Interesting Links for 11-02-2012

[andrewducker]

• A Strange Form of Social Collapse (i.e. one where life is getting steadily better)
  (tags: society usa crime pregnancy )
• About my 'spilled semen' amendment to Oklahoma's Personhood bill
  (tags: politics women usa viaZornhau )
• What does new glacier data mean for the climate debate?
  (tags: globalwarming glaciers )
• IT guy answers daughter's Facebook rant by shooting her laptop
  (tags: facebook parenting funny )
• Economics explained: Plan A vs Plan B
  (tags: economics uk )
• Scotland may have answers to English maths problem
  (tags: scotland england education mathematics )
• Iran Shut Down Gmail , Google , Yahoo and sites using “Https” Protocol
  (tags: iran internet censorship )
• The Swedish model is the opposite of the big society
  (tags: sweden society politics )
• There is no single root cause of your problems (or successes)
  (tags: complexity problems systems troubleshooting )
• The internet is drowning in inaccurate anti-ACTA arguments
  (tags: copyright law )
• British children are culture starved
  (tags: uk culture art )
• Controlling parents more likely to have delinquent children
  (tags: development behaviour children parenting )

Comments

[dalglir]

Lol'd at angry it guy vs daughter's laptop.

Glacier data reflects what we knew all along: both sides of the debate are cherry picking their data.

[andrewducker]

I'm not seeing cherry-picking there - just science being carried out. They previously looked at the lower glaciers and found that they were decreasing. Now they're able to look at the upper ones (using satellites, because getting people up there is insanely difficult and dangerous) and they've found that they aren't decreasing. Which indicates that water lost from the lower glaciers is adding to the upper ones (in the same way as Greenland was gaining weight in its glaciers for a while, because melting water elsewhere was freezing on to them). It doesn't mean the first lot of people were trying to conceal anything - they reported what they found, this lot reported what they found, and we now know more than we did before.

Now, the political/campaigning people _definitely_ cherry-pick data to support their own side. But the scientists need to do it less, because they're just discovering data and making models. And 98% of them believe in human-caused global warming: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change

[azurelunatic]

I'm disappointed that you categorized the shooting daughter's laptop as funny. When my father violently destroyed my possessions, it was traumatic and I feared for my life if he lost further control of his temper.

[andrewducker]

It's funny in the same way that Rick Perry is funny from a safe distance of the other side of the planet, or the comic I posted earlier from Our Valued Customers is funny.

Which is to say that it's not funny for the people involved, at all.

[andrewducker]

There may, of course, be a link between the fourth and last items there.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

Though I am pretty sure that the child in question is not delinquent and the father only moderately controlling. I don't suppose there's a parent in history who hasn't considered destroying, permanently confiscating, or giving away, the toy that a child has persisted in using in a way that they've been repeatedly told not too.

Sometime in his 6m YouTube hits, social services popped round to make sure that the kids were ok; which they are of course.

Oh, yes, and the best comment I've seen so far: "he should be ashamed of himself. That's appalling grouping for shots at that range".

[andrewducker]

There's a big difference between considering destroying a child's toy, and putting several rounds into it and then posting a video of it online.

And I don't think the child is delinquent either. If there are teenagers that have never said bad things about their parents when upset then there' probably something wrong with them.

[skreidle.livejournal.com]

Response from the family here: http://www.litefm.com/pages/news-story.html?feed=421220&article=9744152

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

When upset by his teenager, he took back a gift he had given her, pulled a weapon, and destroyed it. While filming himself. And bragging about it on the internet. And then demanding that she pay him for the privilege.

That's "manipulative psycho", not "competent parent". And the reason they didn't take his kids away from him despite him being a manipulative psycho and not a competent parent is that parental INCOMPETENCE is not grounds for removal. Yes, he's fucked up and he's abusing her and he's undoubtedly abusing his other kids in the same way - but he's not abusing any of them to the degree that the foster system would. And since he's not as fucked up as the foster system, he gets to keep his kids, since it may be terrible for them to grow up near him but the only available alternative is worse.

[naath.livejournal.com]

If I gave you a laptop and then when you used it in a way I don't like I took it away or destroyed it that would be illegal. When I gave it to you as a gift it became your property not mine. I see no reason why gifts given to children should be treated any differently.

She ranted about chores. Chores suck. Ranting about sucky things is not just "not delinquent" it's not even SURPRISING or STRANGE or even CHILDISH - it's something a lot of quite sensible adults do. Most people who rant about how annoying their chores are go on to do the damn chores anyway; because that's the sensible thing to do (and we want clean pants). Theft and destruction of property are NOT REASONABLE RESPONSES to ranting about sucky things to your friends on the internet (in some cyber crime cases the removal and destruction of related computing hardware is officially sanctioned or required; but of course that is to be implemented by the appropriate authority). Oh, and she swore. Well whoo-de-day. Swearing. OMG! Call the police! Someone swore.

Also he is a mahoooosive hypocrite "criticising ME online is totally OUT OF ORDER; but criticising YOU online is obviously JUST FINE". Jerk.

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

You could sort of put up a link that says "The Internet is drowning in (insert any word here) arguments."

[andrewducker]

Yeah, but I don't care that much if there are crazy people out there espousing the idea that the earth was made in 4004BC. ACTA misinformation is getting traction, and I want people to argue against copyright idiocy on facts, not on misunderstandings. Otherwise when the next one comes around nobody will listen to them.

[matgb]

On top of what Andrew says, from a policy making point of view, I know exactly what the politicos I work with do when they find out the lobbying they've received on an issue turns out to be hysterical scaremongering.

The best way to persaude a politician to support something is to couch your arguments against in hyperbole, half truth and nonsense. Because if the best you can do is untrue, then you don't have a real case. It's how they react.

There are damn good reasons to be worried about that treaty, but the hyperbolic nonsense drowns out the legit critique and makes the anti lobby a lot easier to dismiss.

[doubtingmichael.livejournal.com]

I nodded at the "There is no single root cause of your problems" link. We have to deal with a lot of bugs, and we try to work out why they happen. In my view, the second biggest cause is someone made a mistake somewhere. It is much more common that two or more people, working on completely different pieces of functionality, had slightly different expectations which were incompatible.

We don't have bugs in our files. We have bugs where different files touch.

(Please: nobody post about the importance of test harnesses etc. We know. There are reasons they aren't a universal fix for us.)

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

The article on root cause analysis reminds me of a section of Gleick’s book on Chaos where he discusses AT&T’s attempts and failure to find the single cause, the guy with the screwdriver in the wrong place, which was making their system less than perfect.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

The article on the Swedish model has I think helped me name a large part of my discomfort with the idea of the Big Society.

It shifts the power to decide who gets what assistance from the community from a disinterested civil service controlled by democratically elected politicians to self appointed and self regulated private actors. These private actors are not necessarily neutral.

When I was about 13 my family and I spent some time living in a small rural town in Austalia. We were, for a short time, significantly unrich.

One of the local priests would drop round with food parcels on the condition that he was allowed to hit us children when we swore. So food in exchange for a certain narrow view of morality and the acceptance of someone else’s right to control you through violence.