links for 2009-07-15

  • "The mobile phone company Nokia is being hit by a growing economic boycott in Iran as consumers sympathetic to the post-election protest movement begin targeting a string of companies deemed to be collaborating with the regime.

    Wholesale vendors in the capital report that demand for Nokia handsets has fallen by as much as half in the wake of calls to boycott Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) for selling communications monitoring systems to Iran.

    There are signs that the boycott is spreading: consumers are shunning SMS messaging in protest at the perceived complicity with the regime by the state telecoms company, TCI. Iran's state-run broadcaster has been hit by a collapse in advertising as companies fear being blacklisted in a Facebook petition. There is also anecdotal evidence that people are moving money out of state banks and into private banks."

  • "A team of Yale University researchers has discovered a "repulsive" light force that can be used to control components on silicon microchips, meaning future nanodevices could be controlled by light rather than electricity."
  • "We're not robots to listen to evidence and not have feelings. We have to recognize those feelings and put them aside. … But there are situations in which some experiences are important in the process of judging, because the law asks us to use those experiences …"
  • "One reason that feminist scholarship contains hard-to-kill falsehoods is that reasonable, evidence-backed criticism is regarded as a personal attack."
  • "What Sarah Palin understands about energy would fit in a can of 3-in-1 oil and still leave room to fix a whole lot of squeaks.

    And yet, Republicans hold up Palin as an 'expert.' Why? Well, partly it's just the natural tendency of the GOP to replace 'has worked hard to learn something' with 'repeats the party line adequately.' In Republican terms, experience, knowledge, and hard work have no role in expertise."

  • "In hindsight, it would almost seem the Reagan Administration had used this as a test case in their Union Busting campaign. Unions, along with regulations were a hindrance to the Reagan Administration. Over the next 8 years there would be a dismantling of just about every regulation that stood in the way of unbridled greed and corruption. It's important to realize the state our country and economy are now in are not the exclusive property of the Bush Administration – the roots and fundamentals go back to the 1980's, and most likely well before to the Nixon Administration. But it was The Reagan Years that created ultimately the most damage."