Welcome to your weekend open thread. I’m starting my vacation now, so posting may be spotty. What’s on your mind today?
The Ph.D. Challenge is pretty amusing:
An apparently anonymous group of graduate students created “The Ph.D. Challenge,” an annual contest designed to get grad students to do something original, very original:
All men and women who are currently graduate students at an accredited University or Institute of higher-learning are welcome and encouraged to participate. The idea of the PhD Challenge is to have students perform some task that the average graduate student is too timid to perform. It takes a unique caliber of student to overcome adversity and the ire of their adviser in order to complete this challenge.
There’s a different challenge every year. The task this year was to get the phrase “I smoke crack rocks” into a peer-reviewed academic paper.
The 2010 winner is Gabriel Parent, a master’s degree student in Language Technology at Carnegie Mellon University.
I wonder how Parent’s advisor felt about seeing “I smoke crack rocks” in a paper with his/her name? I really wish I had known about this when I was a student. Actually, secret messages in papers is not that unusual. I think it shows how few people actually read the papers.
Congratulations Republican Party and obedient mainstream media! “Lie of the Year” honors are well-deserved.
In the spring of 2009, a Republican strategist settled on a brilliant and powerful attack line for President Barack Obama’s ambitious plan to overhaul America’s health insurance system. Frank Luntz, a consultant famous for his phraseology, urged GOP leaders to call it a “government takeover.”
“Takeovers are like coups,” Luntz wrote in a 28-page memo. “They both lead to dictators and a loss of freedom.”
The line stuck. By the time the health care bill was headed toward passage in early 2010, Obama and congressional Democrats had sanded down their program, dropping the “public option” concept that was derided as too much government intrusion. The law passed in March, with new regulations, but no government-run plan.
But as Republicans smelled serious opportunity in the midterm elections, they didn’t let facts get in the way of a great punchline. And few in the press challenged their frequent assertion that under Obama, the government was going to take over the health care industry.
PolitiFact editors and reporters have chosen “government takeover of health care” as the 2010 Lie of the Year. Uttered by dozens of politicians and pundits, it played an important role in shaping public opinion about the health care plan and was a significant factor in the Democrats’ shellacking in the November elections.
I wonder if the media will have a soul-searching at being the main vehicle for promoting this year’s lie of the year (just like last year’s death panels). Nah, who am I kidding. The media loves them some Republican propaganda. So will Democrats ever learn how to fight this? I guess not, they can’t even make hay of Republicans ignoring 9/11 first responders.