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Dove strips away the smoke and mirrors to remind us that nobody's perfect. 200,000 views on youTube in one week.

In the new version, only edits made by a separate class of "trusted" users will be instantly implemented. To earn this trusted status, users will have to show some commitment to Wikipedia, by making 30 edits in 30 days, say. Other users will have to wait until a trusted editor has given the article a brief look, enough to confirm that the edit is not vandalism, before their changes can be viewed by readers.

It allows select groups of editors, probably associated with specific subject areas, to vote on whether an article should be flagged as high quality. Readers would still see the latest version of an article by default, but a link to a high-quality version, if it exists, would also be available.

Contributors whose edits tend to remain in place are awarded high trust ratings; those whose changes are quickly altered get a low score. The rationale is that if a change is useful and accurate, it is likely to remain intact during subsequent edits, but if it is inaccurate or malicious, it is likely to be changed. Therefore, users who make long-lasting edits are likely to be trustworthy. New users automatically start with a low rating.

The crucial test is whether one’s pet theory can distinguish between selection for trait A and selection for trait B when A and B are coextensive: were polar bears selected for being white or for matching their environment? Search me; and search any kind of adaptationism I’ve heard of. Nor am I holding my breath till one comes along.

Lacking arches, domes fall down; so arches are selected for supporting domes. But arches are linked to spandrels for reasons of geometry; so spandrels aren’t selected for, they are ‘free riders’ on selection for arches. The moral is that phenotypic traits can carry information about linkages among the mechanisms that produce them. Free-riding is always suggestive of such linkages, and free-riding is ubiquitous in evolution.

When you ask Darwin’s question – why are phenotypes often similar? – you do indeed get Darwin’s answer. But if you ask instead why it is that some phenotypes don’t occur, an adaptationist explanation often sounds somewhere between implausible and preposterous. For example, nobody, not even the most ravening of adaptationists, would seek to explain the absence of winged pigs by claiming that, though there used to be some, the wings proved to be a liability so nature selected against them. Nobody expects to find fossils of a species of winged pig that has now gone extinct. Rather, pigs lack wings because there’s no place on pigs to put them. To add wings to a pig, you’d also have to tinker with lots of other things. In fact, you’d have to rebuild the pig whole hog: less weight, appropriate musculature, an appropriate metabolism, an apparatus for navigating in three dimensions, a streamlined silhouette and god only knows what else; not to mention feathers. The moral is that if you want them to have wings, you will have to redesign pigs radically. But natural selection, since it is incremental and cumulative, can’t do that sort of thing. Evolution by natural selection is inherently a conservative process, and once you’re well along the evolutionary route to being a pig, your further options are considerably constrained; you can’t, for example, go back and retrofit feathers.

There is no denying this, and Gitlin, to his credit, does not try. Indeed, this self-imposed restriction and its malign consequences are the deep subject of the book. He provides an honest account of the reasons for his generation's disenchantment with patriotism—an account that helps explain why, even now, the term almost never escapes the lips even of mainstream liberal Democrats without being prefaced by the indignant words "impugning" and "my." For Gitlin's generation, the "generation for whom ‘the war' meant Vietnam and perhaps always will," it could be said that the "most powerful public emotion in our lives was rejecting patriotism." Patriotism became viewed as, at best, a pretext, and at worst, an abandonment of thought itself. It became of interest only in so far as it entered into calculations of political advantage. Far from being a sentiment that one might feel with genuine warmth and intelligent affection, it was merely a talisman, which, if used at all, served chiefly to neutralize its usefulness as a weapon in the hands of others, by making it into a strictly personal preference that others were forbidden to question: "my" patriotism.

The global imbalances created by this dynamic of American borrowing and foreign lending appear stable for now, but if they slip suddenly, that could pose serious dangers for middle- and working-class Americans through soaring interest rates, a crash in the housing market, and sharply higher prices for anything no longer made domestically.

was a run on the pound sterling and he blocked the International Monetary Fund (IMF) from stabilizing the currency. With sterling on the verge of collapse, says Frankel, “Eisenhower told them, ‘We are not going to bail out the pound unless you pull out of Suez.’” Facing bankruptcy, the British withdrew. This incident, notes Frankel, “marked the end of Great Britain’s ability to conduct an independent foreign policy.”

Nearly four-in-ten people (37%) regularly use at least one type of internet news source, either the news pages of major search engines such as Google or Yahoo (25%), the websites of the television news organizations (22%), or the websites of major national newspapers such as the New York Times or USA Today (12%). Additionally, about one-in-ten (11%) read online blogs where people discuss events in the news.

Which Audiences Know the Most?

If you take Wikipedia as seriously as it takes itself, this is a huge problem. The site is ostensibly devoted to democratic consensus and the free exchange of ideas. But whether or not you believe in the holy law of Web 2.0, Wikipedia is tearing at the seams. Many of its core contributors are extremely unhappy about Durova's ill-advised ban and the exposure of the secret mailing list, and some feel that the site's well-being is seriously threatened. In a post to Wikipedia, Jimbo Wales says that this whole incident was blown out of proportion. "I advise the world to relax a notch or two. A bad block was made for 75 minutes," he says. "It was reversed and an apology given. There are things to be studied here about what went wrong and what could be done in the future, but wow, could we please do so with a lot less drama? A 75 minute block, even if made badly, is hardly worth all this drama. Let's please love each other, love the project, and remember what we are here for." But he's not admitting how deep this controversy goes. Wales and the Wikimedia Foudation came down hard on the editor who leaked Durova's email. After it was posted to the public forum, the email was promptly "oversighted" - i.e. permanently removed. Then this rogue editor posted it to his personal talk page, and a Wikimedia Foundation member not only oversighted the email again, but temporarily banned the editor. Then Jimbo swooped in with a personal rebuke. "You have caused too much harm to justify us putting up with this kind of behavior much longer," he told the editor. The problem, for many regular contributors, is that Wales and the Foundation seem to be siding with Durova's bizarre behavior. "I believe that Jimbo's credibility has been greatly damaged because of his open support for these people," says Charles Ainsworth. And if Jimbo can't maintain his credibility, the site's most experienced editors may not stick around. Since the banhammer came down, Bang Bang hasn't edited a lick.

"I have never learned to trust it. I can't trust it to this day ... A dreadful doubt hangs over the whole achievement of literature." Thus wrote Joseph Conrad, in an essay published in the Manchester Guardian Weekly on December 4 1922. Long before Auden was telling us poetry makes nothing happen, or Adorno was saying there could be no poetry after Auschwitz, Conrad was questioning - fundamentally - the political and moral utility of writing. Yet this was a writer who drew the approbation of FR Leavis, the pre-eminent British supporter of the view that literature could play a role in the maintenance of civilisation. In 1941, Leavis described Conrad as being "among the very greatest novelists in the language - or any language".

"Both at sea and on land my point of view is English, from which the conclusions should not be drawn that I have become an Englishman. That is not the case. Homo duplex has in my case more than one meaning."

Why communications companies should escape surveillance lawsuitsBy John D. Rockefeller IVArticle Launched: 11/01/2007 01:36:23 AM PDT var requestedWidth = 0; if(requestedWidth > 0){ document.getElementById('articleViewerGroup').style.width = requestedWidth + "px"; document.getElementById('articleViewerGroup').style.margin = "0px 0px 10px 10px"; } In the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, the Bush administration had a choice: aggressively pursue potential terrorists using existing laws or devise new, secret intelligence programs in uncharted legal waters.

In this second respect, there is and never has been a secret ballot in Britain, because the way in which individual citizens vote can be traced from each ballot paper used. Every ballot paper given to the citizen who is voting contains a serial number on it, which is also printed on the counterfoil retained by electoral officials. Before a ballot paper is handed to the citizen, he is asked for his name and address (or preferably to show the clerk his official poll card which shows his name, address and electoral registration number on it). The polling clerk then traces the person in the copy of the electoral register that he has on the table in from of him, and ticks the voter's name off the list. The clerk then tears one of the ballot papers out of the book of papers printed for the purpose, hands it to the voter and directs him or her to the private booth. And then the clerk writes the electoral registration number of the voter on the counterfoil to the ballot paper just issued.

You can hear the change in what prominent would-be centrists are saying. In the 1990s, when neoliberalism was the centre, the line was: we must slash middle-class entitlements in order to be more competitive in the global free market. Now the line is: in order to save free-market globalism from populists preying on middle-class economic anxieties, we must expand the middle-class welfare state.The winners – at least for now – are welfare state liberals such as old-fashioned New Dealers in the US and their equivalents in other countries. The position of the original “third way” of 1932-68 always made sense. Middle-class social insurance programmes, by guaranteeing economic security, reduce the appeal of populism, socialism and other kinds of ­radical statism, and make possible broad political support for open and competitive national and global markets. You will hear much more of this line as politicians rush to occupy the new centre in the years ahead.

I believe (as I argue in my book The Soulful Science) that economics offers a uniquely powerful way of thinking about society, and how individuals make choices in their social context. Other approaches, those of the other social sciences, or history or literature and music, are valid too - I feel no need to dismiss them. But only economics with its choice-based models emphasises the opportunity costs and trade-offs that inevitably arise from the social and physical realities of our existence.

"The anonymity of the Netflix Prize dataset has been broken by a pair of computer scientists from the University of Texas, according to a report from the physics arXivblog. It turns out that an individual's set of ratings and the dates on which they were made are pretty unique, particularly if the ratings involve films outside the most popular 100 movies. So it's straightforward to find a match by comparing the anonymized data against publicly available ratings on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) (abstract on the physics arxiv). The researchers used this method to find how individuals on the IMDb privately rated films on Netflix, in the process possibly working out their political affiliation, sexual preferences and a number of other personal details"