he Rodney Dangerfield ‘No Respect’ award for 2010-11 has to go to John S Wilkins for two of his recent posts.
First he complains on behalf of his discipline that it gets no respect from the scientists whose work it purports to analyze, and then declares himself bummed out to have only 700 or so daily readers and not be getting any awards.
Well here you go Eeyore and I hope it makes you happier.
I’d like to hear more of what someone like Stephen Downes or Michael Geist thinks about this. (Both have reported the campaign but not really made a clear statement of their own reasons for doing so favourably.)
To me, the logic of true usage-based billing seems very reasonable, and it’s only the implementation that is problematic. Continue reading
It is curious that the days of shortest and longest periods of sunlight (which just about everyone knows are due to the tilt of the earth’s spin axis relative to the plane of its orbit) are not everywhere the same as those of latest and earliest sunrise. This is because the length of the full solar day is not actually constant and so the time of solar noon oscillates around the time that would correspond to noon on a steadily progressing clock.
This is often attributed to the eccentricity of the earth’s orbit, and that does play a minor role. But actually, the effect is mainly due to another effect of the earth’s tilt – a secondary effect on the difference between the length of a full solar day (taken by an apparent revolution of the sun from noon to noon) and a constant sidereal day (taken for a full revolution relative to the distant stars).
For several years now, Arts&Letters Daily has been my favourite source of on-line stimulation. Sadly, its founding editor, Denis Dutton, died on December 28.
Yahoo Shutting Down Del.icio.us, Ning’s recent abandonment of its free service, and the end of Bloglines are just the most recent examples of why it seems dangerous to rely on proprietary solutions to the problem of data storage for web-based networking – and of the shared bookmarking aspect in particular.
And even without the question of stability, there is the ongoing problem of duplication and overlap – whether it’s Del.icio.us vs Diigo vs PearlTrees for sharing links, or Facebook vs LinkedIn vs whatever for personal newtorking. For me it seems that the time wasted in trying to decide how to use these things is worth more than all of the benefits they provide.
What I would feel much more comfortable with are open source redundantly distributed solutions which share information in a common format (similar to the design of the web itself) – and which somehow seamlessly blend and extend the contents of the various proprietary systems now in place.
Pipedream?
Apparently, religion is no more likely than any other kind of group affiliation to be associated with either charity or emotional well-being.
So the argument that religion provides a positive contribution in these areas may like saying that baseball is the medical panacaea because baseball players are healthier than the population average – even though this may only be due to their getting a bit more exercise than the overall population average (but a lot less than they would if they had played soccer instead)
Davis Guggenheim, director of ‘Waiting for Superman’ has asked for and received some feedback from teachers.
When I saw the film, what struck me as the most invidious distortion (among many) was the failure to acknowledge that the children on whom miracles were being performed came from very special families. They weren’t just selected from the population at random. By lottery yes, but only from those who wanted to do the extra work and had family support in that endeavour. And given their circumstances, the level of support and committment shown by some of those parents was nothing less than miraculous.
With the kind of selection that’s involved, it’s no surprise that the results were better at the special schools – at least for those lucky enough to have the necessary support. But what about the rest? There was actually no evidence given that the KIPP or other special schools would work for them, and taking out the best students and families from the regular schools might just condemn the rest to an even greater rate of failure.
It may be that the KIPP strategy of applying triage to the community is actually the best strategy for overall improvement. And it may be that the current teaching strategies are not optimal for those left behind. But neither of these is demonstrated in the film.
As an ex union member, I must also object to the disgusting ploy of trying to make a political point against unions out of the requirement to discuss and attempt to reach agreement on all aspects of a contract before presenting a unilateral ultimatum to be voted on.
Overall, in the end I felt that the stories of some truly inspiring parents, children, and teachers had been tainted by a dishonest presentation.
In his annual Christmas message the Rt Rev John Davies, Bishop of the Church in Wales diocese of Swansea and Brecon, complained about atheists timing their contrary message so as to “coincide with two of the church’s greatest festivals, Christmas and Easter” and claimed that their criticisms were in any case based on a misunderstanding.
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Stephen Downes links to this notice about three free Philosophy courses from John Searle who is famous for his Chinese Room thought experiment. Now Searle may be a great teacher, and the ‘Chinese Room’ may be a useful paedagogical device, but I’m afraid I have difficulty respecting any dsicipline which ever in modern times treated it as anything more than that.
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According to Christopher Hitchens, the WikiLeaks founder is an unscrupulous megalomaniac with a political agenda, and should “turn himself in” in order to accept the consequences of his “civil disobedience”. The character assessment may or may not be true, but Hitchens’ argument that Assange should “turn himself in” on those grounds is nonsense.
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This old debate (which came up when I looked up Al Sharpton in response to Obama’s use of his name in contrast with James Dobson) is quite good, but Hitchens’ failure to take up Sharpton’s (repeated) invitation to raise things to a higher level is disappointing. Continue reading
This comes from before he was president. But note that (at 2:30 on the tape) he says “politics involves compromise” and perhaps that is being applied also to the very principles advocated in this speech.
Over the last three months I spent a considerable amount of time following the #PLENK2010 Massive Open OnLine Course organized by Dave Cormier, Stephen Downes, Rita Kop, and George Siemens.
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This must be everything or else it will be nothing.
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James McGirk, writing in 3quarksdaily, repeats the widely stated claim that the Insane Clown Posse display inexcusable ignorance when they claim, in their song ‘Miracles’, to be mystified by magnets.
One line in particular snagged the world’s attention: “Water, fire, air and dirt, Fucking magnets, how do they work?” Magnetism being a staple of primary school science education, the line struck many casual listeners as spectacularly ignorant.
The explanation of magnetism is definitely NOT a “staple of primary school science education” and the widespread disdain for that line in the song shows greater ignorance than the line itself.
In fact, when one commenter on the youTube site asserts that “33,316 people know how magnets work scientifically” (which would be about five people in a million worldwide), that actually sounds about right.
I would venture to suggest also that, of those of us that do understand how magnets work, most consider it a miracle only slightly less astounding than the fact that we can actually understand it.
The concern expressed here, and here and here, is much more valid than that about usage-based billing. It is not the possibility of having to pay for bandwidth that is problematic, but that of being charged differential rates depending on who owns the content.
For each level of connection service quality (ie combination of speed, latency, reliability etc) there should be one bandwidth rate that applies equally to regular TV and internet. But I suspect that allowing infrastructure owners to also own or control content will always give rise to an irresistable temptation to favour their own material and to give inaccurate or misleading reports about relative costs so it may be necessary to force an arms-length separation of functions in order for the goal to be achievable.
Here’s what I wrote re Net Neutrality and Usage-Based Billing:
The public internet has provided a wonderful stimulus to the economic and cultural life of our country and the entire world. But that stimulus depends on its equal accessibility to all users including small innovators as well as large existing corporations. Net “throttling” and other practices of the infrastructure owners threaten that equality of access and provide them with unfair economic advantage.
The introduction of Usage-Based Billing eliminates the argument about a few heavy users overloading the system at the expense of others, and so also eliminates the case for “throttling” of certain traffic types as well. So I urge you to continue on the path of eliminating that practice entirely.
But in addition to throttling certain parts of the internet relative to others, there is also a risk that utility companies will throttle the public internet as a whole in favour of their own privtely controlled content.
So protection of the internet requires also that the bandwidth cost rate that is applied to public internet traffic does not exceed that aplied to CableTV and other private traffic controlled by the owners of the infrastructrure (who are licensed to use public space and radio bandwidth for its implementation).
People must be able to buy video (and other content) from independent producers for the same delivery cost as they get it from the TV networks.
Please make sure to address this aspect in your supervision of the industry and the CRTC.
Thank you,
sincerely
Alan Cooper
OpenMedia.ca wants to Stop The Meter On Your Internet Use. But if all kinds of bandwidth were charged at the same rate (so that the carriers couldn’t favour one type of content, such as cable tv over another, such as internet) then usage based billing would be perfectly fair and would undermine the arguments usually given for “throttling”. So why is this considered a problem (except for heavy users who want me to subsidize their bandwidth)?
