The Myth of Separate Magisteria | Big Questions Online.
The main problem (aside from its pretentious name) with Stephen Jay Gould’s concept of “Non-overlapping Magisteria” as a resolution of the “conflict” between science and religion is the fact that many religions fail to respect the purported boundary. Sam Harris (and followers like Susan Jacoby) would like to make a counter invasion, but they are wrong. Continue reading
The #PLENK2010 topic for discussion in Week 8 is PKM. Continue reading
The folks at OpenMedia.ca are concerned about the recent CRTC ruling to allw Bell to apply usage-based-billing to independent ISPs. But I don’t se the problem. So long as everyone gets the same speed of sevice regardless of data type it does not seem unreasonable to charge people in proportion to how much bandwidth they actually consume. What am I missing?
This is apparently old news, but I was previously unaware of it. I recall being shocked when Cat Stevens was treated as potentially dangerous after his conversion to Islam. Now not so much!
Jason Rosenhouse has himself missed the point in his criticism of Josh Roseneau’s response to Jerry Coyne’s blog about Chris Mooney and others’ “accommodationist” heresy against the high priests of evangelical atheism. Continue reading
The headline of this article by Hirsi Ali and Daniel Huff is unfortunate because it distinguishes one particular offensive group. But the authors do in fact acknowledge others and note that the case of anti-abortion Christian Extremists has been partly addressed by legislation in the US. Unfortuantely the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act is very narrowly focussed and Hirsi and Huff argue that a similar act is needed to protect against threats intended to constrain otherwise acceptable free expression. But I would go further Continue reading
This article at the Tyee addresses the broader issue of whether ‘Net Neutrality’ is enough if the physical network used by the internet is being shared with competing services owned by the owners of the infrastructure.
Thanks to reader Colleen McGuire for pointing out this interesting development. It does look promising if it can be developed further, although as one of the researchers said, “We do not want to overpromise at this stage, as the devices are still of relatively low efficiency and there is a long way to go before this can become a practical technology.” Continue reading
This came up in a Math Ed discussion at LinkedIn.
Here A, B, and C are three finite sets.
If half of the As are Bs and half of the Bs are Cs and half of the Cs are As, then what are the maximum and minimum possible ratios of the size of A to the size of C?
Continue reading
Wow! That’s a pretty blatant bit of self promotion.
Start by asserting that everyone is arguing from ignorance but don’t do anything to dispel that ignorance in the article, and end with a promo for the book that you claim will get everyone up to speed. Really this is no different from the late night TV infomercial that promises a quick and easy way to lose weight, or earn fantastic amounts of money “Just buy my book to find the secret knowledge”. I’m disgusted.
. . . are something about which I have no expertise – but that’s never stopped me from sounding off about anything else, so here goes:
Continue reading
In week 2, the focus of #PLENK2010 shifted from the basic terminology, and emphasis on user “client-side” tools to the “server-side” area of support tools Continue reading
So here is my current Personal Environment for Networked Learning
(which I think of as the interface with physically remote people and information): Continue reading
is a mess (like this post) because my data streams are not well integrated. Continue reading
Much of the discussion in the first week of the #PLENK2010 course was devoted to the (often quite subtle) distinctions between the Personal Learning Environment and the Personal Learning Network which it supports (and which is itself part of the personal environment). Continue reading
Jean Kazez distinguishes between Hard and Soft Atheism in a post on her blog whose title leads me to think of the range as a spectrum.
In the opening paragraph she identifies atheism as a belief, saying “It’s not enough to not believe in God/gods–or we’re going to have to call my cats atheists.” This explains very well why I do not call myself an “atheist”. Nor do I consider myself an “agnostic” because that implies belief that there is a meaningful question to which I don’t know the answer, and though there are many such, I am not convinced that the question of “existence” of gods is one of them.
What I do consider meaningful and interesting is the role of religion in human life, and it is probably apparent from other posts in this blog that I see a lot of negatives there but am not yet committed to any particular approach to “dealing” with them – either in terms of their influence on my relationships with religious people or of how I react to expressions of evangelical atheism.
I may well be devoting more attention to the issue right now than is actually likely to be useful. But then I have the time so I might as well waste it if I choose to.
The idea of a tax on ipods is no more “toxic” or “dumb” than the one that presently exists on other blank media – which in many cases are *less* likely to be used for “illegal” copies of copyrighted material. (And regardless of what has been asked for, any actual amount would be subject to future ajudication so the requested rate of $75 is certainly not necessarily what would be applied in the law or assigned by an arbitrator.)
If a media levy is to be used to support the creative industries while freeing Canadians to format shift without other fee or penalty, then so be it, but if so then the levy should apply to *all* media types, and for it to be fair there should really be an option for purchase of levy-free media on which copies are not permitted without ownership of a license (analogous to the tax-free fuel provided in some areas for agriculture).
