The terror bombing threats over the weekend in London and Glasgow remind us how tenuous our lives are in the new mixed world of internationalism and religious fanaticism.
Are we, as some news media sites claim, in for a Summer of Terror?
The Christian Science Monitor recently reported the timely and appropriate death of elitist hardcopy scholarly journals — a welcome and deserved demise and here’s why:
For years, traditional “peer review” has come under fire. A jury of three experts, the peer reviewers, assess each article and recommend only those that they feel represent the most significant new work.
At many elite scientific journals, fewer than 10 percent of the articles submitted are accepted. Many of the rejected articles eventually travel down the “food chain” to be published in a plethora of less prestigious (and less noticed) specialty journals.
A year ago, the respected US journal Science was forced to retract two papers it had published about stem cells. The articles had been submitted by a South Korean team led by Hwang Woo-Suk.
Peer reviewers, as well as the editors, had failed to detect the fraud. In general, peer reviewers, themselves researchers pressed for time, don’t try to re-create experiments and rarely ask to see the raw data that supports a paper’s conclusions.
While peer review is expected to separate the wheat from the chaff, it’s “slow, expensive, profligate of academic time, highly subjective, prone to bias, easily abused, poor at detecting gross defects, and almost useless for detecting fraud,” summed up one critic in BMJ, the British medical journal, in 1997.
Continue reading → Scholarly Journals Die a Proper Electronic Death
We all wear masks. Once you’ve lived long enough, you begin to recognize and read people via the mask of their face before any words are spoken. There are few original masks in the world and once you’ve reacted and interacted with one face you quickly begin to learn all masks of that sort behave and express in the same way. What happens when the faces of the dead are resurrected into masks of the living?
Former president Gerald Ford died last night at 93 and, based on the non-stop media coverage, you are led to believe he was the most important president in the history of the United States.
Continue reading → Private Life, Public Death: The Perils of Inappropriate Veneration
In the Jewish religion the day of death is referred to as being more important than the day of birth. What has a person accomplished on the day of their birth other than being born? On the day a person dies we can look back and remember all of the things they have done in their life and commemorate it. The person’s death is then remembered every year on the date of their death which is referred to as the yartzeit. A candle is lit and an effort is made to remember the person through prayer and learning.
Continue reading → Watching O.J. Simpson Unearth the Dead for Entertainment
The other day Janna and I were walking around Journal Square. I was looking one way and Janna another when she saw what I missed: A young woman stepping into the street in the middle of traffic.
State-sponsored execution is not a sign of an enlightened and advanced society and to be fooled by the distorted view of terrorism — where one dead eye requires the death of another eye — is to purchase the argument that terrorism successfully strikes fear in the heats of reasonable people.
Continue reading → Moussaoui Survives the Death Chamber Not His Death
Worth a thousand words:
I have permission to tell this story.
I am sharing this with you because it was a human moment that shocked the core of me with quiet tremors.
In Dan Gookin’s Wambooli email update yesterday he let loose a warning about the danger of Huffing with Dust-Off and how inhaling Dust-Off to get a high can lead to death.
Dust-Off is a compressed air product that used to be mainly used to blow away grit and dust from film negatives. Today you use mainly Dust-Off to blow away grit and dust from computers. The Dust-Off danger is real and not new.
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