Perhaps the greatest mystery is why politicians, editors, and much of the public care so much.
PNSFW, particularly if you read the web through software for text to speech synthesis, and you are not wearing headphones, despite the fact that the 4-ft high walls of your cubicle do nothing to block the noise from disturbing your co-workers.
The Bono episode highlights one of the many paradoxes that surround swearing. When it comes to political speech, we are living in a free-speech utopia. Late-night comedians can say rude things about their nation's leaders that, in previous centuries, would have led to their tongues being cut out or worse. Yet, when it comes to certain words for copulation and excretion, we still allow the might of the government to bear down on what people can say in public.
The head of the Federal Communications Commission has circulated an ambitious plan to relax the decades-old media ownership rules, including repealing a rule that forbids a company to own both a newspaper and a television or radio station in the same city.
It is encouraging that computational social scientists are trying to anticipate threats to trust that are implicit in their work. Any data on human subjects inevitably raise privacy issues, and the real risks of abuse of such data are difficult to quantify. But although the risks posed by researchers seem far lower than those posed by governments, private companies and criminals, their soul-searching is justified. Abuse or sloppiness could do untold damage to the emerging field.
Rules are needed to ensure data can be safely and routinely shared among scientists, thus avoiding a Wild West where researchers compete for key data sets no matter what the terms. The complexities of anonymizing data correctly, and the lack of experience of local ethical committees in such matters, calls for an institutionalized approach to setting standards and protocols for using personal data, as rightly recommended recently by the US National Academy of Sciences. Solid and well thought out rules for research are essential for building trust.
See also a news article (subscription required) on the same subject.
Three-dimensional mapping of starling flocks could shed light not only on the birds' collective behavior but also on a broad range of other aggregate systems.
The group's web site has more information, but the site design is awful. It seems to have been built for 640x480 monitors, or perhaps cell phones.
The purpose of the experiment is to understand what goes on in a baboon’s mind, in this case how carefully the animals keep track of transient relationships.
Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth, a husband-and-wife team of biologists at the University of Pennsylvania, have spent 14 years observing Moremi baboons. Through ingenious playback experiments performed by themselves and colleagues, the researchers say they have worked out many aspects of what baboons use their minds for, along with their limitations.
Reading a baboon’s mind affords an excellent grasp of the dynamics of baboon society. But more than that, it bears on the evolution of the human mind and the nature of human existence. As Darwin jotted down in a notebook of 1838, “He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.”
In a particularly stimulating study, researchers have found that lap dancers earn more when they are in the fertile phase of their menstrual cycle. The finding suggests that women subtly signal when they are most fertile, although just how they do it is not clear.
A few thoughts:
Mad TV, 1997, "The XXX Files" (Broadcast TV, but PNSFW)
Scully: Don't you think 8 hours is enough research? Mulder: Oh, right, research.
Many of us have known this scholar: The hair is well-streaked with gray, the chin has begun to sag, but still our tortured friend slaves away at a masterwork intended to change the course of civilization that everyone else just hopes will finally get a career under way.
For those who attempt it, the doctoral dissertation can loom on the horizon like Everest, gleaming invitingly as a challenge but often turning into a masochistic exercise once the ascent is begun. The average student takes 8.2 years to get a Ph.D. Fifty percent of students drop out along the way, with dissertations the major stumbling block. At commencement, the typical doctoral holder is 33, an age when peers are well along in their professions, and 12 percent of graduates are saddled with more than $50,000 in debt.
A range of theories were offered on the extent of ideological imbalance. Louis Menand, a professor of English at Harvard, said he was surprised and worried by the extent of ideological homogeneity and he focused on how graduate education may encourage and be hurt by this trend.
Menand said that when he was in graduate school in the ’70s, people could hope for a Ph.D. in five years and felt free to propose ideas that challenged conventional wisdom in the humanities. Today, with graduate students facing a decade or more for a humanities doctorate, which Menand called an “obscene” amount of time, graduate students enroll only in programs in which they agree with their professors’ take on the discipline. With that much time involved, and an iffy job market, “who would do this if they didn’t share our views?” Menand asked. And the graduate students who enroll tell professors that the professors’ views are just right, he added, instead of trying out new theories.
“The profession isn’t so much reproducing itself as cloning itself,” Menand said. “If it was easier and cheaper to get in and out, the discipline would have a chance to get oxygenated” by people with new ideas, he added.
Redesdale was the officer; Parker, the enlisted man. If Redesdale did not kill the squirrel, he would never be able to lead. And had his family not led for 1,000 years? So we drove to an isolated parking lot, and Parker took the cage out of the trunk. He put the trap — “it’s me killing trap,” he said — on the asphalt. This was the place this animal was going to die.
The squirrel, large and dark gray with just a hint of red to his fur, wheeled around the cage looking for a way out. Then it made a piteous noise, a whee-whee-whee sound. Parker handed the air rifle to Redesdale, and he pointed it.
“That’s the, uh, trigger?” Redesdale said.
“That’s right,” Parker said.
The squirrel paused. Redesdale steadied the barrel over its head. Then came the shot.
“You’ve got it,” Parker said softly.
But he hadn’t.
“Is it dead?” I asked stupidly.
The squirrel raced around the cage, blood dripping from somewhere around its mouth. WHEE-WHEE-WHEE. The same noise.
“I know it’s bad when they run,” Redesdale apologized. I thought I saw the warm-vomit look in his eyes.
The squirrel kept running and finally stopped when it realized there was still nowhere to go. Redesdale once more placed the rifle over its head. POP! The squirrel fell on its side and shook, scrabbled and shimmied twice around the cage like a break dancer.
“They’re dead when they do that, aren’t they?” Redesdale said, sounding more Macbeth than Prince Hal. Parker assured him it was dead: these were just the death throes.
About 2,500 squirrel enthusiasts belong to the online group The Squirrel Lover's Club. This week you can do what they do year-round: honor squirrels. The first week in October is Squirrel Awareness Week, so maybe you can keep track of the number and the kinds of squirrels you see in your yard or while walking to school. Here's something else to be aware of regarding the furry creatures: There are 35 types of squirrels in North America. The most popular in this area is the Eastern Gray Squirrel.
Back to Redesdale:
“Can I, um, suggest something?” Redesdale said to the three women. ... “I was thinking ... it would be great to form a sort of mobile kill group.”
He added, “We’d get a lot of publicity.”
“And the fun of killing them as well,” Parker said. Parker and Redesdale laughed again, Falstaff and Prince Hal. This time the women smiled too, a bit nervously.
