Paul M. Jones

1) Fox News loves a good on-air rumble. NPR is Lawrence Welk for baby-boomers.

2) Fox News thinks that in the US, lefties, while few in number, punch far above their weight culturally. Lefties agree.

3) Fox News think that the Democratic Party's form of an expanded social services net & interference in the corporate world is but a prelude to socialism. Lefties hope that's the case.

NPR, on the other hand, is basically the urban white wing of the Democratic Party in front of a microphone. It really doesn't want to give Lefties a platform to ask liberals embarrassing questions (like, "Gosh, just how long does it take to close Gitmo?") or to spout off with some Lefty hate-speech (e.g. New Black Panther Party), which might remind NPR listeners that their side is no where near as rational & nice as they think they are.

via Althouse: "Five Bloggers I’d Like To See On FOX News.".

Senior White House and Justice Department officials are considering plans for legal action against Colorado and Washington that could undermine voter-approved initiatives to legalize the recreational use of marijuana in those states, according to several people familiar with the deliberations.

Even as marijuana legalization supporters are celebrating their victories in the two states, the Obama administration has been holding high-level meetings since the election to debate the response of federal law enforcement agencies to the decriminalization efforts.

Marijuana use in both states continues to be illegal under the federal Controlled Substances Act. One option is to sue the states on the grounds that any effort to regulate marijuana is pre-empted by federal law. Should the Justice Department prevail, it would raise the possibility of striking down the entire initiatives on the theory that voters would not have approved legalizing the drug without tight regulations and licensing similar to controls on hard alcohol.

Hey, Mr Obama? In those states, more people voted for pot than for you. Via Radley Balko: In Which Harold & Kumar Go Into Hiding.

I did an email interview with the folks at PHP Magazin; their German version is here. What follows is our original email exchange in English.

First of all, congratulations for releasing Aura 1.0!

Thanks! Most of the packages are at 1.0, but there are still three that are in beta; I expect them to go "stable" soon as well.

Why did you do it?

Aura is essentially a second major version of the Solar Framework. (Solar was the first E_STRICT framework for PHP 5; its development pre-dates that of the Zend Framework.) One of the repeated questions we got regarding Solar went like this: "I want to use just one part of Solar; can I do that without having to download and configure the whole framework?" Of course the answer to that was "not really." It was a monolithic framework, where all the pieces were designed to work with each other in a relatively dependent fashion.

So with Aura, we started out from the other direction. We wanted the pieces to be usable on their own, without any other dependencies. Only after that would we build a framework out of the pieces. We called this our "libraries first, framework second" principle. This means you can use just one Aura package if you want, and you won't get a lot of of other packages as dependencies; each one is completely self contained, including its tests. Each one uses separated interfaces and data transfer objects as necessary to move information across package boundaries.

In addition to that, we wanted to take all the lessons we learned from Solar and break backwards compatibility to start over again. The single biggest BC break has been moving away from a Service Locator implementation and the universal constructor, toward a more formal Dependency Injection oriented system. That one change has made for gigantic improvements in decoupling, testability, and package independence. (I have to thank Jeff Moore here for being patient with me and slowly getting me on the dependency injection track.) We don't even use superglobals within the packages; everything from the environment has to be copied into the objects, which makes things really easy to test.

Why did you decide it has to be PHP 5.4? What's the advantage?

When we started the Aura project in 2010, we targeted PHP 5.3, since it was the most recent PHP version at the time. Closures and traits especially have a lot of powerful uses if you approach them wisely. Then PHP 5.4 came out in January 2012. Almost all of the Aura packages were still in development at the time, so we figured we might as well target PHP 5.4, with its short-array [] syntax and "callable" type hint. Those things seem small, but once you start using them, they are *so* convenient (and frankly they make the code look prettier :-).

You seem to love small packages. What do you think of the microframework approach Ed Finkler published in the beginning of the year?

I think Ed has a strong point, although to be clear I don't think he's so much about "microframework" as he is about "micro-PHP" in general.

It used to be, back in the PHP 3, 4, and early 5.x days, that the word "framework" was a dirty word in PHP land. (The word "CMS" was OK though.) Then, right after Ruby on Rails came out, suddenly a "framework" was a good thing. Lots of developers got on board with that, and we did the same with Solar.

So in a way, I think moving back to a library-oriented approach is a natural tendency for the PHP world. Frameworks still have value, especially for early-to-mid-career developers, or for teams where you need a standardized development process but don't have a strong senior-level architect on staff. But a lot of senior developers want to be able to pick and choose between libraries, and they want to be sure they understand what the library is doing (and why, and how). And they want to be able to replace the pieces they end up not liking. That's a lot easier when you have independent libraries than when you have a monolithic framework.

What can one do better with Aura than they can with Zend or Symfony?

A lot of PHP developers are stuck with codebases they didn't build themselves, or that they need to improve carefully over a long period of time because the business is dependent on it for revenue. For those PHP developers, switching the project to a framework isn't an option. The Aura project, being composed of independent packages, lets these developers use just the individual independent parts they need for their existing projects, and slowly improve the quality of their codebase. It's easier to refactor your project one part at a time using Aura than it is to start all over again with a monolithic framework.

If you're lucky enough to be able to start a brand-new project, Aura also provides a framework system that glues all the other packages into a cohesive whole. If you're the kind of developer who wants to use a full-stack framework, but you also want to be able to pull out parts of the framework and replace them with your own implementations, Aura (because it was built with a "libraries first" approach) makes that a lot easier for you than Zend or Symfony does. There are no cross-package dependencies like there are with Zend and Symfony, and we use separated interfaces for things that should have replaceable implementations. (The framework package is still beta, but it appears to be working just fine.)

Thank you very much and keep up the good work!

Thank you for your interest and attention!

Last year the journal Nature reported an alarming increase in the number of retractions of scientific papers -- a tenfold rise in the previous decade, to more than 300 a year across the scientific literature.

Other studies have suggested that most of these retractions resulted from honest errors. But a deeper analysis of retractions, being published this week, challenges that comforting assumption.

In the new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, two scientists and a medical communications consultant analyzed 2,047 retracted papers in the biomedical and life sciences. They found that misconduct was the reason for three-quarters of the retractions for which they could determine the cause.

via Study Finds Misconduct Widespread in Retracted Scientific Papers - NYTimes.com.

Lynette Lee of Clarksville, Tennessee first told police on November 23 that she had been raped in a hotel room by a man she had met through the dating website MeetMe.com. “Lee said once at the hotel the man removed her clothes and, despite her protests, had sex with her,” according to newschannel5.com.

The rape suspect told police that his sexual experience with Lee was consensual. But apparently it was nothing to write home about.

Lee asked police to drop the rape case four days later, on Nov. 27, claiming that she lied about the rape because “she did not enjoy (the sexual encounter) and it was bad,” according to police.

Be careful reading the original article; it has a picture of the woman who lied. My eyes! My eyes! Via Woman claimed rape because the sex was bad | The Daily Caller.

The New York City homeless man – whose gift of boots from an NYPD police officer became an online sensation last week  – is back on the streets with no shoes.

The New York Times found him Sunday night wandering barefoot in Manhattan. The paper identified him as Jeffrey Hillman, formerly of South Plainfield, N.J.

Asked about the $100 all-weather boots Officer Larry DePrimo gave him on Nov. 14, Hillman says he’s hidden them because “they are worth a lot of money.”

He says he’s grateful for the gift, but he wants “a piece of the pie” because the photo was posted online “without permission.”

“I was put on YouTube, I was put on everything without permission,” he added. “What do I get?”

When you give people free stuff, they usually don't value it as much as when they earn it themselves. Via Homeless Man Behind Viral NYPD Photo Now Shoeless Again, Demanding ‘Piece of the Pie’ | TheBlaze.com.

UPDATE: We also need to realize that the NYPD guy did not actually help the homeless man here. He doesn't appear to be better off. But the NYPD guy feels better about himself for having "done something," and *you* feel like a good person for approving of it. That's what a lot of charity ends up being: a way to make you feel better about yourself, not a way to do actual good in the world. If you want to feel better about yourself, fine, but don't fool yourself into thinking you're doing real good -- *unless* you follow up with individual persons you helped, afterwards, and see how they're doing. Real life-changing charity work is difficult to do.

Men are taught repeatedly that what women want are gestures of investment, commitment, and love.  Give her flowers, buy her an expensive dinner, write her a love letter, etc.

In fact these are things women want, but they don’t want them from just any man.  They want them from a man they are attracted to.  If you think about women’s fantasies as represented in romance novels, etc. you will see that women don’t fantasize about having a bevy of ordinary men falling over themselves to give her the most thoughtful gift.  Women fantasize about winning the heart of the dashing hero, and ultimately having him acknowledge this with tokens of his investment, commitment, and love.  These tokens give her comfort that she isn’t hopelessly pursuing an unavailable man.  She wants him to feel too good to be true, but she also wants some reassurance that she isn’t just being conned.

What men are being taught is to skip the hero part and go straight to the expression of love.  They are taught to offer comfort as a way to build attraction, instead of building attraction first and then offering comfort.  It is no wonder that this not only doesn’t work, but often fails spectacularly.

...

Women wanting a man to lead them is counterintuitive given that we live in a fully feminist age. But there is a difference between what women say and think they want in a man, and what their subconscious wants. Ignore the fundamentals of human psychology at your peril.

Emphasis mine. Read the whole thing. Via Romance 101: How to stop frustrating your wife. | Dalrock.

Here are the slides from my presentation at PHP Brazil 2012 this morning:

It’s interesting how some of those who most vociferously object to government interference in our economic affairs are most desirous of government interference in our personal ones.

I’m referring of course to social conservatives, who want to legislate our morals and values according to their views.

To be clear, I am quite sympathetic to the social conservative argument on abortion. Life, it appears to me, does begin at the moment of conception. (I can’t think of another time.) And at whatever phase of pregnancy an abortion occurs, a choice must be made between human lives, a horrible, and perforce immoral, situation.

I am less sympathetic to the social conservative position on same-sex marriage, which seems to me a civil rights issue.

But hold your tongues (and you blog comments) for a moment. Arguing my positions on these issues is not my intention here.

My point is: The social issues, whatever your position, are best dealt with outside the governmental realm.

Emphasis in original. Via Roger L. Simon » ‘Mind Your Own Beeswax!’: How Social Conservatives Can Win By Losing.

The Aura Project for PHP 5.4 is happy to announce its first release of 1.0.0 stable library packages. The packages include:

• Aura.Autoload
• Aura.Cli
• Aura.Di
• Aura.Http
• Aura.Marshal
• Aura.Router
• Aura.Signal
• Aura.Sql
• Aura.Uri
• Aura.View
• Aura.Web

In addition, we have initial beta releases of three new libarary packages:

• Aura.Filter
• Aura.Intl
• Aura.Session

Each library package is independent of all the others, so you can pick and choose which ones you want to use. With few exceptions, each class in each package has 100% PHPUnit test coverage. Each package has a full README for getting started. They all have a composer.json file and are registered at Packagist.

While the above packages are completely independent of each other, Aura also has a Framework package that binds them all together. Releasing the next version of that Framework and system skeleton is the next thing for us to do.

You can learn more about the Aura Project at http://auraphp.github.com, and please be sure to join our mailing list at http://groups.google.com/group/auraphp.

Update: I originally reported that Aura.Uri was a beta package; it is in fact stable.