Here is a professor of international law, explaining the terms that regularly crop up with respect to Omar Khadr.
This is important, because legal terms are narrow in their scope and if we don’t understand them correctly, we cannot have a meaningful discussion on any topic these terms refer to.
Once, years ago, I saw an interview with an anti-poverty activist. She said it was a disgrace that people were living in poverty and that the government must stop it right away.
When asked how she defined ‘living in poverty’, she quickly replied it was the people in the lowest 15% income bracket.
She honestly did not see the problem…
What are the 10 most frightening words in the English language?
“We are from the government – we are here to help!”
This is a perfect illustration of how the unbalanced copyright laws are abusive.
The political ad of Obama singing the song ‘Let’s Stay Together’ while showing images of him with rich lobbyists is as textbook ‘fair use’ as there is. Yet, the song rightsholder, BMG, had it yanked off the interwebitudes:
‘A YouTube video produced by the Romney for President campaign got hit by a takedown request on Monday, highlighting the challenges that the Digital Millenium Copyright Act can pose for free speech.
…
Yet the “notice and takedown” process established by the DMCA and apparently utilized by BMG in this case doesn’t give the Romney campaign much recourse. It can file a counter notice stating that it believes its clip to be fair use, but YouTube is required to wait a minimum of 10 days before putting the video back up. In a campaign where the news cycle is measured in hours, 10 days is an eternity.’
Because sometimes, delaying a message is just as good as stopping it…
Another dimension of the problem is that individuals unfairly censored under the current policies are penalized for the other side’s failure – without any accessible or effective recourse or remedy readily available. They are, in a very real sense, guilty until proven innocent – at their own cost and by their own effort.
This is so contrary to our common law tradition I don’t know where to begin!
And it’s only going to get worse – unless we shift our enforcement focus from ‘fair dealing’ to ‘fair ‘use’ (as, hopefully, seems to be happening up here, in Canada).
A duly elected member of the new Egyptian government appeals the President’s decision to the courts for a fair ruling: for this, he is attacked by a mob of Islamist Muslim Brotherhood thugs who tear his clothes and, had the police not intervened, would have torn him to pieces.
This does not bode well for the future lives of regular Egyptians…
Charles Sousa, MPP, Mississauga-South. Remember that name…
Do you know how serious long-term energy policy is formulated in Ontario by the McGuinty regime?
By the re-election campaign workers!
And while the newspapers are reporting the cost to be $180 million, Rob Snow of CFRA has just said on air that a confidential source of his has admitted that the true cost is $480M…
Of course, the Oakville situation – which was very similar – is even more expensive.
Cancelling power plants when they are almost completely built, in order to give a local Liberal MPP a few points in the polls – and devil-take the rest of Ontario!
One of my most frustrating pet peeves is when scientists don’t understand what it is they are measuring.
And, let me assure you, this is a much bigger problem than anyone is willing to admit.
My background – going way, way back, before my ventures into the business world or even into parenthood, I studied Science. And, while I never sought a doctorate or any such thing (I had done my due diligence on child-bearing statistics in preparation for parenthood and realized that if I wanted to optimize for my children’s intelligence, I had to conceive my first child at no older an age than 25 – and my last one at no older an age than 30: and since my then fiance – now husband – agreed that we did not approve of the ‘daycare’ model of child-rearing, somewhat to my now hubbie’s chagrin, I chose not to pursue further studies), I do have a degree in Physics in there somewhere….
What I specialized for (though I did not realize at the time that this was ‘soooooo Aspie’) was data acquisition, test and measurement. I made a career out of helping other scientists (and industry, military etc.) figure out how to measure what it was they were really trying to measure, from designing the data acquisition systems to telling them if they were actually measuring what they thought they were measuring.
As such, am somewhat sensitive to ‘sloppy science’.
Which is why I so happy that my son has forwarded me a link to an absolutely excellent essay about how statistics – especially in the medical field -(where, when I was finishing my degree, I was heavily lobbied to go into post-grad, so that I could ‘clean-up’ the methodology in a prominent Canadian immunology University lab – so I really, really understand the criticism here…) are misunderstood not just by the public, not just by the media people who are reporting on it, but especially by the scientists themselves who are carrying out the studies/experiments!
‘Open a random page in your favorite medical journal and you’ll soon be deluged with statistics: t tests, p values, proportional hazards models, risk ratios, logistic regressions, least-squares fits, and confidence intervals. Statisticians have provided scientists with tools of enormous power to find order and meaning in the most complex of datasets, and scientists have embraced them with glee.
Many of these tools are misapplied or misinterpreted.
In fact, most published research findings are probably false.’
Aye, aye.
The essay is written with the layman in mind: it explains things, from first principles, without jargon but with examples of just how easy it is to manipulate results, even without realizing one is doing so.
IF you are interested in science…
IF you have not taken a lot of courses in statistics – but want to understand the real-life meaning of statistics…
IF you want to keep ‘science honest’ ….
IF you question ‘politicized science’…
…you would benefit from/enjoy reading this simple essay.
H/T: Tyr
Xanthippa's Chamberpot 