Information distribution is in a gray area now between the past, when reputation came top-down from the creation of large distribution organizations as surrogates for reputation to the new model, (which still does not work well) where reputation comes bottom-up, from various sources and from group interaction. After this issue gets a lot worse, people will start using peer-weighted reputation as a filter before who they believe, but that shift will take a generation to really take hold widely.

kinda like this,

"Scientists create synthetic polio virus from genetic sequence"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2122619.stm

Several articles on this back in 2002.

Both his Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever series (fantasy) and his Gap series (Sci Fi) were excellent writing and stories. I read them growing up and thought they were great. He's one of the few authors I've read that can do both genres really well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_R._Donaldson

Also, I think a fun class project would be to compile a concept or theme-based wiki and find/cite examples of major themes in fantasy and sci-fi literature. I use "wiki" loosely here because in my experience wiki tools offer too much freedom to express and with groups it usually makes a mess. But simply put, answer this: what are major and interesting repeated themes in sci fi and fantasy literature, which books do those themes appear in, and for each, a brief description of how the story uses or modifies the basic theme for that story, which stories show best examples of the theme, which places did the theme first appear, etc.

when I first read this description, I thought it was about people using twitter to by open and public about their money.

In most other parts of the world the Internet is driving companies and products to "out-open" each other. more transparency wins, more obvious pricing models win, easier services win. People who are more open and more public about their lives are more successful generally (though its not clear which are the causes and which are the effects).

This drive toward open has not reached financial matters (yet). People and companies are still extremely private about how much money hey have and what they do with that money, for good reason.

Eventually I see the intersection of "open" culture drivers - and the privacy of personal and organizational finance hitting a crossroad. It may not be pretty. I think that once the norm is forced to be more open in order to compete, then eventually there will be a drive to be open about money and transactions - how much people and orgs have, and exactly how they use it. Financial information may be protected for some time legally, but with ever increasing information available about everything, it will get out, be shared, and used to make decisions. I think we'll see on 10+ year timelines some organizations and people and orgs being "open" about their money voluntarily and it will be a very good thing. Totally open finance.

Consumers will have data never before imagined: consider at point of sale knowing exactly what the producers of a product paid in capital and marginal costs to produce a product you might buy, the breakdown of costs and profits to which organizations, and which people are benefiting from that potential purchase? I think we'll see this faster than you might imagine.

Reading TFA, Nate's analysis implies that there is a systematic bias toward some last digits in the overall poll percentages aggregated over many disparate topics.

What seems so improbable (to me) is that if someone really were grossly "cooking the books" like this - literally not doing the poll, or tallying any numbers at all, but instead simply reporting fake results for press ... is that they would be so stupid to make up the results manually instead of using a computer in some way. What, some guy in an office reading other polls and saying "gee I think the number will be 45%."

If this kind of bias really has been introduced by manually creating and publishing the results (as the analysis seems to imply), then it will be easy to track down and prove with further digging into the data, interviewing people who made the calls or took the data, etc. However, accepting such an explanation would requires a level of stupid on the part of the principals in this company that is so extreme that I find such a scenario an improbable explanation for the results presented.

NOT ALL MEN are sensors, concerned primarily with the "look" and image of beauty that is socially defined as "attractive". Most are, but not all. This social, media driven image of one beauty for women is a big social myth that even if not true for some men, most all men learn that this one, social image is the "normal" for attractive, so they mimic the behaviors of other men.

FTA: "'We conclude men's cognitive functioning may temporarily decline after an interaction with an attractive woman.'"

More accurately, they could say: "conclude MANY men's cognitive functioning".

Jung developed and published models of cognition in the early 1900s that explain directly the different means by which people (men and women) collect information and make judgments. These models are not scientific (yet), but rather observational classification. They have been re-used and rediscovered multiple times under many different names for decades. It is really frustrating to read professional scientists doing funded social research that blurs the lines and causes confusion about these issues in the lay public. While I do not dispute their results, the point is that there are observational models that show that these results do not apply to all men, and these models can reproducibly predict (in some people) which men it would apply to.

It will be such a huge leap forward for humanity when there is reproducible scientific evidence and measurement techniques to back up Jung's neural models so that social researchers can segment the population intelligently for this kind of social research.

But, but... think of the children

I have been using Opera since Opera version 4 ish - still prefer it above all others and have tried all the rest, but it is still faster, better layout, and more customizable to my taste than any other option. It also wins completely on GUI speed, and on keyboard navigation.

Just started with 10 now, and Opera still has it.

When I do web development, and want "inspect this" element and a browse-able dom tree - I use Firefox. To do layout checking and rendering checking, we fire up both Safari and IE. But for day to day, with 20-50 tabs open, browsing around... Opera is the one that works best.

ALREADY one new feature I LOVE: inline spell checking while I write! (This was one thing I wanted but it took a while for Opera to catch up to FF, and had to add a JavaScript user-side spell checker.)

"Dear Court:

Providing a different option will be hard for us.
Please provide us relief."

Seems to me like this issue is exactly why monopolies are bad for consumers.

The last PC I helped someone fix (bloated and slow, crippled with malware) didn't even
come with system reinstall disks - they had to order and pay for them separately once the
computer arrived. Oops!

Great question. I don't have a great answer. Not everyone sees the current situation as a problem, which is copyright is the way it is today.

Here is what I think, and from that, others perhaps will understand why I think the current situation is unreasonable.

Intellectual property, like property, is a complete social fiction - its a very useful one, but nonetheless - a fiction.

Property is a big unspoken social agreement we have that assigns resources to individuals and entities and gives them superior rights of control over those resources. This assignment we call "ownership", and is a critical part to nonviolent resource distribution with many independent entities. In civil society it is simply given that this property mapping of things to people/organizations is "real", but in fact it is only supported, like all rules, (both laws and social mores) if people generally agree - both agree that the rules are reasonable, and agree that they each will (in the vast majority) follow those rules. If people don't agree, laws don't work.

Intellectual property extends the idea of this big shared social mapping of resources (property) to intangible "intellectual" creations (written words, music, video and most anything translatable into computer bits). The basic idea of intellectual property says that if one entity (person, company) did a lot of work in creating something, they should have superior rights to control it for a while. By itself, this is a very reasonable idea.

On the other hand, there is no physical basis to support property rights on information objects like there are on working land or creating physical things. Many would argue extremely convincingly that in a highly connected world, most people would be much better off if there were no intellectual property at all. That only those large organizations profiting from culture creation and limiting access to culture would be those harmed by eliminating IP entirely.

However, most important to the debate from my perspective is one of culture. The shared actions of humans that create the beauty, education, entertainment, and everyday existence for human beings is now encoded very often in digital information used to create experiences we all share. The fundamental question at hand is this: are we better off with human experience owned by corporations, or not? To me, this is the essence of the whole copyright debate - it has nothing to do with the specifics of law or legality, the politics of lobbying groups, or even the money people make off IP - it has to do with what kind of entity gets to create and control human culture, and whether it happens primarily by and for individuals in an open way, or whether it happens primarily under corporate ownership in a closed way.

Currently, we unequivocally have the latter. Large corporations primarily own the most valuable and most widely shared cultural elements in all 1st-world countries. The length of copyright basically only benefits and perpetuates corporations now. Governments with WIPO and other treaties are trying to enforce long, strong copyright protections globally. Its not individuals' creative expression driving how we live, how we think, how we get news and information, how we are entertained, how we are educated - but rather (and I'm being extremely general here) - it is corporations. These statements are extremely broad and there are many counter examples, but I'm referring to the largest factors and the most momentum in society.

I see it as unreasonable that culture created today will never be available to me openly and legally in my lifetime. The only reason the system works this way is because large companies profit more from IP working this way than other ways. The social fiction of IP is no longer a good deal for the individual in this case. This basic understanding that this legal fiction is no longer a good deal for individuals is why so many people redistribute music, why black market activity on IP is out of control, and why some large cultures simply reject entirely the premise of strong IP protection.

As I said above, not everyone sees this as a problem. I have no particular negative bent against companies, they are essential to human progress. I do have a problem when the interests of the corporation squashes the interests of individuals. In the case of shared human culture, who owns it, and who controls it - corporate interests seem to trump individual interests most every time.

<< steps up >>

There can be no rational discussion about copyright until people acknowledge
that current copyright laws, created almost entirely to meet corporate interests,
are completely out of whack with people's expectations and with any semblance of
fairness or social good for individuals.

The current norm is "Life + 70 years" with a comprehensive list here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries'_copyright_length

This means that *NOTHING* created by artists, musicians, or *ANY* of
the culture created today will move into the public domain in your lifetime
(expected lifetime) unless the people or companies who control the rights let
you have access to it through licensing or sales. You will die first before
the vast majority of today's' culture is available to you legally.

That is absurd. It is not how the intellectual property system was ever
intended to work.

<< / steps down off my soapbox >>

"by any stretch of reality"...

perhaps not in this stretch: http://rspa.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2009/07/28/rspa.2009.0080.full.pdf

only time will tell. The universe still has a great many secrets undiscovered.

LegalTorrents does hosting and distribution of open licensed content:

see http://www.legaltorrents.com/books

"Twitter is a reflection of what people are interested in right now"
=>
"Twitter is a reflection of what the twits are twatting in right now"

Can you see the problem?

Our volunteers just finished a download compilation here:
http://www.legaltorrents.com/torrents/680-california-learning-resource-network-textbooks

All of the textbook except one included a share-friendly license. One Biology book did not, and the content was not included. The Physics texts were published about a year ago.