ShaunMacPherson

Why Fukushima made me stop worrying and love nuclear power Exerpt:

A crappy old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami. The electricity supply failed, knocking out the cooling system. The reactors began to explode and melt down. The disaster exposed a familiar legacy of poor design and corner-cutting. Yet, as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation.

Some greens have wildly exaggerated the dangers of radioactive pollution. For a clearer view, look at the graphic published by xkcd.com. It shows that the average total dose from the Three Mile Island disaster for someone living within 10 miles of the plant was one 625th of the maximum yearly amount permitted for US radiation workers. This, in turn, is half of the lowest one-year dose clearly linked to an increased cancer risk, which, in its turn, is one 80th of an invariably fatal exposure. I'm not proposing complacency here. I am proposing perspective.

There are some things that money simply can't buy and influence on high can't arrange, because people get in the way. You know, people. As in democracy? As in the Internet? As in bloggers, for example. — Pamela Jones on the subject of Microsoft opposing the open document standard OpenDocument.

Welcome to my Wikipedia page. My nick in the #Wikipedia channel is either ShaunMacPherson or Synonymous in case you wanted to know :). I have been a member of Wikipedia since January, 2004. Some describe me as an inclusionist although I dislike (being imprisoned by) labels.

My background: I am a 2003 cum laude graduate from Laurentian University with an honours Bachelor of Arts in economics / psychology. I have ~50% more courses in economics than psychology so one could possibly say I have a major in economics.

I like science fiction, organizing data, video and computer games, reading books, and reading online articles, news, columns, blogs and reports.

I've contributed large lists of information for List of SNES games and List of video game music. I am especially good at collecting and manuplating spreadsheet information, and then converting it into Wiki format.

I was on the List of Wikipedians by number of edits and was sliding down due to having limited internet access. However now I do :).

Resources a Online research, journals, academic periodicals, and sourcebooks Some of the links below are helpful for finding references online. I'm also listing some journals found in JSTOR in particular that come with the benefit of free access. Research JSTOR online archives "Established in August 1995, JSTOR is an independent not-for-profit organization created with the assistance of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in information technology. In pursuing this mission, JSTOR has adopted a system-wide perspective, taking into account the sometimes conflicting needs of scholars, libraries and publishers." 1 Lexis-Nexis Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (free access for general social survey and national election survey) Paul Hensel's International Relations Data Site United Nations Human Development Report Office World Values Survey ("The World Values Survey is a worldwide investigation of sociocultural and political change. It has carried out representative national surveys of the basic values and beliefs of publics in more than 65 societies on all six inhabited continents, containing almost 80 percent of the world's population." 1) Eldis Country profiles (focus on information related to development) Eurostat (Statistics on European Union countries) OECD (Economic, social, and infrastructure data on industrialized countries) UNICEF World Bank (World Development Indicators database) International Monetary Fund (IMF research and links to World Economic Outlook) UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) FAOSTAT International data on food production, land use, nutrition. UN World Health Organization Statistical Information System (WHOSIS) "The WHO Statistical Information System is the guide to health and health-related epidemiological and statistical information available from the World Health Organization." 2 UNDP World Income Inequality Database UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs Population Division (World population data and trends) The Association for History and Computing "an organisation dedicated to the use of computers in historical research 3 EuroDocs: Primary Historical Documents From Western Europe THE INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY World Wide Web site History of Economics Internet References NON-WESTERN SOURCES ON CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL ISSUES from the Political Science Department and the Bartle Library Collaboratory at Binghamton University "The purpose of this continuously developing web page is to allow Americans to see how people who live in non -Western, or less industrialized societies view a variety of contemporary political issues. It was constructed to meet the teaching and research needs of political science. We believe that it will also be useful for students and teachers in other disciplines." 4 Library of Congress Handbook of Latin American Studies Sourcebooks, encyclopedias, and archives Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress under the Country Studies/Area Handbook Program sponsored by the U.S. Department of Army (public domain text) The Catholic Encyclopedia The CIA Factbook The Jürgen Habermas Web Resource The Heritage Foundation/Wall Street Journal Index of Economic Freedom Glossary of Selected Social Science Computing Terms and Social Science Data Terms A Glossary of Political Economy Terms Dr. Paul M. Johnson FACTS SUBJECT INDEX Marx/Engels Internet Archive Academic journals and periodicals Foreign Policy (a leading quarterly of international affairs) Foreign Affairs (published by the Council on Foreign Relations) Journal of Democracy (free access) Web page of The Economist Social Forces "Social Forces is a journal of social research highlighting sociological inquiry but also exploring realms shared with social psychology, anthropology, political science, history, and economics. The journal's intended academic readers include sociologists, social psychologists, criminologists, economists, political scientists, anthropologists, and students of urban studies, race/ethnic relations, and religious studies." 2 Comparative Studies in Society and History "Comparative Studies in Society and History" is an international forum for new research and interpretation concerning problems of recurrent patterning and change in human societies through time and the contemporary world." 3 FERNAND BRAUDEL CENTER for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations Review, A Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center World-Systems Archive Journal of World-Systems Research (free access) New Left Review (see "A BRIEF HISTORY OF NEW LEFT REVIEW") Monthly Review (free access) American Sociological Association Marxist Section The Socialist Register Review ofRadical Political Economics "The Review of Radical Political Economics (RRPE) publishes articles onradical political economic theory and applied analysis from a wide variety of theoreticaltraditions: Marxist, institutionalist, post Keynesian, and feminist. RRPE is published by Sage Publications." 4 Policy think-tanks, advocacy, other The Cato Institute Brookings Institution American Enterprise Institute Hoover Institution The Jamestown Foundation "The Jamestown Foundation's mission is to contribute to U.S. understanding of its strategic adversaries that pose a threat to democracy and freedom" 4 Johnson's Russia List "Johnson's Russia List is a daily e-mail newsletter with information and analysis about contemporary Russia from a wide range of sources." 5 The Overseas Young Chinese Forum ("OYCF") Amnesty International (human rights) Human Rights Watch (human rights) One World (sustainable development and human rights) Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, Woodrow Wilson Center News agencies Reuters BBC Associated Press (AP) Scripps Howard News Service People's Daily Cox News Service Xinhua CNN Fox News Haaretz Asia Times Online Guardian UK Aljazeera New York Times Teharan Times Thanks to User:172 for this list.

Inside joke: I am starting to use this inside joke more around Wikipedia so I will uninside it. Since I do not spell that great sometimes, I've accussed people of following me around fixing my articles and spelling, and I call them my posse, or the mob :).

Wikipedia Projects I belong to

• WikiProject_Fact_and_Reference_Check
• WikiProject_Computer_and_Video_Games WikiProject: Computer and Video Games
• Category_talk:Data_management Data Management
• M:Association_of_Inclusionist_Wikipedians
• Wikipedia:WikiProject_Energy_development
• Wiikiproject Wikipedians against censorship

Quotations

See also: Archive of Quotes

Whenever a new technology has disrupted copyright, we've changed copyright. Copyright isn't an ethical proposition, it's a utilitarian one. There's nothing *moral* about paying a composer tuppence for the piano-roll rights, there's nothing *immoral* about not paying Hollywood for the right to videotape a movie off your TV. They're just the best way of balancing out so that people's physical property rights in their VCRs and phonographs are respected and so that creators get enough of a dangling carrot to go on making shows and music and books and paintings.

— Cory Doctorow from Microsoft Research DRM talk

There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped or turned back, for their private benefit.
Robert A. Heinlein

Google Popularity Wikipedia Article Ranking Project

What a mouthful! I am starting an interesting little sub project here to see how well Wikipedia ranks on google for information on different topics. If you think this is a good idea feel free to move this to a common area and email the address in my talk page.

Links

W:Wikipedia:The_Business_and_Economics_Forum

[1]

• List_of_Number_1_Hits_(USA)

• List_of_court_cases
• List_USA_court_cases
• List_Canada_court_cases
• List of Famicom Disk System games
• List of Famicom games
• List of Japanese companies
• List of NES accessories
• List of NES games
• List of SNES games
• Wikipedia:Gaming_Collaboration_of_the_week

• William-Adolphe Bouguereau_gallery
• List_gallery

• Roms and Roms lists for NES, SNES, and others

• W:Wikipedia:WikiProject_Computer_and_Video_Games

• Wikipedia Requests for Comment

Test Area

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Sub Area Links

As the template suggests all my work on Wikipedia has been, and will continue to be unless otherwise noted, released under the creative commons copyright license as shown.