joneilortiz

"I go to a private school that is rather strict. Recently, the principal and school teacher council released a (very long) list of books we're not allowed to read. I was absolutely appalled, because a large number of the books were classics and others that are my favorites. One of my personal favorites, The Catcher in the Rye, was on the list, so I decided to bring it to school to see if I would really get in trouble. Well... I did but not too much. Then (surprise!) a boy in my English class asked if he could borrow the book, because he heard it was very good AND it was banned! This happened a lot and my locker got to overflowing with the banned books, so I decided to put the unoccupied locker next to me to a good use. I now have 62 books in that locker, about half of what was on the list. I took care only to bring the books with literary quality. Some of these books are:" - joneilortiz from Bookmarklet

It is pretty crappy the school wants to train students to think like them, but a couple of things jumped out. She censored the list again for "literary quality" and don't they have a public library in this community? - Dave - SustainedEuphoria

Couldn't have said it better myself. - joneilortiz from Bookmarklet

Where can this shirt be purchased? I need one for work. - vosey

"Sharon Buchanan was a 31-year-old cashier at the Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio, the day the bar code made its debut. One or two other clerks were working that day, but she was chosen to work the checkout, she said Thursday in an interview. “I was a little bit nervous at the time,” she said. “I mean what if this doesn’t work? Everybody was there taking pictures, the photographers, the local press, people from around town. But it worked just fine. It was quite my 15 minutes of fame, I suppose.” For all the excitement that day, the adoption of the bar code was gradual. For years, businesses were hamstrung by shoppers who refused to buy bar-coded products, worrying that they might be cheated at the checkout counter without price labels." - joneilortiz from Bookmarklet

June 11-12, MIT - Provisional Schedule - joneilortiz

"Manchester Evening News published a right-objectionable story that’s probably going to get some blood boiling. This week, after recent sentencing for 5 and a half years, Barratt used a mobile phone to update his Facebook profile from his cell. He changed his staus, chatted with friends and posted two photos. After the Manchester Evening News told the Ministry of Justice about Barratt’s activity the page disappeared from Facebook. The phone was later confiscated." - joneilortiz from Bookmarklet

Quite interesting. In the first image, it looks like those two guys are showing some sort of call signs. - Carl Cabading

Strange this doesn't come up more often. I thought like everyone in prison had a cell phone. - joneilortiz

The appeal of evolutionary psychology is easy to grasp. Just think of Annie Hall. The last few decades have left us so profoundly disoriented about the most urgent personal matters--gender roles, sexual norms, the possibility of creating lasting romantic relationships, not to mention absolutely everything to do with family structure--that it's no surprise to find people embracing a theory that promises to restore order. Once we had religion to tell us who we are. Then, for a while, we had Freud. Now we have evolutionary psychology, which, as an attempt to construct a science of human nature on Darwinian principles, marshals two of the most powerful ideas in contemporary culture: science, our most authoritative way of knowing, and nature, our highest ground of moral appeal. No wonder the field is catnip to journalists and armchair theorists alike. - joneilortiz

The historical use of science in the search for truth has posed consistent evidentiary problems of definition, causation, validity, accuracy, inferential conclusions unsupported by data, and complications of real-world applications. As the Innocence Project exoneration data show and the National Academy of Science Report on Forensic Science suggest, our reach in this area may well exceed our grasp. This article argues that the neuroimaging of deception - focusing primarily on the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies done to date - may well include all of these problems. This symposium article reviews briefly the types of neuroimaging used to detect deception, describes some of the specific criticisms leveled at the science, and explains why these small group of studies are not yet courtroom-ready. Arguing that the studies meet neither the general acceptance nor reliability standards of evidence, the article urges courts to act with restraint ... - joneilortiz

"There is something deeply disgusting in the publication of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s love letters. There is something loathsome in the mockery of these love letters. Yes, Sanford is guilty of negligence and dereliction of duty with respect to his responsibilities as Governor. Yes, it is very likely that Sanford stole from the citizens to South Carolina to fund his trips to Argentina. Yes, Sanford is a cynical hypocrite who used the mantra of “family values” to manipulate stupid conservative values based voters to support him and who participated in legislation designed to oppress women and LBGT folk in the name of “family values” (the show True Blood has the proper take on what these conservative religious groups are really about). Despite all this, there’s absolutely no reason to publish these letters and the mockery of these letters is even worse. Last night I watched with thorough disgust as the gasbag Keith Olbermann adopted a mocking voice and read the letters to... more... - joneilortiz from Bookmarklet

Download entire book (pdf). - joneilortiz

Furthermore, and too few young scholars realize this, every press plays a crucial role in the tenuring process. A humanities professor teaching in most universities and many colleges typically needs to publish at least one through-written book to support a case for tenure. There is thus a vast demand that some entity publish said books. The problem is that an academic can deftly write a book that virtually no one wants to read, let alone buy. So university presses are, in effect, subsidizing the tenure process. - joneilortiz

Over the years we have seen many geovisualization technologies emerge, each with their own ups and downs (pun, sadly, intended). All of the approaches, however, can be broken down to two styles: 1) flythrough visualizations, where the creator has setup a prescribed flight path that the viewer can not escape (often distributed as a video), and 2) interactive visualizations, where the viewer has control of how and where they approach the visualzation they have been given. - joneilortiz

"I've been on the trail of this historical nugget for a few years now. Until recently, the earliest known appearance of Ms. was nearly half a century later, from 1949. In The Story of Language, Mario Pei wrote: "Feminists, who object to the distinction between Mrs. and Miss and its concomitant revelatory features, have often proposed that the two present-day titles be merged into a single one, 'Miss' (to be written 'Ms.')." Pei states that Ms. had been "often proposed," but where were the proposals? The closest precursor that had been found was a 1932 letter to the New York Times where the title M's is suggested, not quite the same as Ms" - joneilortiz from Bookmarklet