Well, but isn't the CO2 released from petroleum technically bio-derived as well? (That is, unless you're one of those crackpots who doesn't believe oil is biogenic.) There's no Co2 coming out of my tailpipe that wasn't taken out of the atmosphere by plants millions of years ago. Of course, we'd prefer that fixed carbon to stay in the ground rather than being returned to the air, but it's all biological processes we're talking about, here.
...why not just recommend that existing personnel take a course of anti-depressants or other libido-lowering pharmaceuticals for the duration of the mission?
There are some ethical issues to be worked out, sure, but it's my understanding that astronauts already submit to a fair amount of tinkering with their minds and bodies.
The Daily Show isn't left of center, either. It's been studied (someone counted the number of jokes made at the expenses of both sides) and it's basically 50/50.
I haven't read the study in question (and I'm suspicious on principle of blanket statements that begin, "studies show..."), but in any case the raw number of jokes at the expense of Republicans vs. Democrats has nothing to do with the bias or lack of bias of the show in question. A joke making fun of Bush as a moron or a baby-killer does not equate to a joke making fun of Hillary's hair.
From what I've seen, the vast majority of jokes on the Daily Show come from a leftist perspective (i.e. positing liberal principles as important, respectable and true, while conservative principles are laughable or repugnant). Which is not to say that it's not a funny show, but it does illustrate the difficulty of coming up with objective or rigorous measures of "fairness" in cases like these.
It'll probably come out sounding patronizing, but I've got to say, I'm glad it was a 60-year-old who managed this. Our culture today is far too youth-centric-- hurray for older people proving they're capable of competing with and even outperforming the whippersnappers at feats of freakish, useless intellectual wankery.
Based on the overblown rhetoric and continent-sized generalizations in Schmidt's piece, I highly doubt that this "truth predictor" notion is anything more than a PR move aimed at keeping up consumer interest in Google in an election year. BUT if they're really trying to develop such an application, I can't see how it would be anything but a very, very bad thing.
It's true that the Internet offers easily accessible facts, but it doesn't offer easy answers. Schmidt says that "by typing a few key words into a computer, it's possible to find out about almost any subject -- comparing prices, products and policies within seconds"-- but the danger is that many people stop at that step, assuming their few seconds of clicking has made them experts on cancer or global warming or whatever, without realizing that the real picture may be vastly more complex and nuanced than a few KB of easily accessed internet data would suggest.
The way I see it, the problem is not that we can't get the facts, but that we've become less and less capable of (or willing to) think through their complexities once we have them. How many people on average, for example, understand or acknowledge the difference between "just false," "false, but he couldn't have known that at the time," "false, but had a reasonable probability of being true," "technically false, but was a rhetorical stand-in for truer statements too complicated to explain at the time," "false in one sense, but true in another," etc., etc.? And yet those are all important distinctions to recognize when evaluating political statements. People are already too quick to jump to conclusions-- the very last thing we need is a piece of software designed to make the jump for us, with all the monumental authority of Google to back up whatever ridiculous generalization emerges.
I've got to say, in a community that values freedom of information, the overwhelmingly negative commentary on this story is really surprising to me. Sure, the program (if it gets implemented at all) will certainly have plenty of imperfections, but the concept of transparency and accountability in government spending is still an excellent one. As far as I'm concerned, Sens. Coburn and Obama deserve credit for introducing the idea, and yes, Bush deserves credit for supporting it. It will be the job of lawmakers and citizens to work hard to see that it's implemented in a fair and effective way, but the fact remains that this is a first step, at least.
That 90% of the responses here breeze past the good news to fall back into the same tired old rants ("The government sucks, it'll do a terrible job!" "The military sucks, that's our real problem!" "Bush sucks, he must have been forced to support that bill!") suggests, disappointingly, that people are more interested in reinforcing their prejudices than in assimilating new facts.
Instead of bitching, why not say, "Great!," give credit where it's due, and move on to making sure this does get implemented in a way that'll benefit the American people?
Seems like real-world clothing manufacturers could easily take advantage of such a system to provide low-cost marketing data. Is someone trying to pitch a potentially risky line of avant-garde designs? Create a quickie virtual mock-up and see whether the Second-Lifers go for it. Overhead is reduced to essentially nil, and you have the added opportunity to create a built-in customer base if you ever do decide to sell the clothing in real life.
OK, shall I go out on a limb here and say that I think there really might be valid arguments in favor of grad students cheating?
Mind you, I'm a grad student myself, and I would never, never even consider plagiarizing or copying anyone else's published or unpublished work (at least partly because I think my own work is better than most other people's, anyway:) ). But realistically, grad school is not like undergrad, where every test performance, every paper, every evaluation is being used to sort you out of the herd and give your future employers information about your ability and potential. In grad school, three or four big, important performance evaluations-- getting in, passing comps, finishing the dissertation, getting it published-- are interspersed with lots of smaller "evaluations" that are basically hoops to jump through.
Most humanities and social science courses I know require papers, and most students will get A's on said papers-- A's that are basically meaningless since employers don't look at transcripts anyway. So one's performance on the paper is essentially immaterial-- it's not making you look any better, it's not teaching you much (particularly in courses outside your field), and the professor may barely skim it before dustbinning. Under those circumstances, actually writing the paper essentially just ensures that you waste lots of time that could be devoted to performance points that do matter, like the diss. Plagiarism under those circumstances is still lying, I guess, and lying is always wrong, but I don't think in these cases that it's the sort of lying that necessarily says much about your professionalism or future behavior-- just that you're the sort of person who gets impatient with pointless rules.
I find it amazing that many of the comments here are relatively negative in tone-- that people are still more interested in grousing about the religious right and their ridiculous ethics than they are in celebrating (however cautiously) an advance that may make it possible to reap the benefits of stem-cell research without compromising morals or sacrificing what some consider to be human lives.
This development might offer a way for both sides to win. Should we really be feeling disheartened about that, like "Ugh, what if embryonic stem cells really aren't necessary, and they turn out to have been right all along?"? My impression was that supporting stem cell research was about being pro-science, not anti-religion.
My understanding was that normal cancers survive in the body because they're part of its own tissue, and are recognized by the immune system as normal body cells. If, as the article says, this sarcoma really is transmitted via the cancer cells themselves (as opposed to an infectious cancer-causing agent like a virus), then shouldn't the infected dog's immune system recognize the cells as coming from another dog and attack them?
Cascio has worked on a number of television and film projects, and has designed two science fiction game settings, exploring issues of posthumanity, intellectual property, sapient AI, nanotechnology, and bioengineering. Jamais has degrees in Anthropology, History and Political Science.
This snippet from the blogger's bio encapsulates, basically, why calls (like this one) for a turn away from "content" to "a more critical approach" make me nervous. It's true that social values influence technology, and that the nexus of the two is an important area of study-- but why is it that offers to critically examine that nexus always seem to come from outsiders who aren't themselves involved or well-versed in the technology?
Everybody has an opinion, naturally, but a learned commentary on bioengineering, coming from a poli-sci type who may or may not have taken even the most introductory biology courses, would carry about as much weight for me as a lecture on Aristotle from my cocker spaniel. If "critical futurism" is poised to become a valid scholarly/intellectual discipline, I'd much rather see it populated by actual scientists and engineers-- people who're themselves helping to create the future, and who should therefore be in a good position to comment on how it's going-- than by film-school types who've read Foucault but can't do math.
These doomsday initiatives are most interesting, to my mind, for the insight they give us into the way people currently think about life and human identity. It's a question C.S. Lewis took up way back in the '60s, actually. For most people, the idea of "preserving the human race" or even "preserving life" has a purely visceral or emotional attractiveness-- ask someone why it's right to preserve humanity after a disaster, and they'll find it hard to explain in rational terms, beyond saying that it seems like a pretty fundamental human duty.
But what exactly is it that we feel it's our duty to preserve? It's not our own lives, since most of us won't be here by doomsday anyway. It's not our children or our descendants-- the chances of any given person's bloodline surviving a doomsday scenario are virtually nil. It's not any physical organism, since many of the projects discussed aim only to store DNA. The evolutionary imperative-- preserve your species!-- seems like a good explanation until you consider that an organism's traits are only valuable insofar as they fit it for a particular environment. With Earth gone, the new environment would likely require so many modifications as to make surviving H.sapiens virtually (if not actually) different species.
As far as I can see, then, our sense of fealty and protectiveness in this case is attaching to what's essentially just information-- when we say that humanity should be preserved, we mean that it'd be good if part of our genetic code were still around, say, ten thousand years hence. Why on earth would I want to spend my tax dollars for that?
The article is pretty vague, but after a brief read-through I can't find any evidence that the investigation was designed to prove what the summary says it proves. This bit:
U of T linguists Sali Tagliamonte and Derek Denis studied over 70 Toronto teenagers and compared their use of language both in speech and while using instant messaging.
makes it sound as though the researchers just took a bunch of teens who already IMed and compared their speech patterns off- and online. I guess it's interesting that the speech they observed was surprisingly complex, but that in no way proves that IM has no detrimental effects on grammar skills: who knows how great those kids' grammar might have been had they never chatted at all?
What we really need is a study comparing IM-using teen with non-IM-using teens (normalized for intelligence, socioeconomics, etc., of course), preferably involving enough subjects to yield results of actual significance. Call me when that article comes out, and then I'll consider relaxing the household IM ban.
I can't imagine that this game will be popular, even with a computer-literate set. For one thing, ideas like this credit-based Monopoly ignore the very real fact that a symbol is not the same as the thing symbolized, either conceptually or in emotional terms.
Now, I'm a woman, so my perspective may not be shared by the estrogen-challenged among us, but for me part of the satisfaction of board games (as well as of many other hobbies) is the opportunity to interact with and manipulate real objects-- to see a stack of money grow, move around a little iron doggie, build wooden roads in Settlers, construct fields of color in Blockus, etc. It's not especially smart, I know, but it is a very visceral and very real component of my enjoyment of the game. For children, exploration of the objects involved may constitute most or all of the pleasure they take in gameplay, and rightly so, since that kind of play is needed to build spatial relations and motor skills.
Even for adults, though, I can't help feeling as though interactions with concrete physical objects are necessary to keep in touch with our environment and maintain a sense of control and comfort in our world. We evolved from monkeys, after all-- manipulating objects is what we do best. Abstract thinking is useful and necessary, too, of course, but I can't help feeling as though the ongoing virtualization of everyday life is going to result in increased stress and poor decision-making for our recently-ex-hunter/gatherer selves.
That said, I do hope the social scientists mount some comparative studies of virtual-Monopoly vs. real-Monopoly gameplay. What a great opportunity to examine the psychology of credit!
Only bad things happen when people steal hard-science ideas to describe soft-science phenomena-- the ridiculous (and unaccountably persistent) idea of "social evolution" is one example, and as far as I can see, this "technological singularity" notion is another. History is a phenomenally complex system; even in hindsight, it's virtually impossible to find real patterns, and grafting the language of astrophysics onto a theory of social progress lends an undeserved air of gravitas and mathematical precision to what's essentially just fun speculation.
Sure, things change, sometimes quite suddenly and unexpectedly. But really, the relationship between the development of literacy (NPR's example of a past singularity) and the subsequent course of history is nothing like the relationship between a real singularity and... anything. It's just a bad metaphor, and I think I'd have a lot more respect for "future studies" if they dropped it and came up with a new way of describing whatever phenomenon it is they're predicting
Before the discussion slides predictably towards vague diatribe on governmental encroachment and abuses of state power, I just wanted to point out that this is not something that's being proposed or enforced by the government at any level; it's strictly a question of managers of private condo complexes making "secure" wireless one of the many (arguably draconian) regulations already in place for people who wish to live there.
We may still not think it's a good idea, of course, but the fact that it's being implemented by private individuals makes a big difference-- I'd get stroppy if my state governor said I couldn't own a dog, but I'll accept the same restriction from my apartment super with no objections.
Re:Knowing the drug companies . . .
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And the consumer price will be increased by 20%.
Not really-- according to TFA, the whole point of this new production process is that, being cheaper, it'll enable the manufacturers to sell it at prices below current retail, thus giving them a competitive advantage. If they did what you're suggesting, what would be the incentive for people to buy their more-expensive insulin over the varieties currently on the market?
Knee-jerk rants about wicked capitalists and heartless pharmaceuticals aside, this seems like an excellent example of how market forces can work in favor of innovative and, ultimately, more affordable products. Sure, it's not as good as a wholesale cure would be, but the GM-safflower method they're using may well have cross-applicability to other drug-manufacturing processes which could make it a really important advance. I highly doubt the process would have been developed had the researchers not seen the opportunity to profit from their discoveries.
I understand that, should the flu develop a mutated strain capable of human-human transmission, there's no guarantee that this vaccine will be effective against the new virus. But there's no guarantee to the contrary, either, is there? My understanding was that many vaccines can have some cross-applicability to viruses of slightly different strains (ex. cowpox/smallpox); a mutation that changed the virus's transmission capabilities might or might not alter the particular proteins that are recognized as antigens by the body. If it didn't alter them substantially, the old vaccine should work against killer strains too, I'd think.
I hated rebates as much as the next person, and I usually ended up forgetting to mail in the damn things anyway. But the phasing out of rebates is NOT a great boon for the consumer.
Rebates are like coupons and generic brands in that they enable retailers to sell the same product at two different prices-- a higher one that you can choose to pay if you want the convenience of not mailing in anything and/or the cache of a name brand, and a much lower one if price matters enough to you to make you clip coupons, mail in receipts or put up with ugly packaging. This is a good thing for everyone involved, because it gives people more options; people choose how much they want to trade convenience for $$, and the company can afford to offer much lower rebate prices because they know everyone won't pay them.
It might seem that with the elimination of rebates, everyone would get the original rebate price, instead of just a selected receipt-mailing few-- but what I suspect is that everyone will just have to pay a much higher sale price that's an average of the original off-the-shelf and the original rebate price.
From TFA: [i]In Washington, U.S. Treasury spokeswoman Molly Millerwise said foreign banks have used the department's list of terrorist names to freeze $150 million in assets since Sept. 11. Millerwise didn't know the value of money transfers blocked using the list, but said frustrations endured were regrettable but necessary.
"We have an obligation to do all we can to keep money out of the hands of terrorists," Millerwise said.
The list of names, available on the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control Web site, contains hundreds of Mohammeds. [/i]
So this is not, as the summary and a few sentences in the article implied, simply a question of racists indiscriminately blocking all people with Arab-sounding first names. If that were the case, I doubt Western Union would be able to afford to do it, since, as others have mentioned, there are an awful lot of Mohammeds out there in the US. What the article says, however, is that the sum total of transactions affected in this way is in the 1000's-- most only delayed by a few hours-- with far fewer actual blocks made on transactions. That suggests that the ostensible explanation-- that for a customer who happens to have the exact same first and last name as a terrorist, Western Union takes a little time to make sure they're dealing with somebody else-- is actually the correct one.
And is it really such a bad policy? Back in the Unabomer days, if my name was Ted Kaczynski and I asked someone to wire me money, I'd sure as hell expect the company to take some time to check out my identity, and I wouldn't follow up by alleging racism against people of Polish descent.
This is a cool toy, but I wonder how they'll sustain demand for a purely visual text-recognition device when so many of the written items we encounter everyday are going digital anyway. Already many restaurant menus and conference programmes and utility bills are accessible over the Web, local street signs via GPS, and poster/event info via listservs and email lists. Come 2010, what exactly are we going to need to read off slips of paper?
Setting aside the question of whether any of these solutions are at all practical, (AND the still larger question of whether there'll ever be a real climate crisis to necessitate them), I wonder how measures like the ones proposed in the article could be implemented, practically speaking, on a global level. Who would pay for this, for one thing? And what governing body exists capable of giving permission to tinker deliberately with the whole globe? Seems to me that geoengineering on a realistic scale would require pan-global organizational and economic structures that simply don't exist at present.
I don't know about that theory -- after all, being "scared" of a parent's death and being "scared" when something jumps out at you in an alley are two completely different sensations. Nobody shrieks or jumps at the thought that their mom might die of cancer. I suspect what's actually going on is that surprises and shocks trigger a fight-or-flight response and the release of adrenaline, which causes sensations that some find pleasurable. Scary gaming might serve as a distraction from more deep-seated anxieties, but I doubt that it helps "get them out" or exorcise them.
Based on the way that study is described, it doesn't sound as though the data necessarily supports a clear-cut causality between coffee-drinking and cirrhosis reduction. They based the results on a questionnaire, after all, and many of those are far too broad (and too sloppily answered) to give precise data about an individual's real consumption of either alcohol or coffee.
The most that this data proves is a correlation between higher reported coffee consumption and reduced cirrhosis-- and there are a ton of other reasons why that might be the case. Maybe heavy drinkers of alcohol tend to under-report their consumption of other harmful substances (like caffeine) out of guilt. Maybe higher caffeine consumption makes heavy drinkers drink a little less. Maybe coffee-drinking indicates a more white-collar lifestyle, which in turn might indicate better education and healthier life habits, any of which might itself be responsible for the diminished cirrhosis. As usual, the pop-sci treatment jumps to an easy causal conclusion that's far from being warranted by the facts.
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Well, but isn't the CO2 released from petroleum technically bio-derived as well? (That is, unless you're one of those crackpots who doesn't believe oil is biogenic.) There's no Co2 coming out of my tailpipe that wasn't taken out of the atmosphere by plants millions of years ago. Of course, we'd prefer that fixed carbon to stay in the ground rather than being returned to the air, but it's all biological processes we're talking about, here.
...why not just recommend that existing personnel take a course of anti-depressants or other libido-lowering pharmaceuticals for the duration of the mission?
There are some ethical issues to be worked out, sure, but it's my understanding that astronauts already submit to a fair amount of tinkering with their minds and bodies.
The Daily Show isn't left of center, either. It's been studied (someone counted the number of jokes made at the expenses of both sides) and it's basically 50/50.
I haven't read the study in question (and I'm suspicious on principle of blanket statements that begin, "studies show..."), but in any case the raw number of jokes at the expense of Republicans vs. Democrats has nothing to do with the bias or lack of bias of the show in question. A joke making fun of Bush as a moron or a baby-killer does not equate to a joke making fun of Hillary's hair.
From what I've seen, the vast majority of jokes on the Daily Show come from a leftist perspective (i.e. positing liberal principles as important, respectable and true, while conservative principles are laughable or repugnant). Which is not to say that it's not a funny show, but it does illustrate the difficulty of coming up with objective or rigorous measures of "fairness" in cases like these.
It'll probably come out sounding patronizing, but I've got to say, I'm glad it was a 60-year-old who managed this. Our culture today is far too youth-centric-- hurray for older people proving they're capable of competing with and even outperforming the whippersnappers at feats of freakish, useless intellectual wankery.
Based on the overblown rhetoric and continent-sized generalizations in Schmidt's piece, I highly doubt that this "truth predictor" notion is anything more than a PR move aimed at keeping up consumer interest in Google in an election year. BUT if they're really trying to develop such an application, I can't see how it would be anything but a very, very bad thing.
It's true that the Internet offers easily accessible facts, but it doesn't offer easy answers. Schmidt says that "by typing a few key words into a computer, it's possible to find out about almost any subject -- comparing prices, products and policies within seconds"-- but the danger is that many people stop at that step, assuming their few seconds of clicking has made them experts on cancer or global warming or whatever, without realizing that the real picture may be vastly more complex and nuanced than a few KB of easily accessed internet data would suggest.
The way I see it, the problem is not that we can't get the facts, but that we've become less and less capable of (or willing to) think through their complexities once we have them. How many people on average, for example, understand or acknowledge the difference between "just false," "false, but he couldn't have known that at the time," "false, but had a reasonable probability of being true," "technically false, but was a rhetorical stand-in for truer statements too complicated to explain at the time," "false in one sense, but true in another," etc., etc.? And yet those are all important distinctions to recognize when evaluating political statements. People are already too quick to jump to conclusions-- the very last thing we need is a piece of software designed to make the jump for us, with all the monumental authority of Google to back up whatever ridiculous generalization emerges.
I've got to say, in a community that values freedom of information, the overwhelmingly negative commentary on this story is really surprising to me. Sure, the program (if it gets implemented at all) will certainly have plenty of imperfections, but the concept of transparency and accountability in government spending is still an excellent one. As far as I'm concerned, Sens. Coburn and Obama deserve credit for introducing the idea, and yes, Bush deserves credit for supporting it. It will be the job of lawmakers and citizens to work hard to see that it's implemented in a fair and effective way, but the fact remains that this is a first step, at least.
That 90% of the responses here breeze past the good news to fall back into the same tired old rants ("The government sucks, it'll do a terrible job!" "The military sucks, that's our real problem!" "Bush sucks, he must have been forced to support that bill!") suggests, disappointingly, that people are more interested in reinforcing their prejudices than in assimilating new facts.
Instead of bitching, why not say, "Great!," give credit where it's due, and move on to making sure this does get implemented in a way that'll benefit the American people?
Seems like real-world clothing manufacturers could easily take advantage of such a system to provide low-cost marketing data. Is someone trying to pitch a potentially risky line of avant-garde designs? Create a quickie virtual mock-up and see whether the Second-Lifers go for it. Overhead is reduced to essentially nil, and you have the added opportunity to create a built-in customer base if you ever do decide to sell the clothing in real life.
Mind you, I'm a grad student myself, and I would never, never even consider plagiarizing or copying anyone else's published or unpublished work (at least partly because I think my own work is better than most other people's, anyway :) ). But realistically, grad school is not like undergrad, where every test performance, every paper, every evaluation is being used to sort you out of the herd and give your future employers information about your ability and potential. In grad school, three or four big, important performance evaluations-- getting in, passing comps, finishing the dissertation, getting it published-- are interspersed with lots of smaller "evaluations" that are basically hoops to jump through.
Most humanities and social science courses I know require papers, and most students will get A's on said papers-- A's that are basically meaningless since employers don't look at transcripts anyway. So one's performance on the paper is essentially immaterial-- it's not making you look any better, it's not teaching you much (particularly in courses outside your field), and the professor may barely skim it before dustbinning. Under those circumstances, actually writing the paper essentially just ensures that you waste lots of time that could be devoted to performance points that do matter, like the diss. Plagiarism under those circumstances is still lying, I guess, and lying is always wrong, but I don't think in these cases that it's the sort of lying that necessarily says much about your professionalism or future behavior-- just that you're the sort of person who gets impatient with pointless rules.
I find it amazing that many of the comments here are relatively negative in tone-- that people are still more interested in grousing about the religious right and their ridiculous ethics than they are in celebrating (however cautiously) an advance that may make it possible to reap the benefits of stem-cell research without compromising morals or sacrificing what some consider to be human lives.
This development might offer a way for both sides to win. Should we really be feeling disheartened about that, like "Ugh, what if embryonic stem cells really aren't necessary, and they turn out to have been right all along?"? My impression was that supporting stem cell research was about being pro-science, not anti-religion.
My understanding was that normal cancers survive in the body because they're part of its own tissue, and are recognized by the immune system as normal body cells. If, as the article says, this sarcoma really is transmitted via the cancer cells themselves (as opposed to an infectious cancer-causing agent like a virus), then shouldn't the infected dog's immune system recognize the cells as coming from another dog and attack them?
Cascio has worked on a number of television and film projects, and has designed two science fiction game settings, exploring issues of posthumanity, intellectual property, sapient AI, nanotechnology, and bioengineering. Jamais has degrees in Anthropology, History and Political Science.
This snippet from the blogger's bio encapsulates, basically, why calls (like this one) for a turn away from "content" to "a more critical approach" make me nervous. It's true that social values influence technology, and that the nexus of the two is an important area of study-- but why is it that offers to critically examine that nexus always seem to come from outsiders who aren't themselves involved or well-versed in the technology?
Everybody has an opinion, naturally, but a learned commentary on bioengineering, coming from a poli-sci type who may or may not have taken even the most introductory biology courses, would carry about as much weight for me as a lecture on Aristotle from my cocker spaniel. If "critical futurism" is poised to become a valid scholarly/intellectual discipline, I'd much rather see it populated by actual scientists and engineers-- people who're themselves helping to create the future, and who should therefore be in a good position to comment on how it's going-- than by film-school types who've read Foucault but can't do math.
These doomsday initiatives are most interesting, to my mind, for the insight they give us into the way people currently think about life and human identity. It's a question C.S. Lewis took up way back in the '60s, actually. For most people, the idea of "preserving the human race" or even "preserving life" has a purely visceral or emotional attractiveness-- ask someone why it's right to preserve humanity after a disaster, and they'll find it hard to explain in rational terms, beyond saying that it seems like a pretty fundamental human duty.
But what exactly is it that we feel it's our duty to preserve? It's not our own lives, since most of us won't be here by doomsday anyway. It's not our children or our descendants-- the chances of any given person's bloodline surviving a doomsday scenario are virtually nil. It's not any physical organism, since many of the projects discussed aim only to store DNA. The evolutionary imperative-- preserve your species!-- seems like a good explanation until you consider that an organism's traits are only valuable insofar as they fit it for a particular environment. With Earth gone, the new environment would likely require so many modifications as to make surviving H.sapiens virtually (if not actually) different species.
As far as I can see, then, our sense of fealty and protectiveness in this case is attaching to what's essentially just information-- when we say that humanity should be preserved, we mean that it'd be good if part of our genetic code were still around, say, ten thousand years hence. Why on earth would I want to spend my tax dollars for that?
The article is pretty vague, but after a brief read-through I can't find any evidence that the investigation was designed to prove what the summary says it proves. This bit:
U of T linguists Sali Tagliamonte and Derek Denis studied over 70 Toronto teenagers and compared their use of language both in speech and while using instant messaging.
makes it sound as though the researchers just took a bunch of teens who already IMed and compared their speech patterns off- and online. I guess it's interesting that the speech they observed was surprisingly complex, but that in no way proves that IM has no detrimental effects on grammar skills: who knows how great those kids' grammar might have been had they never chatted at all?
What we really need is a study comparing IM-using teen with non-IM-using teens (normalized for intelligence, socioeconomics, etc., of course), preferably involving enough subjects to yield results of actual significance. Call me when that article comes out, and then I'll consider relaxing the household IM ban.
I can't imagine that this game will be popular, even with a computer-literate set. For one thing, ideas like this credit-based Monopoly ignore the very real fact that a symbol is not the same as the thing symbolized, either conceptually or in emotional terms.
Now, I'm a woman, so my perspective may not be shared by the estrogen-challenged among us, but for me part of the satisfaction of board games (as well as of many other hobbies) is the opportunity to interact with and manipulate real objects-- to see a stack of money grow, move around a little iron doggie, build wooden roads in Settlers, construct fields of color in Blockus, etc. It's not especially smart, I know, but it is a very visceral and very real component of my enjoyment of the game. For children, exploration of the objects involved may constitute most or all of the pleasure they take in gameplay, and rightly so, since that kind of play is needed to build spatial relations and motor skills.
Even for adults, though, I can't help feeling as though interactions with concrete physical objects are necessary to keep in touch with our environment and maintain a sense of control and comfort in our world. We evolved from monkeys, after all-- manipulating objects is what we do best. Abstract thinking is useful and necessary, too, of course, but I can't help feeling as though the ongoing virtualization of everyday life is going to result in increased stress and poor decision-making for our recently-ex-hunter/gatherer selves.
That said, I do hope the social scientists mount some comparative studies of virtual-Monopoly vs. real-Monopoly gameplay. What a great opportunity to examine the psychology of credit!
Only bad things happen when people steal hard-science ideas to describe soft-science phenomena-- the ridiculous (and unaccountably persistent) idea of "social evolution" is one example, and as far as I can see, this "technological singularity" notion is another. History is a phenomenally complex system; even in hindsight, it's virtually impossible to find real patterns, and grafting the language of astrophysics onto a theory of social progress lends an undeserved air of gravitas and mathematical precision to what's essentially just fun speculation.
Sure, things change, sometimes quite suddenly and unexpectedly. But really, the relationship between the development of literacy (NPR's example of a past singularity) and the subsequent course of history is nothing like the relationship between a real singularity and... anything. It's just a bad metaphor, and I think I'd have a lot more respect for "future studies" if they dropped it and came up with a new way of describing whatever phenomenon it is they're predicting
Before the discussion slides predictably towards vague diatribe on governmental encroachment and abuses of state power, I just wanted to point out that this is not something that's being proposed or enforced by the government at any level; it's strictly a question of managers of private condo complexes making "secure" wireless one of the many (arguably draconian) regulations already in place for people who wish to live there.
We may still not think it's a good idea, of course, but the fact that it's being implemented by private individuals makes a big difference-- I'd get stroppy if my state governor said I couldn't own a dog, but I'll accept the same restriction from my apartment super with no objections.
And the consumer price will be increased by 20%.
Not really-- according to TFA, the whole point of this new production process is that, being cheaper, it'll enable the manufacturers to sell it at prices below current retail, thus giving them a competitive advantage. If they did what you're suggesting, what would be the incentive for people to buy their more-expensive insulin over the varieties currently on the market?
Knee-jerk rants about wicked capitalists and heartless pharmaceuticals aside, this seems like an excellent example of how market forces can work in favor of innovative and, ultimately, more affordable products. Sure, it's not as good as a wholesale cure would be, but the GM-safflower method they're using may well have cross-applicability to other drug-manufacturing processes which could make it a really important advance. I highly doubt the process would have been developed had the researchers not seen the opportunity to profit from their discoveries.
I understand that, should the flu develop a mutated strain capable of human-human transmission, there's no guarantee that this vaccine will be effective against the new virus. But there's no guarantee to the contrary, either, is there? My understanding was that many vaccines can have some cross-applicability to viruses of slightly different strains (ex. cowpox/smallpox); a mutation that changed the virus's transmission capabilities might or might not alter the particular proteins that are recognized as antigens by the body. If it didn't alter them substantially, the old vaccine should work against killer strains too, I'd think.
Rebates are like coupons and generic brands in that they enable retailers to sell the same product at two different prices-- a higher one that you can choose to pay if you want the convenience of not mailing in anything and/or the cache of a name brand, and a much lower one if price matters enough to you to make you clip coupons, mail in receipts or put up with ugly packaging. This is a good thing for everyone involved, because it gives people more options; people choose how much they want to trade convenience for $$, and the company can afford to offer much lower rebate prices because they know everyone won't pay them.
It might seem that with the elimination of rebates, everyone would get the original rebate price, instead of just a selected receipt-mailing few-- but what I suspect is that everyone will just have to pay a much higher sale price that's an average of the original off-the-shelf and the original rebate price.
From TFA: [i]In Washington, U.S. Treasury spokeswoman Molly Millerwise said foreign banks have used the department's list of terrorist names to freeze $150 million in assets since Sept. 11. Millerwise didn't know the value of money transfers blocked using the list, but said frustrations endured were regrettable but necessary. "We have an obligation to do all we can to keep money out of the hands of terrorists," Millerwise said. The list of names, available on the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control Web site, contains hundreds of Mohammeds. [/i] So this is not, as the summary and a few sentences in the article implied, simply a question of racists indiscriminately blocking all people with Arab-sounding first names. If that were the case, I doubt Western Union would be able to afford to do it, since, as others have mentioned, there are an awful lot of Mohammeds out there in the US. What the article says, however, is that the sum total of transactions affected in this way is in the 1000's-- most only delayed by a few hours-- with far fewer actual blocks made on transactions. That suggests that the ostensible explanation-- that for a customer who happens to have the exact same first and last name as a terrorist, Western Union takes a little time to make sure they're dealing with somebody else-- is actually the correct one. And is it really such a bad policy? Back in the Unabomer days, if my name was Ted Kaczynski and I asked someone to wire me money, I'd sure as hell expect the company to take some time to check out my identity, and I wouldn't follow up by alleging racism against people of Polish descent.
This is a cool toy, but I wonder how they'll sustain demand for a purely visual text-recognition device when so many of the written items we encounter everyday are going digital anyway. Already many restaurant menus and conference programmes and utility bills are accessible over the Web, local street signs via GPS, and poster/event info via listservs and email lists. Come 2010, what exactly are we going to need to read off slips of paper?
Setting aside the question of whether any of these solutions are at all practical, (AND the still larger question of whether there'll ever be a real climate crisis to necessitate them), I wonder how measures like the ones proposed in the article could be implemented, practically speaking, on a global level. Who would pay for this, for one thing? And what governing body exists capable of giving permission to tinker deliberately with the whole globe? Seems to me that geoengineering on a realistic scale would require pan-global organizational and economic structures that simply don't exist at present.
I don't know about that theory -- after all, being "scared" of a parent's death and being "scared" when something jumps out at you in an alley are two completely different sensations. Nobody shrieks or jumps at the thought that their mom might die of cancer. I suspect what's actually going on is that surprises and shocks trigger a fight-or-flight response and the release of adrenaline, which causes sensations that some find pleasurable. Scary gaming might serve as a distraction from more deep-seated anxieties, but I doubt that it helps "get them out" or exorcise them.
Based on the way that study is described, it doesn't sound as though the data necessarily supports a clear-cut causality between coffee-drinking and cirrhosis reduction. They based the results on a questionnaire, after all, and many of those are far too broad (and too sloppily answered) to give precise data about an individual's real consumption of either alcohol or coffee.
The most that this data proves is a correlation between higher reported coffee consumption and reduced cirrhosis-- and there are a ton of other reasons why that might be the case. Maybe heavy drinkers of alcohol tend to under-report their consumption of other harmful substances (like caffeine) out of guilt. Maybe higher caffeine consumption makes heavy drinkers drink a little less. Maybe coffee-drinking indicates a more white-collar lifestyle, which in turn might indicate better education and healthier life habits, any of which might itself be responsible for the diminished cirrhosis. As usual, the pop-sci treatment jumps to an easy causal conclusion that's far from being warranted by the facts.