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Tony Porter: A call to men

Tony Porter: A call to men

Comment: Wikipedia asks why it has few academic contributions - The clique police dismisseth us Online encyclopedia Wikipedia has finally admitted that it needs real academics editing entries. It has asked academic experts why they are not submitting papers and editing on the site. However they do not appear to have wondered if their own culture is responsible. The outfit has teams of editors whose main qualifications appear to be that they are mates and have power complexes. One editor was caught out faking his doctorate, and another made it his life's work to make Mike Magee and the Everywhere Girl disappear from history. But Wackypedia's editorial antics are also having an effect on the number of academics who are offering to edit the online encyclopaedia. One edit I did on Magee was deleted because another editor could not accept that a person who set up IT magazines could possibly be an expert on Tantra. In the old days of the Inquirer there was a regular story about a woman called the Everywhere Girl.

Non-possession: seeking intense simplicity and the good life Know the biases of your operating system Douglas Rushkoff wrote in Life Inc. that our society is nothing more than an operating system upon which we (as software) live: The landscape on which we are living – the operating system on which we are now running our social software – was invented by people, sold to us as a better way of life, supported by myths, and ultimately allowed to develop into a self-sustaining reality. In turn, operating systems are designed and maintained by engineers who make choices and have biases. We fail to see these things, or rather, we take them for granted because they are our operating system. Science has an operating system as well. In my previous post, I challenged public education. Several people cannot imagine that you can become smart without a formal education which includes at least a high school diploma. Challenging preconceived notions is difficult because your feelings will betray you. Exams and grades appear neutral: on the face of it, they are merit-based challenges.

Fact-Checking the Bill Nye-Marsha Blackburn Climate Change 'Debate' If you are not the sort of person who watches Meet the Press (because you are not an old person), you may have missed Sunday's "debate" between Tennessee Rep. Marsha Blackburn and Mr. William Nye, Science Guy. Allow me to summarize: There is no actual debate over climate change. I pulled out the assertions presented by the participants in the discussion and evaluated them for truth. Here's an example of how this will work. Al Roker: Is it a natural cycle? Rating: False What Roker's doing here is what you might call skepticism-once-removed. It is humanity's fault, at least according to the same scientists that say it is happening, which is nearly every climate scientist with only a few isolated exceptions. That was an error before the discussion even began, compiled when host David Gregory showed a snippet of a climate change denier from the Cato Institute, which was completely wrong. So what did the guests have to say? Blackburn: But that's intentionally misleading. Nye: David Gregory:

Ethnogenesis Passive or active ethnogenesis[edit] Ethnogenesis can occur passively, in the accumulation of markers of group identity forged through interaction with the physical environment, cultural and religious divisions between sections of a society, migrations and other processes, for which ethnic subdivision is an unintended outcome. It can occur actively, as persons deliberately and directly 'engineer' separate identities to attempt to solve a political problem - the preservation or imposition of certain cultural values, power relatioen related to language revival or creation of a new language, in what eventually becomes a "national literature". In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, societies challenged by the obsolescence of those narratives which previously afforded them coherence have fallen back on ethnic or racial narratives as a means of maintaining or reaffirming their collective identity, or polis.[1] Inclusive or exclusive nationalism[edit] Language revival[edit] Religion[edit]

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