When a company spends $2 million dollars on helping victims of
domestic violence, and
$108
million dollars publicizing that donation, it's not
about helping women.
[via Q Daily News]
Technology and ideology alike are exercises in applied imagination.
--Phil Agre
When a company spends $2 million dollars on helping victims of
domestic violence, and
$108
million dollars publicizing that donation, it's not
about helping women.
[via Q Daily News]
Are the right-winger jargon-pushers hypocrites or
two-year-olds?
Just
in time for the twenty-first century: starting on
January 1, 2001, patients in American hospitals have the
right
to have their pain properly treated.
The
Guardian on
the
right-wing coup that shames America and what it will mean
for the rest of the world.
This will prove a disastrous administration for America and the world, and the coup will become widely understood as a moment of partisan infamy. It is a brutal lesson for us liberals. Never, never forget the treachery and poison on the Right.
Alistair
Cockburn believes that the problem with
software
design methodologies is that
We process designers and methodologists have been designing complex systems without studying the operating characterizing of the active components of our systems, which are known to be highly non-linear and variable (people).He draws on DeMarco and Lister, and Gerald Weinberg. The point of this story is that
- Problem 1. The people on the projects were not interested in learning our system.
- Problem 2. They were successfully able to ignore us, and were still delivering software, anyway.
The main
problem
with micropayments is that they overvalue cheap things,
like cycles, and undervalue human time. They also ignore the cost of
decision making.
This analysis doesn't mention Epinions, in which the contributors are rewarded on a micropayment model but the users pay nothing: I'm not the only person who is more willing to be paid 1-3 cents every time someone reads my reviews than to pay 1-3 cents every time I want to read someone else's reviews. [via rc3.org]
Quote of the day: Planting poison ivy just because it is
green is not necessarily an act of environmental nobility. --Robert
Goodman, in the CELery
Will the media give Dubya the usual deference that a
new president gets, or will they remember his lack of
legitimacy and weird definition of
equal
protection?
[via BuzzFlash]
They're still at it: a Republican Congressman is
objecting
to the media-sponsored recount of Florida ballots, on
the grounds that it would "undermine the legitimacy of the
presidency." He means "challenge the putsch": if he thought
his candidate had won, he wouldn't mind testing it.
This
ad
parody is nasty, but not as nasty as the Commander-and-thief
deserves.
Sampling of the wild chinook salmon near Hanford, in the Columbia
River, shows that
four
out of every five female salmon there is genetically male.
Hormones can produce this effect in the laboratory, but this is
the first time it's been observed in the wild.
The genetically altered females, instead of carrying the normal two X chromosomes, appear to carry one X and one Y chromosome, the normal genetic signature of the male. The altered females of the Hanford Reach produced eggs, spawned and then died as is normal in the Pacific salmon's life cycle. DNA from small pieces of fin showed the genetic markers that indicate their male genotype. The mating of a genetically altered female and a normal male could then produce males with two Y chromosomes, and such males could then only produce male offspring, thus imbalancing the sex ratio of spawners.
The War on Some Drugs is bad for the United States, but
far
worse for South America: the official prediction, from the
people supporting our military involvement in Colombia, is 10,000
new refugees. International aid officials point out that 1.5 million
Colombians have already been displaced by this war, most of
whom are receiving no help from anyone.
"There will be many people displaced," said Jaime Gomez, regional director of the Solidarity Network, the government agency that helps people made homeless by the war. "How many thousands, we don't know. But it will be too many for us to handle."
This observation, backed by such radical forces as heads of the Caqueta Chamber of Commerce, doesn't seem to have had any effect on the Colombian government's willingness to spend ever more money on destroying the coca crop. They say they'll help people plant new crops, but that's meaningless if they've been forced to flee their homes and farms.
When
California
slides into the ocean...
The
ruins of the Mayan city of Caracol show evidence of
suburbs,
in addition to the central palaces and adjacent
slums that have been the standard model of Mayan civilization for
400 years. The outlying areas were connected to the city by
a system of causeways, and seem to have been inhabited
by a well-fed middle class.
The first
experiments
with blood transfusion, in the 17th century, were
attempts to change the recipients' character by giving them
blood from animals with more suitable temperaments.
Two minutes and half a pint of sheep's blood later it was all over. Coga seemed none the worse for the experience, and returned a few days later to tell the society how he was faring. "I was pleased to see the person who had his blood taken out," wrote Pepys. "He finds himself much better since, and as a new man, but he is cracked a little in the head."Then one of the patients died. Of poisoning, as it turned out, but an outcry led to the practice being banned, before the doctors figured out the real risks of immune reactions to foreign blood.
Marylaine
Block is
dismayed
but unsurprised that the Supreme Court opted to trust machines
rather than humans, because we have a long history of this error:
I can't say it surprised me, because Americans don't seem to trust human beings very much anymore. Give us a complex, human problem, and instead of studying the situation and sitting down to think it through together, you can count on us to come up with a simple, uniform mechanical solution.
And so we get television in schools, three-strikes laws instead of judicial discretion, and security cameras. She ends with a poignant question:
I don't know the answers. I rarely do. But I do know that when our solutions aren't working, the first step is to ask the right questions. And my other question is this: what makes us think that, once we've turned control over to machines, we can ever take it back again?
The gargoyles have taken over another cathedral: a
Coke promotion at the
Library
of Congress. It's all about PR, so the dissenters were
tackled and dragged outside, but not arrested.
[via Follow
Me Here]
Copyright 2000 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@redbird.org.
If you like this, you might also like my home page.
