I recall watching a video for some class in college, or even at the end of high school, about the country of Bhutan which choose to increase their Gross National Happiness (GNH) instead of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Now, since they let television and other technology into their lives in 1999, they have been adopting more and more.
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Archive for July, 2006
According to The Register, the US government is asking for comments on how the Internet should be run, and anyone is allowed to comment. I definitely need to take a look into this sometime in the next couple days.
Includes such classic lines as:
I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?
…And
again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck.
[?external:http://media.publicknowledge.org/stevens-on-nn.mp3 stevens-on-nn.mp3]
I listened to this today with one of the employees at work. I really couldn’t tell if this person was for or against the Internet, trucks, or tubes. I lost track, probably because this person was not a good speaker. Thank you Senator Stevens, I know now that if I am going to talk to a group of people, I need to make my speech very cryptic and metaphoric if I have no idea what I am talking about, as they might otherwise catch on to my lack of knowledge.
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7/6/2006: I updated the title to reflect what his stance really was.
To quote Sam Vaknin:
It is a question of time before the Wikipedia self-destructs and implodes. It poses such low barriers to entry (anyone can edit any number of its articles) that it is already attracting masses of teenagers as “contributors” and “editors”, not to mention the less savory flotsam and jetsam of cyber-life.
Apparently Sam has an ax to grind. He apparently expects Wikipedia to become a black hole from which nothing, not even light, can escape, and with it, huge portions of the web will be torn asunder, floating around in the accretion disc that forms, before plummeting towards the singularity. He sites the following “Six Sins of the Wikipedia”:
- The Wikipedia is opaque and encourages recklessness.
- The Wikipedia is anarchic, not democratic.
- The Might is Right Editorial Principle.
- Wikipedia is against real knowledge.
- Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia.
- The Wikipedia is rife with libel and violations of copyrights.
However, a counter story was created by someone over at Wikipedia. However, at the bottom of the article, in an e-mail from Sam, it was mentioned that there were class action lawsuits being prepared against Wikipedia. However, my attempt to find any information about this, including that the site that supposedly had the information (http://www.wikipediaclassaction.org) redirected to something completely worthless, was in vain. Chances are, this is nothing worth while, and probably won’t happen.
Some comments in Digg included Firemeboy saying:
Why are we listening to a guy who has a home page that looks like this.
http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/
and Matt’s comment of:
This Vaknin fellow was accredited by a commercial Brainbench Institution. One of those places where you buy your degree. As for Wikipedia, I believe it to be a good source of information and a fantastic example of collaborative work towards a positive goal. One must always be careful to check sources and facts. Sounds to me like Vaknin had a dispute with some moderator over a particular article and decided to throw a hissy fit.
These quotes seemed to be the general consensus on Digg.
I agree, you need to be careful of what you use Wikipedia for, and then you check your references. There is also a discussion hiding in the Digg comments as to whether or not Wikipedia, or even encyclopedias in general, should be cited as references in college or university classes. I would think this depends on the subject matter in question, as well as the difficulty level of the class. For an intro class, it would be helpful to use Wikipedia to cite basic information in case you couldn’t quite comprehend the way the text book presented it. Even better, use Wikipedia as a way of enhancing what you learn from class and the text book. I would imagine that if I read the article about something on Wikipedia while working on a term paper, I had better just list it down, just to be safe. I think part of the reason I believe that to be something to do is because I seldom wrote papers for my classes, as they were not part of the course. Whatever.
So, this morning, Meghan and I saw a commerical on VH1 showing such famous people as Ringo Starr and Mick Jagger saying that they recalling listening to a band called Platinum Weird back in the day. They had an album released in 1973.
That would be interesting to know if Platinum Weid wasn’t started sometime in 2004 or 2005.
It’s not like the information is that hidden on the web concerning their origin, but consider that the main site, [?external:http://platinumweird.com.uk platinumweird.com.uk], has the following:
In 1974, Dave Stewart formed a band called Platinum Weird in North London with his female songwriting partner, muse and soul mate, Erin Grace. The pair originally met a few months earlier and formed a creative and spiritual bond. Their debut gig was at Mick Jagger’s birthday party where they quickly enjoyed a cult-like status performing at intimate gigs in London’s rock club circuit. Elton John’s Rocket label signed the band, putting down an advance to send them into studio and lay down tracks.
There’s more, of course, but that’s the first paragraph.
However, consider the [?external:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platinum_Weird wikipedia article about Platinum Weird]:
DioGuardi discussed her role in the project during a 2005 interview. She and Stewart had initially been asked to write songs for The Pussycat Dolls in 2004, but instead the pair ended up with material that DioGuardi described as resembling Fleetwood Mac. Although the collaboration did not produce the intended Pussycat Dolls songs, Interscope chairman Jimmy Iovine encouraged the continuation of the project, and longtime DioGuardi partner John Shanks was brought in for album production duties. Stewart confirmed the collaboration in a separate interview. In March 2005, it was reported that they would release an album entitled Avalanche that year. MP3 versions of the tracks “Avalanche” and “Happiness” were made available via MySpace.
There is more information there, of course, but that’s the origin listed. The alternate origin lists something more or less like that from the PW website.
The thing is, careful planning could easily allow for a band no one has heard of to truly have this happen. They [Interscope Records] weren’t trying to cover their track, and needed the rich and famous people to back them up. They also don’t completely say that it is true or fake. I’m curious how this will all play out. It’s kind of like Spinal Tap or MTV’s 2ge+her and similar things. If you think of the ways things could have been done, you’d expect someone from Miniluv to delete this post in about 19 seconds.
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