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A good example of manual curation vs. crowdsourced curation is the competing app markets on the Apple iPhone and Google Android phone operating systems.

Apple is a monarchy, albeit with a wise and benevolent king. Android is burgeoning democracy, inefficient and messy, but free. Apple is the last, best example of the Industrial Age and its top-down, mass market/mass production paradigm.

They manufacture cool. They rely on “consumers”, and they protect those consumers from too many choices by selecting what is worthy, and what is not.

David Breashears is one of America’s legendary mountain climbers, a man who has climbed Mount Everest five times and led the Everest IMAX film team in 1996.

These days, Mr. Breashears is still climbing the Himalayas, but he is lugging more than pitons and ice axes. He’s also carrying special cameras to document stunning declines in glaciers on the roof of the world.

he dug out archive photos from early Himalayan expeditions, and then journeyed across ridges and crevasses to photograph from the exact same spots. The pairs of matched photographs, old and new, are staggering. Time and again, the same glaciers have shrunk drastically in every direction, often losing hundreds of feet in height.

Where does our sense of right and wrong come from? Most people think it is a gift from God, who revealed His laws and elevates us with His love. A smaller number think that we figure the rules out for ourselves, using our capacity to reason and choosing a philosophical system to live by.

Moral naturalists, on the other hand, believe that we have moral sentiments that have emerged from a long history of relationships. To learn about morality, you don’t rely upon revelation or metaphysics; you observe people as they live.

People who behave morally don’t generally do it because they have greater knowledge; they do it because they have a greater sensitivity to other people’s points of view. Hauser reported on research showing that bullies are surprisingly sophisticated at reading other people’s intentions, but they’re not good at anticipating and feeling other people’s pain.

The Earth is now recognized as a self-regulating system that includes a reactive biosphere; the system maintains a long-term steady-state climate and surface chemical composition favourable for life. We are perturbing the steady state by changing the land surface from mainly forests to farm land and by adding greenhouse gases and aerosol pollutants to the air. We appear to have exceeded the natural capacity to counter our perturbation and consequently the system is changing to a new and as yet unknown but probably adverse state. I suggest here that we regard the Earth as a physiological system and consider amelioration techniques, geoengineering, as comparable to nineteenth century medicine.

Organisms change their world locally for purely personal selfish reasons; if the advantage conferred by the ‘engineering’ is sufficiently favourable, it allows them and their environment to expand until dominant on a planetary scale.

Our use of fires as a biocide to clear land of natural forests and replace them with farmland was our second act of geoengineering; together these acts have led the Earth to evolve to its current state. As a consequence, most of us are now urban and our environment is an artefact of engineering.

Sam Harris’s first book, The End of Faith , ignited a worldwide debate about the validity of religion. In the aftermath, Harris discovered that most people—from religious fundamentalists to non-believing scientists—agree on one point: Science has nothing to say on the subject of human values. Indeed, our failure to address questions of meaning and morality through science has now become the most common justification for religious faith. It is also the primary reason why so many secularists and religious moderates feel obligated to “respect” the hardened superstitions of their more devout neighbors.

In this explosive new book, Sam Harris tears down the wall between scientific facts and human values, arguing that most people are simply mistaken about the relationship between morality and the rest of human knowledge. Harris urges us to think about morality in terms of human and animal well-being, viewing the experiences of conscious creatures as peaks and valleys on a “moral landscape.” Because there are definite facts to be known about where we fall on this landscape, Harris foresees a time when science will no longer limit itself to merely describing what people do in the name of “morality”; in principle, science should be able to tell us what we ought to do to live the best lives possible.

Harris demonstrates that we already know enough about the human brain and its relationship to events in the world to say that there are right and wrong answers to the most pressing questions of human life. Because such answers exist, moral relativism is simply false—and comes at increasing cost to humanity.

cryonics offers almost eternal life. To its critics, cryonics is pseudoscience; the idea that we could freeze someone today in such a way that future technology might be able to re-animate them is nothing more than wishful thinking on the desire to avoid death. Many who battle nonsense dressed as science have spoken out against it: see for example Nano Nonsense and Cryonics, a 2001 article by celebrated skeptic Michael Shermer; or check the Skeptic’s Dictionary or Quackwatch entries on the subject, or for more detail read the essay Cryonics–A futile desire for everlasting life by “Invisible Flan”.

And of course the pro-cryonics people have written reams and reams of material such as Ben Best’s Scientific Justification of Cryonics Practice on why they think this is exactly as plausible as I might think, and going into tremendous technical detail setting out arguments for its plausibility and addressing particular difficulties. It’s almost enough to make you want to sign up on the spot. Except, of course, that plenty of totally unscientific ideas are backed by reams of scientific-sounding documents good enough to fool non-experts like me. Backed by the deep pockets of the oil industry, global warming denialism has produced thousands of convincing-sounding arguments against the scientific consensus on CO2 and AGW. T

Nano Nonsense and Cryonics goes for the nitty-gritty right away in the opening paragraph:To see the flaw in this system, thaw out a can of frozen strawberries. During freezing, the water within each cell expands, crystallizes, and ruptures the cell membranes. When defrosted, all the intracellular goo oozes out, turning your strawberries into runny mush. This is your brain on cryonics.This sounds convincing, but doesn’t address what cryonicists actually claim. Ben Best, President and CEO of the Cryonics Institute, replies in the comments:Strawberries (and mammalian tissues) are not turned to mush by freezing because water expands and crystallizes inside the cells. Water crystallizes in the extracellular space because more nucleators are found extracellularly. As water crystallizes in the extracellular space, the extracellular salt concentration increases causing cells to lose water osmotically and shrink. Ultimately the cell membranes are broken by crushing from extracellular ice and/or high extracellular salt concentration. […] Cryonics organizations use vitrification perfusion before cooling to cryogenic temperatures. With good brain perfusion, vitrification can reduce ice formation to negligible amounts.

This question has concerned western thinkers at least since Plato (5th-4th century BCE). It has also concerned thinkers in other cultural traditions: Confucius (6th-5th century BCE); China’s legalist tradition; and India’s Kautilya (4th-3rd century BCE). The perspective here is that of the contemporary democratic west.

The core purpose of the state is protection. This view would be shared by everybody, except anarchists, who believe that the protective role of the state is unnecessary or, more precisely, that people can rely on purely voluntary arrangements.

Contemporary Somalia shows the horrors that can befall a stateless society. Yet horrors can also befall a society with an over-mighty state. It is evident, because it is the story of post-tribal humanity that the powers of the state can be abused for the benefit of those who control it.

What is the one bit of science from your field that you think everyone should know?David Attenborough: The unity of life.Richard Dawkins: The unity of life that comes about through evolution, since we're all descended from a single common ancestor. It's almost too good to be true, that on one planet this extraordinary complexity of life should have come about by what is pretty much an intelligible process. And we're the only species capable of understanding it.

RD: I know you're working on a programme about Cambrian and pre-Cambrian fossils, David. A lot of people might think, "These are very old animals, at the beginning of evolution; they weren't very good at what they did." I suspect that isn't the case?DA: They were just as good, but as generalists, most were ousted from the competition.RD: So it probably is true there's a progressive element to evolution in the short term but not in the long term – that when a lineage branches out, it gets better for about five million years but not 500 million years. You wouldn't see progressive improvement over that kind of time scale.DA: No, things get more and more specialised. Not necessarily better.RD: The "camera" eyes of any modern animal would be better than what had come before.DA: Certainly... but they don't elaborate beyond function. When I listen to a soprano sing a Handel aria with an astonishing coloratura from that particular larynx, I say to myself, there has to be a biological reason that was useful at some stage. The larynx of a human being did not evolve without having some function. And the only function I can see is sexual attraction.RD: Sexual selection is important and probably underrated.DA: What I like to think is that if I think the male bird of paradise is beautiful, my appreciation of it is precisely the same as a female bird of paradise.

People say Richard Feynman had one of these extraordinary minds that could grapple with ideas of which I have no concept. And you hear all the ancillary bits – like he was a good bongo player – that make him human. So I admire this man who could not only deal with string theory but also play the bongos. But he is beyond me. I have no idea what he was talking of.

One of the more unpleasant aspects of the New Labour government was its anti-Hayekian pretence that central government could acquire knowledge which, in fact, is unobtainable.

it is impossible to predict what research will be commercially useful. History is full of examples of businessmen and scientists - let alone politicians - utterly failing to anticipate commercial uses, for example:“There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable”"The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value.” "Radio has no future. Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible. X-rays will prove to be a hoax.""While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially it is an impossibility." “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."“This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us."

The notion that government can cut only “useless” science funding is an egregious pretence to know things that cannot be known. Instead, such cuts operate much as financial constraints for business operate: they diminish the ecology upon which natural selection operates.

the "data" from which the economic calculus starts are never for the whole society "given" to a single mind which could work out the implications and can never be so given.

The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.

The economic problem of society

My recent post “The War Over ‘Nice’” (describing the blogosphere’s reaction to Phil Plait’s “Don’t Be a Dick” speech) has topped out at more than 200 comments.

Many readers appear to object (some strenuously) to the very ideas of discussing best practices, seeking evidence of efficacy for skeptical outreach, matching strategies to goals, or encouraging some methods over others. Some seem to express anger that a discussion of best practices would be attempted at all. 

No Right or Wrong Way? The milder forms of these objections run along these lines: “Everyone should do their own thing.” “Skepticism needs all kinds of approaches.” “There’s no right or wrong way to do skepticism.” “Why are we wasting time on these abstract meta-conversations?”

If top scientists such as John Polkinghorne and Bernard d'Espagnat believe in God, that challenges the simplistic claim that science and religion are completely incompatible. It doesn't hurt that this message is being pushed with the help of the enormous wealth of the Templeton Foundation, which funds innumerable research programmes, conferences, seminars and prizes as a kind of marriage guidance service to religion and science.

why on earth should physicists hold this exalted place in the theological firmament?

it can almost be reduced to a linguistic mistake: thinking that because both physicists and theologians study fundamental forces of some kind, they must study fundamental forces of the same kind.

That science and politics are nonoverlapping magisteria (vide Stephen Jay Gould’s model separating science and religion) was long my position until I read Timothy Ferris’s new book The Science of Liberty (HarperCollins, 2010). Ferris, the best-selling author of such science classics as Coming of Age in the Milky Way and The Whole Shebang, has bravely ventured across the magisterial divide to argue that the scientific values of reason, empiricism and antiauthoritarianism are not the product of liberal democracy but the producers of it.

“The new government, like a scientific laboratory, was designed to accommodate an ongoing series of experiments, extending indefinitely into the future,” Ferris explains. “Nobody could anticipate what the results might be, so the government was structured, not to guide society toward a specified goal, but to sustain the experimental process itself.”

“Liberalism and science are methods, not ideologies. Both incorporate feedback loops through which actions (e.g., laws) can be evaluated to see whether they continue to meet with general approval. Neither science nor liberalism makes any doctrinaire claims beyond the efficacy of its respective methods—that is, that science obtains knowledge and that liberalism produces social orders generally acceptable to free peoples.”

In his fascinating new book, "Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat," Hal Herzog looks at the wild, tortured paradoxes in our relationship with the weaker, if sometimes more adorable, species.

it's the human-meat relationship. The fact is, very few people are vegetarians; even most vegetarians eat meat. There have been several studies, including a very large one by the Department of Agriculture, where they asked people one day: Describe your diet. And 5 percent said they were vegetarians. Well, then they called the same people back a couple of days later and asked them about what they ate in the last 24 hours. And over 60 percent of these vegetarians had eaten meat. And so, the fact is, the campaign for moralized meat has been a failure. We actually kill three times as many animals for their flesh as we did when Peter Singer wrote "Animal Liberation" [in 1975]. We eat probably 20 percent more meat than we did when he wrote that book. Even though people are more concerned about animals, it seems like that's been occurring. The question is, why?

What was it about the two giant viral videos of the past few weeks -- the London woman, Mary Bale, who tried to trash that cat; the Bosnian woman who threw puppies from a bridge

Dear Richard, I do not agree with the cynical adage "science progresses--funeral by funeral", but I fear that it might be true in your case for the subject of group selection.

Edward Wilson was misunderstanding kin selection as far back as Sociobiology, where he treated it as a subset of group selection ... Kin selection is not a subset of group selection, it is a logical consequence of gene selection. And gene selection is (everything that Nowak et al ought to mean by) 'standard natural selection' theory: has been ever since the neo-Darwinian synthesis of the 1930s.

I do not agree with the Nowak et al. article in every respect and will articulate some of my disagreements in subsequent posts. For the moment, I want to stress how alone you are in your statement about group selection. Your view is essentially pre-1975, a date that is notable not only for the publication of Sociobiology but also a paper by W.D. Hamilton, one of your heroes, who correctly saw the relationship between kin selection and group selection thanks to the work of George Price. Ever since, knowledgeable theoretical biologists have known that inclusive fitness theory includes the logic of multilevel selection, which means that altruism is selectively disadvantageous within kin groups and evolves only by virtue of groups with more altruists contributing more to the gene pool than groups with fewer altruists. The significance of relatedness is that it clusters the genes coding for altruistic and selfish behaviors into different groups.

generally speaking, economists who thought it was a good idea at the time think it worked, and economists who thought otherwise beg to differ. And both sides make their cases with plenty of hard numbers.

Why do economists argue at all? Given that Fed members and economists are looking at the same data, and given the reams of evidence accumulated over decades — not to mention a few centuries of great minds, great theories and thick books that preceded this crisis — why isn’t a right answer self-evident?

the limits of economics is a subject that many in the field have been discussing for years, in print, in discussions with each other, and, in the case of Robert Solow, Nobel Prize winner and M.I.T. professor emeritus, with graduate students. “I talk about what it is about economics and economic life that leads to differences of opinion,” Mr. Solow said. “One point I always make to my graduate students is, avoid sound bites. Never sound more certain than you are.”

This retraction notice made me go, "WTF were you folks thinking?"

Here's the text of the retraction notice: This article has been retracted. Please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/withdrawalpolicy). Reason: This article has been retracted at the request of the editor as the authors have plagiarised part of several papers that had already appeared in several journals. One of the conditions of submission of a paper for publication is that authors declare explicitly that their work is original and has not appeared in a publication elsewhere. Re-use of any data should be appropriately cited. As such this article represents a severe abuse of the scientific publishing system. The scientific community takes a very strong view on this matter and we apologise to readers of the journal that this was not detected during the submission process. From a limited, non-exhaustive check of the text, several elements of the text had been plagiarised from the following list of sources: Dihydroxyacetone - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia StateMaster - Encyclopedia: Dihydroxyacetone

From a quick scan, I found this section in the paper ... In the 1950s, Eva Wittgenstein at the University of Cincinnati did further research with dihydroxyacetone. Her studies involved using dihydroxyacetone as an oral drug for treating children with glycogen storage disease (Wittgenstein and Berry, 1960). The children received large oral doses of dihydroxyacetone, and sometimes spit or spilled the substance onto their skin. Healthcare workers noticed that the skin turned brown after a few hours of dihydroxyacetone exposure. Eva Wittgenstein continued to experiment with this unique substance, painting dihydroxyacetone liquid solutions onto her own skin. She was able to consistently reproduce the pigmentation effect, and noted that dihydroxyacetone did not penetrate beyond the stratum corneum, or dead skin surface layer. which is very similar to this section in the Wikipedia entry: In the 1950s Eva Wittgenstein at the University of Cincinnati did further research with dihydroxyacetone.[4][5][6][7] Her studies involved using DHA as an oral drug for assisting children with glycogen storage disease. The children received large doses of DHA by mouth, and sometimes spat or spilled the substance onto their skin. Healthcare workers noticed that the skin turned brown after a few hours of DHA exposure. Eva Wittgenstein continued to experiment with this unique substance, painting DHA liquid solutions onto her own skin. She was able to consistently reproduce the pigmentation effect, and noted that DHA did not penetrate beyond the stratum corneum, or dead skin surface layer.

Everyone is a skeptic nowadays, or so it seems. From climate change to evolution to vaccination, large proportions of the population claim to be skeptical about many of the claims of mainstream science. So why are we, member of the skeptical community, not rejoicing?

A skeptic, in popular discourse, is simply someone who denies a particular claim. But true skepticism, as espoused by philosophers and scientists for millenia, is more an intellectual attitude than a position on a specific issue. A skeptic is someone who always demands sufficient evidence or reasons before accepting a claim. This skeptical attitude – its opposite is credulity – leads skeptics to reject as unfounded any claim that cannot withstand the rigours of the scientific method, which includes controlled experimental testing. The more extraordinary the claim, the more rigourously it must be tested before a skeptic will be willing to accept

skepticism does not always lead to denial. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but sometimes that extraordinary evidence can be provided. Einstein’s theory of relativity, which holds that matter can change the very shape of space and time, is an extraordinary claim, yet it has stood up to the most demanding of scientific testing.

In 2001, rumors were circulating in Greek hospitals that surgery residents, eager to rack up scalpel time, were falsely diagnosing hapless Albanian immigrants with appendicitis. At the University of Ioannina medical school’s teaching hospital, a newly minted doctor named Athina Tatsioni was discussing the rumors with colleagues when a professor who had overheard asked her if she’d like to try to prove whether they were true—he seemed to be almost daring her. She accepted the challenge and, with the professor’s and other colleagues’ help, eventually produced a formal study showing that, for whatever reason, the appendices removed from patients with Albanian names in six Greek hospitals were more than three times as likely to be perfectly healthy as those removed from patients with Greek names. “It was hard to find a journal willing to publish it, but we did,” recalls Tatsioni. “I also discovered that I really liked research.” Good thing, because the study had actually been a sort of audition. The professor, it turned out, had been putting together a team of exceptionally brash and curious young clinicians and Ph.D.s to join him in tackling an unusual and controversial agenda.

were drug companies manipulating published research to make their drugs look good? Salanti ticked off data that seemed to indicate they were, but the other team members almost immediately started interrupting. One noted that Salanti’s study didn’t address the fact that drug-company research wasn’t measuring critically important “hard” outcomes for patients, such as survival versus death, and instead tended to measure “softer” outcomes, such as self-reported symptoms (“my chest doesn’t hurt as much today”). Another pointed out that Salanti’s study ignored the fact that when drug-company data seemed to show patients’ health improving, the data often failed to show that the drug was responsible, or that the improvement was more than marginal.

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.