This is what's interesting to me about one argument in favor of GM. On the one hand, the author seems to argue (here and in her books) that GM is merely an extension of what farmers have been doing for ages, and that the type tools and techniques of the work done to change organisms are irrelevant.
On the other hand, GM crops are patentable, whereas hybridized crops are not (is this correct?). This is the heart of the economic argument: Farmers can buy the seed or not. But they can't produce it themselves. So the tools and techniques aren't irrelevant.
It's certainly _possible_ to have it both ways (as we do now), but this way of parsing the issue seems to me neither economically nor technologically (in the sense of patentability) advantageous to agriculture in the long term. I'd prefer not to get into a situation where the only economically sensible way to produce food is to buy seed from one source. And that's the rational choice for a company like Monsanto: increase shareholder value by becoming the only economical source of seed.
I've been seeing this book pop up all over the place for the past year or so. It seems to be the go-to recommendation from friends to other friends who are frustrated at not finding relief from chronic pain after trying many other treatments.
I haven't read the book. All I can say is that the results, from my perspective, have been mixed. Some people who have tried it and not seen their pain alleviated blame themselves for not getting to the root of their stress. I haven't heard of anyone's pain disappearing in 2 weeks. I've heard people recommend it for all kinds of pain, not just muscle and back pain. Claims about its efficacy seem to have broadened over time.
The book is set at a very good "it can't hurt to try" price point, and the word of mouth marketing makes it very appealing to people who feel desperate.
I am a random person. My experiences are anecdotal.
It looks like the document is included in the article in a PDF viewer. Sometimes those don't show up because of ad-blockers.
The Examiner does tend to cherry-pick, and it's definitely worth reviewing the document. I searched the doc for "facebook" and it looks to me like the broader goal was engagement, not "likes" as an end-all. They were working off the assumption that more likes meant more engagement, and during that campaign, people started to realize and point out that it wasn't happening. And to that end it appears to be a waste of $630k.
But it's not the case that they just blindly wanted more likes because it feels good. (The article doesn't say that, but a lot of people think about "likes" that way). Facebook and Twitter are legit ways to reach international audiences, for example, to disseminate propaganda / information (depending on how you lean).
Hey, likewise! Unfortunately there's no kickstarter for better bullying utilities. At least this does things that they might also want to do? Calculating: still for nerds. But imagine being able to check your notifications while holding someone's head under the faucet.
Well, true, that's what we've grown up with: handles that are clever and reflect something about us (or deflect everything about us). But who wants to use [email protected] as a professional contact address? Unless your full name is John Basketball Expert, which is sort of what I'm getting at. I wouldn't change my kid's middle/surname to Basketball Expert, but I'd consider something like Emily Clementine Raptor Mitchell. Seems silly now, but I like the idea that my child could turn on and off her searchability, or at least tune it up or down.
Two namespace wars in the email address: the part before @, which is where we fight over who gets to be "johnsmith", and the domain, where we fight to get either johnsmith.com, the most neutral, popular name like gmail.com, or a short, memorable, personal, pronounceable, and easy to spell domain.
And then we pitch headfirst into the coming TLD clusterfuck! It all makes for fun times and cash money.
Brooks's entire business model is getting people to respond to what he writes, however stupid it is. "Trolling for money" (a trite observation, but there it is). It's unfortunate that even sound rebuttals like this one feed into the cycle that makes him a successful columnist.
I think this campaign largely misses the more interesting problem, which is that we got to this point despite the fact that 1984 is a bestselling cornerstone of literature. It's been required reading in high schools for years and years.
Are the representatives on the receiving end of this campaign going to slap their heads and go "Oh golly, I never thought of that"?
There's no easy way to get through to people who think the benefits of ubiquitous surveillance outweigh the costs. They know 1984, and they don't see themselves in the role of big brother. Throwing this book at them isn't going to change that.
Edit: "There's no easy way" suggests that this is meant as a solution, which obviously isn't the campaigner's intention. What I mean is that I don't think this will have an impact other than to make the recipients think their constituents are oversimplifying the issue, a la Godwin's law.
Whenever something happens that people want to explain away, some new technical term pops out into the public discourse. It's impossible to predict what the next phrase will be, but the pattern is consistent and it's always interesting.
You take a phrase with a legitimate meaning in a technical context and say it over and over in a non-technical context. It makes everything slippery. People have to jump through mental hoops to integrate the new terminology, and you get all this wiggle room to nitpick whether some argument applies to it. You can claim it means something technical and specific if you need to, and continue to use it vaguely when you want it the other way.
I don't have a ready list of the most recent ones I've noticed, but "weapons of mass destruction," "enhanced interrogation," and "enemy combatants" are some good oldies. "Wardrobe malfunction" too.
Anyway, I never would have guessed "metadata" would join the ranks.
A subject near and dear to my heart. In college I was briefly obsessed with cross-linguistic adverb ordering.
I wish middle school science included some linguistics. The empirical data are already in our heads, so it's a great vehicle for teaching the scientific method -- look at data, make a hypothesis, check its predictions against other data (no equipment needed!) and refine it until it encompasses the counter-examples.
That's true, but the comparison I'm getting at is the learning curve. The process of consuming an algorithm or procedure is more of a tabs-vs-semicolons thing, a language war.
I mention editors because the arguments about learning one often have to do with the trade-off between expert efficiency and expressiveness and the painful learning curve (for many). And because that's honestly what the discussion reminds me of, whether or not it's a perfect match :)
The discussion here reminds me of the longstanding debate over editors like vim/emacs vs (whatever you want to call the other editors). Or semicolons vs indentation, to make a slightly more "reading" oriented comparison.
There's obviously a difficult learning curve for many people, but others who are already proficient argue that the rewards of learning standard music notation are worth an extended effort, if that's what it takes.
The thing I've noticed most about sheet music as I'm learning it is that it's compressed. It uses different symbols and techniques to say the same thing in a smaller space, and reuses space and symbols more efficiently by applying modifier symbols at the beginning of the staff and elsewhere. It allows notes on lines and spaces instead of just spaces or just lines. Tighter, smaller, more on the page. Changes in pitch can also be indicated by modifier codes next to the notes, sharp and flat, allowing further combinations with only 2 more symbols.
So I have to learn to decompress the information at the same time I'm interpreting it. Tricky! I do stop and wonder if this compression algorithm is the right fit for humans. I don't buy the argument that continuity with the volume of existing sheet music is a good reason to never develop an alternative. But any alternative needs to be much better on some metric that outweighs continuity. Otherwise we should just keep hacking the learning process with color coding and mnemonics and whatnot.
It's funny, I was talking to a friend about my struggle to learn sheet music and music theory, and he said "It seems hard at first but you'll start to get it pretty soon." And I said "Yeah, it's sort of like math in that way." To which he replied "oh, I don't know about that, I can't do math. I've never been good at it."