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Weiye Loh

MDA says Aware needs distribution licence for DVD of 2009 meeting - 0 views

jg69.amplify.com/...icence-for-dvd-of-2009-meeting

AWARE Law Feminism Gender Equality Singapore Censorship

shared by Weiye Loh on 19 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • WOMEN'S advocacy group Aware's plan to distribute a set of DVDs of its dramatic extraordinary general meeting (EGM), held in May 2009, has hit a snag.
  • The Association of Women for Action and Research (Aware) has not been able to distribute the DVDs, as it is appealing against a requirement that it needs a government licence to do so.
  • The MDA has, in the meantime, given the DVD an M18 rating - meaning it should be seen only by those aged 18 and above.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Aware planned to sell the four-disc DVD box set of the EGM only to its 600 members, as an official record of the event. But its executive director Corinna Lim, 45, said an MDA official contacted her 'a few days' after news of the $100-per-set DVDs broke last October, to ask if Aware had a distribution licence. Ms Lim, a former corporate lawyer, said Aware has appealed against the need for one. She argued that the licensing requirement applies to businesses, not non-profit organisations.
  • Section 6 of the Films Act states that a person must have a valid licence in order to 'carry on any business, whether or not the business is carried on for profit, of importing, making, distributing or exhibiting films'.
  • 'I really take the view that we are not obliged to have a licence, and if they make us have a licence, they would be setting a terrible precedent for Singapore. 'That means any organisation that wants to distribute to your shareholders or just your members would need a licence.' She noted that recordings of the EGM were online, such as on video-sharing site YouTube.
  • But MDA director of customer services and operations Pam Hu told The Straits Times yesterday that the MDA has required some religious and arts groups - and not just businesses - to possess the distribution licence. Ms Hu added, however, that the MDA is reviewing Aware's appeal and would notify the group of the outcome shortly.
  • On the M18 rating, she said this is because the DVDs 'feature discussion of homosexuality and Aware's sexuality programme, which stirs up strong emotion among the members'. 'This contributed to the M18 rating as it requires maturity to understand the issues discussed and not be carried away by the emotive passion of the meeting.'
  • Observers were divided on how to interpret the law. Singapore Management University assistant law professor Eugene Tan said the language of the law does not limit its reach and thus could apply to Aware. But Professor Ang Peng Hwa, of Nanyang Technological University's Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, said Aware should not need a licence as it does not distribute films in its normal course of work. 'If it needs to have a licence, that means any company that does a corporate video will also need (one). MDA will be flooded with licensing (applications),' he said.
Weiye Loh

The new SingaNews - 13 views

Hi Valerie, I fully agree with your reply. However, there are some issues I will like to raise. "It seems a Christian cannot do anything in the secular realm without drawing criticisms or at th...

SingaNews Christian Fundamentalism Family Objectivity

started by Weiye Loh on 15 Sep 09 3 follow-ups, last by Weiye Loh on 21 Sep 09
Weiye Loh

The Death of Postmodernism And Beyond | Philosophy Now - 0 views

www.philosophynow.org/...th_of_Postmodernism_And_Beyond

Postmodernism Foucault Philosophy Modernism Spectacle Reality Reality TV

shared by Weiye Loh on 28 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • Most of the undergraduates who will take ‘Postmodern Fictions’ this year will have been born in 1985 or after, and all but one of the module’s primary texts were written before their lifetime. Far from being ‘contemporary’, these texts were published in another world, before the students were born: The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Nights at the Circus, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (and Blade Runner), White Noise: this is Mum and Dad’s culture. Some of the texts (‘The Library of Babel’) were written even before their parents were born. Replace this cache with other postmodern stalwarts – Beloved, Flaubert’s Parrot, Waterland, The Crying of Lot 49, Pale Fire, Slaughterhouse 5, Lanark, Neuromancer, anything by B.S. Johnson – and the same applies. It’s all about as contemporary as The Smiths, as hip as shoulder pads, as happening as Betamax video recorders. These are texts which are just coming to grips with the existence of rock music and television; they mostly do not dream even of the possibility of the technology and communications media – mobile phones, email, the internet, computers in every house powerful enough to put a man on the moon – which today’s undergraduates take for granted.
  • somewhere in the late 1990s or early 2000s, the emergence of new technologies re-structured, violently and forever, the nature of the author, the reader and the text, and the relationships between them.
  • Postmodernism, like modernism and romanticism before it, fetishised [ie placed supreme importance on] the author, even when the author chose to indict or pretended to abolish him or herself. But the culture we have now fetishises the recipient of the text to the degree that they become a partial or whole author of it. Optimists may see this as the democratisation of culture; pessimists will point to the excruciating banality and vacuity of the cultural products thereby generated (at least so far).
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Pseudo-modernism also encompasses contemporary news programmes, whose content increasingly consists of emails or text messages sent in commenting on the news items. The terminology of ‘interactivity’ is equally inappropriate here, since there is no exchange: instead, the viewer or listener enters – writes a segment of the programme – then departs, returning to a passive role. Pseudo-modernism also includes computer games, which similarly place the individual in a context where they invent the cultural content, within pre-delineated limits. The content of each individual act of playing the game varies according to the particular player.
  • The pseudo-modern cultural phenomenon par excellence is the internet. Its central act is that of the individual clicking on his/her mouse to move through pages in a way which cannot be duplicated, inventing a pathway through cultural products which has never existed before and never will again. This is a far more intense engagement with the cultural process than anything literature can offer, and gives the undeniable sense (or illusion) of the individual controlling, managing, running, making up his/her involvement with the cultural product. Internet pages are not ‘authored’ in the sense that anyone knows who wrote them, or cares. The majority either require the individual to make them work, like Streetmap or Route Planner, or permit him/her to add to them, like Wikipedia, or through feedback on, for instance, media websites. In all cases, it is intrinsic to the internet that you can easily make up pages yourself (eg blogs).
  • Where once special effects were supposed to make the impossible appear credible, CGI frequently [inadvertently] works to make the possible look artificial, as in much of Lord of the Rings or Gladiator. Battles involving thousands of individuals have really happened; pseudo-modern cinema makes them look as if they have only ever happened in cyberspace.
  • Similarly, television in the pseudo-modern age favours not only reality TV (yet another unapt term), but also shopping channels, and quizzes in which the viewer calls to guess the answer to riddles in the hope of winning money.
  • The purely ‘spectacular’ function of television, as with all the arts, has become a marginal one: what is central now is the busy, active, forging work of the individual who would once have been called its recipient. In all of this, the ‘viewer’ feels powerful and is indeed necessary; the ‘author’ as traditionally understood is either relegated to the status of the one who sets the parameters within which others operate, or becomes simply irrelevant, unknown, sidelined; and the ‘text’ is characterised both by its hyper-ephemerality and by its instability. It is made up by the ‘viewer’, if not in its content then in its sequence – you wouldn’t read Middlemarch by going from page 118 to 316 to 401 to 501, but you might well, and justifiably, read Ceefax that way.
  • A pseudo-modern text lasts an exceptionally brief time. Unlike, say, Fawlty Towers, reality TV programmes cannot be repeated in their original form, since the phone-ins cannot be reproduced, and without the possibility of phoning-in they become a different and far less attractive entity.
  • If scholars give the date they referenced an internet page, it is because the pages disappear or get radically re-cast so quickly. Text messages and emails are extremely difficult to keep in their original form; printing out emails does convert them into something more stable, like a letter, but only by destroying their essential, electronic state.
  • The cultural products of pseudo-modernism are also exceptionally banal
  • Much text messaging and emailing is vapid in comparison with what people of all educational levels used to put into letters.
  • A triteness, a shallowness dominates all.
  • In music, the pseudo-modern supersedingof the artist-dominated album as monolithic text by the downloading and mix-and-matching of individual tracks on to an iPod, selected by the listener, was certainly prefigured by the music fan’s creation of compilation tapes a generation ago. But a shift has occurred, in that what was a marginal pastime of the fan has become the dominant and definitive way of consuming music, rendering the idea of the album as a coherent work of art, a body of integrated meaning, obsolete.
  • To a degree, pseudo-modernism is no more than a technologically motivated shift to the cultural centre of something which has always existed (similarly, metafiction has always existed, but was never so fetishised as it was by postmodernism). Television has always used audience participation, just as theatre and other performing arts did before it; but as an option, not as a necessity: pseudo-modern TV programmes have participation built into them.
  • Whereas postmodernism called ‘reality’ into question, pseudo-modernism defines the real implicitly as myself, now, ‘interacting’ with its texts. Thus, pseudo-modernism suggests that whatever it does or makes is what is reality, and a pseudo-modern text may flourish the apparently real in an uncomplicated form: the docu-soap with its hand-held cameras (which, by displaying individuals aware of being regarded, give the viewer the illusion of participation); The Office and The Blair Witch Project, interactive pornography and reality TV; the essayistic cinema of Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock.
  • whereas postmodernism favoured the ironic, the knowing and the playful, with their allusions to knowledge, history and ambivalence, pseudo-modernism’s typical intellectual states are ignorance, fanaticism and anxiety
  • pseudo-modernism lashes fantastically sophisticated technology to the pursuit of medieval barbarism – as in the uploading of videos of beheadings onto the internet, or the use of mobile phones to film torture in prisons. Beyond this, the destiny of everyone else is to suffer the anxiety of getting hit in the cross-fire. But this fatalistic anxiety extends far beyond geopolitics, into every aspect of contemporary life; from a general fear of social breakdown and identity loss, to a deep unease about diet and health; from anguish about the destructiveness of climate change, to the effects of a new personal ineptitude and helplessness, which yield TV programmes about how to clean your house, bring up your children or remain solvent.
  • Pseudo-modernism belongs to a world pervaded by the encounter between a religiously fanatical segment of the United States, a largely secular but definitionally hyper-religious Israel, and a fanatical sub-section of Muslims scattered across the planet: pseudo-modernism was not born on 11 September 2001, but postmodernism was interred in its rubble.
  • pseudo-modernist communicates constantly with the other side of the planet, yet needs to be told to eat vegetables to be healthy, a fact self-evident in the Bronze Age. He or she can direct the course of national television programmes, but does not know how to make him or herself something to eat – a characteristic fusion of the childish and the advanced, the powerful and the helpless. For varying reasons, these are people incapable of the “disbelief of Grand Narratives” which Lyotard argued typified postmodernists
  • Weiye Loh on 28 Apr 12
     
    Postmodern philosophy emphasises the elusiveness of meaning and knowledge. This is often expressed in postmodern art as a concern with representation and an ironic self-awareness. And the argument that postmodernism is over has already been made philosophically. There are people who have essentially asserted that for a while we believed in postmodern ideas, but not any more, and from now on we're going to believe in critical realism. The weakness in this analysis is that it centres on the academy, on the practices and suppositions of philosophers who may or may not be shifting ground or about to shift - and many academics will simply decide that, finally, they prefer to stay with Foucault [arch postmodernist] than go over to anything else. However, a far more compelling case can be made that postmodernism is dead by looking outside the academy at current cultural production.
Weiye Loh

Are partisan news sources polarizing Americans? | Ars Technica - 0 views

arstechnica.com/...s-sources-polarizing-americans

News Media Media Effects Partisan Polarisation Entertainment

shared by Weiye Loh on 04 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 04 Nov 13
     
    "By separating people into "news seekers" (those who said they'd prefer to watch the news programs) and "entertainment seekers," an interesting pattern is revealed. Entertainment seekers who were assigned to watch one of the partisan programs (much to their disappointment) were actually much more influenced by them than news seekers watching the same shows. News seekers are presumably more aware of current political debates and may have already formed their own opinions, making new information less likely to change their thinking."
yongernn teo

Eli Lilly Accused of Unethical Marketing of Zyprexa - 0 views

www.newsinferno.com/1346

Zyprexa UnethicalMarketing EliLilly PharmaceuticalCompanies

shared by yongernn teo on 19 Aug 09 - Cached
  • yongernn teo on 19 Aug 09
     
    Summary of the Unethical Marketing of Zyprexa by Eli Lilly: \n\nEli Lilly is a global pharmaceutical company. In the year 2006, it was charged with unethical marketing of Zyprexa, the top-selling drug. It is approved only for the treatment of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. \nFirstly, Eli Lilly in a report downplayed the risks of obesity and increased blood sugar associated with Zyprexa. Although Eli Lilly was aware of these risks for at least a decade, they went ahead without emphasizing the significance of these risks, in fear of jeopardizing their sales. \nSecondly, Eli Lilly held a promotional campaign called Viva Zyprexa, encouraging off-label usage of this drug in patients who had neither schizophrenia nor bipolar disorder. This campaign was targeted at the elderly who had dementia. However, this drug was not approved to treat dementia. In fact, it could increase the risk of death in older patients who had dementia-related psychosis. \nAll these were done to boost the sale of Zyprexa and to bring in more revenue for Eli Lilly. Zyprexa could alone bring in $4billion worth of sales annually. \n\nEthical Question:\nTo what extent should pharmaceutical companies go to inform potential consumers on the side-effects of their drugs? \n\nEthical Problem: \nThe information that is disseminated through marketing campaigns have to be true and transparent. There should not be any hidden agenda behind the amount of information being released. In this case, to prevent sales from plummeting, Eli Lilly downplayed the side-effects of Zyprexa. It also encouraged off-label usage. \nIt is very important that pharmaceutical companies practice good ethics as this concerns the health of its consumers. While one drug may act as a remedy for a health-problem, it could possibly lead to other health problems due to the side-effects. All these have to be conveyed to the consumer who exchanges his money for the product. \nNot being transparent and honest with the information of the pr
joanne ye

Measuring the effectiveness of online activism - 2 views

Reference: Krishnan, S. (2009, June 21). Measuring the effectiveness of online activism. The Hindu. Retrieved September 24, 2009, from Factiva. (Article can be found at bottom of the post) Summary...

online activism freedom control

started by joanne ye on 24 Sep 09 no follow-up yet
Jody Poh

Australia's porn-blocking plan unveiled - 10 views

Elaine said: What are the standards put in place to determine whether something is of adult content? Who set those standards? Based on 'general' beliefs and what the government/"web police'' think ...

started by Elaine Ong on 31 Aug 09 2 follow-ups, last by Jody Poh on 01 Sep 09
Paul Melissa

Police raid 13 shops in Lucky Plaza - 13 views

http://www.tnp.sg/printfriendly/0,4139,209251,00.html 1) Officers from the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) raided 13 shops in Lucky Plaza and arrested 27 men and one woman, aged...

Pirated games Illegal modification

started by Paul Melissa on 24 Aug 09 no follow-up yet
Weiye Loh

Cooks Source, condescension and copyright law | Econsultancy - 0 views

econsultancy.com/...condecension-and-copyright-law

Digital Labor Copyright Plagiarism

shared by Weiye Loh on 05 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • It’s hard to make a living writing online. In general, those who write for the web are looked down on by their ‘in-print’ counterparts. Despite the fact that we often speak to larger and more relevant audiences, there’s still an attitude that web copy is somehow illegitimate, less professional.
  • A couple of years ago, LiveJournal user Monica Gaudio posted a short article on the history of the apple pie. Conclusion: It isn’t quite as all-American as you might think. Fairly innocuous stuff, until it recently resurfaced in Cook’s Source magazine. According to Monica , she only became aware of this when a friend asked her how she had managed to be published. Monica acted correctly, contacting the magazine under the assumption that a mix-up had occurred. The response showed an astonishing lack of knowledge about digital copyright, content value, and of course, the ever-looming spectre of social media fail and internet wrath. Apparently, the magazine had simply lifted the article directly from Monica’s site, publishing it in their print magazine, on their website and on the Cooks Source Facebook page. 
  • A few emails in and the editor finally asked what Monica wanted. Her list of demands was hardly excessive: A printed apology, and a donation of $130 to the Columbia school of Journalism, and she’d ignore the entire incident. Instead, the editor of Cook’s Source responded with a remarkable display of ignorance and condescension: Honestly Monica, the web is considered "public domain" and you should be happy we just didn't "lift" your whole article and put someone else's name on it! It happens a lot, clearly more than you are aware of, especially on college campuses, and the workplace. If you took offence and are unhappy, I am sorry, but you as a professional should know that the article we used written by you was in very bad need of editing, and is much better now than was originally. Now it will work well for your portfolio. For that reason, I have a bit of a difficult time with your requests for monetary gain, albeit for such a fine (and very wealthy!) institution. We put some time into rewrites, you should compensate me! I never charge young writers for advice or rewriting poorly written pieces, and have many who write for me... ALWAYS for free! I’m unable to fathom where the notion that all web content is public domain came from for starters. If this is true, then it should be perfectly fine for me to reprint the entire contents of The Times on my blog each day.
  • Weiye Loh on 05 Nov 10
     
    Cooks Source, condescension and copyright law
Weiye Loh

The Ashtray: The Ultimatum (Part 1) - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...e-ashtray-the-ultimatum-part-1

Philosophy Science Paradigm Shift

shared by Weiye Loh on 16 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • “Under no circumstances are you to go to those lectures. Do you hear me?” Kuhn, the head of the Program in the History and Philosophy of Science at Princeton where I was a graduate student, had issued an ultimatum. It concerned the philosopher Saul Kripke’s lectures — later to be called “Naming and Necessity” — which he had originally given at Princeton in 1970 and planned to give again in the Fall, 1972.
  • Whiggishness — in history of science, the tendency to evaluate and interpret past scientific theories not on their own terms, but in the context of current knowledge. The term comes from Herbert Butterfield’s “The Whig Interpretation of History,” written when Butterfield, a future Regius professor of history at Cambridge, was only 31 years old. Butterfield had complained about Whiggishness, describing it as “…the study of the past with direct and perpetual reference to the present” – the tendency to see all history as progressive, and in an extreme form, as an inexorable march to greater liberty and enlightenment. [3] For Butterfield, on the other hand, “…real historical understanding” can be achieved only by “attempting to see life with the eyes of another century than our own.” [4][5].
  • Kuhn had attacked my Whiggish use of the term “displacement current.” [6] I had failed, in his view, to put myself in the mindset of Maxwell’s first attempts at creating a theory of electricity and magnetism. I felt that Kuhn had misinterpreted my paper, and that he — not me — had provided a Whiggish interpretation of Maxwell. I said, “You refuse to look through my telescope.” And he said, “It’s not a telescope, Errol. It’s a kaleidoscope.” (In this respect, he was probably right.) [7].
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • I asked him, “If paradigms are really incommensurable, how is history of science possible? Wouldn’t we be merely interpreting the past in the light of the present? Wouldn’t the past be inaccessible to us? Wouldn’t it be ‘incommensurable?’ ” [8] ¶He started moaning. He put his head in his hands and was muttering, “He’s trying to kill me. He’s trying to kill me.” ¶And then I added, “…except for someone who imagines himself to be God.” ¶It was at this point that Kuhn threw the ashtray at me.
  • I call Kuhn’s reply “The Ashtray Argument.” If someone says something you don’t like, you throw something at him. Preferably something large, heavy, and with sharp edges. Perhaps we were engaged in a debate on the nature of language, meaning and truth. But maybe we just wanted to kill each other.
  • That's the problem with relativism: Who's to say who's right and who's wrong? Somehow I'm not surprised to hear Kuhn was an ashtray-hurler. In the end, what other argument could he make?
  • For us to have a conversation and come to an agreement about the meaning of some word without having to refer to some outside authority like a dictionary, we would of necessity have to be satisfied that our agreement was genuine and not just a polite acknowledgement of each others' right to their opinion, can you agree with that? If so, then let's see if we can agree on the meaning of the word 'know' because that may be the crux of the matter. When I use the word 'know' I mean more than the capacity to apprehend some aspect of the world through language or some other represenational symbolism. Included in the word 'know' is the direct sensorial perception of some aspect of the world. For example, I sense the floor that my feet are now resting upon. I 'know' the floor is really there, I can sense it. Perhaps I don't 'know' what the floor is made of, who put it there, and other incidental facts one could know through the usual symbolism such as language as in a story someone tells me. Nevertheless, the reality I need to 'know' is that the floor, or whatever you may wish to call the solid - relative to my body - flat and level surface supported by more structure then the earth, is really there and reliably capable of supporting me. This is true and useful knowledge that goes directly from the floor itself to my knowing about it - via sensation - that has nothing to do with my interpretive system.
  • Now I am interested in 'knowing' my feet in the same way that my feet and the whole body they are connected to 'know' the floor. I sense my feet sensing the floor. My feet are as real as the floor and I know they are there, sensing the floor because I can sense them. Furthermore, now I 'know' that it is 'I' sensing my feet, sensing the floor. Do you see where I am going with this line of thought? I am including in the word 'know' more meaning than it is commonly given by everyday language. Perhaps it sounds as if I want to expand on the Cartesian formula of cogito ergo sum, and in truth I prefer to say I sense therefore I am. It is my sensations of the world first and foremost that my awareness, such as it is, is actively engaged with reality. Now, any healthy normal animal senses the world but we can't 'know' if they experience reality as we do since we can't have a conversation with them to arrive at agreement. But we humans can have this conversation and possibly agree that we can 'know' the world through sensation. We can even know what is 'I' through sensation. In fact, there is no other way to know 'I' except through sensation. Thought is symbolic representation, not direct sensing, so even though the thoughtful modality of regarding the world may be a far more reliable modality than sensation in predicting what might happen next, its very capacity for such accurate prediction is its biggest weakness, which is its capacity for error
  • Sensation cannot be 'wrong' unless it is used to predict outcomes. Thought can be wrong for both predicting outcomes and for 'knowing' reality. Sensation alone can 'know' reality even though it is relatively unreliable, useless even, for making predictions.
  • If we prioritize our interests by placing predictability over pure knowing through sensation, then of course we will not value the 'knowledge' to be gained through sensation. But if we can switch the priorities - out of sheer curiosity perhaps - then we can enter a realm of knowledge through sensation that is unbelievably spectacular. Our bodies are 'made of' reality, and by methodically exercising our nascent capacity for self sensing, we can connect our knowing 'I' to reality directly. We will not be able to 'know' what it is that we are experiencing in the way we might wish, which is to be able to predict what will happen next or to represent to ourselves symbolically what we might experience when we turn our attention to that sensation. But we can arrive at a depth and breadth of 'knowing' that is utterly unprecedented in our lives by operating that modality.
  • One of the impressions that comes from a sustained practice of self sensing is a clearer feeling for what "I" is and why we have a word for that self referential phenomenon, seemingly located somewhere behind our eyes and between our ears. The thing we call "I" or "me" depending on the context, turns out to be a moving point, a convergence vector for a variety of images, feelings and sensations. It is a reference point into which certain impressions flow and out of which certain impulses to act diverge and which may or may not animate certain muscle groups into action. Following this tricky exercize in attention and sensation, we can quickly see for ourselves that attention is more like a focused beam and awareness is more like a diffuse cloud, but both are composed of energy, and like all energy they vibrate, they oscillate with a certain frequency. That's it for now.
  • I loved the writer's efforts to find a fixed definition of “Incommensurability;” there was of course never a concrete meaning behind the word. Smoke and mirrors.
Weiye Loh

It's Even Less in Your Genes by Richard C. Lewontin | The New York Review of Books - 0 views

www.nybooks.com/...its-even-less-your-genes

Genetic Nature Nurture Diversity

shared by Weiye Loh on 17 May 11 - No Cached
  • One of the complications is that the effective environment is defined by the life activities of the organism itself.
  • Thus, as organisms evolve, their environments necessarily evolve with them. Although classic Darwinism is framed by referring to organisms adapting to environments, the actual process of evolution involves the creation of new “ecological niches” as new life forms come into existence. Part of the ecological niche of an earthworm is the tunnel excavated by the worm and part of the ecological niche of a tree is the assemblage of fungi associated with the tree’s root system that provide it with nutrients.
  • , the distinction between organisms and their environments remains deeply embedded in our consciousness. Partly this is due to the inertia of educational institutions and materials
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • But the problem is deeper than simply intellectual inertia. It goes back, ultimately, to the unconsidered differentiations we make—at every moment when we distinguish among objects—between those in the foreground of our consciousness and the background places in which the objects happen to be situated. Moreover, this distinction creates a hierarchy of objects. We are conscious not only of the skin that encloses and defines the object, but of bits and pieces of that object, each of which must have its own “skin.” That is the problem of anatomization. A car has a motor and brakes and a transmission and an outer body that, at appropriate moments, become separate objects of our consciousness, objects that at least some knowledgeable person recognizes as coherent entities.
  • Evelyn Fox Keller sees “The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture” as a consequence of our false division of the world into living objects without sufficient consideration of the external milieu in which they are embedded, since organisms help create effective environments through their own life activities.
  • The central point of her analysis has been that gender itself (as opposed to sex) is socially constructed, and that construction has influenced the development of science:If there is a single point on which all feminist scholarship…has converged, it is the importance of recognizing the social construction of gender…. All of my work on gender and science proceeds from this basic recognition. My endeavor has been to call attention to the ways in which the social construction of a binary opposition between “masculine” and “feminine” has influenced the social construction of science.
  • major critical concern of Fox Keller’s present book is the widespread attempt to partition in some quantitative way the contribution made to human variation by differences in biological inheritance, that is, differences in genes, as opposed to differences in life experience. She wants to make clear a distinction between analyzing the relative strength of the causes of variation among individuals and groups, an analysis that is coherent in principle, and simply assigning the relative contributions of biological and environmental causes to the value of some character in an individual
  • It is, for example, all very well to say that genetic variation is responsible for 76 percent of the observed variation in adult height among American women while the remaining 24 percent is a consequence of differences in nutrition. The implication is that if all variation in nutrition were abolished then 24 percent of the observed height variation among individuals in the population in the next generation would disappear. To say, however, that 76 percent of Evelyn Fox Keller’s height was caused by her genes and 24 percent by her nutrition does not make sense. The nonsensical implication of trying to partition the causes of her individual height would be that if she never ate anything she would still be three quarters as tall as she is.
  • In fact, Keller is too optimistic about the assignment of causes of variation even when considering variation in a population. As she herself notes parenthetically, the assignment of relative proportions of population variation to different causes in a population depends on there being no specific interaction between the causes.
  • Keller’s rather casual treatment of the interaction between causal factors in the case of the drummers, despite her very great sophistication in analyzing the meaning of variation, is a symptom of a fault that is deeply embedded in the analytic training and thinking of both natural and social scientists. If there are several variable factors influencing some phenomenon, how are we to assign the relative importance to each in determining total variation? Let us take an extreme example. Suppose that we plant seeds of each of two different varieties of corn in two different locations with the following results measured in bushels of corn produced (see Table 1). There are differences between the varieties in their yield from location to location and there are differences between locations from variety to variety. So, both variety and location matter. But there is no average variation between locations when averaged over varieties or between varieties when averaged over locations. Just by knowing the variation in yield associated with location and variety separately does not tell us which factor is the more important source of variation; nor do the facts of location and variety exhaust the description of that variation.
  • Weiye Loh on 17 May 11
     
    In trying to analyze the natural world, scientists are seldom aware of the degree to which their ideas are influenced both by their way of perceiving the everyday world and by the constraints that our cognitive development puts on our formulations. At every moment of perception of the world around us, we isolate objects as discrete entities with clear boundaries while we relegate the rest to a background in which the objects exist.
Weiye Loh

How the net traps us all in our own little bubbles | Technology | The Observer - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...sation-internet-data-filtering

Internet Search Search Engine Optimization Fragmentation Polarisation Cultural Industries

shared by Weiye Loh on 14 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Google would use 57 signals – everything from where you were logging in from to what browser you were using to what you had searched for before – to make guesses about who you were and what kinds of sites you'd like. Even if you were logged out, it would customise its results, showing you the pages it predicted you were most likely to click on.
  • Most of us assume that when we google a term, we all see the same results – the ones that the company's famous Page Rank algorithm suggests are the most authoritative based on other pages' links. But since December 2009, this is no longer true. Now you get the result that Google's algorithm suggests is best for you in particular – and someone else may see something entirely different. In other words, there is no standard Google any more.
  • In the spring of 2010, while the remains of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig were spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico, I asked two friends to search for the term "BP". They're pretty similar – educated white left-leaning women who live in the north-east. But the results they saw were quite different. One saw investment information about BP. The other saw news.
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  • the query "stem cells" might produce diametrically opposed results for scientists who support stem-cell research and activists who oppose it.
  • "Proof of climate change" might turn up different results for an environmental activist and an oil-company executive.
  • majority of us assume search engines are unbiased. But that may be just because they're increasingly biased to share our own views. More and more, your computer monitor is a kind of one-way mirror, reflecting your own interests while algorithmic observers watch what you click. Google's announcement marked the turning point of an important but nearly invisible revolution in how we consume information. You could say that on 4 December 2009 the era of personalisation began.
  • We are predisposed to respond to a pretty narrow set of stimuli – if a piece of news is about sex, power, gossip, violence, celebrity or humour, we are likely to read it first. This is the content that most easily makes it into the filter bubble. It's easy to push "Like" and increase the visibility of a friend's post about finishing a marathon or an instructional article about how to make onion soup. It's harder to push the "Like" button on an article titled "Darfur sees bloodiest month in two years". In a personalised world, important but complex or unpleasant issues – the rising prison population, for example, or homelessness – are less likely to come to our attention at all.
  • As a consumer, it's hard to argue with blotting out the irrelevant and unlikable. But what is good for consumers is not necessarily good for citizens. What I seem to like may not be what I actually want, let alone what I need to know to be an informed member of my community or country. "It's a civic virtue to be exposed to things that appear to be outside your interest," technology journalist Clive Thompson told me. Cultural critic Lee Siegel puts it a different way: "Customers are always right, but people aren't."
  • Personalisation is based on a bargain. In exchange for the service of filtering, you hand large companies an enormous amount of data about your daily life – much of which you might not trust friends with.
  • To be the author of your life, professor Yochai Benkler argues, you have to be aware of a diverse array of options and lifestyles. When you enter a filter bubble, you're letting the companies that construct it choose which options you're aware of. You may think you're the captain of your own destiny, but personalisation can lead you down a road to a kind of informational determinism in which what you've clicked on in the past determines what you see next – a web history you're doomed to repeat. You can get stuck in a static, ever- narrowing version of yourself – an endless you-loop.
  • Weiye Loh on 14 Jun 11
     
    An invisible revolution has taken place is the way we use the net, but the increasing personalisation of information by search engines such as Google threatens to limit our access to information and enclose us in a self-reinforcing world view, writes Eli Pariser in an extract from The Filter Bubble
yongernn teo

Ethics and Values Case Study- Mercy Killing, Euthanasia - 8 views

www.brainmass.com/...86151

Euthanasia

shared by yongernn teo on 21 Oct 09 - Cached
  • yongernn teo on 21 Oct 09
     
    THE ETHICAL PROBLEM: Allowing someone to die, mercy death, and mercy killing, Euthanasia: A 24-year-old man named Robert who has a wife and child is paralyzed from the neck down in a motorcycle accident. He has always been very active and hates the idea of being paralyzed. He also is in a great deal of pain, an he has asked his doctors and other members of his family to "put him out of his misery." After several days of such pleading, his brother comes into Robert's hospital ward and asks him if he is sure he still wants to be put out of his misery. Robert says yes and pleads with his brother to kill him. The brother kisses and blesses Robert, then takes out a gun and shoots him, killing him instantly. The brother later is tried for murder and acquitted by reason of temporary insanity. Was what Robert's brother did moral? Do you think he should have been brought to trial at all? Do you think he should have been acquitted? Would you do the same for a loved one if you were asked? THE DISCUSSION: In my opinion, the most dubious part about the case would be the part on Robert pleading with his brother, asking his brother to kill him. This could be his brother's own account of the incident and could/could not have been a plea by Robert. 1) With assumption that Robert indeed pleaded with his brother to kill him, an ethical analysis as such could be derived: That Robert's brother was only respecting Robert's choice and killed him because he wanted to relieve him from his misery. This could be argued to be ethical using a teleoloigical framework where the focus is on the end-result and the consequences that entails the action. Here, although the act of killing per se may be wrong and illegal, Robert was able to relieved of his pain and suffering. 2) With an assumption that Robert did not plea with his brother to kill him and that it was his brother's own decision to relieve Robert of all-suffering: In this case, the b
  • ...2 more comments...
  • Elaine Ong on 22 Oct 09
     
    I find euthanasia to be a very interesting ethical dilemma. Even I myself am caught in the middle. Euthanasia has been termed as 'mercy killing' and even 'happy death'. Others may simply just term it as being 'evil'. Is it right to end someone's life even when he or she pleads you to do so? In the first place, is it even right to commit suicide? Once someone pulls off the main support that's keeping the person alive, such as the feeding tube, there is no turning back. Hmm..Come to think of it, technology is kind of unethical by being made available, for in the past, when someone is dying, they had the right to die naturally. Now, scientific technology is 'forcing' us to stay alive and cling on to a life that may be deemed being worthless if we were standing outside our bodies looking at our comatose selves. Then again, this may just be MY personal standpoint. But I have to argue, who gave technology the right to make me a worthless vegetable!(and here I am, attaching a value/judgement onto an immobile human being..) Hence, being incompetent in making decisions for my unconscious self (or perhaps even brain dead), who should take responsibility for my life, for my existence? And on what basis are they allowed to help me out? Taking the other side of the argument, against euthanasia, we can say that the act of ending someone else's life is the act of destroying societal respect for life. Based on the utilitarian perspective, we are not thinking of the overall beneficence for society and disregarding the moral considerations encompassed within the state's interest to preserve the sanctity of all life. It has been said that life in itself takes priority over all other values. We should let the person live so as to give him/her a chance to wake up or hope for recovery (think comatose patients). But then again we can also argue that life is not the top of the hierarchy! A life without rights is as if not living a life at all? By removing the patient
  • juliet huang on 28 Oct 09
     
    as a human being, you supposedly have a right to live, whether you are mobile or immobile. however, i think that, in the case of euthanasia, you 'give up' your rights when you "show" that you are no longer able to serve the pre-requisites of having the right. for example, if "living" rights are equate to you being able to talk, walk, etc etc, then, obviously the opposite means you no longer are able to perform up to the expectations of that right. then again, it is very subjective as to who gets to make that criteria!
  • Magdaleine on 02 Nov 09
     
    hmm interesting.. however, a question i have is who and when can this "right" be "given up"? when i am a victim in a car accident, and i lost the ability to breathe, walk and may need months to recover. i am unconscious and the doctor is unable to determine when am i gonna regain consciousness. when should my parents decide i can no longer be able to have any living rights? and taking elaine's point into consideration, is committing suicide even 'right'? if it is legally not right, when i ask someone to take my life and wrote a letter that it was cus i wanted to die, does that make it committing suicide only in the hands of others?
  • Low Yunying on 04 Nov 09
     
    Similarly, I question the 'rights' that you have to 'give up' when you no longer 'serve the pre-requisites of having the right'. If the living rights means being able to talk and walk, then where does it leave infants? Where does it leave people who may be handicapped? Have their lost their rights to living?
Weiye Loh

Phone hacking: David Cameron is not out of the sewer yet - Telegraph - 0 views

www.telegraph.co.uk/...-not-out-of-the-sewer-yet.html

Murdoch News Politics Power

shared by Weiye Loh on 10 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Murdoch himself was protected by his potent political contacts. Tony Blair, for example, would do anything to help out his close friend and ally. I can even disclose that, before the last election, Tony Blair rang Gordon Brown to try to persuade the Labour Prime Minister to stop the Labour MP Tom Watson raising the issue of phone hacking. And as recently as two weeks ago both Ed Miliband and David Cameron attended the News International (News Corp’s British newspaper publishing arm) summer party, despite the fact that the newspaper group was the subject of two separate criminal investigations.
  • Weiye Loh on 10 Jul 11
     
    For more than three decades the most powerful man in Britain has not been a politician; it has been the brilliant but ruthless US-based media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, who burst on to the scene with the purchase of the News of the World in an audacious takeover bid in 1968. Within barely a decade he had built up a controlling interest in British newspapers.But he did not just control our media. He dominated British public life. Politicians - including prime ministers - treated him with deference and fear. Time and again the Murdoch press - using techniques of which we have only just become aware - destroyed political careers. Murdoch also claims to determine the results of general elections.
Weiye Loh

Rationally Speaking: Why do libertarians deny climate change? - 0 views

rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/...rians-deny-climate-change.html

Climate Science Libertarianism

shared by Weiye Loh on 28 May 10 - Cached
  • the trend is hard to miss. The libertarian think tank CATO Institute has been waging a media war against the very notion for years, and even prominent skeptics with libertarian leanings have pronounced themselves negatively on the matter (most famously Penn & Teller, and initially even Michael Shermer, though both — I count P&T as one — lately have taken a few steps back from their initial positions).
  • whether climate change is real or not. It is, according to the best science available. Yes, even the best science can be wrong, but frankly the only people who can tell with any degree of reasonability are those belonging to the relevant community of experts, in this case climate scientists
  • The question is particularly pertinent to libertarians and the ideologically close allied group of “objectivists,” i.e. followers of Ayn Rand (though there are significant differences between the two groups, as I mentioned before). These people often claim to be friends of science (as opposed to many radical conservatives like Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla), who called global warming the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people” (perpetrated by whom? And to what end?)), and in the case of objectivists, whose whole approach to politics is allegedly based on rational considerations of the facts.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • one would think that libertarians could make a distinction between evidence-based interpretation of reality (global warming is happening), and whatever policies we might want to enact to avoid catastrophe. Qua Qua libertarians, they would obviously resist any government-led effort at clean up, especially if internationally coordinated, preferring instead a coalition of the willing within the private sector
  • there certainly is plenty of room for reasonable discussions and disagreements about how best to proceed in confronting the problem. On the other hand, there doesn’t seem to be much room for reasonable disagreement about the very existence of the problem itself. So, what gives, my dear libertarians?
  • . In the case of major libertarian outlets, like the CATO Institute think tank, the rather unglamorous answer may simply be that they are in the pockets of the oil industry. A large amount of the funding for CATO comes from private corporations with obvious political agendas including, you guessed it, Exxon-Mobil (remember the Valdez?). No wonder CATO people trump the party line on this one.
  • The second reason, however, is more personal and widespread: libertarianism is committed to the high moral value of private enterprise
  • it follows naturally (if irrationally) that libertarians cannot admit to themselves, and even less to the world at large, that the much vaunted private sector may be responsible — out of both greed and downright incompetence — for a major environmental catastrophe of planetary proportions. The industry is the good guy in their movie, how then could they possibly have done something so horrible?
  • hat’s the problem with ideology in general (be it left, right, or libertarian), it provides us with thick blinders that very effectively shield us from reality. Of course, no one is actually free of bias, yours truly included. But a core principle of skepticism and critical thinking is that we do our best to be aware (and minimize) our own biases, and that we ought to open ourselves to honest criticism from different parties, in pursuit of the best approximation to the truth that we can muster.
  • Weiye Loh on 28 May 10
     
    Why do libertarians deny climate change?
Weiye Loh

Fight against Net porn a collective effort: MDA - 0 views

www.straitstimes.com/...STIStory_426728.html

shared by Weiye Loh on 08 Sep 09 - Cached
  • MDA has also commissioned a special programme entitled Once Upon A Cyberspace to raise awareness among 10- to 14-year-olds and their families on the importance of Internet safety. Beginning on April 6, this was aired as six one- minute interstitials on Okto for six weeks running. Various courses are also run by a number of organisations for parents and children. Details can be found on www.mda.gov.sg under the links 'Media & I' and subsequently 'Public Education'.
    • Weiye Loh
      Weiye Loh on 08 Sep 09
       
      This is relevant to our debate last week on pornography and children.
Weiye Loh

TODAYonline | World | The photo that's caused a stir - 0 views

www.todayonline.com/...The-photo-thats-caused-a-stir

War Information Censorship Family Death

shared by Weiye Loh on 06 Sep 09 - Cached
  • reporters had not specifically asked the family's permission to publish them and that his parents had not wanted the photographs to be used. "There was no question that the photo had news value," AP senior managing editor John Daniszewski said. "But we also were very aware the family wished for the picture not to be seen."After lengthy internal discussions, AP concluded that the photo was a part of the war they needed to convey.
  • The US Defence Secretary, Mr Robert Gates, condemned the decision by the news agency Associated Press (AP) to publish the picture. "I cannot imagine the pain and suffering Lance Corporal Bernard's death has caused his family. Why your organisation would purposefully defy the family's wishes, knowing full well that it will lead to yet more anguish, is beyond me,"
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • the picture illustrated the sacrifice and the bravery of those fighting in Afghanistan."We feel it is our journalistic duty to show the reality of the war there, however unpleasant and brutal that sometimes is," said Mr Santiago Lyon, director of photography for AP.
  • Weiye Loh on 06 Sep 09
     
    Ethical question, when public's demand for information collides with private's demand for non-disclosure, which one should win? How do we measure the pros and cons?
  • Weiye Loh on 06 Sep 09
     
    Journalistic Ethics
Weiye Loh

Censoring Sex Education - 3 views

http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/singaporelocalnews/view/1002815/1/.html International guidelines on sex education reignite debate By Ong Dailin, TODAY | Posted: 04 September 2009 071...

Sex Education

started by Weiye Loh on 04 Sep 09 no follow-up yet
joanne ye

TJC Stomp Scandal - 34 views

This is a very interesting topic. Thanks, Weiman! From the replies for this topic, I would say two general questions surfaced. Firstly, is STOMP liable for misinformation? Secondly, is it right for...

started by Weiman Kow on 19 Aug 09 3 follow-ups, last by joanne ye on 26 Aug 09
juliet huang

Go slow with Net law - 4 views

Article : Go slow with tech law Published : 23 Aug 2009 Source: Straits Times Background : When Singapore signed a free trade agreement with the USA in 2003, intellectual property rights was a ...

sim lim square

started by juliet huang on 26 Aug 09 no follow-up yet
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