North Carolina caves to telecom attack on community broadband

Free Press issued this press release today:

WASHINGTON – North Carolina Gov. Bev Perdue today refused to veto a bill that will hinder towns’ and municipalities’ ability to build their own broadband networks, ignoring of thousands of phone calls and emails from her constituents and others around the country concerned about communities being stranded on the wrong side of the digital divide. The bill, pushed through the statehouse by Time Warner Cable and CenturyLink, stifles local efforts to bring faster, affordable broadband to areas of the state under served by the incumbent phone and cable companies. Free Press President and CEO Craig Aaron made the following statement: “In refusing to veto the bill, Governor Perdue sided with powerful phone and cable companies and against efforts by local communities to build their own crucial communications infrastructure. Rather than stand up for her constituents, she ignored their voices and thousands of others from across the nation who had urged her to stand up for real broadband competition and choice. “The big cable companies view these municipal upstarts as major threats and are willing to shower local legislatures with campaign contributions to block their way. North Carolina is just the latest example of what phone and cable incumbents are hoping to do across the nation. Though they’re unwilling to invest in their networks or extend them to communities that need them, they won’t allow anyone else to do it. They’re now threatening to introduce similar bills in other states where municipal broadband efforts are poised to provide citizens with cheaper and faster alternatives. “In light of what has happened in North Carolina, we need federal legislation that would protect the rights of communities to build their own municipal networks. Protecting local communities’ ability to build their own networks was a key recommendation of the National Broadband Plan, and such legislation has attracted bipartisan support in the past. Millions of people across the country lack access to broadband Internet because big companies like Time Warner Cable, CenturyLink and AT&T chose not to extend services to where they live. These same companies – and the politicians whose campaigns they fund – should not be able to block local governments from offering the Internet service their constituents need.”

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And now there’s Error Management Theory

Why do people so readily believe in Gods?  Dominic D.P. Johnson presents “Error Management Theory” (the name plays off Terror Management Theory).  This is an excerpt from the abstract Johnson's book, The Error of God: Error Management Theory, Religion, and the Evolution of Cooperation:

“Error Management Theory” is derived from signaling theory, suggests that if the costs of false positive and false negative decision-making errors have been asymmetric over human evolutionary history, then natural selection would favor a bias towards the least costly error over time (in order to avoid whichever was the worse error). So, for example, we have a bias to sometimes think that sticks are snakes (which is harmless), but never that snakes are sticks (which may be deadly). Applied to religious beliefs and behaviors, I derive the hypothesis from EMT that humans may gain a fitness advantage from a bias in which they tend to assume that their every move (and thought) is being watched, judged, and potentially punished by supernatural agents. Although such a belief would be costly because it constrains freedom of action and self-interested behaviors, it may nevertheless be favored by natural selection if it helps to avoid an error that is even worse: committing selfish actions or violations of social norms when there is a high probability of real-world detection and punishment by victims or other group members. Simply put, supernatural beliefs may have been an effective mindguard against excessively selfish behaviour – behavior that became especially risky and costly as our social world became increasingly transparent due to the evolution of language and theory of mind. If belief in God is an error, it may at least be an adaptive one.

I spotted this abstract while exploring a website titled Evolution of Religion. Here's the aim of the project, of which Dominic Johnson is a part:

Religious believers incur significant costs in terms of time, energy and resources that could be spent elsewhere. Religion therefore poses a major puzzle for disciplines that explain behavior on the basis of individual costs and benefits—in particular economics and evolutionary biology. To many scholars, religious beliefs and behaviors appear so bizarre and so costly that they fall outside rational explanation, leading instead to explanations based on psychosis, cognitive accidents, or cultural parasites. The aim of our project is to conduct a scientific examination of exactly the opposite hypothesis—that religious beliefs and behavior confer adaptive advantages to individual believers, and were therefore favored by natural selection over human evolutionary history. In other words, religion may have evolved.

For further reading on the evolution of religion, the website offers this reading list.

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Will China’s moonshots rejuvenate America’s respect for science?

China has already sent two unmanned lunar probes to the moon, and China has bold plans to send several astronauts to the moon by 2017. While those Chinese astronauts are on the moon, they plan to mine helium 3, an ideal fuel for nuclear fusion.  We can assume that when Chinese astronauts step onto the moon, video cameras will be bringing beautiful images back to the world, which will then applaud China’s great technological achievement, to America’s begrudging dismay. Thus, China is about to a space exploring nation in a dramatic and visible way. This is exactly what American needs. Why? China’s highly visible lunar program comes at a time when American is dramatically cutting its space ambitions (including the Shuttle program). America is being subjected to systematic campaigns disparaging science, much of it driven by religious leaders, corporate disinformation and government attempts to manipulate data.  At the same time, anti-science religion is thriving in many American classrooms. The United States is essentially a warmongering nation; we lurch from war to war. Americans apparently need an enemy to make sense of things. For us to get our heads back into science and math, we apparently need a math and science “enemy,” someone to intellectually challenge our standing as a technologically "advanced" nation. [More . . . ]

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Copyright bottom-feeder on the prowl

From Threat Level, we learn about a big business called Righthaven picking on little people and non-profit organizations who run blogs. If you are running a blog, there are two options. A) Register as a DMCA takedown agent with the U.S. Copyright Office (which I am now in the process of doing) or B) Prepare to travel to Las Vegas federal court to defend yourself against this copyright troll, based (usually) on a commenter's use of copyright material. Here's an excerpt from the Threat Level article:

Founded in March, the Las Vegas-based Righthaven has begun buying out the copyrights to newspaper content of the Las Vegas Review-Journal for the sole purpose of suing blogs and websites that re-post, or even excerpt, those articles without permission. The company has settled about 60 of 160 cases for a few thousand dollars each, and plans to expand its operations to other newspapers across the country. Many of its lawsuits arise, not from articles posted by a website’s proprietors, but from comments and forum posts by the site’s readers.
How-to instructions are provided at Threat Level.

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