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Inosha Wickrama

ethical porn? - 50 views

I've seen that video recently. Anyway, some points i need to make. 1. different countries have different ages of consent. Does that mean children mature faster in some countries and not in other...

pornography

started by lee weiting on 30 Aug 09 9 follow-ups, last by Inosha Wickrama on 04 Sep 09
Weiye Loh

CBC News - Montreal - Depressed woman loses benefits over Facebook photos - 0 views

www.cbc.ca/...ebook-sick-leave-benefits.html

Facebook Privacy

shared by Weiye Loh on 27 Nov 09 - Cached
  • A Quebec woman on long-term sick leave is fighting to have her benefits reinstated after her employer's insurance company cut them, she says, because of photos posted on Facebook.
  • The Eastern Townships woman was receiving monthly sick-leave benefits from Manulife, her insurance company, but the payments dried up this fall.
  • She said her insurance agent described several pictures Blanchard posted on the popular social networking site, including ones showing her having a good time at a Chippendales bar show, at her birthday party and on a sun holiday — evidence that she is no longer depressed, Manulife said. Blanchard said she notified Manulife that she was taking a trip, and she's shocked the company would investigate her in such a manner and interpret her photos that way.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Blanchard said that on her doctor's advice, she tried to have fun, including nights out at her local bar with friends and short getaways to sun destinations, as a way to forget her problems. She also doesn’t understand how Manulife accessed her photos because her Facebook profile is locked and only people she approves can look at what she posts.
  • Insurer confirms it uses Facebook
    • Weiye Loh
      Weiye Loh on 27 Nov 09
       
      Yup. Facebook has greater implications than staying connected with friends. 
  • the insurer said: "We would not deny or terminate a valid claim solely based on information published on websites such as Facebook." It confirmed that it uses the popular social networking site to investigate clients.
  • Weiye Loh on 27 Nov 09
     
    Depressed woman loses benefits over Facebook photos
Weiye Loh

Judge dismisses authors' case against Google Books | Internet & Media - CNET News - 0 views

news.cnet.com/...hors-case-against-google-books

Google Books Copyright

shared by Weiye Loh on 16 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 16 Nov 13
     
    "In my view, Google Books provides significant public benefits. It advances the progress of the arts and sciences, while maintaining respectful consideration for the rights of authors and other creative individuals, and without adversely impacting the rights of copyright holders. It has become an invaluable research tool that permits students, teachers, librarians, and others to more efficiently identify and locate books. It has given scholars the ability, for the first time, to conduct full-text searches of tens of millions of books. It preserves books, in particular out-of-print and old books that have been forgotten in the bowels of libraries, and it gives them new life. It facilitates access to books for print-disabled and remote or underserved populations. It generates new audiences and creates new sources of income for authors and publishers. Indeed, all society benefits."
Jody Poh

Subtitles, Lip Synching and Covers on YouTube - 13 views

I think that companies concerned over this issue due to the loss of potential income constitutes egoism. They mainly want to defend their interests without considering the beneficial impact of the ...

copyright youtube parody

started by Ang Yao Zong on 25 Aug 09 1 follow-up, last by Jody Poh on 25 Aug 09
Weiye Loh

Is Pure Altruism Possible? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...is-pure-altruism-possible

Altruism Philosophy Evolution

shared by Weiye Loh on 05 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • It’s undeniable that people sometimes act in a way that benefits others, but it may seem that they always get something in return — at the very least, the satisfaction of having their desire to help fulfilled.
  • Contemporary discussions of altruism quickly turn to evolutionary explanations. Reciprocal altruism and kin selection are the two main theories. According to reciprocal altruism, evolution favors organisms that sacrifice their good for others in order to gain a favor in return. Kin selection — the famous “selfish gene” theory popularized by Richard Dawkins — says that an individual who behaves altruistically towards others who share its genes will tend to reproduce those genes. Organisms may be altruistic; genes are selfish. The feeling that loving your children more than yourself is hard-wired lends plausibility to the theory of kin selection.
  • The defect of reciprocal altruism is clear. If a person acts to benefit another in the expectation that the favor will be returned, the natural response is: “That’s not altruism!”  Pure altruism, we think, requires a person to sacrifice for another without consideration of personal gain. Doing good for another person because something’s in it for the do-er is the very opposite of what we have in mind. Kin selection does better by allowing that organisms may genuinely sacrifice their interests for another, but it fails to explain why they sometimes do so for those with whom they share no genes
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • When we ask whether human beings are altruistic, we want to know about their motives or intentions. Biological altruism explains how unselfish behavior might have evolved but, as Frans de Waal suggested in his column in The Stone on Sunday, it implies nothing about the motives or intentions of the agent: after all, birds and bats and bees can act altruistically. This fact helps to explain why, despite these evolutionary theories, the view that people never intentionally act to benefit others except to obtain some good for themselves still possesses a powerful lure over our thinking.
  • The lure of this view — egoism — has two sources, one psychological, the other logical. Consider first the psychological. One reason people deny that altruism exists is that, looking inward, they doubt the purity of their own motives. We know that even when we appear to act unselfishly, other reasons for our behavior often rear their heads: the prospect of a future favor, the boost to reputation, or simply the good feeling that comes from appearing to act unselfishly. As Kant and Freud observed, people’s true motives may be hidden, even (or perhaps especially) from themselves. Even if we think we’re acting solely to further another person’s good, that might not be the real reason. (There might be no single “real reason” — actions can have multiple motives.)
  • So the psychological lure of egoism as a theory of human action is partly explained by a certain humility or skepticism people have about their own or others’ motives
  • There’s also a less flattering reason: denying the possibility of pure altruism provides a convenient excuse for selfish behavior.
  • The logical lure of egoism is different: the view seems impossible to disprove. No matter how altruistic a person appears to be, it’s possible to conceive of her motive in egoistic terms.
  • The impossibility of disproving egoism may sound like a virtue of the theory, but, as philosophers of science know, it’s really a fatal drawback. A theory that purports to tell us something about the world, as egoism does, should be falsifiable. Not false, of course, but capable of being tested and thus proved false. If every state of affairs is compatible with egoism, then egoism doesn’t tell us anything distinctive about how things are.
  • s ambiguity in the concepts of desire and the satisfaction of desire. If people possess altruistic motives, then they sometimes act to benefit others without the prospect of gain to themselves. In other words, they desire the good of others for its own sake, not simply as a means to their own satisfaction.
  • Still, when our desires are satisfied we normally experience satisfaction; we feel good when we do good. But that doesn’t mean we do good only in order to get that “warm glow” — that our true incentives are self-interested (as economists tend to claim). Indeed, as de Waal argues, if we didn’t desire the good of others for its own sake, then attaining it wouldn’t produce the warm glow.
  • Common sense tells us that some people are more altruistic than others. Egoism’s claim that these differences are illusory — that deep down, everybody acts only to further their own interests — contradicts our observations and deep-seated human practices of moral evaluation.
  • At the same time, we may notice that generous people don’t necessarily suffer more or flourish less than those who are more self-interested.
  • The point is rather that the kind of altruism we ought to encourage, and probably the only kind with staying power, is satisfying to those who practice it. Studies of rescuers show that they don’t believe their behavior is extraordinary; they feel they must do what they do, because it’s just part of who they are. The same holds for more common, less newsworthy acts — working in soup kitchens, taking pets to people in nursing homes, helping strangers find their way, being neighborly. People who act in these ways believe that they ought to help others, but they also want to help, because doing so affirms who they are and want to be and the kind of world they want to exist. As Prof. Neera Badhwar has argued, their identity is tied up with their values, thus tying self-interest and altruism together. The correlation between doing good and feeling good is not inevitable— inevitability lands us again with that empty, unfalsifiable egoism — but it is more than incidental.
  • Altruists should not be confused with people who automatically sacrifice their own interests for others.
  • Weiye Loh on 05 Nov 10
     
    Is Pure Altruism Possible?
Weiye Loh

Epiphenom: The evolution of dissent - 0 views

epiphenom.fieldofscience.com/...evolution-of-dissent.html

Evolution Religion Genetic

shared by Weiye Loh on 16 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • Genetic evolution in humans occurs in an environment shaped by culture - and culture, in turn is shaped by genetics.
  • If religion is a virus, then perhaps the spread of religion can be understood through the lens of evolutionary theory. Perhaps cultural evolution can be modelled using the same mathematical tools applied to genetic evolution.
  • Michael Doebli and Iaroslav Ispolatov at the University of  British Columbia
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • set out to model was the development of religious schisms. Such schisms are a recurrent feature of religion, especially in the West. The classic example is the fracturing of Christianity that occured after the reformation.
  • Their model made two simple assumptions. Firstly, that religions that are highly dominant actually induce some people to want to break away from them. When a religion becomes overcrowded, then some individuals will lose their religion and take up another.
  • Second, they assume that every religion has a value to the individual that is composed of it's costs and benefits. That value varies between religion, but is the same for all individuals. It's a pretty simplistic assumption, but even so they get some interesting results.
  • Now, this is a very simple model, and so the results shouldn't be over-interpreted. But it's a fascinating result for a couple of reasons. It shows how new religious 'species' can come into being in a mixed population - no need for geographical separation. That's such a common feature of religion - from the Judaeo-Christian religions to examples from Papua New Guinea - that it's worth trying to understand what drives it. What's more, this is the first time that anyone has attempted to model the transmission of religious ideas in evolutionary terms. It's a first step, to be sure, but just showing that it can be done is a significant achievement.
  • The value comes because it shifts the focus from thinking about how culture benefits the host, and instead asks how the cultural trait is adaptive in it's own right. What is important is not whether or not the human host benefits from the trait, but rather whether the trait can successfully transmit and reproducing itself (see Bible Belter for an example of how this could work).
  • Even more intriguing is the implications for understanding cultural-genetic co-evolution. After all, we know that viruses and their hosts co-evolve in a kind of arms race - sometimes ending up in a relationship that benefits both.
  • Weiye Loh on 16 Dec 10
     
    Genetic evolution in humans occurs in an environment shaped by culture - and culture, in turn is shaped by genetics
Weiye Loh

What If The Very Theory That Underlies Why We Need Patents Is Wrong? | Techdirt - 0 views

www.techdirt.com/...0517167656.shtml

Patent Law Innovation

shared by Weiye Loh on 22 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Scott Walker points us to a fascinating paper by Carliss Y. Baldwin and Eric von Hippel, suggesting that some of the most basic theories on which the patent system is based are wrong, and because of that, the patent system might hinder innovation.
  • numerous other research papers and case studies that suggest that the patent system quite frequently hinders innovation, but this one approaches it from a different angle than ones we've seen before, and is actually quite convincing. It looks at the putative putative theory that innovation comes from a direct profit motive of a single corporation looking to sell the good in market, and for that to work, the company needs to take the initial invention and get temporary monopoly protection to keep out competitors in order to recoup the cost of research and development.
  • the paper goes through a whole bunch of studies suggesting that quite frequently innovation happens through a very different process: either individuals or companies directly trying to solve a problem they themselves have (i.e., the initial motive is not to profit directly from sales, but to help them in something they were doing) or through a much more collaborative process, whereby multiple parties all contribute to the process of innovation, somewhat openly, recognizing that as each contributes some, everyone benefits. As the report notes: This result hinges on the fact that the innovative design itself is a non-rival good: each participant in a collaborative effort gets the value of the whole design, but incurs only a fraction of the design cost.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • patents are designed to make that sort of thing more difficult, because it assumes that the initial act of invention is the key point, rather than all the incremental innovations built on top of it that all parties can benefit from.
  • the report points to numerous studies that show, when given the chance, many companies freely share their ideas with others, recognizing the direct benefit they get.
  • Even more importantly, the paper finds that due to technological advances and the ability to more rapidly and easily communicate and collaborate widely, these forms of innovation (innovation for direct use as well as collaborative innovation) are becoming more and more viable across a variety of industries, which in the past may have relied more on the old way of innovating (single company innovative for the profit of selling that product).
  • because of the ease of communication and collaboration these days, there's tremendous incentive for those companies that innovate for their own use to collaborate with others, since the benefit from others improving as well help improve their own uses. Thus, the overall incentives are to move much more to a collaborative form of innovation in the market. That has huge implications for a patent system designed to help the "old model" of innovation (producer inventing for the market) and not the increasingly regular one (collaborative innovation for usage).
  • no one is saying that producer-based innovation (company inventing to sell on the market) doesn't occur or won't continue to occur. But it is an open policy question as to whether or not our innovation policies should favor that model over other models -- when evidence suggests that a significant amount of innovation occurs in these other ways -- and that amount is growing rapidly.
  • Weiye Loh on 22 Apr 10
     
    What If The Very Theory That Underlies Why We Need Patents Is Wrong? from the collaborative-innovation-at-work dept
Weiye Loh

"Cancer by the Numbers" by John Allen Paulos | Project Syndicate - 0 views

www.project-syndicate.org/...cancer-by-the-numbers

Data Interpretation Statistics Cost Benefits Harm Cancer Screening Health

shared by Weiye Loh on 25 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • The USPSTF recently issued an even sharper warning about the prostate-specific antigen test for prostate cancer, after concluding that the test’s harms outweigh its benefits. Chest X-rays for lung cancer and Pap tests for cervical cancer have received similar, albeit less definitive, criticism.CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphThe next step in the reevaluation of cancer screening was taken last year, when researchers at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy announced that the costs of screening for breast cancer were often minimized, and that the benefits were much exaggerated. Indeed, even a mammogram (almost 40 million are given annually in the US) that detects a cancer does not necessarily save a life.CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphThe Dartmouth researchers found that, of the estimated 138,000 breast cancers detected annually in the US, the test did not help 120,000-134,000 of the afflicted women. The cancers either were growing so slowly that they did not pose a problem, or they would have been treated successfully if discovered clinically later (or they were so aggressive that little could be done).
Weiye Loh

Skepticblog » A Post-Modernist Response to Science-Based Medicine - 0 views

skepticblog.org/...onse-to-science-based-medicine

Postmodernism Science Medicine

shared by Weiye Loh on 26 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • One blogger, Marya Zilberberg at Healthcare, etc., has written a series of posts responding to what she thinks is our position at Science-based medicine
  • She is partly responding to this article of mine on SBM (What’s the harm) in which I make the point that medicine is a risk vs benefit game. Ethical responsible medical practice involves interventions where there is at least the probability of doing more benefit than harm with proper informed consent, so the patient knows what those chances are. Using scientifically dubious treatments, where there is little or no chance of benefit, especially when they are overhyped, is therefore unethical. And further, the “harm” side of the equation needs to include all forms of harm, not just direct physical harm.
  • Zilberberg’s response is the typical tu quoque logical fallacy – well, science-based medicine is not all it’s cracked up to be either, so there. She writes: Now, let’s get on to “proof” in science-based medicine. As you well know, while we do have evidence for efficacy and safety of some modalities, many are grandfathered without any science. Even those that are shown to have acceptable efficacy and safety profiles as mandated by the FDA, are arguably (and many do argue) not all that. There is an important concept in clinical science of heterogeneous response to treatment, HTE, which I have addressed extensively on my blog. I did not make it up, it is very real, and it is this phenomenon that makes it difficult to predict how an individual will respond to a particular intervention. This confounds much of what we think is God’s own word on what is supposed to work in allopathic medicine.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • This is also the fallacy of the perfect solution – since science-based medicine is not perfect, there is no legitimate basis for criticism of any modality.
  • Weiye Loh on 26 Oct 10
     
    A POST-MODERNIST RESPONSE TO SCIENCE-BASED MEDICINE
Weiye Loh

Rationally Speaking: On Utilitarianism and Consequentialism - 0 views

rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/...nism-and-consequentialism.html

Ethics Philosophy Utilitarianism Consequentialism

shared by Weiye Loh on 27 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • Utilitarianism and consequentialism are different, yet closely related philosophical positions. Utilitarians are usually consequentialists, and the two views mesh in many areas, but each rests on a different claim
  • Utilitarianism's starting point is that we all attempt to seek happiness and avoid pain, and therefore our moral focus ought to center on maximizing happiness (or, human flourishing generally) and minimizing pain for the greatest number of people. This is both about what our goals should be and how to achieve them.
  • Consequentialism asserts that determining the greatest good for the greatest number of people (the utilitarian goal) is a matter of measuring outcome, and so decisions about what is moral should depend on the potential or realized costs and benefits of a moral belief or action.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • first question we can reasonably ask is whether all moral systems are indeed focused on benefiting human happiness and decreasing pain.
  • Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, wrote the following in his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation: “When a man attempts to combat the principle of utility, it is with reasons drawn, without his being aware of it, from that very principle itself.”
  • Michael Sandel discusses this line of thought in his excellent book, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?, and sums up Bentham’s argument as such: “All moral quarrels, properly understood, are [for Bentham] disagreements about how to apply the utilitarian principle of maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain, not about the principle itself.”
  • But Bentham’s definition of utilitarianism is perhaps too broad: are fundamentalist Christians or Muslims really utilitarians, just with different ideas about how to facilitate human flourishing?
  • one wonders whether this makes the word so all-encompassing in meaning as to render it useless.
  • Yet, even if pain and happiness are the objects of moral concern, so what? As philosopher Simon Blackburn recently pointed out, “Every moral philosopher knows that moral philosophy is functionally about reducing suffering and increasing human flourishing.” But is that the central and sole focus of all moral philosophies? Don’t moral systems vary in their core focuses?
  • Consider the observation that religious belief makes humans happier, on average
  • Secularists would rightly resist the idea that religious belief is moral if it makes people happier. They would reject the very idea because deep down, they value truth – a value that is non-negotiable.Utilitarians would assert that truth is just another utility, for people can only value truth if they take it to be beneficial to human happiness and flourishing.
  • . We might all agree that morality is “functionally about reducing suffering and increasing human flourishing,” as Blackburn says, but how do we achieve that? Consequentialism posits that we can get there by weighing the consequences of beliefs and actions as they relate to human happiness and pain. Sam Harris recently wrote: “It is true that many people believe that ‘there are non-consequentialist ways of approaching morality,’ but I think that they are wrong. In my experience, when you scratch the surface on any deontologist, you find a consequentialist just waiting to get out. For instance, I think that Kant's Categorical Imperative only qualifies as a rational standard of morality given the assumption that it will be generally beneficial (as J.S. Mill pointed out at the beginning of Utilitarianism). Ditto for religious morality.”
  • we might wonder about the elasticity of words, in this case consequentialism. Do fundamentalist Christians and Muslims count as consequentialists? Is consequentialism so empty of content that to be a consequentialist one need only think he or she is benefiting humanity in some way?
  • Harris’ argument is that one cannot adhere to a certain conception of morality without believing it is beneficial to society
  • This still seems somewhat obvious to me as a general statement about morality, but is it really the point of consequentialism? Not really. Consequentialism is much more focused than that. Consider the issue of corporal punishment in schools. Harris has stated that we would be forced to admit that corporal punishment is moral if studies showed that “subjecting children to ‘pain, violence, and public humiliation’ leads to ‘healthy emotional development and good behavior’ (i.e., it conduces to their general well-being and to the well-being of society). If it did, well then yes, I would admit that it was moral. In fact, it would appear moral to more or less everyone.” Harris is being rhetorical – he does not believe corporal punishment is moral – but the point stands.
  • An immediate pitfall of this approach is that it does not qualify corporal punishment as the best way to raise emotionally healthy children who behave well.
  • The virtue ethicists inside us would argue that we ought not to foster a society in which people beat and humiliate children, never mind the consequences. There is also a reasonable and powerful argument based on personal freedom. Don’t children have the right to be free from violence in the public classroom? Don’t children have the right not to suffer intentional harm without consent? Isn’t that part of their “moral well-being”?
  • If consequences were really at the heart of all our moral deliberations, we might live in a very different society.
  • what if economies based on slavery lead to an increase in general happiness and flourishing for their respective societies? Would we admit slavery was moral? I hope not, because we value certain ideas about human rights and freedom. Or, what if the death penalty truly deterred crime? And what if we knew everyone we killed was guilty as charged, meaning no need for The Innocence Project? I would still object, on the grounds that it is morally wrong for us to kill people, even if they have committed the crime of which they are accused. Certain things hold, no matter the consequences.
  • We all do care about increasing human happiness and flourishing, and decreasing pain and suffering, and we all do care about the consequences of our beliefs and actions. But we focus on those criteria to differing degrees, and we have differing conceptions of how to achieve the respective goals – making us perhaps utilitarians and consequentialists in part, but not in whole.
  • Weiye Loh on 27 Nov 10
     
    Is everyone a utilitarian and/or consequentialist, whether or not they know it? That is what some people - from Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill to Sam Harris - would have you believe. But there are good reasons to be skeptical of such claims.
Weiye Loh

Expectations can cancel out the benefit of pain drugs - 0 views

health.asiaone.com/...A1Story20110217-263988.html

Placebo Medicine

shared by Weiye Loh on 17 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • People who don't believe their pain medicine will work can actually reduce or even cancel out the effectiveness of the drug, and images of their brains show how they are doing it, scientists said
  • Researchers from Britain and Germany used brain scans to map how a person's feelings and past experiences can influence the effectiveness of medicines, and found that a powerful painkilling drug with a true biological effect can appear not to be working if a patient has been primed to expect it to fail.
  • By contrast, positive expectations about the treatment doubled the natural physiological or biochemical effect of an opioid drug among 22 healthy volunteers in the study.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • "The brain imaging is telling us that patients really are switching on and off parts of their brains through the mechanisms of expectation -- positive and negative," said Irene Tracy of Britain's Oxford University, who led the research. "(The effect of expectations) is powerful enough to give real added benefits of the drug, and unfortunately it is also very capable of overriding the true analgesic effect." The placebo effect is the real benefit seen when patients are given dummy treatments but believe they will do them good. The nocebo effect is the opposite, when patients get real negative effects when they have doubts about a treatment.
  • For their study, the scientists used the drug remifentanil, a potent ultra short-acting synthetic opioid painkiller which is marketed by drugmakers GlaxoSmithKline and Abbott as Ultiva. The study was published in the Science Translational Medicine journal on Wednesday. Volunteers were put in an MRI scanner and had heat applied to one leg. They were asked to rate pain on a 1 to 100 scale. Unknown to the volunteers, the researchers started giving the drug via infusion to see what effects there would be when the volunteers had no knowledge or expectation of treatment. The average initial pain rating of 66 went down to 55. The volunteers were then told they would now start to get the drug, although no change was actually made and they just continued receiving the opioid at the same dose. The average pain ratings dropped further to 39. The volunteers were then told the drug had been stopped and warned that there may be an increase in pain. In reality, the drug was still being given at the same dose, but their pain intensity increased to 64 -- meaning the pain was almost as bad as it had been at the beginning, before they had had any drug.
  • Tracey said there may be lessons for the design of clinical trials, which often compare an experimental drug against a dummy pill to see if there is any effect beyond the placebo effect. "We should control for the effect of people's expectations on the results of any clinical trial," she said. "At the very least we should make sure we minimize any negative expectations to make sure we're not masking true efficacy in a trial drug."
Weiye Loh

Have you heard of the Koch Brothers? | the kent ridge common - 0 views

kentridgecommon.com/?p=10234

News media bias Protest Violence Union

shared by Weiye Loh on 13 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • I return to the Guardian online site expressly to search for those elusive articles on Wisconsin. The main page has none. I click on News – US, and there are none. I click on ‘Commentary is Free’- US, and find one article on protests in Ohio. I go to the New York Times online site. Earlier, on my phone, I had seen one article at the bottom of the main page on Wisconsin. By the time I managed to get on my computer to find it again however, the NYT main page was quite devoid of any articles on the protests at all. I am stumped; clearly, I have to reconfigure my daily news sources and reading diet.
  • It is not that the media is not covering the protests in Wisconsin at all – but effective media coverage in the US at least, in my view, is as much about volume as it is about substantive coverage. That week, more prime-time slots and the bulk of the US national attention were given to Charlie Sheen and his crazy antics (whatever they were about, I am still not too sure) than to Libya and the rest of the Middle East, or more significantly, to a pertinent domestic issue, the teacher protests  - not just in Wisconsin but also in other cities in the north-eastern part of the US.
  • In the March 2nd episode of The Colbert Report, it was shown that the Fox News coverage of the Wisconsin protests had re-used footage from more violent protests in California (the palm trees in the background gave Fox News away). Bill O’Reilly at Fox News had apparently issued an apology – but how many viewers who had seen the footage and believed it to be on-the-ground footage of Wisconsin would have followed-up on the report and the apology? And anyway, why portray the teacher protests as violent?
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • In this New York Times’ article, “Teachers Wonder, Why the scorn?“, the writer notes the often scathing comments from counter-demonstrators – “Oh you pathetic teachers, read the online comments and placards of counterdemonstrators. You are glorified baby sitters who leave work at 3 p.m. You deserve minimum wage.” What had begun as an ostensibly ‘economic reform’ targeted at teachers’ unions has gradually transmogrified into a kind of “character attack” to this section of American society – teachers are people who wage violent protests (thanks to borrowed footage from the West Coast) and they are undeserving of their economic benefits, and indeed treat these privileges as ‘rights’. The ‘war’ is waged on multiple fronts, economic, political, social, psychological even — or at least one gets this sort of picture from reading these articles.
  • as Singaporeans with a uniquely Singaporean work ethic, we may perceive functioning ‘trade unions’ as those institutions in the so-called “West” where they amass lots of membership, then hold the government ‘hostage’ in order to negotiate higher wages and benefits. Think of trade unions in the Singaporean context, and I think of SIA pilots. And of LKY’s various firm and stern comments on those issues. Think of trade unions and I think of strikes in France, in South Korea, when I was younger, and of my mum saying, “How irresponsible!” before flipping the TV channel.
  • The reason why I think the teachers’ protests should not be seen solely as an issue about trade-unions, and evaluated myopically and naively in terms of whether trade unions are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is because the protests feature in a larger political context with the billionaire Koch brothers at the helm, financing and directing much of what has transpired in recent weeks. Or at least according to certain articles which I present here.
  • In this NYT article entitled “Billionaire Brothers’ Money Plays Role in Wisconsin Dispute“, the writer noted that Koch Industries had been “one of the biggest contributors to the election campaign of Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, a Republican who has championed the proposed cuts.” Further, the president of Americans for Prosperity, a nonprofit group financed by the Koch brothers, had reportedly addressed counter-demonstrators last Saturday saying that “the cuts were not only necessary, but they also represented the start of a much-needed nationwide move to slash public-sector union benefits.” and in his own words -“ ‘We are going to bring fiscal sanity back to this great nation’ ”. All this rhetoric would be more convincing to me if they weren’t funded by the same two billionaires who financially enabled Walker’s governorship.
  • I now refer you to a long piece by Jane Mayer for The New Yorker titled, “Covert Operations: The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama“. According to her, “The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests.”
  • Their libertarian modus operandi involves great expenses in lobbying, in political contributions and in setting up think tanks. From 2006-2010, Koch Industries have led energy companies in political contributions; “[i]n the second quarter of 2010, David Koch was the biggest individual contributor to the Republican Governors Association, with a million-dollar donation.” More statistics, or at least those of the non-anonymous donation records, can be found on page 5 of Mayer’s piece.
  • Naturally, the Democrats also have their billionaire donors, most notably in the form of George Soros. Mayer writes that he has made ‘generous private contributions to various Democratic campaigns, including Obama’s.” Yet what distinguishes him from the Koch brothers here is, as Michael Vachon, his spokesman, argued, ‘that Soros’s giving is transparent, and that “none of his contributions are in the service of his own economic interests.” ‘ Of course, this must be taken with a healthy dose of salt, but I will note here that in Charles Ferguson’s documentary Inside Job, which was about the 2008 financial crisis, George Soros was one of those interviewed who was not portrayed negatively. (My review of it is here.)
  • Of the Koch brothers’ political investments, what interested me more was the US’ “first libertarian thinktank”, the Cato Institute. Mayer writes, ‘When President Obama, in a 2008 speech, described the science on global warming as “beyond dispute,” the Cato Institute took out a full-page ad in the Times to contradict him. Cato’s resident scholars have relentlessly criticized political attempts to stop global warming as expensive, ineffective, and unnecessary. Ed Crane, the Cato Institute’s founder and president, told [Mayer] that “global-warming theories give the government more control of the economy.” ‘
  • K Street refers to a major street in Washington, D.C. where major think tanks, lobbyists and advocacy groups are located.
  • with recent developments as the Citizens United case where corporations are now ‘persons’ and have no caps in political contributions, the Koch brothers are ever better-positioned to take down their perceived big, bad government and carry out their ideological agenda as sketched in Mayer’s piece
  • with much important news around the world jostling for our attention – earthquake in Japan, Middle East revolutions – the passing of an anti-union bill (which finally happened today, for better or for worse) in an American state is unlikely to make a headline able to compete with natural disasters and revolutions. Then, to quote Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker during that prank call conversation, “Sooner or later the media stops finding it [the teacher protests] interesting.”
  • What remains more puzzling for me is why the American public seems to buy into the Koch-funded libertarian rhetoric. Mayer writes, ‘ “Income inequality in America is greater than it has been since the nineteen-twenties, and since the seventies the tax rates of the wealthiest have fallen more than those of the middle class. Yet the brothers’ message has evidently resonated with voters: a recent poll found that fifty-five per cent of Americans agreed that Obama is a socialist.” I suppose that not knowing who is funding the political rhetoric makes it easier for the public to imbibe it.
Weiye Loh

Freakonomics » Why Is Failure a Sign of a Healthy Economy? A Guest Post by Ti... - 0 views

www.freakonomics.com/...my-a-guest-post-by-tim-harford

Economics Disaster Uncertainty Chance Risk Cosmopolitics

shared by Weiye Loh on 12 May 11 - No Cached
  • Governments often fall down on all three: they have a particular ideology and so push a single-minded policy; they bet big; and they don’t bother to evaluate the results too carefully, perhaps through overconfidence. But markets can fail badly too, and for much the same reason. Just think about the subprime crisis. It failed the same three tests. First, many big banks and insurance companies were taking similar bets at similar times, so that when subprime loans started to go bad, much of Wall Street started struggling simultaneously. Second, the bets were gigantic. Fancy derivatives such as credit default swaps and complex mortgage-backed securities were new, rapidly growing, and largely untested. And third, many investment bankers were being paid large bonuses on the assumption that their performance could be measured properly – and it couldn’t, because profitable-seeming bets concealed large risks.
  • a study by Kathy Fogel, Randall Morck, and Bernard Yeung, found statistical evidence that economies with more churn in the corporate sector also had faster economic growth. The relationship even seems causal: churn today is correlated with fast economic growth tomorrow. The real benefit of this creative destruction, say Fogel and her colleagues, is not the appearance of “rising stars” but the disappearance of old, inefficient companies. Failure is not only common and unpredictable, it’s healthy.
  • Weiye Loh on 12 May 11
     
    a study by Kathy Fogel, Randall Morck, and Bernard Yeung, found statistical evidence that economies with more churn in the corporate sector also had faster economic growth. The relationship even seems causal: churn today is correlated with fast economic growth tomorrow. The real benefit of this creative destruction, say Fogel and her colleagues, is not the appearance of "rising stars" but the disappearance of old, inefficient companies. Failure is not only common and unpredictable, it's healthy.
lee weiting

should we develop nanotechnology? - 1 views

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090610192431.htm This articles discuss about the possible health risk of nanotechnology. on one hand, the use of nanoparticles may be promising for di...

nanotechnology

started by lee weiting on 28 Oct 09 no follow-up yet
Weiye Loh

Keen On… Michael Fertik: Why Data is the New Oil and Why We, the Consumer, Ar... - 0 views

techcrunch.com/...fertik-why-data-is-the-new-oil

Data Power Open Privacy

shared by Weiye Loh on 15 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 15 Jul 11
     
    In today's Web 3.0 personal data rich economy, reputation is replacing cash, Fertik believes. And he is confident that his company, Reputation.com, is well placed to become the new rating index of this digital ecosystem. But Fertik isn't ecstatic about the way in which new online products, such as facial recognition technology, are exploiting the privacy of online consumers. Arguing that "data is the new oil," Fertik believes that the only people not benefitting from today's social economy are consumers themselves. Rather than government legislation, however, the solution, Fertik told me, are more start-up entrepreneurs like himself providing paid products that empower consumers in our Web 3.0 world of pervasive personalized data. This is the second and final part of my interview with Fertik. Yesterday, he explained to me why people will pay for privacy.
Weiye Loh

Secrecy in the age of WikiLeaks - 1 views

www.lowyinterpreter.org/...y-in-the-age-of-WikiLeaks.aspx

Open Government Open Information Security Social Media

shared by Weiye Loh on 14 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 14 Mar 12
     
    As government agencies look to leverage new technologies to communicate with the public, move more citizen services online, share services amongst agencies, share intelligence for national security purposes and collaborate with other nations and private industry, they will need to take a more open stance to secrecy and information sharing. But to mitigate risks, they need to take a more solid security stance at the same time. It is imperative for leaders at all levels within government (agencies, departments, contractors, etc.) to weigh the risks and benefits of making information more accessible and, once decided, put strong safeguards in place to ensure only those who need access can get access. Information leaks imply failures across multiple areas, particularly risk management, access control and confidentiality. The ongoing WikiLeaks exposé clearly shows that the threat is not always from external groups; it can be far more insidious when it stems from trusted individuals within an organisation.
Weiye Loh

Red-Wine Researcher Charged With 'Photoshop' Fraud - 0 views

www.medscape.com/...756865

Academic Research Wine Alcohol Photoshop

shared by Weiye Loh on 26 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 26 Feb 12
     
    A University of Connecticut researcher known for touting the health benefits of red wine is guilty of 145 counts of fabricating and falsifying data with image-editing software, according to a 3-year university investigation made public Wednesday. The researcher, Dipak K. Das, PhD, is a director of the university's Cardiovascular Research Center (CRC) and a professor in the Department of Surgery. The university stated in a press release that it has frozen all externally funded research in Dr. Das's lab and turned down $890,000 in federal research grants awarded to him. The process to dismiss Dr. Das from the university is already underway, the university added.
Weiye Loh

De-Universalizing Access! Is there a Conspiracy to Electronically "Kettle" th... - 0 views

gurstein.wordpress.com/...-means-for-the-social-contract

Internet Access Social Security

shared by Weiye Loh on 10 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 10 Jun 12
     
    those wishing to access and make use of government services or benefits may be quite out of luck if they can't afford in home Internet service, live in a remote area, don't own a computer and/or lack the necessary knowledge, skill, physical facility, and cognitive capacity to manage computer and Internet access and use.
Weiye Loh

Should This Be the Last Generation? - Opinionator Blog - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...ld-this-be-the-last-generation

Ethics

shared by Weiye Loh on 02 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Have you ever thought about whether to have a child? If so, what factors entered into your decision? Was it whether having children would be good for you, your partner and others close to the possible child, such as children you may already have, or perhaps your parents?
  • Some may also think about the desirability of adding to the strain that the nearly seven billion people already here are putting on our planet’s environment. But very few ask whether coming into existence is a good thing for the child itself.
  • we think it is wrong to bring into the world a child whose prospects for a happy, healthy life are poor, but we don’t usually think the fact that a child is likely to have a happy, healthy life is a reason for bringing the child into existence. This has come to be known among philosophers as “the asymmetry” and it is not easy to justify.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • How good does life have to be, to make it reasonable to bring a child into the world? Is the standard of life experienced by most people in developed nations today good enough to make this decision unproblematic
  • Arthur Schopenhauer held that even the best life possible for humans is one in which we strive for ends that, once achieved, bring only fleeting satisfaction.
  • One of Benatar’s arguments trades on something like the asymmetry noted earlier. To bring into existence someone who will suffer is, Benatar argues, to harm that person, but to bring into existence someone who will have a good life is not to benefit him or her.
  • Hence continued reproduction will harm some children severely, and benefit none.
  • human lives are, in general, much less good than we think they are. We spend most of our lives with unfulfilled desires, and the occasional satisfactions that are all most of us can achieve are insufficient to outweigh these prolonged negative states.
  • Weiye Loh on 02 Jul 10
     
    June 6, 2010, 5:15 PM Should This Be the Last Generation? By PETER SINGER
Li-Ling Gan

Facebook awarded $873 million in spam case | Security - CNET News - 0 views

news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10106932-83.html

spam

shared by Li-Ling Gan on 19 Aug 09 - Cached
  • Li-Ling Gan on 19 Aug 09
     
    Description of case: The issue being put across in this case is Spamming. In summary, a Canadian man was accused of sending spam messages to its members through Facebook, using this to earn money for his company. Facebook then took action and sued them under the Can-Spam (Contolling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing) Act, and was awarded $873 million in damages for winning this case. Ethical question: I think the most important question here is to what extent is it considered unethical to send messages to people who might not want such information. In the case of Facebook, should there be a line drawn between sending such 'spam' messages to people you do not know, and people who are already on your 'Friends' list or in the same online community? Ethical problem: I feel the problem of wastage surfaces with spamming. Resources are being used up to keep the internet working and these are in turn wasted when people receieve unwanted mail or messages that they end up deleting. Furthermore, there is a large amount of spam received that are also scams, this then touches on the problem of fraud and cheating other users for the sender's benefit.
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