Hulleye Comes By!

The venerable Encyclopaedia Britannica is launching an unusual public war to defend itself against a scientific article that argued it’s scarcely better than a free-for-all Web upstart.

On Dec. 15, the scientific journal Nature ran a two-page “special report” titled “Internet encyclopedias go head to head.” It compared the accuracy of science entries for the online encyclopedia Wikipedia and the online version of Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Founded in 1768 in Edinburgh, Scotland, Britannica is painstakingly compiled by a collection of scholars and other experts around the world. Wikipedia came to life in California five years ago under a “user-generated” model: That is, anyone who wants to can contribute, or change, an entry.

The Nature report, published in the journal’s news section, said there was not much difference between the two. For every four errors in Wikipedia, Britannica had three. “Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries,” the study concluded.

The article was immediately cited by dozens of newswires, papers and magazines around the world. Leslie H. Gelb, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of Britannica’s editorial board, said he first heard about the article from his son-in-law, who taunted him, saying, “Your Britannica is no different from Wikipedia,” Mr. Gelb recalls. “He was tormenting me.”

Now, Britannica’s editors are firing back with a strongly worded open letter demanding that Nature retract its article and a 7,000-word rebuttal on its Web site.

Read the rest here.

since pakistan is still blocking the blogspot domain, i have been informed that you can access this blog using pkblogs, using the following URL - http://www.pkblogs.com/halai.

so i’m back from vacation. had a grand time. cuba is a brilliant place, assuming you don’t mind a socialist dictator. this was the view that i woke up to every morning. it was an all you can drink and eat place where we were staying. i saw some lovely sunsets too, went swimming with dolphins , hung out at some beautiful beaches, saw a replica of the US capitol building, and much, much more. interesting propaganda posters are also splattered all over havana. this is one of them. a friend helped translate the billboard for me.

i asked my coworker gonzalo for help translating this. it didn’t make much sense to me until then. he says it’s like “the bush plan will take away your right to rest and relax with your friends on the park bench like you always used to.” the part that didn’t make sense to me was literally “the right to rest and to singing friendship” - basically he said that was a poetic way to express the idea and emotion of close friendships.

the bush plan announced in 2003 included making coming to the U.S. easier for cubans who want to leave cuba, as well as making it more difficult for u.s. citizens to travel there. so essentially, the bush plan will take away your friends.

best part about the whole deal, my wife, who holds only a pakistan passport did not require a visa to get there. i think it is the only nation on the planet that i have been to using a pakistani passport without requiring a visa.

another interesting fact, whenever any local cubano asked where the two of us were from we replied, “canada”, and then they persisted in asking us where we were originally from. when they found out that it was pakistan, they were extremely intrigued and every single person who asked me knew where pakistan was and what our entire history is and that there are currently over 1000 doctors in cuba helping out with earthquake relief. the same cannot be said about 7 out of 10 americans who have asked me where i am from.

also the country boasts a near 100% literacy rate. high school is mandatory, and if you do not score 96% or higher in high school, even university is mandatory. if you score higher than 96, you have the option for university, which is obviously free.