alQpr

Stephen Downes and Jay Hathaway are upbeat about this, but I share the doubts expressed by ‘saltrix’ and ‘Alain’ on Jay’s posting, and by the critics quoted in the NYT’s more recent article. Namely “protecting the internet” won’t mean a damn once there’s a new “differentiated” network on which the anomaly of relatively cheap publication costs for small independent sources can be done away with. At present the internet is supported by the traffic of big and small transmitters, but if the big ones leave it may get squeezed – and if the big corporate entities find it more congenial to ‘competerate’ with one another rather than with the less predictable challenges afforded by upstarts, then squeeze they will.

The rise of the new agnostics. – By Ron Rosenbaum – Slate Magazine. is a childish rant against the so-called “New Atheists” based on the canard that

Atheists display a credulous and childlike faith, worship a certainty as yet unsupported by evidence—the certainty that they can or will be able to explain how and why the universe came into existence. (And some of them can behave as intolerantly to heretics who deviate from their unproven orthodoxy as the most unbending religious Inquisitor.)

Faced with the fundamental question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” atheists have faith that science will tell us eventually.

Continue reading →

Nicholas Carr’s  ‘Experiments in delinkification’ includes (and depends for its rationale on) the following statement: “People who read hypertext comprehend and learn less, studies show, than those who read the same material in printed form”.

But this deserves (needs!) at least a footnote (and a hyperlink would have been much better!).

The phrase “studies show” always sets off alarm bells in my mind because it doesn’t take much cleverness to design a “study” which will “show” just about anything. Regarding the issue in question, it would be easy to make up a document in which links are obstructive, but it seems that Carr has just demonstrated by example that it is equally possible to make one in which the absence of links is even more so (since I will not have been able to “comprehend” his post until I have had a chance to look at the sample documents used in those “studies”).

And when Carr says “The link is . . . a more violent form of a footnote” I agree instead with Crawford Killian who says that ” I increasingly find footnotes in print text to be ‘more violent’: those tiny little superscript numbers tell me the real information is buried in the back of the book, but I’m too lazy to keep flipping back and forth. If I did flip to the back of the book, I’d find a reference to an unobtainable book or article—or to a URL that I would have to painstakingly type in to my computer.”

Killian concludes in the end that “-wherever the hell he wants to put his links. Nicholas Carr is a guy worth knowing”, and that may be true, but I stand by my earlier opinion on the value of this antiweb stuff.

An unfortunate link from Arts&Letters Daily led to this silly article by David B Hart in First Things. The article presents itself as a review of the recently published 50 Voices of Disbelief but after briefly dismissing a number of the contributions to that effort it goes on to become a general polemic against the so-called “New Atheists”. Not that I hold any brief for any of these worthies in particular (in fact I do often find them smug though I seldom agree with the common charge of outright brutish rudeness), but Hart’s article is full of derisive snorting about failings which he does not substantiate (and which I know are often unfairly ascribed).
Continue reading →