The Mini-Meta Widget plugin is, not surprisingly, a replacement for the Meta Widget that ships with WordPress. Among others things, the Mini-Meta Widget makes it possible to easily put the logon form in the sidebar itself (and then redirect to whatever page the user was on after logging on).
Day: August 27, 2008
Just How Large Is the Gold Farming Industry?
The BBC reports on a study of gold farming that concludes the practice may be a $500 million/year industry that contributes a significant amount of activity to developing countries’ economies.
Prof Heeks said very accurate figures for the size of the gold farming sector were hard to come by but his work suggested that in 2008 it employs 400,000 people who earn an average of $145 (£77) per month creating a global market worth about $500m.
But, he said, the true size of the sector was hard to estimate – it could easily be twice as big.
The quasi-criminal nature of gold-farming made it hard to truly gauge its extent, said Prof Heeks.
As Heeks notes, that would put gold farming on par with the entire Indian IT outsourcing industry in 2004. Frankly, that seems a bit on the high side. It could easily be twice as big, but I bet it could easily be half that size.
Interestingly, the BBC also quotes Steven Davis — who works for Secure Play which develops software to stop gold farming and other forms of cheating — noting an interesting take on comparative advantage in the gold farming business,
A hierarchy of gold farmers arranged by where wages were lowest was starting to emerge, said Mr Davis. For instance, the low wages gold farmers in Vietnam will accept means they now do for Chinese gamers what many in China do for those in the West.
“It’s moving down the chain,” he said.
Fascinating. The only game I play where gold farming is a real issue is World of Warcraft, and Blizzard so far seems to have the upper hand over gold selling, in large part because the game world is such an artificial one where it can impose the sort of arbitrary restrictions on transactions that would be easy to evade in the real world.
Hasbro’s Marvel Transformers
I was never much of a Transformers fan, but my soon-to-be 6-year old is begging to get these for his birthday. Yes, Marvel super-heroes and super-villains that transform into motorcycles, tanks and other vehicles.
But Science and Religion Do Inherently Clash
An article from the New York Times — Teacher shows that science, religion don’t have to clash — seem to have been linked to widely across the Internet as an example of a teacher doing a good job of demonstrating natural selection to his students in a country where sympathy for creationism seems to be on the upswing.
The article is fairly interesting, except if you stop to think why a science teacher demonstrating basic scientific principles to his students is considered remarkable enough to warrant an entire article in The New York Times. Its the title, however, and the last few paragraphs that reflect a silly but widely accepted dichotomy,
He [science teacher David Campbell] looked around the room. “Bryce, what is it called when natural laws are suspended – what do you call it when water changes into wine?”
“Miracle?” Bryce supplied.
Campbell nodded. The ball hit the floor again.
“Science explores nature by testing and gathering data,” he said. “It can’t tell you what’s right and wrong. It doesn’t address ethics.
“But it is not antireligion. Science and religion just ask different questions.”
He later explained to the class, “Faith is not based on science,” Campbell said. “And science is not based on faith.”
This idea that science and religion are complementary seems widely assumed but makes absolutely no sense. Science completely undercuts the rationale for religion across disciplines, including ethics, despite what Campbell asserts.
Once someone has rejected revelation in favor of experimentation, observation and data gathering, exactly what is the argument in favor of revelation for establishing ethics? It would seem fairly untenable to argue that when it comes to explaining, say, the weather that we should rely on observation and reason, but the second we want to discuss the ethics of using birth control that we should run to some holy book or holy person for The One True Answer?
Thankfully, at least in the West, we do not do anything like that anymore. Rather, our laws and ethical beliefs have been largely secularized. Over time people have abandoned large parts of “ethical” principles contained in their religions precisely because they applied data gathering, observation and reason to religious teachings and jettisoned the parts that didn’t make any sense. In turn, people tend to redefine their religious views to accommodate these to the point where the religious views become neutered shadows of themselves — like silly proclamations that “Jesus is love”.
Religious texts are helpful to the extent that they codify and let us closely examine what particular groups of humans in their time and in the context of their culture thought constituted morality. Some of it is splendid and worth copying, while much of it is ugly and rightly cast aside. But those particular decisions are best made by the application of reason, not by some appeal to an inherently irrational faith in God(s) and those who claim the mantle of representing them here on Earth.
Is Aging Just an Accident of Evolution?
DailyGalaxy.com highlights the work of Stanford researcher Stuart Kim who, along with colleagues, has been studying aging in the C. elegans worm.
Essentially, Kim claims that C. elegans does not age because it is exposed to environmental stressors that gradually wear its ability to maintain itself down, but rather that as it ages,
So it looked as though worm aging wasn’t a storm of chemical damage. Instead, Kim said, key regulatory pathways optimized for youth have drifted off track in older animals. Natural selection can’t fix problems that arise late in the animals’ life spans, so the genetic pathways for aging become entrenched by mistake. Kim’s team refers to this slide as “developmental drift.”
“We found a normal developmental program that works in young animals, but becomes unbalanced as the worm gets older,” he said. “It accounts for the lion’s share of molecular differences between young and old worms.”
Kim is quick to add that he cannot say whether human aging also occurs due to the same sort of issues, but the fact that it happens at all at least makes it a possibility to be explored in human aging research.
If humans do age due to this sort of process, it would mean that it would possible to forestall or stop altogether aging by correcting the regulatory pathways that go astray as we age (effectively treating the underlying causes rather than the symptoms of such changes).
WordPress Plugin to Regenerate Thumbnails
The other day I realized I had accidentally set thumbnail generation in WordPress to be exactly 150×150 even when that wasn’t a proportional resizing of the larger graphic. Ugh. I reset the pref to the proportional setting, but what to do about the existing thumbnails?
Well, this is WordPress so you have to use a plugin for everything, and it turned out there’s a nice Regenerate Thumbnails plugin that will let you resize all thumbnails after changing the preferences. Worked like a charm for me.