encarta dies, bare necessities, autism and toddler eye contact
March 31, 2009 at 2:57 pm | In photography, photoshop, science, tech culture | Leave a CommentMicrosoft Encarta Dies After Long Battle With Wikipedia
Microsoft delivered the coup de grâce Monday to its dying Encarta encyclopedia, acknowledging what everyone else realized long ago: it just couldn’t compete with Wikipedia, a free, collaborative project that has become the leading encyclopedia on the Web.
In January, Wikipedia got 97 percent of the visits that Web surfers in the United States made to online encyclopedias, according to the Internet ratings service Hitwise. Encarta was second, with 1.27 percent. Unlike Wikipedia, where volunteer editors quickly update popular entries, Encarta can be embarrassingly outdated.
I’ve used Encarta software and found it very useful. It was way ahead of Wikipedia in terms of videos, pictures, illustrations, charts and maps. While the main articles were not updated as frequently as Wikipedia, what was there was on average, more thorough. Since Microsoft is willing to simply toss the entire endeavor, why not make Encarta an open community like Wikipedia and allow the reinvented Encarta rights to all that graphic and video material. Even better, run a few discreet ads on Encarta to generate enough revenue to pay a few master editors that could police entry and solicit contributions from open sources journals. I use Wikipedia all the time to verify dates and names, but it has always lacked in substance. Add in the people that are determined to slant controversial subjects and you end up with a source that never seems to be able to work out the kinks.
The eyes are a window into socialization, Toddlers’ Focus on Mouths Rather Than on Eyes is a Predictor of Autism Severity
After the first few weeks of life, infants look in the eyes of others, setting processes of socialization in motion. In infancy and throughout life, the act of looking at the eyes of others is a window into people’s feelings and thoughts and a powerful facilitator in shaping the formation of the social mind and brain.
The scientists found that the amount of time toddlers spent focused on the eyes predicted their level of social disability. The less they focused on the eyes, the more severely disabled they were. These results may offer a useful biomarker for quantifying the presence and severity of autism early in life and screen infants for autism. The findings could aid research on the neurobiology and genetics of autism, work that is dependent on quantifiable markers of syndrome expression.
On the other hand, adults that insist on constantly staring, zombie like, into another adults eyes are more creepy then social.
Why people pay attention to Matt Drudge or a variety of other self appointed expert pundits is curious at best. Matt is currently running a headline that says we’re becoming a nanny state because the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration(SAMHSA) has some information up about the economy and mental health issues related to same. The government and its agencies have posted such public service information for years about issues related to tainted peanut butter, preparing for hurricanes and how to deal with the mental health effects of natural catastrophes like tornadoes, applying for student loans, and tons of information to help farmers among hundreds of other topics. For the last eight years government web sites ran such advice and warnings without even a mention by Drudge. Why has the media’s number one go to guy on breaking news suddenly decided to portray the most mundane news and as evidence the nation is sinking into helplessness – he’s setting the bar darn low. Maybe because the Big Daddy president who’s laundry he carried for eight years is gone. Or maybe Drudge, being a little off in the mental acuity department thinks this is actually a story – didn’t the Roman Empire fall because of public service mental heath announcements.
the lengths the faihful go to, magic bunny, cheney the disingenuous
March 27, 2009 at 5:53 pm | In Philosophy & Religion, economic, graphic art, history, photoshop | Leave a Comment
In Eat your saints, purge your demons – Why do people worship religious relics, and why is the number of trainee exorcists rising? Two new books suggest that our desire to believe in magical forces remains irresistible. Laura Miller writes that the devoted have been known to bite off and smuggle parts of human remains (relics) - Mary Magdalene and St. Francis Xavier and swallow holy nails – to be given to another church of course. While Peter Manseau’s who wrote “Rag and Bone: A Journey Among the World’s Holy Dead,” is sympathetic and shows some awe at the depth of the faithfuls beliefs, but also notes that many of the world’s relics are not falling apart because of age, but because people are literally tearing them apart bit by bit. Manseau dares to correct a little history and point out the less then beneficent aim of the Crusades. Much of the motivation of the Crusaders was about ransacking the Holy land in search of relics – spreading the word and conversions were at best a secondary motivation. It is true that every Catholic church in Europe, that I’m aware of, has some little relic. The relic bestows stature on the church and offers the promise of potent, other worldly powers – that range from finding a mate to healing wounds.
Italy is said to undergoing a kind of satanic panic attack with devil worshipers around every corner. The Catholic churches officials are actually not all that fond of being in the exorcism business, but more or less bowing to public demand, have appointed an exorcist for every diocese – even those are supposed to work with mental health professionals. Miller compares it to the American wave of satanic possession obsession back in the 80s. It reminds me of the Rights paranoia about jihadists cells. Cells that are biding their time waiting to make Americans all wear head scarves and remove their shoes during prayer.
Anyway, Miller’s review is more detailed and worth a read.
magic bunny. the aztec, inca and many native american tribes believed in animal spirits and there are relics remaining from those civilizations. in the case of the inca, thanks to the conquistadors and small pox there are not any inca left to make a fuss about relics. though they are objects of national pride.
Dick Cheney was right - A misleading headline. When Cheney made his deficits quipt, he knew that deficits, in ordinary times do matter, but did not matter to him or any of his Republican predecessors. He was just taking another condescending swipe at his detractors for one of the rare times someone in the media dared to challenge the administration’s fiscal policy.
Of the roughly $11 trillion in federal debt accumulated to date, more than 90 percent can be attributed to the tenure of three presidents: Ronald Reagan, who used to complain constantly about runaway spending; George Herbert Walker Bush, reputed to be one of those old-fashioned green-eyeshade Republicans; and his spendthrift son George “Dubya” Bush, whose trillion-dollar war and irresponsible tax cuts accounted for nearly half the entire burden. Only Bill Clinton temporarily reversed the trend with surpluses and started to pay down the debt (by raising rates on the wealthiest taxpayers).
And because it always comes up as a way to deflect responsibility. Bush 43 debt to GDP ratio was worse then Clinton and Carter.
many of us are not ants, flor de la lluvia, some deities are like that
March 26, 2009 at 6:08 pm | In art, photography, science, sociology | Leave a CommentBees and ants ‘operate in teams’ in which the BBC reports,
The study’s findings appear to echo the insect worlds portrayed in the animated films Antz and Bee Movie, in which the characters live in rigidly conformist societies.
In some co-operative groups of animals – known as superorganisms – members are closely related, and work together to ensure their shared genetic material is passed on, the researchers concluded.
In other groups they perform a policing role, for instance in honey bee hives where worker bees destroy any eggs not laid by the queen to ensure the queen’s offspring survive.
Dr Andy Gardner, from the University of Edinburgh, said: “We often see animals appearing to move in unison, such as bison or fish.
“However, what looks like a team effort is in fact each animal jostling to get to the middle of the group to evade predators.
“By contrast, an ant nest or a beehive can behave as a united organism in its own right. In a beehive, the workers are happy to help the community, even to die, because the queen carries and passes on their genes.
“However, superorganisms are quite rare, and only exist when the internal conflict within a social group is suppressed - so we cannot use this term, for example, to describe human societies.”
The findings, funded by the Royal Society, are published in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology.
Cooperation and its benefits in human evolution are pretty obvious, but there are extremes which seem a little dangerous at the fringes and range from hurtful to aggravating in general. One term thorwn around as though it was nothing but the crsut for a thin style pizza is the some things are worth dying for. Probably everyone has a generalized idea of exactly what those things or cricumstances entail. When it washes over debate about public policy it becomes a cultural cudgel. The speaker(s) intention to reduce the population to a colony of ants, often times, without self knowledge of the irony, accusing the non-ants of being communists. One could show some appreciation, think of all the existential and intense moral questions that an actual individual would go through to decide to put one’s life in imminent jeopardy – this cause is without doubt a give me liberty or death situation – maybe to the speaker – other would like to think it over. Instead go with the flow, let the leaders of the colony make that choice for you. Human cooperation is filled with caveats, some ranges from harsh to funny, but we’re definitely not bees. We’re cooperators, but we do a lot of costs-benefit analysis
Even casual observation suggests some robust patterns in cooperative social behavior. You’ve probably noticed that people can be quite particular about who they will help, when, and how much. First, people act frequently, and sometimes at great cost to themselves, to help their families, especially their kids. Why is that? People help friends, and sometimes acquaintances, but there is something different about ‘the rules’ for helping these people vs. helping close family. Friends who break the ‘helping rules’ often drop from ‘friend’ to ‘acquaintance’. Kids, on the other hand (even as adults), are not only given more latitude, but are evaluated using quite different ‘rules’. Why are friends different from family members, and where do these ‘rules’ come from? Moreover, what about helping strangers? For instance, have you ever considered why you would willingly stop to give directions to a lost visitor on the street rather than continuing onwards? Such an action wastes your time, has some risks (the person may be a thief, con-artist or murderer), and you’ll likely never see that person again. If you don’t stop to help this stranger, why would you feel bad about it? Are you more likely to help some strangers than others? If so, who are you more likely to
help, and why?
Shame on the New York Times Magazine for publishing an extended, largely favorable profile of Freeman Dyson, a true climate crackpot. Dyson is in his eighties. Having older relatives I can understand on a personal plain about not correcting every goofy thing they say, but you don’t let them prattle in an unchallenged puff piece on a prominent media soapbox.
Palin Sounds Off On Media, McCain Campaign At GOP Dinner (VIDEO)
Of the McCain campaign, she said that when she wanted some support before her debate with Joe Biden, there was “nobody I could find that I wanted to hold hands with and pray.”
I could cheat and look it up, but apparently Palin belongs to a religion with a diety that will not answer prayers made in private or it did listen and acted accordingly.
lead overkill, blue city radio, corrupting populism
March 25, 2009 at 6:19 pm | In culture, legal, photoshop, sociology | Leave a CommentBook Dealers Told to Get The Lead Out - Libraries Resist Ban on Potentially Toxic Books
“On the scale of concerns to have about lead, this is very clearly not a high priority,” said Ellen Silbergeld, a MacArthur scholar and professor of public health at Johns Hopkins University who is considered one of the leading experts on lead poisoning.
“It doesn’t take a tremendous amount of intelligence to figure out what the highest-risk sources of lead are,” Silbergeld said. “This is a way of distracting attention from their failure to protect children from the clear and present dangers of lead. I think this is just absurd, and I think it’s disingenuous.” She said that toys, poorly made jewelry and other trinkets were cause for much more alarm.
The legislation, which passed with strong bipartisan support, was a reaction to lead’s being discovered on and in thousands of imported toys, mostly from China, in 2007. It restricts lead content in products designed for children age 12 and younger to 600 parts per million by weight; the threshold drops to 300 parts per million in August of this year. Items as varied as bikes and jewelry are affected.
I’m fairly well informed on the very real dangers of lead, especially in children and pregnant women, yet I find myself sympathetic to those that think this ban on any book printed before 1985 is an excessive hardship. While tagging books with warning labels would entail some expense it would certainly be cheaper then having libraries try to replace what must be hundreds of thousands of books. Library books that are in regular circulation, as opposed to special collections, have a life cycle and would be replaced eventually. I’m not familar with this blog, but they put up a link to a pdf study of how this particular facet of the law was almost destined to be heavy handed in regards to children’s books in particular.
Buzzwords always ride a wave and while I’m always glad to see them peak and move on, the current fetish with populism has taken an especially ugly turn in some quarters – Populism and Paranoia
In our own era, populism has been a force for the right, and it’s been channeled toward what Hofstadter, citing Theodor Adorno, called “status politics,” which we now call cultural politics. Hofstadter believed that status politics replaced interest politics during periods of prosperity, like the nineteen-twenties (the return of the Klan, Prohibition, the Scopes trial, etc.), and the nineteen-fifties and sixties (McCarthyism and the rise of the new right). But one could also argue that cultural politics has been perpetuated by the economic erosion of the decades since the early nineteen-seventies: reformers were unable to arrest the slide of the working- and middle-class, so those Americans focused their passions on social issues.
In 2008, with a new depression looming, interest politics finally overtook status politics, which is why the name-calling and cultural appeals of the McCain-Palin campaign didn’t work. In general, this turn benefits Democrats (see F.D.R.), and it has given Obama the chance to set the terms of political discourse for years to come. But if interest politics turns into the kind of populism that rejects all forms of institutional authority—and we’re closer than we’ve been since at least the nineteen-seventies—the public mood will sweep aside Obama’s program of reforms and quite possibly turn into a new sort of reaction: anti-bank, anti-Washington, anti-immigrant, anti-global. The populist temper and the paranoid style are not the same thing, but they are related in obvious ways: when the former loses its bearings, it can degenerate into the latter.
Packer also notes that populism, especially like that typified by McCarthy in the 50s and Father Coughlin ( who makes a good example because he started out somewhat reasonable and ended up giving a new meaning to wacko) especially when it starts on the Right can get angry and destructive very quickly. If Washington, those dang foreigners, the Treasury Department, banks, etc become that omnious other which must be stopped, or in other words some of the people and institutions, imperfect as they are, we need to fix the our current predicaments all become the enemy, we end up with a nation of Robespierres with enemies behind every corner. Notice that many of these same people, for eight years thought government could do no wrong. Bush ignored memo warning Bin laden might attack – Bush and government got a free pass. Let one of the South’s premiere cities drown – blame it on the victims – Bushgovernment is all good. Leave Obama the worse economic disaster since the Great Depression – switch everyones attention to the national debts that are projected to rescue the economy. Costs we wouldn’t have to pay if the last White House occupant had a clue what good governance was. maybe we should get every president to sign a contract; they have to leave the country as in good a condition as they found it or better, not loot it and retire.
Packer is always worth a read. Those interested in reading the whole piece might want to click over soon, his stuff has a way of diasppearing into the archives.
this ain’t no blue sky. a friends’ wallpaper that i took the noise out of and tweaked the color.
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