“However, Alcor remains something of a shadowy organization that many within the cryonics community are suspicious of.”

Really? That’s a remarkable statement. Alcor has a long history of open communication with its members and the cryonics community in general. Among the ways Alcor does this:

• Cryonics magazine
• Alcor News emailings
• RSS feed
• conferences
• case reports
• extremely detailed website with information on finances, governance… everything
• Facebook page
• Member Forums

See: http://www.alcor.org/newatalcor.html

“Mike Darwin, a former Alcor president, has written at length on both organizations at http://www.chronopause.com, and on the whole, at least based on what I've read, Alcor comes across looking less competent, less trustworthy, and less open than CI.”

Darwin is a member of Alcor, not CI. How do you explain that? Darwin thoroughly enjoys criticizing Alcor (rightly or not) but remains a member. In a related comment, ahartnell says “from what I have read both seem to provide basically the same service”.

This is a remarkable belief. Alcor uses the most advanced cryoprotectant, M22, to perfuse whole bodies and neuros. CI uses a less advanced (and cheaper) cryoprotectant but cryoprotects ONLY THE HEAD, allowing the rest of the body to be straight frozen with massive damage. That’s especially odd since (many of) CI members are insistent about being whole body patients rather than neuros.

Also, and VERY importantly, ischemic time matters hugely. CI members can get standby and transport services from SA by paying a fee (one that makes Alcor neuros significantly LESS expensive). Otherwise, except for CI members undergoing clinical death in the Detroit area, this means long ischemic times and tremendous damage. When I was at CI’s 2011 AGM, Aschwin and Chana de Wolf presented their research findings showing the frightening damage done by extended ischemic time. They also showed that a large majority of CI patients experienced that damage. Staggeringly, no one objected, challenged them, or seem the least concerned.

You mention Mike Darwin, yet note that in Figure 11 of a recent analysis by him, he says that 48 percent of patients in Alcor's present population experienced "minimal ischemia." Of CI, Mike writes, "While this number is discouraging, it is spectacular when compared to the Cryonics Institute, where it is somewhere in the low single digits."

As to Ralph Merkle’s comments: His frank assessment of past practices contradicts the claim that Alcor is secretive. His comments were also about past practices. Unlike CI, Alcor has created robust practices and mechanisms for long-term maintenance and growth of the Patient Care Trust Fund and the Endowment Fund. Go take a look at CI’s financial reports. See how little money is available for the indefinite care and eventual revival of each patient. Also look at the returns on investment of those funds.

For those interested in comparing Alcor and CI, plenty of basic factual information is available here:

http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/faq06.html#choose

A sample of Alternet headlines from the front page:

The Supreme Court Is Ruled by Right-Wing Extremists -- Can the Court's Moderate Women Counteract Their Radical Bent?

Politicians Swallow Pink Slime to Prove Their Allegiance to Corporations.

Voter Suppression 101: How Conservatives Are Conspiring to Disenfranchise Millions of Americans

And, from Campaign for Change's About section:

"We live in a remarkable political moment: precarious, yet potentially transforming. At the Campaign for America’s Future, our daily work is to bring about the progressive transformation.

After three decades of conservative dominance in American politics, we Americans are threatened with economic disintegration, environmental devastation and international isolation."

When I tried to read the first article, a widget complaining about wolves caught in inhumane traps popped up, and I couldn't get rid of it. The article itself was pretty vague and almost bereft of examples. Take this paragraph: "4. If it's taboo, it's probably important.

The thing you are not discussing -- the elephant in the room -- has a very high probability of being the very thing that will put an end to the present era, and launch you into the next phase of your future. Worse: the longer you ignore or deny it, the more at its mercy you will ultimately be when the change does come down."

Yet she doesn't cite any examples of taboos that could be important, perhaps because she can't think of any (other than perhaps that Conservatives are less intelligent than liberals and the elderly need to be euthanized), or she can think of genuine taboos, but she is unwilling to acknowledge them for fear of offending the sensibilities of her far-left readership (like the ominous growing body of data on race and IQ differences).

The second article was even weaker than the first.

(P.S.: though I disagreed, I didn't downvote.)

I realize that this was an introductory video to their theory and initial findings, but failing to make any acknowledgement of the fact that correlation doesn't imply causation doesn't seem very rigorous of them. The previous discussion linked to in the OP has a quotation from Geoff Pullum (via roshni) which makes the same point, and then some. I was going type up the same objection to shoehorning languages into "weak FTR" and "strong FTR" boxes myself, but the quotation makes the point better than I could have. I'll repost the quotation here for ease of reference:

If English has future tense markers at all, it has at least a dozen of different ones; but simple use of the present tense is a very prominent way of referring to future time, so what do we make of that? For my part, I have no confidence at all that English is accurately described as "strong FTR". Nearly all traditional grammarians report English as having a tense system that includes a future tense, but that isn't really true; will is a modal auxiliary that has various other uses too. If the facts are shaky for English, how likely are they to be accurate on languages that have not been studied nearly so intensively?

I also worry that it is too easy to find correlations of this kind, and we don't have any idea just how easy until a concerted effort has been made to show that the spurious ones are not supportable. For example, if we took "has (vs. does not have) pharyngeal consonants", or "uses (vs. does not use) close front rounded vowels", would we find correlations there too? I have some colleagues here at the University of Edinburgh, within Simon Kirby's research group, who have run some informal experiments on the data Chen uses to see if dredging up spurious correlations of this kind is easy or hard, and so far they have found it jaw-droppingly easy. (I won't say any more, because I am in the weird position of writing unrefereed telegraphing of unrefereed and informal objections to an unrefereed and unpublished working paper, and it's all getting a bit too weird for me.)

Observing a correlation between the dominant language in a country and the saving habits of that country is well and good, but how, exactly, do they intend to control for cultural differences? How will their theories account for multilingualism or the non-native speakers of a given language in a country, particularly if they form a significant part of the population? How about economic inequality in a given country, what kind of role does that play in saving habits?

I'm not convinced. There are good reasons why strong linguistic relativity has been objected to as vehemently as it has.

So after years of denying Sapir–Whorf, have the linguists finally admitted their error, and have they begun to back away from the strong version of their beloved Universal Grammar hypothesis?

From the first article:

"The Chomskyan school also holds the belief that linguistic structures are largely innate and that what are perceived as differences between specific languages – the knowledge acquired by learning a language – are merely surface phenomena and do not affect cognitive processes that are universal to all human beings. This theory became the dominant paradigm in American linguistics from the 1960s through the 1980s and the notion of linguistic relativity fell out of favor and became even the object of ridicule."