robert.schuppenies.de – weblog

I’m Still Tortured by What I Saw in Iraq

It’s no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me — unless you don’t count American soldiers as Americans.

Empiricism is Not a Matter of Faith

“Hurrah, this is it!” you exclaim as you set down the most recent issue of Computational Linguistics. “This Zigglebottom Tagger is exactly what I need!” A gleeful smile crosses your face as you imagine how your system will improve once you replace your tagger from graduate school with the clearly superior Zigglebottom method. You rub your hands together and page through the article looking for a way to obtain the tagger, but nothing is mentioned. That doesn’t dampen your enthusiasm, so you search the Web, but still nothing turns up. [..] Some days, or perhaps weeks, later, you get a hesitant reply saying: “We’re planning to release a demo version soon, stay tuned . . . ” Or perhaps: “We don’t normally do this, but we can send you a copy (informally) once we clean it up a bit . . . ”