Thu Sep 19 21:06:15 EDT 2013

Items of Interest

Some web links I found to be of interest:

  • America No Longer Has a Functioning Judicial System
    The Separation of Powers Which Define Our Democracy Have Been Destroyed.

    Bush destroyed much of the separation of powers which made our country great.
    But under Obama, it's gotten worse.

  • Spying Program Doesn't Make Us Safer and Spying Leaks Don't Harm America
    NSA Leaks Help -- Rather than Hurt -- the United States

    America's top national security experts say that the NSA's mass surveillance program doesn't make us safer and that whistleblowers revealing the nature and extent of the program don't harm America.

  • The Tabarrok Curve: Why The Patent System Is Not Fit For Purpose

    Dr. Tabarrok argued in his 2011 book "Launching the Innovation Renaissance" that patents cannot encourage innovation if they raise its costs. In fields where innovation is a cumulative process, he argued, restricting patents would cause firms to lose some of their monopoly rights, but they would gain the opportunity to use the innovations of others. "The result is greater total innovation."

    Patents are supposed to prevent imitation, but in practice, imitation is often more costly than innovation. Most patent disputes are not about firms copying each other's inventions but about two companies discovering simultaneously the next step in an innovative process. Yet patent law can't easily handle that type of situation.

  • The Emerging Science of Memes

    No one has any idea what makes something go viral in the first place. Attempts to predict what will go viral on the internet are based on the past behavior of a meme. As Coscia emphasizes in his work, no one has yet to rigorously demonstrate, in advance, why any particular type of content goes viral. This sort of prognostication remains an art rather than a science.

  • The Problem With Psychiatry, the DSM and the Way We Study Mental Illness

    Psychiatry is under attack for not being scientific enough, but the real problem is its blindness to culture. When it comes to mental illness, we wear the disorders that come off the rack.

    ... Americans, for some reason, find it particularly difficult to grasp that mental illnesses are absolutely real and culturally shaped at the same time


Posted by mjm | Permanent link | Comments
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