local6.com
March 23, 2006 Homeowners in an Orange County, Fla., neighborhood claim their community has been overrun by rats big enough to pick fights with small dogs, according to a Local 6 News report.
Residents in the Conway Acres neighborhood in Orange County said the rats are scurrying around their neighborhood 24 hours a day. Homeowners said they have seen the rats running on power lines into homes. Comment: Well, with a rat for governor, what did they expect??
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By Don Hazen, AlterNet. Posted March 23, 2006.
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By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco
Published Thursday 23rd March 2006 03:33 GMT Nature magazine has some tough questions to answer after it let its Wikipedia fetish get the better of its responsibilities to reporting science. The Encyclopedia Britannica has published a devastating response to Nature's December comparison of Wikipedia and Britannica, and accuses the journal of misrepresenting its own evidence.
Where the evidence didn't fit, says Britannica, Nature's news team just made it up. Britannica has called on the journal to repudiate the report, which was put together by its news team. When Nature published the news story in December, it followed weeks of bad publicity for Wikipedia, and was a gift for the project's beleaguered supporters.
In October, a co-founder had agreed that several entries were "horrific crap". A former newspaper editor and Kennedy aide John Siegenthaler Snr then wrote an article explaining how libellous modifications had lain unchecked for months. By early December, Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales was becoming a regular feature on CNN cable news, explaining away the site's deficiencies. "Nature's investigation suggests that Britannica's advantage may not be great," wrote news editor Jim Giles. Nature accompanied this favorable news report with a cheerful, spin-heavy editorial that owed more to an evangelical recruitment drive than it did a rational analysis of empirical evidence. It urged readers to "push forward the grand experiment that is Wikipedia." (Former Britannica editor Robert McHenry dubbed Wikipedia the "Faith based encyclopedia", and the project certainly reflects the religious zeal of some of its keenest supporters. Regular Register readers will be familiar with the rhetoric. See "Wikipedia 'to make universities obsolete'). Hundreds of publications pounced on the Nature story, and echoed the spin that Wikipedia was as good as Britannica - downplaying or omitting to mention the quality gap. The press loves an upbeat story, and what can be more uplifting than the utopian idea that we're all experts - at whatever subject we choose? The journal didn't, however, disclose the evidence for these conclusions until some days later, when journalists had retired for their annual Christmas holiday break. And this evidence raised troubling questions, as Nicholas Carr noted last month. Many publications had assumed Nature's Wikipedia story was objectively reporting the work of scientists - Nature's staple - rather than a news report assembled by journalists pretending to be scientists. And now we know it was anything but scientific. Carr noted that Nature's reviewers considered trivial errors and serious mistakes as roughly equal. So why did Nature risk its reputation in such a way? Perhaps the clue lies not in the news report, but in the evangelism of the accompanying editorial. Nature's news and features editor Jim Giles, who was responsible for the Wikipedia story, has a fondness for "collective intelligence", one critical website suggets. "As long as enough scientists with relevant knowledge played the market, the price should reflect the latest developments in climate research," Giles concluded of one market experiment in 2002. The idea became notorious two years ago when DARPA, under retired Admiral Poindexter, invested in an online "terror casino" to predict world events such as assassinations. The public didn't quite share the sunny view of this utopian experiment, and Poindexter was invited to resign. What do these seemingly disparate projects have in common? The idea that you can vote for the truth. We thought it pretty odd, back in December, to discover a popular science journal recommending readers support less accurate information. It's even stranger to find this institution apparently violating fundamental principles of empiricism. But these are strange times - and high summer for supporters of junk science. |
By EDUARDO GALLARDO
AP Mar 23, 3:53 AM (ET) SANTIAGO, Chile - A bus carrying cruise ship tourists plunged off a highway in northern Chile and tumbled 300 feet down a mountainside Wednesday, killing 12 Americans, U.S. and Chilean officials said.
Two other U.S. tourists and two Chileans - the driver and the tour guide - were hospitalized in serious condition, said Juan Carlos Poli, a city hall spokesman in the Pacific port city of Arica. The tourists were returning to Celebrity Cruises' ship Millennium from an excursion to Lauca National Park when the driver swerved to avoid an approaching truck on a rugged highway near Arica, 1,250 miles north of Santiago, he said. |
Thursday, 23 March 2006, 10:23 GMT
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By David Usborne in New York
Published: 23 March 2006 When it comes to matters archaeological, New York can't compete with Egypt or Greece for buried temples or hidden tombs. So forgive the city its ripple of excitement this week when a long forgotten chamber deep inside the foundations of the Brooklyn Bridge gave up its secret trove of Cold War crackers.
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