The Secret Ingredient in Computational Creativity | MIT Technology Review - 0 views
The Real Hoax Was Climategate | Media Matters Action Network - 0 views
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Sen. Jim Inhofe's (R-OK) biggest claim to fame has been his oft-repeated line that global warming is "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people."
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In 2003, he conceded that the earth was warming, but denied it was caused by human activity and suggested that "increases in global temperatures may have a beneficial effect on how we live our lives."
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In 2009, however, he appeared on Fox News to declare that the earth was actually cooling, claiming "everyone understands that's the case" (they don't, because it isn't).
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Rationally Speaking: Liberal Democracy's Constant Tension: The Openness of Debate - 0 views
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These questions essentially get at the issue of openness of debate. Openness includes at least two aspects, which are inevitably closely related, indeed hard to separate: who (or, whose ideas) can enter the debate; and how long should debate last before it ends (and people move to the next topic, or act on conclusions from the past debate).
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The first issue would seem an easy one: no person, nor any person’s ideas, can be barred from debate.
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ohn Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, which is a cornerstone work of the modern liberal society: “If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. … To refuse a hearing to an opinion, because they are sure that it is false, is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolutely certainty. All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility. …” (Mill, 23, 28).
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Bad Health Habits Blamed on Genetics - Newsweek - 0 views
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A new study shows just how alluring “My DNA did it!” is to some people.
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here are serious scientific concerns about the reliability and value of many of the genes linked to disease. And now we have another reason why the hype is worrisome: people who engage in the riskiest-for-health behaviors, and who therefore most need to change, are more likely to blame their genes for their diseases, finds a new study published online in the journal Annals of Behavioral Medicine.
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Worse, the more behavioral risk factors people have—smoking and eating a high-fat diet and not exercising, for instance—the less likely they are to be interested in information about living healthier.
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Bloggers bemoan Yahoo's role in writer's arrest - 3 views
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-5852898-7.html Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist is being convicted of sending a government's 'top secret' message that was sent to the newspaper agency he was workin...
Online Censorship: Obama urged to fine firms for aiding censors - 3 views
Internet activists are urging Barack Obama to pass legislation that would make it illegal for technology companies to collaborate with authoritarian countries that censor the internet. -The Guardi...
The tweeter and the phweeter - 8 views
Article Link: http://www.asiaone.com/Digital/Features/Story/A1Story20090728-157468.html Summary of Case: With the growing popularity of Twitter.com, a popular micro-blogging website which allo...
Hacked blogger seeks Russia probe - 20 views
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8194395.stm To sum it up, the article is about a russian blogger who asked Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to hold an inquiry, claiming that russian...
Rationally Speaking: Should non-experts shut up? The skeptic's catch-22 - 0 views
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You can read the talk here, but in a nutshell, Massimo was admonishing skeptics who reject the scientific consensus in fields in which they have no technical expertise - the most notable recent example of this being anthropogenic climate change, about which venerable skeptics like James Randi and Michael Shermer have publicly expressed doubts (though Shermer has since changed his mind).
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I'm totally with Massimo that it seems quite likely that anthropogenic climate change is really happening. But I'm not sure I can get behind Massimo's broader argument that non-experts should defer to the expert consensus in a field.
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First of all, while there are strong incentives for a researcher to find errors in other work in the field, there are strong disincentives for her to challenge the field's foundational assumptions. It will be extremely difficult for her to get other people to agree with her if she tries, and if she succeeds, she'll still be taking herself down along with the rest of the field.
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Philosophy Talk: The Blog: The Irrationality of Human Decision Making - 0 views
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most people (and probably most philosophers too) are pretty irrational in their decision-making.
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if the mug is already yours (and you have to set a sell price) you’ll think it’s worth a lot more than a similar mug that isn’t yet yours (on which you have to place a “willing to purchase it” price.) One way to think of this is as an instance of loss aversion. You’ve got your precious mug in hand and you don’t want to lose it. It means a lot to you. And so you set a very high price on it. That is, people tend to value things they already have and might lose, much more highly than things they don’t have, but could get.
Rational Irrationality: Do Good Kindergarten Teachers Raise their Pupils' Wages? : The ... - 0 views
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Columnist David Leonhardt reports the findings of a new study which suggests that children who are fortunate enough to have an unusually good kindergarten teacher can expect to make roughly an extra twenty dollars a week by the age of twenty-seven.
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it implies that during each school year a good kindergarten teacher creates an additional $320,000 of earnings.
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The new research (pdf), the work of six economists—four from Harvard, one from Berkeley, and one from Northwestern—upends this finding. It is based on test scores and demographic data from a famous experiment carried out in Tennessee during the late nineteen-eighties, which tracked the progress of about 11,500 students from kindergarten to third grade. Most of these students are now about thirty years old, which means they have been working for up to twelve years. The researchers also gained access to income-tax data and matched it up with the test scores. Their surprising conclusion is that the uplifting effect of a good kindergarten experience, after largely disappearing during a child’s teen years, somehow reappears in the adult workplace. (See Figure 7 in the paper.) Why does this happen? The author don’t say, but Leonhardt offers this explanation: “Good early education can impart skills that last a lifetime—patience, discipline, manners, perseverance. The tests that 5-year-olds take may pick up these skills, even if later multiple-choice tests do not.”
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Op-Ed Columnist - Our Beaker Is Starting to Boil - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Sam Harris to Speak at 3 CFI Branches on U.S. Book Tour | Center for Inquiry - 1 views
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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.
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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.
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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.
When Value Judgments Masquerade as Science - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Most people think of the term in the context of production of goods and services: more efficient means more valuable output is wrung from a given bundle of real resources (which is good) or that fewer real resources are burned up to produce a given output (which is also good).
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In economics, efficiency is also used to evaluate alternative distributions of an available set of goods and services among members of society. In this context, I distinguished in last week’s post between changes in public policies (reallocations of economic welfare) that make some people feel better off and none feel worse off and those that make some people feel better off but others feel worse off.
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consider whether economists should ever become advocates for a revaluation of China’s currency, the renminbi — or, alternatively, for imposing higher tariffs on Chinese imports. Such a policy would tend to improve the lot of shareholders and employees of manufacturers competing with Chinese imports. Yet it would make American consumers of Chinese goods worse off. If the renminbi were significantly and artificially undervalued against the United States dollar, relative to a free-market exchange rate without government intervention, that would be tantamount to China running a giant, perennial sale on Chinese goods sold to the United States. If you’re an American consumer, what’s not to like about that? So why are so many economists advocating an end to this sale?
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Is 'More Efficient' Always Better? - NYTimes.com - 1 views
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Efficiency is the seemingly value-free standard economists use when they make the case for particular policies — say, free trade, more liberal immigration policies, cap-and-trade policies on environmental pollution, the all-volunteer army or congestion tolls. The concept of efficiency is used to justify a reliance on free-market principles, rather than the government, to organize the health care sector, or to make recommendations on taxation, government spending and monetary policy. All of these public policies have one thing in common: They create winners and losers among members of society.
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can it be said that a more efficient resource allocation is better than a less efficient one, given the changes in the distribution of welfare among members of society that these allocations imply?
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Suppose a restructuring of the economy has the effect of increasing the growth of average gross domestic product per capita, but that the benefits of that growth accrue disproportionately disproportionately to a minority of citizens, while others are worse off as a result, as appears to have been the case in the United States in the last several decades. Can economists judge this to be a good thing?
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In Wired Singapore Classrooms, Cultures Clash Over Web 2.0 - Technology - The Chronicle... - 0 views
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Dozens of freshmen at Singapore Management University spent one evening last week learning how to "wiki," or use the software that lets large numbers of people write and edit class projects online. Though many said experiencing a public editing process similar to that of Wikipedia could prove valuable, some were wary of the collaborative tool, with its public nature and the ability to toss out or revise the work of their classmates.
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It puts students in the awkward position of having to publicly correct a peer, which can cause the corrected person to lose face.
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"You have to be more aware of others and have a sensitivity to others."
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What is the role of the state? | Martin Wolf's Exchange | FT.com - 0 views
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Economics is Easy; Comedy is Hard | The Big Picture - 0 views
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Stung by myriad criticisms of the Fed, Athreya attempted to defend the priesthood of economics. “Writers who have not taken a year of PhD coursework in a decent economics department (and passed their PhD qualifying exams), cannot meaningfully advance the discussion on economic policy,” he wrote. Predictably, it provoked a firestorm of criticism from the blogosphere.
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But Athreya’s circle the wagon’s defense raises a valid point — economics is too important to leave to just anyone. Especially economists.
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all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful.
Skepticblog » Further Thoughts on the Ethics of Skepticism - 0 views
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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.
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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.
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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?”
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