n/t

A friend of mine works in a lot of internet marketing and used to do things like search optimization and whatnot. Trust me, no matter what user-based system you set up, people will work day and night to subvert it to push their products. Any sort of review or rating system would be corrupted very quickly.

So the system is inherently flawed.

I can't believe there's no way to design a more robust system of review that isn't prone to corruption. Maybe the FDA is that system, but it's an expensive and inefficient way to go. Of course though, any app that interfaces with a pacemaker or diabetic medication or something ought to be vetted by them. A "health and fitness app" less so.

Is this something that would respond to crowd-sourcing? I'm asking because I really don't know.

I've noticed that the reviews for apps have become much less reliable. Apple and Google have even started making it harder to break out the low-rated reviews on apps in their stores now, and there's so much manipulation of the reviews that it's impossible to fully trust them. And Apple and Google are far from blameless in this.

I wouldn't mind seeing some independent site that had sort of "wiki-reviews" of apps and medical apps might be a place to start. Let's see what some people with medical book-learnin' have to say about these things. We all know the wide range of quality of these things. This is one of those areas where anecdotal information would be pretty useful. I don't need to read peer-reviewed journal articles to know whether an app that measures and charts heart rate is useful, I just need to know if it does what it says it's doing. I've used an excellent sleep app for about a year now and I'm convinced that my experience matches what it's telling me, but I would have liked to know a little more in advance.

Having reviews on online stores was a good idea, but it's getting hopelessly corrupted. There's got to be some solution to this besides having the FDA have to chase it all down and delay the release of apps until they pass regulatory muster.

God made humans rational beings.

Telling people who collect stamps they're idiots could be a hobby.

Slashdot needs to knock it off with these "Child genius is going to totally upstage all those stupid companies and make something amazing!" stories they run some time. The thing is, they are essentially never true and we as geeks should know better.

Smart kids often have the problem of thinking they know everything. They have the brains to be well above their peers at pretty much everything, and so have a confidence in their knowledge and intelligence, but lack the experience to understand the limitations of both in the larger world. Hence they'll think that they have found an "obvious" solution to a problem in the world that nobody else has managed to think of. I'm sure most of us felt like that at one time or another as children.

However, it turns out that smart kids become smart adults, and those smart adults get job making the thing we use, solving the problems we have, and so on. So, usually if there's something that hasn't been solved, the reason is that there is NOT a simple solution. There isn't something that a kid will just say "Oh look, here's a better way to do it." Rather it is a complex problem and thus the solutions are complex.

So Slashdot needs to quit with stories on shit like this unless there' something to back it up. A printer actually gets released based on this kids design? Ok that's a story. Some kid says he can do way better than anyone else? That's not a story. That is, to quote the Reapers, "A confidence borne of ignorance." It's not news.

I'm so old, I still think an "engineer" is the guy who drives a train.

Clearly, a whale isn't going to be driving a train, though, so they must be the other type of engineer. But how do they work a slide rule with those flipper things?

Not him, this era.

A year ago, I would have said different, but I'm starting to get optimistic. Even the strange anti-corporate anti-authoritarian turn the Tea Party individuals have taken makes me optimistic.

What doesn't make me optimistic is the counter-revolutionary scum that's growing on the Left. Fortunately, those people are getting found out pretty quickly and exposed. The Obama dead-enders, the neo-feminists theoriticians and people who will tell you that privacy is "so 20th century".

I've got precious little energy left for those who would rather sit and point at "them" whether they be far-Left adbuster types or tea partiers. I had a bit of a revelation this weekend, hanging around a small Western Wisconsin town with a bunch of people who would consider themselves "tea party". They're figuring out that the Kochs and the mainstream AFP folks who've been funding the tea party don't really have their best interests at heart. They sounded a lot like the adbusters I know back home. Very strange times, when they figure out they've got converging interests, as they already have in Moral Monday parts of the South and anti-Keystone XL groups in Nebraska.

Or maybe it was just a nice quiet weekend in the country and I'm in a charitable mood. But you're right, fuck Obama. He's got nothing for me.

You do know they're a British government agency, right?

And the British government is an agency of The City bankers and imperial corporatists.

So what's your point?

When you can give an example of the BBC doing or saying something that runs counter to the interests of the economic elite, let me know.

your purportedly noble savages may not have been so noble

You mean Incas sacrificing their children by cutting their jugulars and allowing them to bleed out as a sacrifice to a volcano is not noble?

Yeah, now that I think about it, probably not. But white Europeans and their ancestors are the inventors of atrocity. Didn't you know that?

And look at all the American colonies in Africa, Asia, South America. The don't exist, except for the ones made by corporations, which are now transnational, and anything but liberal.

Say what you will about America and the Enlightenment. At least there is a learning curve. At least there isn't wholesale regression into stonings and female circumcision (Family Research Council not withstanding). Mistakes throughout, but more people have clean water and flush toilet. Women don't need to have 10 babies because 7 of them will die by age 4. We screw up other countries, sure, but even there you see something that represents a learning curve. And despite my misgivings about him (and Smitty's and JC's) Obama will be part of that ascending curve. Thing about culture and societies, even ideologies - they're trial and error. There's a reason the troglodytes screaming and trying to shame young women outside abortion clinics aren't gaining any traction: Because people mostly, and basically decent, and it's in part the residual of the European Enlightenment that has made them so and keeps them so and keeps them moving in the right direction. Guys like Smitty make the mistake of thinking it's been "Judeo Christian values" and "The Constitution" that have kept us together two and a half centuries, but it's neither. It's a basic desire among Americans to try to find some agreeable way to live together and to know when it's time to bend those hoary old chestnuts to make a decent life possible for more people. It's why most Americans are now willing to overlook Leviticus and support gay marriage. Legal and safe abortion. Birth control. And why despite the loud and well-funded protestations of the dead-enders, the hold outs, they're becoming extinct and we'll mainly be better off for it. It was never about "The Bible" or "The Constitution". It was about our willingness to adhere to some set of guidelines in order to live together and have as many people better off as possible. Until it's time to make a change, which in most cases, we make. In all of US history, there's only one group of people who have lost rights instead of gained them, and that's slave owners. Of course, now we're facing another threat in the form of the corporate fascists (and the police state they have given birth to), but I'm pretty optimistic that it will be dealt with (hopefully before too much more damage is done).

Considering the history of what humans have done to each other in the name of superstition, greed, envy, nationalism, racism, sexism and other sins, I'm not sure you can single out "Liberalism" as some special culprit. It might make you feel clever to do so, but it's basically grad-school drama. JC, you're too good for that. Like Smitty, the one you think is your enemy...is not.

Apologizing for history is a sucker's game. It's how the hustlers dine out. The magnificent Te-Nehisi Coates not withstanding. And while it's not usually my style to agree with Smitty One Each, it kind of is cheap propaganda. To what end? That's the question, yes?

Ha! I knew the denialists would come swarming out of the woodwork on this one.

Consider the stem cell paper that we're talking about here. It was published in January and immediately started going down in flames. Here we are six months later, watching scientists gleefully kick the cold corpse of the authors' reputations. And you're still wondering who keeps the reviewers and editors of a scientific journal honest?

Peer review isn't some kind of certification of a paper's truth. It can't reliably weed out misconduct, experimental error, or statistical bad luck. It's just supposed to reduce the frequency of fiascos like this one by examining the reasoning and methods as described in the paper. It doesn't have to be perfect; in fact it's preferable for it to let the occasional clunker through onto the slaughterhouse floor than to squelch dissenting views or innovation.

That's why climate change denialists still get published today, even the ones who disbelieve climate change because it contravenes their view of the Bible. Peer review allows them to keep tugging at the loose threads of the AGW consensus while preventing them from publishing papers making embarrassingly broad claims for which they don't have evidence that has any chance of convincing someone familiar with the past fifty years of furious scientific debate.

Here's what I think is the confounding factor (there always is one): I'd be wondering, "Does that button REALLY deliver a shock, or is it some kind of sham social psychology experiment prop? I bet it's a prop. If it isn't, it won't deliver THAT bad a shock. If it is, I wonder what the researchers will do when I push it?"

The confounding factor is curiosity. They'd have to do *two* sessions with the overly curious.

Oh, excuse me. I was reading too fast. My reply was predicated on the notion that the "traitors" in the original post referred to terrorists or something. For some reason (maybe the six beers I had shotgunned) I read "traitors" as "terrorists", and thought he was saying that we should dismantle the surveillance state only after we'd caught all the terrorists.

Of course we should behead the people responsible for the NSA overreach, and any unrepentant corporate fascists, after a brief and respectful trial. I'm still not completely comfortable with the "put their heads on pikes as a reminder to any public servant or CEO who would ever consider such surveillance again" but only because it doesn't sound very hygienic.

The problem is that a half-hour after you move into one of these houses, you want to move into another.