Posts by giovanni tiso
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but there was a paper in Nature a while back showing that Wiki was pretty close to the Encyclopaedia Britannica in terms of accuracy.
More accurate than Encarta in terms of historical data, and only slightly less than Britannica, according to the Roy Rosenzweig article I quote upthread.
(There's a lovely Alexei Sayle series on BBC radio (and hence the Web) at the moment about the history of alternative comedy in the UK. Entirely by the by.)
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__I don't accept that either.__
Well, in a perfect world, nor do I. But I'm just trying to compromise with our anti-smoker friends, given our current health budget...
Don't compromise, this notion that we cannot deliver social justice because of our limited resources is getting way out of hand - we are going into a general election with both main parties both promising to cut taxes, for Pete's sake. The madness has got to stop.
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Or how about telling Jonah Lomu that he wasn't going to have a perfectly good liver wasted on him unless he promised to stop playing rugby
Quite, although the sports person association game leads me to what I think was an acceptable case of discrimination: George Best got a liver transplant, kept boozing, destroyed his new liver and was refused another.
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OK, fine. How about prioritising people who don't smoke ahead of those who do? There's an incentive for them to quit.
I don't accept that either. And besides, how do you police that? And who's to say that butter doesn't kill or disable more people than cigarettes? "I'm sorry, sir, but I saw you eating an eclair for breakfast on your way here, we'll have to cancel your heart transplant."
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I have an alternative point of view.
Okay, sorry, I honestly thought you were winding us up with the apostrophe thing. We ought to make allowances for people with dislexia, of course. But other than that if anything I think that academic writing style isn't pushed enough. I tutored in a second year uni film course where we weren't supposed to get too hung up on syntax, grammar and spelling; the unfortunate result was that I found myself having to assume that a student unable to string three sentences together might in fact be making a coherent argument, whereas those who wrote well enough to let it transpire that they had in fact no idea what they were on about didn't get such benefit of the doubt.
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there's no compelling reason why smokers should be allowed to consume limited health resources.
There's no compelling reason why health resources should be limited. It's a political decision.
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I think there are two senses of "reference" being used here:
something you refer to for more information when you a learning about a topic, and something you cite in a scholarly work. Encyclopedias (with Terence's case as an exception) aren't generally suitable for the second role, especially WikipediaYes, although there could be exceptions. Say you're writing an essay in which you claim that Edgar Allan Poe was an influence on Jeff Noon, and during your research you notice that Wikipedia lists Poe among Noon's influences. You'd probably have to acknowledge that. There are all manners of connections that an encyclopaedia makes that are implicitly original and argumentative, as opposed to statements of fact.
Wikipedia seems singularly unsuitable for referencing simply because of its transient nature. You could reference it, and two weeks later the page might not say the same thing.
I can't see the problem there. There were dozens of Web references in my dissertation that disappeared or changed while I was still writing it - that's why you add a date to the footnote and cache the material.
To get hung up on pedantic academic writing style's
You were just baiting us, weren't you?
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If we improve health throughout life, in many areas, people will be less likely to be sick or injured when they are older because their health will be better. They will have stronger hearts, lungs, bones etc etc.
We're going around in circles here. So let me ask you again: and then what happens? Are you planning to emulate the divine Maude and take a pill on your eightieth birthday? Things are going to start to go wrong eventually, and your demise won't be any less expensive for the public health system than anyone else's - likely more so, in fact, since people who live longer are statistically more likely to get Alzheimer's which is just about the most heart-breaking and expensive way to go.
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You can't hate people for their own good, to quote someone very clever whose name i can't remember.
Yes, but on the other hand hating people for one's own good has never been especially hard. And who among us does not see the slippery slope from what is being proposed here and the refusal to cure people who make bad personal choices?
When this story broke a few months ago, I was outraged enough by the proposition that
smokers, heavy drinkers, the obese and the elderly should be barred from receiving some operations, according to doctors, with most saying the health service cannot afford to provide free care to everyone.
But then it transpired that many UK hospitals are already doing just that, in the case of smokers and the overweight.
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I'm pretty skeptical of this. There's nothing about being 'old' that makes your medical costs higher than being young. It's not until your body gets sick or breaks down in some way that it gets to be more expensive. That often happens as you get older, but not necessarily.
Have you been hanging out with Albert Hoffman? Watched Cocoon once too many times? Or are you seriously telling me that the average 80 year old needs as many meds and medical procedures as the average 50 year old?
If you wanted to look at it from purely monetary terms we should at least try and keep everyone alive until about 65, at which point we've got the maximum tax take out of them </mercenary>
I think you'll find that that particular goal is best achieved by letting people smoke and be obese. Worked a treat on my dad, to reiterate that rather painful point. He was an absolute boon to the state, barely used any public services in his life (including school).