Non-Urban Philosophy

One fears, in fact, that our naming practices could easily take on the infinite character of the very series the names are meant to pick out.

.. Thus the contemporary American philosopher of science Michael Friedman, for example, drawing on J. L. Heilbron’s excellent book “The Sun in the Church,” has compellingly argued that we can trace a straight line from the ancient preoccupation with the temporal rhythms of the church calendar, to the construction of medieval cathedrals as dual-purpose astronomical observatories, and on, in a few more interesting steps, to modern European philosophical reflections on the nature of space and time.

.. Socrates would be even more blunt in his characterization of philosophy as by definition an urban activity, and thus an activity more or less removed from the cycles of the seasons and of nature. As he puts it in the dialogue “Phaedrus”: “I am a lover of knowledge, and the men who dwell in the city are my teachers, and not the trees or the country.”

…  It excludes the vast cognitive and interpretive resources of peoples who live in closer contact with the forces and cycles of the natural world, whether as foragers or as pastoralists and farmers. And let us make no mistake: these resources are equal to those of the people in the academies praised by Vico. They are the product of exactly the same sort of brains, set into different circumstances, making sense of those circumstances using just the same mixture of practical and theoretical reflection to which the “men who dwell in the city” have access.

Even Non-Nerds Should Care That Netflix Broke Up With Developers

So it’s hard not to see the closure of the Netflix API, on top of the closure of all the other APIs, as symbolic in its own way—of a new era of the web that is less concerned with outreach, and more concerned with consolidation. A web controlled by companies that prefer their own way of doing things, without external input. A web that takes the productive enthusiasms of independent developers and says, essentially, “Thanks, but no thanks.”

 

Give the Data to the People

Today, more than half of the clinical trials in the United States, including many sponsored by academic and governmental institutions, are not published within two years of their completion. Often they are never published at all. The unreported results, not surprisingly, are often those in which a drug failed to perform better than a placebo. As a result, evidence-based medicine is, at best, based on only some of the evidence. One of the most troubling implications is that full information on a drug’s effects may never be discovered or released.

.. This program doesn’t mean that just anyone can gain access to the data without disclosing how they intend to use it. We require those who want the data to submit a proposal and identify their research team, funding and any conflicts of interest. They have to complete a short course on responsible conduct and sign an agreement that restricts them to their proposed research question. Most important, they must agree to share whatever they find. And we exclude applicants who seek data for commercial or legal purposes.