There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production– with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth.A headline in the New York Times reads: “Climate Changes Endanger World’s Food Output.”
As they review the bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the past several years, a growing number of scientists are beginning to suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations are actually part of a global climatic upheaval.All of this sounds very ominous. That is, until you realize that the three quotes ... were from articles in 1975 editions of Newsweek Magazine and The New York Times, and Time Magazine in 1974.
Cooper's art has some defects. In one place in "Deerslayer," and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offenses against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record.
There are nineteen rules governing literary art in domain of romantic fiction -- some say twenty-two. In "Deerslayer," Cooper violated eighteen of them. These eighteen require:
...................
2. They require that the episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it. But as the "Deerslayer" tale is not a tale, and accomplishes nothing and arrives nowhere, the episodes have no rightful place in the work, since there was nothing for them to develop.
3. They require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others. But this detail has often been overlooked in the "Deerslayer" tale.
..........
10. They require that the author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones. But the reader of the "Deerslayer" tale dislikes the good people in it, is indifferent to the others, and wishes they would all get drowned together.
................................. it seems to me that "Deerslayer" is just simply a literary delirium tremens.
A work of art? It has no invention; it has no order, system, sequence, or result; it has no lifelikeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality; its characters are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and words they prove that they are not the sort of people the author claims that they are; its humor is pathetic; its pathos is funny; its conversations are -- oh! indescribable; its love-scenes odious; its English a crime against the language.
Counting these out, what is left is Art. I think we must all admit that.
The displacement of the idea that facts and evidence matter by the idea that everything boils down to subjective interests and perspectives is -- second only to American political campaigns -- the most prominent and pernicious manifestation of anti-intellectualism in our time.
-- Larry Laudan, Science and Relativism (1990)
For some years I've been troubled by an apparent decline in the standards of intellectual rigor in certain precincts of the American academic humanities. But I'm a mere physicist: if I find myself unable to make head or tail of jouissance and differance, perhaps that just reflects my own inadequacy.
So, to test the prevailing intellectual standards, I decided to try a modest (though admittedly uncontrolled) experiment:
Would a leading North American journal of cultural studies -- whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross -- publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions?
The answer, unfortunately, is yes.
"Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,'' in the Spring/Summer 1996 issue of Social Text. It appears in a special number of the magazine devoted to the "Science Wars.''
I can never remember
whether it snowed for six days and six nights
when I was twelve
or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights
when I was six.
.............
Years and years ago, when I was a boy,
when there were wolves in Wales,
and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats
whisked past the harp-shaped hills,
when we sang and wallowed
all night and day in caves
that smelt like Sunday afternoons
in damp front farmhouse parlors,
and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons,
the English and the bears,
before the motor car,
before the wheel,
before the duchess-faced horse,
when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback,
it snowed and it snowed.
But here a small boy says:
"It snowed last year, too.
I made a snowman
and my brother knocked it down
and I knocked my brother down
and then we had tea."
"But that was not the same snow," I say.
"Our snow was not only shaken
from white wash buckets down the sky,
it came shawling out of the ground
and swam and drifted
out of the arms and hands
and bodies of the trees;
snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses
like a pure and grandfather moss,
minutely -ivied the walls
and settled on the postman,
opening the gate,
like a dumb, numb thunder-storm
of white, torn Christmas cards."
.................................
First, you need to remember that plainly expressed language is out of the question. It is too realist, modernist and obvious. Postmodern language requires that one uses play, parody and indeterminacy as critical techniques to point this out. Often this is quite a difficult requirement, so obscurity is a well-acknowledged substitute. For example, let's imagine you want to say something like, ``We should listen to the views of people outside of Western society in order to learn about the cultural biases that affect us''. This is honest but dull. Take the word ``views''. Postmodernspeak would change that to ``voices'', or better, ``vocalities'', or even better, ``multivocalities''. Add an adjective like ``intertextual'', and you're covered. ``People outside'' is also too plain. How about ``postcolonial others''? To speak postmodern properly one must master a bevy of biases besides the familiar racism, sexism, ageism, etc. For example, phallogocentricism (male-centredness combined with rationalistic forms of binary logic). Finally ``affect us'' sounds like plaid pajamas. Use more obscure verbs and phrases, like ``mediate our identities''. So, the final statement should say, ``We should listen to the intertextual, multivocalities of postcolonial others outside of Western culture in order to learn about the phallogocentric biases that mediate our identities''. Now you're talking postmodern! ``How To Speak and Write Postmodern'' -http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/how-to-talk-postmodern.html |
September 08, 2006 (Computerworld) -- About 2.6 million current and former Circuit City credit card account holders are being notified by credit card vendor Chase Card Services that five computer data tapes containing their personal information were mistakenly identified as trash and thrown away by Chase personnel in July.
In a statement yesterday, Chase said that no misuse of the credit card information has been reported and that the tapes are believed to have been destroyed in processing.
"Working closely with federal and local law enforcement, Chase conducted a thorough investigation and believes that the tapes, contained within a locked box, were compacted, destroyed and are buried in a landfill where the trash was taken," the company said.
"We deeply regret that this has occurred and apologize to those impacted," said Rich Srednicki.
You don't even have to know what a logarithm is to use the Kelly formula. You should wager this fraction of your bankroll on a favorable bet:
edge/odd
The edge is how much you expect to win, on the average, assuming you could make this wager over and over with the same probabilities. It is a fraction because the profit is always in proportion to how much you wager. At a racetrack, the edge is diminished by the track take. When your edge is zero or negative, the Kelly criterion says not to bet.
Odds means the public or tote-board odds. It measures the profit if you win. The odds will be something like 8:1, meaning that a winning wager receives 8 times the amount wagered plus return of the wager itself.
In the Kelly formula, odds is not necessarily a good measure of probability. Odds are set by market forces, by everyone else's beliefs about the chance of winning. These beliefs may be wrong. In fact, they have to be wrong for the Kelly gambler to
have an edge. The odds do not factor in the Kelly gambler's inside tips.
Example:
The tote board odds for Seabiscuit are 5:1. Odds are a fraction -- 5:1 means
5/1 or 5. The 5 is all you need.
The tips convince you that Seabiscuit actually has a 1 in 3 chance of winning. Then by betting $100 on Seabiscuit you stand a 1/3 chance of ending up with $600. On
the average, that is worth $200, a net profit of $100. The edge is the $100
profit divided by the $100 wager, or simply 1.
The Kelly formula, edge/odds, is 1/5. This means that you should bet one-fifth of your bankroll on Seabiscuit.
