I’ve been mulling over how to respond to Mark Liberman’s recent jibe at semioticians. This jibe was provoked by my claim that linguistics should be thought of expansively, as a subfield of semiotics (as Saussure initially intended) and not in the more narrow modern sense. In his post Liberman picks on Roland Barthes, and his [...]
Writing in Mother Jones, Bradford Plumer says we need better statistics to gauge the situation in Iraq: according to the Pentagon’s own estimates, that need is increasing far faster than the U.S. can train new troops. Official statistics currently claim that 145,000 Iraqi Security Forces are “trained and equipped.” Yet the estimated number of troops [...]
Nathan Newman asks why the Republicans aren’t planning on fixing racial differences in health care, when they have so recently been willing to exploit those differences for political gain. He then goes on to highlight some of the most shocking discrepancies: Sixty-nine percent of whites are insured through their employers, compared with only 52 percent [...]
Why do the French hate Google? First the national French press agency is suing Google: Agence France Presse is suing Google for $17.5 million for aggregating and extracting headlines and excerpts from AFP stories on its Google News service. Google claims its use of AFP material is protected by fair use laws; AFP denies it. [...]