| |
|
10. oktober 2007
|
|
When the feds screw up, ordinary people step in:
Ordinary Americans are tracking down U.S. Web sites used by al Qaeda and jihadi sympathizers and then using the Internet to persuade the service providers to snuff out the sites.
"I do this because it has to be done," says one blogger who calls himself a "counter-cyberjihadist" for his campaigns to post on the Web the Internet service providers (ISPs) that host the pro-jihad sites.
A perfect storm of complaints forced several ISPs to shut down Web sites just days before al Qaeda released a tape of Osama bin Laden in August, says Aaron Weisburd, director of the Society for Internet Research and host of the Web site Haganah.us. He released a list of 19 pro-jihad Web sites, some of which were shut down in August.
The tactic was so effective that al Qaeda later said it was forced to disseminate the video directly to the networks, Mr. Weisburd said.
Even an extreme right to free speech doesn't give you a right to use anybody else's pulpit.
5:58:15 PM 
|
|
The NYT's John Tierney has a very interesting book review of Gary Taubes “Good Calories, Bad Calories” and how a cascade of bad science created a scientific consensus that fat was the main cause of obestity and heart diseases, despite there being no solid evidence that this was the case. With sufficient big science names behind it and mainstream media jumping on the bandwagon, the story had its own momentum, and only very slowly gave in to facts, namely the actual studies that pretty consistently failed to provide any evidence for the bad fat hypothesis.
The Department of Agriculture’s advice against eating too much fat was issued in 1980 and would later be incorporated in its “food pyramid.”
Meanwhile, there still wasn’t good evidence to warrant recommending a low-fat diet for all Americans, as the National Academy of Sciences noted in a report shortly after the U.S.D.A. guidelines were issued. But the report’s authors were promptly excoriated on Capitol Hill and in the news media for denying a danger that had already been proclaimed by the American Heart Association, the McGovern committee and the U.S.D.A.
The scientists, despite their impressive credentials, were accused of bias because some of them had done research financed by the food industry. And so the informational cascade morphed into what the economist Timur Kuran calls a reputational cascade, in which it becomes a career risk for dissidents to question the popular wisdom.
With skeptical scientists ostracized, the public debate and research agenda became dominated by the fat-is-bad school. Later the National Institutes of Health would hold a “consensus conference” that concluded there was “no doubt” that low-fat diets “will afford significant protection against coronary heart disease” for every American over the age of 2. The American Cancer Society and the surgeon general recommended a low-fat diet to prevent cancer.
But when the theories were tested in clinical trials, the evidence kept turning up negative. As Mr. Taubes notes, the most rigorous meta-analysis of the clinical trials of low-fat diets, published in 2001 by the Cochrane Collaboration, concluded that they had no significant effect on mortality.
Mr. Taubes argues that the low-fat recommendations, besides being unjustified, may well have harmed Americans by encouraging them to switch to carbohydrates, which he believes cause obesity and disease. He acknowledges that that hypothesis is unproved, and that the low-carb diet fad could turn out to be another mistaken cascade. The problem, he says, is that the low-carb hypothesis hasn’t been seriously studied because it couldn’t be reconciled with the low-fat dogma.
Well, there's one candidate for the next understudied diet fad that will do more harm than good.
And I can't help thinking that there is another social cascade going on in another discipline of science right now... Stay tuned for a book to explain how it all went wrong, coming out sometime around 2040 (when the world still hasn't gone to hell).
7:29:59 AM
|
|
You already enjoy the benefit of the scientific work behind the 2007 Nobel Prize in physics every time you "save".
The effect is called giant magnetoresistance, but it enables amazing things at the miniature level. Two European scientists won the 2007 Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for their discoveries of the phenomenon, which spurred some of computing's most astonishing developments, from video-playing handheld devices to PCs whose storage capacity now seems all but limitless.
France's Albert Fert and Germany's Peter Gruenberg independently described giant magnetoresistance in 1988, then saw the electronics industry apply it in disks with incredible amounts of storage.
"I can hardly think of an application that has a bigger bang than the magnetic hard drive industry," said Phil Schewe, a physicist and spokesman for the American Institute of Physics. "Every one of us probably owns three or four or five devices, probably more, that depend on billions of bits of information stored on something the size of a dime."
Congrats.
7:15:38 AM
|
|
|
© Copyright 2007 Jan Haugland.
Last update: 02.11.2007; 20:17:40.
|
|
|
