information

A Just Society

Why All the Fuss?

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The word “justice” conjures different things for different people. Very often discrepancies between definitions arise when we attempt to apply the word in relatively isolated situations.  Current events in Washington, DC involving a phone conversation, a whistle-blower and a flurry of allegations of wrongdoing represent a collection of those isolated situations.  They too frequently give rise to partisan interpretations (perhaps driven by ideological myopia or something far worse). As reflected in social media and most news reporting, assessments (which is to say “judgments”) of these events tend to cluster around political leanings rather than more philosophical principles reflecting profound ideals.  When we begin to depart from those more limited notions of “justice”, turning instead to consider a more general understanding of systemic societal wrongs—when we stop yapping about what we wish for and focus instead on considerations of who we are—we might find our definitions begin to coalesce. (more…)

AI News?

On the frontier of artificial intelligence journalism

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In an era when venerable news publications such as the New York Times and the Washington Post are being maligned by key societal figures accusing them of “leftist” bias, when publications such as Breitbart or similar media sources often deemed “conservative” unabashedly present stories slanted to reflect political views far right of the majority of public sentiment in the country and when a significant portion of the general public acquires its “facts” about the nature of world events from Twitter, Facebook and a network that used to fly a banner emblazoned with the words “fair and balanced”, bias both inadvertent and intentional has become an insurmountable impediment to attaining the “truth” about what is going on around us. In the face of such a large, sprawling situation, we sometimes get lost, failing to understand the meaning of our daily encounters and  the most appropriate intent we should seek regarding any of these events. Enter knowherenews.com.  This website proposes that computer software can filter reports of world events and effectively sanitize them of ideological bias.

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Truth Matters

“Like it or not, people will have to acquire their own news to a certain extent and must therefore learn journalistic techniques and various tricks of the trade”
~Bruce Bartlett

In the current era of “fake news” and a general mood of “alternate fact” inaccuracies and slights of hand, many of us who truly seek the positive in life—“Good” and “Truth”, for instance—we sometimes can feel overwhelmed by a lack of reliable sources of information about the world.  Bruce Bartlett has written a book—The Truth Matters–to partially address this situation.

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Free to Explore

Vixra: A potentially valuable source of stimulating ideasknowledge-exchange

Continuing the “decentralization” theme that was largely the focus of a recent post, consider Vixra.org as a resource you might find useful (or at least entertaining).  Vixra is “an e-print archive set up as an alternative to the popular arXiv.org service owned by Cornell University. Vixra was founded and is maintained by scientists who found they were unable to submit their articles to arXiv.org because of Cornell University’s policy of endorsements and moderation designed to filter articles considered by the editorial staff as “inappropriate.”

Vixra provides free access to well over 20,000 electronic documents which can be read online or downloaded as PDFs.  Access is free, with no subscription required.  Available articles cover a wide range of topics falling under the general categories: physics, mathematics, computational science, biology, chemistry, humanities, and academics.  While the general idea is to present articles on “science and mathematics”, you might be surprised by the wide range of topics that appear. Each of these major categories contains multiple subcategories such as Mind Science, Religion and Spirituality, Quantitative Biology, Education & Didactics, Condensed Matter, Mathematical Physics and Relativity & Cosmology, and many others.  (more…)