A while ago, I posted a journal entry that described my thoughts on what I wanted Slashdot moderation to look like. My summary said, "I don't see any reason why the scoring caps on the top and the bottom should remain on Slashdot."

Unsuprisingly, Taco has been thinking about the moderation system on Slashdot as well, and has announced in his journal that some major changes are coming. There are a number of insights in his JE, but I wanted to highlight one of them here:

... we throw out the arbitrary 'Score:-1 to Score:5' and instead focus on providing NN comments to the user that most fit their preferred way of reading the site ...

Ahhh...music to my ears.

He goes on to say:

I suspect that this change might be among the most controversial of all changes we could implement on Slashdot. ... So it will be a challange [sic] to balance the needs of the hardcore readers ... with the needs of the newbie ...

Taco, count this "hardcore reader" as a supporter of your ideas. I think change is needed, and I like your ideas so far.

I'm looking forward to reading other ideas in future JEs.

I just submitted the following story to Slashdot. In case it's rejected, I've copied it here.

Has your job been offshored? What're you doing about it? Well, these guys did something rather unusual. They offered their 3D design experience on eBay. 3 days left to get your very own 3D Graphics Development Team! They claim that 'The product of our work has touched the lives of every person who has ever enjoyed a movie, played a computer game, or watched television.' (Disclaimer: I don't even know these guys.)

Update: Man...that was fast. Rejected in under 5 minutes.

From the Chicago Sun Times:

[In the movies,] Catholicism has been represented far more frequently than any other faith. I've probably seen more films about the Catholic Church (and movies with nuns or priests as supporting characters) than all other religions put together. Just from the last four years, I could easily put together a Catholic Film Festival -- but I don't think too many Catholics would be pleased with the entries.

What follows is a list of movies that feature Catholic religious, most of whom have far removed themselves from Communion with the Church, though they wouldn't admit it.

Go read the article, and tell me if you agree with its conclusion:

[N]o other religious group gets bashed with such frequency. Can you imagine a similar number of films with Jewish leaders playing villains and moral weaklings?

Wendy McElroy is the editor of ifeminists.com, an interesting site that deals with the question of the equality of the sexes. Ms. McElroy often does a very good job of separating the issues of gender equality and traditional "feminisism." She gets a lot of hate mail from traditional feminists because what she espouses is very different from the normal feminist party line. However, her arguments very much hold together logically.

There have been times when I disagree with her conclusions, or the procedure by which she arrives at them. But they are compelling arguments nonetheless, and I always enjoy reading her articles.

Her most recent article talks about students protesting Affirmitive Action by offering a bake sale where the price is determined by race or gender. White students must pay $1. Women $0.75. Blacks $0.25. Though obviously protected speech, these demonstrations have frequently been met with everything including violence.

Go read Wendy McElroy's article and tell me what you think.

(While I was composing this journal entry in my head, FroMan coincidentally wrote a very similar journal entry. I figured there's nothing to lose about getting the word out twice. Plus, my JE has actual links. ;-)

A site I occasionally lurk at is the Image of the Day at The Cellar. Always something interesting to look at, and often some good debate.

Recently, they posted some images of a rally in Iraq. From the site:

Yesterday ten thousand Iraqis took to the streets in a demonstration against terrorism and for Democracy. With Iraqi police protecting the event, the people found voices that they have never had before.

The blog Healing Iraq has a massive gallery of photos of the demonstration, and much commentary on what the demonstration meant to the author, Alaa, an ordinary Iraqi.

...

Unfortunately, the march did not fit the narrative of most of the foreign media and so they pretty much saw fit to ignore it. Here are some of the shots from Healing Iraq.

Go check it out. No matter what your political leanings, I expect you'll find it interesting, especially the discussion and debate.

Today I learned about a (new?) feature on Google that lets you search for synonyms of words instead of just individual words. Rather than typing "perl help", for instance, you can prefix the word "help" with a tilde, "perl ~help" and get pages that also contain the words "guide", "FAQ", "manual", "tutorial", "problems", "support", "tips", in addition to derivatives of the word itself, like "helpful", and "helping".

Nice!

Some simple combinations:

• computer = laptop, pc, hardware
• linux = rpm, redhat, howto, mandrake, debian, suse
• happy = fun, lucky
• earth = world, space, planet, universe
• geek = linux, tech, nerd
• baby = pregnancy, child, infant, birth

You can start to learn what synonyms Google thinks are related to a given word with the search "~word -word". Using this, I've decided that the "synonym map" must be automatically generated from the content of Google's database, rather than hand coded, or retrieved from a thesaurus. That is because there are some rather strange combinations:

• dinner = meal, cooking, recipies, sunset, mystery
• here = hear, macintosh
• yes = "roger dean"
• antitrust = "rachel leigh cook"

Have fun!

(This is the continuation of a conversation that I started with fenix down about slashdot moderation. I saw a +5 comment that I thought had a lot more value than the other comments attached to that article. Rather than get moderated OT for the rest of the discussion, I thought I'd move the conversation here to my journal. Please join in the conversation, as I think this is an interesting topic.)

I don't have a lot of experience with other moderation systems (Kuroshin comes to mind), but I know what features I'd like to see in a moderation system.

I expect that any given thread of conversation will have a bell curve distribution of rated comments, assuming no cap to the top or the bottom. That is, there are very few highly-rated comments, very few low-rated comments, and a vast proportion of comments in the middle, spread out.

I'd like to see a moderation system that reflects this. I'd like to be able to set my threshold to a percentage of the bell curve: show me the top 2% of posts. You could also set it to say: show me the top 20 posts, which would figure out what the threshold percentage should be, based on the posting distribution.

With this model, having a cap at the top and the bottom cuts off the bell curve prematurely, saying, in essence, that all posts that would have been rated above (or below) the cap should all be treated as equal.

Caps do prevent the abuse of moderation, however. No single post can be sent into the stratosphere or down to oblivion. But I thought metamoderation, as currently implemented on slashdot, is seen by the editors as being the solution to invalid moderation.

All summed up, I don't see any reason why the scoring caps on the top and the bottom should remain on Slashdot.

However, I'm willing to be convinced otherwise. Please educate me.

I found an interesting article about the debate about whether the use of force by the U.S. against Iraq, without a "second" (hah!) U.N. resolution, is "legal". I put "legal" in quotes because there are conflicting ideas about what body of law should be used. Here's the full article. It's not very long.

Some salient bits:

The UN Charter is universally accepted as the main authority regarding the international use of force. But the charter's effectiveness has come under increasing debate by legal scholars.

It has not proven to be a major deterrent to warfare since its signing 58 years ago. A new report issued by the United Nations Association, a New York-based policy institute, says there have been 291 interstate conflicts involving 126 countries since 1945.

As has been mentioned other places, the lack of a specific U.N. resolution authorizing the use of force does not automatically make such force "illegal". NATO actions in Kosovo are frequently brought up in this context:

In the case of Kosovo, the United States led a NATO air campaign against Yugoslavia after Russia threatened to veto any such action in the Security Council. Glennon said the NATO bombardment had international legitimacy, although it was technically illegal. "NATO in 1999, with all 19 NATO democracies joining together, proceeded to bomb Yugoslavia in plain violation of the [UN] Charter. There was no authorization of the Security Council, but it was done because it was thought to be wise, because the benefits were thought to outweigh the costs. That's the test that is applied today, whether it's wise, not whether it's lawful," Glennon said.

And then you have the reason why I believe that the U.S. is perfectly legally justified, on all fronts, to unilaterally act against Iraq:

Richard Gardner is a professor of international law at Columbia University in New York and a former diplomat. He told RFE/RL he has long held the view that the United States and its allies have had the right to take action against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein because of his violation of the cease-fire conditions ending the 1991 Gulf War.

Bring on the debate!

(I only have 8 fans, but you gotta start somewhere...)