Solution to IT Woes at Evergreen
Finally, institution has been created to accomodate those who are still unconvinced and/or unable to become computer savvy.
See this important breakthrough here.
« September 2005 | Main | December 2005 »
Finally, institution has been created to accomodate those who are still unconvinced and/or unable to become computer savvy.
See this important breakthrough here.
Conservative jurist Robert Bork has written one of the most scorching editorials in the 200-plus years of the republic. He leaves President George W. Bush in ashes.
Here's the link, from the Wall Street Journal opinion page.
Vice President Dick Cheney is widely thought to be in real legal trouble due to the involvement of his office in dirty political tricks inside the beltway.
The legal precedent that would make him vulnerable to indictment while in office is the one that let the Paula Jones case go forward against then sitting President Bill Clinton.
Here's the roundup of facts by Bloomberg's.
Yahoo has recently turned over the identity of a dissident Chinese blogger to the Chinese government. It has also started a blog room for what it hopes will be sensational posts detailing battles in the world's war zones.
Here's an editorial from the LA Times.
Mr. Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court has divided the conservative intelligentsia, but the "stealth" quality of the pick is reliably fanning the fires under potboiler issues for his christian populist voting base. Here's an overview of the move ...
... from the right and one from the middle.
The choice of Miers continues the rovian Republican strategy of driving an emotional and easily stampeded populist electorate into the party fold by exacerbating their most salacious fears.
The predictable rhetoric and imagery from the christian right of aborted fetuses, same-sex sex, and abstinent teen lust serve as a kind of soft-core porn for the populist right.
It inflames the rank and file and distracts them from larger issues of the economic decline of the middle class and the many disastrous realities of post-colonial foreign affairs.
The conservative intelligentsia has cynically exploited a cross-class coalition with christian populism behind the Bush political machine.
Taking up the national civic life with the small and tawdry matters of personal morality has enabled the GOP to avert substantive debate and the necessity of bipartisan consensus in Congress on the grave issues of domestic economic policy, geopolitical energy strategy, and other foreign affairs.
The conservative elite helped make Bush a king on the strength of distracting social issues, and now he, apparently having come to believe his own stage persona, is biting the hand that has fed him.
This week and next, we are reading about online communities.
The archetypal community site, Friendsters, has recently instituted changes that make lurking anonymously inside its community impossible.
Here's an article from Wired.
Some members of the UN are pressing the United States to relinquish institutional control of the internet to the international body.
Some foreign governments believe that, although the internet was developed in the U.S., it has become a global resource that American interests no longer have a right to control.
Other nations want more power to control online activities that reach across their borders from the outside, and still others want power to better control the political speech and commerce of individuals fully within their borders.
Here's a conservative editorial that raises practical questions.
cNet News reports today that 70,000 new blogs are being created everyday right now, and the total number of blogs is doubling every five months.
That makes us very cool.
Here's the article.
Our seminar readings this week included "Philosophy of Information" by Luciano Floridi. It was an interesting introduction to our questions about the influence information technology and computer literacy are having on human ways of knowing...
Luciano Floridi, “ Open Problems in the Philosophy of Information ," Metaphilosophy 35:4 (July 2004), 554-582.
This article was a dense, philosophical treatise on the ontology and he epistemology of knowledge. In plainer English, Floridi laid out a bunch of new questions the great digital turn is raising for philosophers.
Floridi's vocabulary list alone made some important distinctions for us:
Data, information, knowledge, truth, meaning.
Cognition, intelligence, consciousness, creativity, mind.
Know, prove, inform, signify, describe, explain.
We also got some important definitions from Floridi:
Data is a set of elements with uninterpreted differences.
Information is well-formed patterns of data.
Knowledge is meaningful, truthful and well-explained information.
Information management processes include:
Data seeking, acquiring and mining.
Information harvesting, gathering, storage, retrieval, editing, formatting, aggregation, extrapolation, distribution, verification, quality control and evaluation.
The relation between data, information and knowledge is complex.
Data and information can be read at multiple levels of abstraction.
Information at one level of abstraction can serve as data for the next one up.
Knowing is apprehending multiple levels of abstraction about a data set and being able to explain the relation of data to information.
An example used by Floridi to explain the compound relation between data, information and knowledge:
Egyptian hieroglyphics were pure data to western eyes prior to the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. They were uninterpreted patterns of difference.
With the Rosetta Stone, they became interpretable by western scholars and thus became information.
When scholars developed the ability to explain the information contained in hieroglyphic writings, they began to develop knowledge.
Questions this example and the article raised for us:
Does information exist as a quality intrinsic to data patterning or is it framed only through cognition? Did the hieroglyphics contain information about the Egyptians whether westerners could read it or not? If no one could ever read it again?
Is the scientific characterization of DNA as information an empirical description or a metaphor? Is information material, ideal, or some third thing?
Are meaning and truth moral elements of data and information? Is knowledge? Can data and information have moral content? Can knowledge?
In a surprise move, George W. Bush chose his own longtime lawyer to be the next nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court. Harriet Miers has unusual credentials and professional experience for the job, including not having worked as a judge in the past ....
Ms. Miers has her law degree from Southern Methodist University, not the type of Ivy League school usually represented on the court. Her job experience includes heading the Texas State Bar Association and the Texas State Lottery Commission.
Roughly ten years ago, she began working for Mr. Bush as his personal lawyer. In 2000, she joined his White House staff and currently serves as Chief White House Counsel.
Her nomination is not being well-received by conservatives.
Here's a story on Miers from the Washington Post.
Here's a typical editorial from the political right.
Tom Delay is the House Majority Leader for the Republicans. As the leader, he enforces party discipline, which means he uses threats, money, cajoling, deal-making, flattery, and intimidation to get members of his party to vote his way.
He is a former insect exterminator from Texas. His nickname, based on his ruthless and unprecedented effectiveness as leader, is "The Hammer." He has been a key feature of the Bush administration's domination of Congress in the past 4.5 years.
In this indictment, Delay is accused of using the checkbook of a national Republican group to launder Texas political contributions in deliberate circumvention of Texas campaign finance laws. The technical charge, brought by the state of Texas, is criminal conspiracy to do so.
This story is bigger than just another money scandal because Delay used the cash to rearrange US congressional districting in Texas to Republican benefit.
Here's a thorough summary of the story in the Washington Post.
ps ... the GOP nickname for the Republicans stands for Grand Old Party.
In an unsettling and scary move, OJ Simpson is signing autographs this weekend at a horror convention. He's doing this on the tenth anniversary of his wife's death. That makes him more scary than the people lining up for the occasion to buy his autographs, but not by much.
Here's the story in the Houston Chronicle.