unique subset that is probably nowhere representative of the conservative population.
I think the concern with alot of posters on this topic is that depression is something worth escaping from (despite its rumored literary-inspirational quality), which is why this research is worthy. Let's conceptualize depression as an extended residence in a state below the "baseline" level of happiness. Most of us humans reside about around the baseline, and the key is whether these special mice reside around (normal) or above the baseline (happy).
If it's above the baseline, then I think what you propose could very likely happen. Permanently happy mice is differently from normal mice. Depression can be theorized as an extreme form of the "sad" emotion, and such negative emotions do have a function in life. They become adversive states that condition your behavior; that is, you may have messed up something and failed, making you unhappy. You resolve to not fail again, and go about working on it. In this sense, failure and more importantly, your reaction to it directs (by that, I don't mean command but point to) your future behavior.
Some permanently happy humans would probably not upset the ecological balance of society. Many, and I have no idea.
If anything, I'd say that the intelligence arises from the complexity that comes with more members and a rich environment. With neighbouring goldfish, the cognitive landscape is changed because you now have a potential competitor (threat) or a potential playmate (benefit). Interaction levels are increased with a wider range of possible actions.. I seriously think you've anthromorphized the fishies for this point.
I just want to point out that you're offering a misleading frame of two alternatives -- strong work ethic as innate character or third-world conditions. It's actually more like the asian culture, or the asian spirit that forges this sort of hard working mentality. However, it's probably true that the poverty, massive lower-class (farmer population) and the dire living conditions select for the dilligent. Then, that sort of mentality is drilled into descendants.
An example of cultural effect would be Japan: Japanese salary men don't live in conditions anywhere near third-world nations; nor are they exploited by first-world nations. Their working hours are legendary, just like their suicide rates. I've heard that it comes from their historical roots in the samurai, always chasing for perfection..
The hard-working stereotype of oriental asians in the West is also explainable by the fact that immigrants or visitors (like students) to the West are only a specific subset of the asian population. Immigrants are usually middle-class or higher, with well-educated parents who likely came through with solid work ethics in their earlier life. Foreign asian students who go over to Canadian/US universities are usually rather bright (or very rich). As a result, the stereotype conceived is probably not at all a close representative of the general asian population.
How will astroturfing be prevented? Or minimized?
Math is "true" via axiomatic assumptions that a particular math is built upon. They form the "premise" which is analogous to deductive arguments. Therefore, when you write and derive mathematical statements, they are "true" as elaborated functions that ride upon the background of axioms. You don't test the validity of axioms in math, they're just there (don't ask me what this means, no philosopher has come up with a widely-accepted theory of numbers, even).
Science, in contrast, is empirical and its findings are not best described as truth, like another poster mentioned, but FACT. Each empirical case adds onto the finding that helps to make the case for a theory, or completely disprove one (because you only need one solid counter-example to disprove a universal assertion, while a universal assertion cannot be proved with finitely large amounts of agreeing data). As such, scientific theories have sometimes been described as "approximations" or "simulations" of physical reality.
You far too easily make the statement that "math is just a specialised and more abstract form of science".. Both of them are vastly different systems, with science incorporating elements of math as tools for theory-building, calculations and in general, empirical work. My guess, and I think many philosophers of science would agree, is that they are not separated by a gray line.
I'd like to see you come up with a similar example for science. The reason why we can do it for math are very special reasons... For example Wittgenstein came to the conclusion that math is essentially a closed system, and you can make "truth" observations in such closed systems because of the token-token relationships.
I'd elaborate more but it'll get fairly technical. It's different with science, which isn't a closed system but a correspondence one (to the world).
I think you're taking "fittest" in the wrong sense. What it means is not the survival of the strongest, or the most physically fit (healthy) but rather "fit" in the sense of being compatible with the environment. Thus, in evolutionary talk, the use of "evolutionary fitness"..
Do we look at all "societal and economic consequences" before giving equal rights to blacks and females?
By the way, according to Wikipedia, at least 85% of Icelanders are Christians and belong to the National Church of Iceland. Which makes the contrast of the belief ratio between Iceland/America even more dramatic.
I'm suprised at some of the things expressed in the article, but note that the psychologist is actually quite careful in his proclamation:
"If you keep your inbox full rather than empty, it may mean you keep your life cluttered in other ways," says psychologist Dave Greenfield, who founded the Center for Internet Behavior in West Hartford, Conn. "Do you cling to the past? Do you have a lot of unfinished business in your life?"
Of course, it still remains somewhat sensationalist. But did we expect less?
He didn't say anything about degree of technology. You can have high technology and still lead a simple, low consumption-rate life.
Aren't the 10 most common malwares common to Windows only because Windows is the dominant platform?
Instead of having mere pictures of eyes and such, they have mirrors placed in front of participants who are isolated in rooms doing tests. They have to stop at a certain time limit by themselves, and it was found that the participants with mirrors placed in front of them "cheated" (by continuing to work on the test after the time limit) less than participants with no mirrors in front of them.
The drawn conclusion is something along the lines that the mirror provides continual access to explicit self-monitoring -- you wouldn't even want to see yourself cheating.
Well, to be fair, you never made that explicit in your original post. Your explanations now seem to be post-hoc confabulations than anything else, but it would be better in the future to post such caveats when you're making your post.