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The same thing would've happened in Canada too, of course

Ok.

In the US, if you have a problem that needs treatment but isn't yet an emergency, you just don't get treated at all if you don't have enough money. In Canada, you do get treated, even though you might have to wait first.

This is where Health savings accounts and walkin clinics come in. Lower costs at clinics would allow people to show up and ask for assistance. Perhaps a person notices their eyesight isn't as good as it used to be so they go down to the neighborhood clinic. A Nurse Practitioner orders a blood test which shows low levels of vitamin A in the blood so the NP then gives them a shot of A and counsel on what they need to eat to raise the level.

I see. So, apparently when you say "free market", you don't just mean getting rid of tax breaks - you want to get rid of every regulation and let anyone practice medicine if they feel like it.

What I want is for everyone to have the same tax benefits that employees and their employers have now. Even employers like McDonald's may pay employees a dollar an hour more so that full time workers could pay insurance on their own, and save money in the process. As for getting rid of regulations, yes some can be eliminated, such as the ban on midwives. If nothing else, though I oppose it, they can be licensed after passing an exam.

Sounds like a great plan. I can't wait for the opportunity to go to my local barber for a good old-fashioned bleeding, instead of having to go to one of those phony "MDs" who want to charge me for a bunch of useless tests and dangerous anesthetic. If it was good enough for my great-great-great-grandfather, it's good enough for me!

Ah, that's what it's all about, you're trolling.

I think if you invent drugs, you should be able to charge for them,' he said, adding with a shrug: 'That may seem radical.

yes this is radical. holding up this kind of neoliberal ideology costs the live of several million people/year. (10 million are starving each year). million of death just to be able to cling to some stupid ideology.

property is exclusion.

Society confronts the simple fact that when everyone can possess every intellectual work of beauty and utility--reaping all the human value of every increase of knowledge--at the same cost that any one person can possess them, it is no longer moral to exclude. If Rome possessed the power to feed everyone amply at no greater cost than that of Caesar's own table, the people would sweep Caesar violently away if anyone were left to starve. But the bourgeois system of ownership demands that knowledge and culture be rationed by the ability to pay.
--Eben Moglen dotCommunist Manifesto

http://eesc.columbia.edu/courses/ees/climate/labs/vostok/

OK, I built a simple model using the data from the ice cores from this website. The model says with 99.9% certainty that in the next 5000 years we will experience an ice age.

Do I trust my own model? No, I trust it as much as the other models I disputed before. And I although I will state this a million times here on out: No one really understands how CO2 effects global climate.

As for the physics vs. data mining, are you kidding? I am disputing the physics behind these models. I do question whether these models were created correctly, but even if I assume they are, they are incorrect because they are based on what I have shown to be a very weak if not false premise. I am disputing trusting statistics because we do not understand our climate enough to draw conclusions on what our impact on the Earth is going to be. Yes, CO2 has a certain effect on the earth's climate. What is that effect? There are so many other factors that you can not even begin to tell me that simply making a model based on the premise that the only changes are going to be more greenhouse gases can be correct in any manner. I provided studies that showed a reverse correlation in co2 and the earth's climate.... So now you argue that I am wrong simply because experiments in labortories say otherwise? We are talking climate here, not a laboratory where everything is controlled. I am not disputing CO2 as a greenhouse gas. I am not disputing the greenhouse effect in general. But obviously I must be an idiot if I don't believe in global warming, so go figure.

I can also argue about how statistics confuse science just as much as it helps it, but thats a long argument. You can't take statistics and take it for the gospel truth until you unravel the methods used. This is why statistics by themselves mean zilch. The scientific method uses statistics very carefully, and although its a very useful tool, its not something to take as basis simply because someone says "With this degree of confidence". And extrapolation...Don't even get me started on how wrong I have been with modeling sometimes trying this. And here we have people doing it regularly...

"The models that really get me are the ones that predict the weather 100 years from now based on 100 years worth of data."

Seriously, you have to know I mispoke there. Substitute climate for weather and come back. No I didn't confuse weather with climate. I simply said weather when I meant to say climate.

As for your analogy, try again. Its more like starting from the rock at location X not knowing the direction its flying, the gravity involved, and the initial velocity and attempting to predict its location in the next second. There are too many contradictory studies on CO2 and its effect on the earth's climate to draw a conclusion in any direction even assuming the only constant is going to be an increase in greenhouse gases...

You can predict the effect CO2 has based on sound science, but why do studies show climate changing based on other factors? And why in the earth's past is there a history of increased co2 in the atmosphere prior to ice ages? How about my model again? Should I show you why an increase in CO2 lead to the ice age....well duh I don't know why....and apperantly neither do the scientists who are creating the global warming models.

Gahh, screwed up the second link, sorry. https://mice.cs.columbia.edu/getTechreport.php?techreportID=483 (PDF).

Gonna make another post sorry, but why not just use modern self-help? Nothing wrong with that and I was on a self-help kick for a long time myself (especially after my divorce), but the bible simply contains the nuggets of everything we really need to live life IMO. I always thought it's better to learn C before C++ or Java. Or it's better to understand linux/unix before windows, but maybe that's just me. I want to learn assembly one day for the hell of it and finally mess with "linux from scratch" or something. I even bought "regular expressions" and am working through it for a 2nd time. Windows people just don't get the power of the shell. And beyond that, how many here can make a cat5 patch cord or tone-out a line? I'd rather know how to configure a router before building a webpage and I'd like to understand how to build a basic datacenter before using active directory. All of these "seminal" things are important if one really wants to 'get' tech. And that's the bible to me -- seminal. Sure, Carnegie is awesome. Read both his books (how to win friensd/how to stop worrying), but Christ said it best, "do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself." Carnegie even uses the bible, and Christ's words, copiously....

Lewis points out that the bible is the epidomy of all religious documents. It is a refinement of them all. Confucious says, "Never do to others what you would not like them to do to you." Christ improves upon this with 'The Golden Rule', "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you." So, the bible is linux, c or assembly to modern self-helps (windows -- haha, I'm cracking myself here, but serious too).

Check out Lewis's list of evidence of The Tao -- of "the story" I call it: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/lewis/abolition4.htm

I really, really digress now, but here's The Abolition of Man online. One of my fav books of all time:

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/lewis/abolition1.htm#1

Gonna make another post sorry, but why not just use modern self-help? Nothing wrong with that and I was on a self-help kick for a long time myself (especially after my divorce), but the bible simply contains the nuggets of everything we really need to live life IMO. I always thought it's better to learn C before C++ or Java. Or it's better to understand linux/unix before windows, but maybe that's just me. I want to learn assembly one day for the hell of it and finally mess with "linux from scratch" or something. I even bought "regular expressions" and am working through it for a 2nd time. Windows people just don't get the power of the shell. And beyond that, how many here can make a cat5 patch cord or tone-out a line? I'd rather know how to configure a router before building a webpage and I'd like to understand how to build a basic datacenter before using active directory. All of these "seminal" things are important if one really wants to 'get' tech. And that's the bible to me -- seminal. Sure, Carnegie is awesome. Read both his books (how to win friensd/how to stop worrying), but Christ said it best, "do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself." Carnegie even uses the bible, and Christ's words, copiously....

Lewis points out that the bible is the epidomy of all religious documents. It is a refinement of them all. Confucious says, "Never do to others what you would not like them to do to you." Christ improves upon this with 'The Golden Rule', "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you." So, the bible is linux, c or assembly to modern self-helps (windows -- haha, I'm cracking myself here, but serious too).

Check out Lewis's list of evidence of The Tao -- of "the story" I call it: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/lewis/abolition4.htm

I really, really digress now, but here's The Abolition of Man online. One of my fav books of all time:

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/lewis/abolition1.htm#1

Google has done a great job in searching raw free-text data. However, healthcare data is a different beast. The sheer number of datatypes is mind-boggling -- the number of different labs, drug classes, diseases etc that can get coded in patient records runs in to millions. So over the years healthcare databases have been constructed differently - they follow an EAV (Entity Attribute Value) representation, which means that the patient databases are generally just ONE BIG TABLE! Here is the database schema used at New York Presby. Schema - all past 20 years patient data is stored in one table! oh yeah.. DB2 Baby!

Essentially all data/knowledge complexity is present in the Ontology/Terminology (such as SNOMED or LOINC) and the patient data itself instantiates from these.

Also doing NLP over medical notes is a difficult problem requiring years of tuning and domain knowledge to construct one -- which again is so specific to a given institution or region that it just does not work elsewhere.

Even though they pulled out, infections were inevitable.

Depending on your definition of "better-than-nature", we can already do this. If better is more efficient, for instance. If you mean economical compared with fossil gasoline, then we're not there. Maybe with further technological development and a price on carbon emissions. This concept was discussed a bit on slashdot last month.

The EdGCM project has wrapped a NASA global climate model (GCM) in a GUI (OS X and Win). You can add CO2 or turn the sun down by a few percent all with a checkbox and a slider. Supercomputers and advanced FORTRAN programmers are no longer necessary to run your own GCM.

Targeted to high school and undergraduate levels. Includes lesson plans, sample homework assignments, and documentation about how it meets the education standards.

Disclaimer: I'm the project developer.

Everyone gets those "Phantom Vibrations", but try again - they're just muscle memory. [citation: http://jscms.jrn.columbia.edu/cns/2005-05-03/orso-phantomvibes ]

The interference with speakers is caused by...wait for it... radio waves.

Those things that are engulfing all of us, all the time, in varying intensities. Naturally produced or not.

Just because you do not understand the world around you, doesn't mean you must be fearful of it.

The direct alternative to biofuels that you speak of, which does not depend on growing biomass, was the topic of a recent Slashdot discussion (the specific Sandia technology), and I wrote a response about it and that there are other means of achieving the same end. It is definitely a good idea to cut out the biomass and eliminate all of the associated environmental issues, land area constraints, and greenhouse gas issues that are the topic of this discussion.

The journal articles that this current discussion refers to (regarding "biofuels make greenhouse gases worse") were both made available in Science a few of days ago: one, two, and they were also discussed in the New York Times.

The direct alternative to biofuels that you speak of, which does not depend on growing biomass, was the topic of a recent Slashdot discussion (the specific Sandia technology), and I wrote a response about it and that there are other means of achieving the same end. It is definitely a good idea to cut out the biomass and eliminate all of the associated environmental issues, land area constraints, and greenhouse gas issues that are the topic of this discussion.

The journal articles that this current discussion refers to (regarding "biofuels make greenhouse gases worse") were both made available in Science a few of days ago: one, two, and they were also discussed in the New York Times.

Columbia's Language Acquisition and Development lab is a good place to start.

http://www.columbia.edu/~as1038/

A paper by Ann Senghas discusses the age effects of acquisition and development that we're talking about (in the context of Nicaraguan Sign Lanugage. Technical, but good.

http://www.columbia.edu/~as1038/pdf/Senghas1995a.pdf

Columbia's Language Acquisition and Development lab is a good place to start.

http://www.columbia.edu/~as1038/

A paper by Ann Senghas discusses the age effects of acquisition and development that we're talking about (in the context of Nicaraguan Sign Lanugage. Technical, but good.

http://www.columbia.edu/~as1038/pdf/Senghas1995a.pdf

Its interesting that this issue is not brought up and discussed more. I understand your point of view about the kludginess of NATs, but as a architect for a large networking company, having worked with scores and scores of corporate networks all over the world, my experience is that NATs are standard in the corporate world, and whether that comes from ignorance or legitimate security concerns is an interesting discussion, but lets not forget the practical reality of the observation.

The fact of the matter is that, currently, NATs are here and they have to be dealt with. Protocols developed long ago, such as FTP, which used embedded IP addresses and separate control connections have been enormous challenges in the networking industry. I have written NAT proxies that support FTP properly, and I can tell you, it is a major pain to get it right, especially when you deal with thousands of concurrent connections churning through the port numbers. *sigh*. So, single connection protocols such as ssh/scp or http cause much less trouble and that is nicer for the networking folks to work with.

In the last decade, a lot of media protocols have become very popular, but unfortunately, in many cases the designers of these protocols simply ignored the issue of NATs. While it is fine to climb up to the top of the ivory tower and declare NATs are bad and your protocol should not be bothered with them, please do not be surprised to hear that hundreds of expensive networking software engineers in scores of different networking companies have to read a 70 page Masters Thesis to understand how to parse your protocol, and of course, then write and maintain tricky, mission critical network protocol software for years on end to deal with it properly. http://www.cs.columbia.edu/sip/drafts/Ther0005_SIP.pdf [columbia.edu]

Is it any wonder SIP has grown much slower than it should have given the underlying wonderful flexibility of the higher level semantics? But no, a budding internet phone service provider ends up buying and setting up complex and expensive SIP NAT traversal devices (google that phrase) just to get going. I suppose protocol researchers do not spend a lot of time working with corporate networks. Unfortunately, the cost of this ignorance has been enormous. Fortunately for most, it was swallowed by large networking companies who have not complained enough perhaps.

By the way, protocol researchers should look at SCTP as the basis for signaling protocols. It is based on IP and is an alternative to TCP and UDP see http://www.isoc.org/briefings/017/ [isoc.org] , and every operating system is on board ... except Microsoft, of course. But there is a standard 3rd party library available ala winsock. Perhaps, just as they hated winsock and the internet (and still do, IMHO) until it became too popular to ignore, perhaps so it will be with SCTP.

--
I do not want to write forever, but reviving the question from my first paragraph, it is interesting to think about whether corporations will be comfortable giving up the anonymity and security benefits (if only illusionary) of their NATs when they are presented with the opportunity to provide an unlimited number of cheap, routable IPv6 addresses to their employees. I honestly have no idea. It would make my job easier, but surfing slashdot with my personal corporate IP address would make it hard for me to be ... an Anonymous Coward

Well I'm happy to put my PhD against theirs. This link pretty much explains how I feel about this movie: http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=83

Perhaps there are problems with how polls are conducted. This statistician's Jan 9 blog entry points out that pollsters routinely throw out the results of the interviews with people they consider to be unlikely voters. How do they determine likelihood? ... by some formula. Thinking about it, polls are usually reported as "XY.z% of likely voters favor Sen. Lardbottom." Gelman suggests that Obama may never have actually been ahead among all voters only among the "likely" voters. Who watches the watchers?

...but the legal threats are too much for me to handle. I live in an apartment complex with dozens of college students, and I don't want to be threatened by Viacom when someone downloads video on my network (as has happened to others I know).
However, there are other ways to support the notion of universal, free wifi access that seem more effective. One example is Eben Moglen's experiment to undermine Starbucks's "pay ridiculous amounts of $ for our wifi" scheme, outlined in his Die Gedanken Sind Frei speech. Seems like you could get Starbucks clientele themselves to pitch in for open wifi networks within range of the coffee shop, rather than pay Starbucks (especially if you flyered out front about the benefits). It probably wouldn't be difficult to get neighboring businesses behind it either, since they'd be able to host a wireless network in their own business for free (that is, if you got enough donations).

Plastic can be organically produced from corn and citrus oil, possibly even other sources. That makes it at least a potentially renewable resource. Copper is a finite one, there's only so much of it to dig up out of the ground.

If we recycled it better than we do now, it wouldn't be as a big a concern... but I know several people who throw away the last 60 or so feet on a 1000' spool of CAT5 because they're too lazy to be bothered to use it.

Printers? For drivers for a range of printers.

Try here

http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/

I am working on a similar process that synthesizes hydrocarbon fuels from carbon dioxide, water, and non-fossil energy (could be solar) and should eventually have some publications out about this. There are several ways to go about this. But first, let me comment on some of the comments:

Regarding the "They're leaving the production of actual liquid fuel to other people ... all this thing does right now is produce carbon monoxide." comment, reducing CO2 to CO is the hardest part of the process. Once you have concentrated CO, you can follow the coal-to-liquids processes and water-gas shift (CO + H2O => CO2 + H2) to get hydrogen and run the syngas (CO + H2 mixture) into Fischer-Tropsch reactors. They've been doing this for 50 years in South Africa to produce synthetic diesel.

Regarding the "Renewable not!" comment and using power-plant flue gas CO2 as the input to this process, this would indeed not be sustainable. However, if industrial capture of CO2 from the air is available, one can fully close the loop and have a sustainable hydrocarbon fuel cycle. Flue gas CO2 could be a good option in the short term, however. For instance, if solar and other nearly-carbon-free energy sources begin to rapidly take over, coal plants will not immediately be shut down. Other CO2-emitting industrial plants such as aluminum smelters, etc, will also have CO2 emissions to deal with, and this form of using it to store non-fossil energy by recycling it once as a liquid fuel would be worthwhile. One comment discussed this transition well.

Related, other comments say "why not just use the solar energy to produce electricity". These intermittent resources need storage, and liquid fuel storage is not a bad method (and very versatile). Others responded about storage.

So, processes like this are a way to store non-fossil energy as a convenient energy-dense fuel which can be used in our existing petroleum fuel infrastructure and vehicles (as opposed to hydrogen and batteries). Biofuels can do the same, and there are many comments above ("I saw something like this... it's called a tree") mentioning biofuels and how this process replicates it with much more complexity; indeed you could call this whole process including the Fischer-Tropsch fuel synthesis "artificial photosynthesis". However, this process cuts out the middle-man of the plant in biofuels processes, which has much lower sunlight-to-fuel efficiency than industrial solar collectors (PV or thermal) and requires a lot of fertilizers and pesticides to boost growth rate. Such land- and resource-intensive agriculture is not sustainable in its current form and may not ever be on the scale we will need it.

TFA discusses a solar-heat-driven thermochemical process that has potential. A somewhat similar solar-heat thermolytic process splits CO2 directly at higher temperatures. There are many other methods of accomplishing this that are at different levels of development and being researched, including electrochemical (pdf link1, pdf link2), photoelectrochemical, photo(bio)chemical...

I am working on a similar process that synthesizes hydrocarbon fuels from carbon dioxide, water, and non-fossil energy (could be solar) and should eventually have some publications out about this. There are several ways to go about this. But first, let me comment on some of the comments:

Regarding the "They're leaving the production of actual liquid fuel to other people ... all this thing does right now is produce carbon monoxide." comment, reducing CO2 to CO is the hardest part of the process. Once you have concentrated CO, you can follow the coal-to-liquids processes and water-gas shift (CO + H2O => CO2 + H2) to get hydrogen and run the syngas (CO + H2 mixture) into Fischer-Tropsch reactors. They've been doing this for 50 years in South Africa to produce synthetic diesel.

Regarding the "Renewable not!" comment and using power-plant flue gas CO2 as the input to this process, this would indeed not be sustainable. However, if industrial capture of CO2 from the air is available, one can fully close the loop and have a sustainable hydrocarbon fuel cycle. Flue gas CO2 could be a good option in the short term, however. For instance, if solar and other nearly-carbon-free energy sources begin to rapidly take over, coal plants will not immediately be shut down. Other CO2-emitting industrial plants such as aluminum smelters, etc, will also have CO2 emissions to deal with, and this form of using it to store non-fossil energy by recycling it once as a liquid fuel would be worthwhile. One comment discussed this transition well.

Related, other comments say "why not just use the solar energy to produce electricity". These intermittent resources need storage, and liquid fuel storage is not a bad method (and very versatile). Others responded about storage.

So, processes like this are a way to store non-fossil energy as a convenient energy-dense fuel which can be used in our existing petroleum fuel infrastructure and vehicles (as opposed to hydrogen and batteries). Biofuels can do the same, and there are many comments above ("I saw something like this... it's called a tree") mentioning biofuels and how this process replicates it with much more complexity; indeed you could call this whole process including the Fischer-Tropsch fuel synthesis "artificial photosynthesis". However, this process cuts out the middle-man of the plant in biofuels processes, which has much lower sunlight-to-fuel efficiency than industrial solar collectors (PV or thermal) and requires a lot of fertilizers and pesticides to boost growth rate. Such land- and resource-intensive agriculture is not sustainable in its current form and may not ever be on the scale we will need it.

TFA discusses a solar-heat-driven thermochemical process that has potential. A somewhat similar solar-heat thermolytic process splits CO2 directly at higher temperatures. There are many other methods of accomplishing this that are at different levels of development and being researched, including electrochemical (pdf link1, pdf link2), photoelectrochemical, photo(bio)chemical...

Its interesting that this issue is not brought up and discussed more. I understand your point of view about the kludginess of NATs, but as a architect for a large networking company, having worked with scores and scores of corporate networks all over the world, my experience is that NATs are standard in the corporate world, and whether that comes from ignorance or legitimate security concerns is an interesting discussion, but lets not forget the practical reality of the observation.

The fact of the matter is that, currently, NATs are here and they have to be dealt with. Protocols developed long ago, such as FTP, which used embedded IP addresses and separate control connections have been enormous challenges in the networking industry. I have written NAT proxies that support FTP properly, and I can tell you, it is a major pain to get it right, especially when you deal with thousands of concurrent connections churning through the port numbers. *sigh*. So, single connection protocols such as ssh/scp or http cause much less trouble and that is nicer for the networking folks to work with.

In the last decade, a lot of media protocols have become very popular, but unfortunately, in many cases the designers of these protocols simply ignored the issue of NATs. While it is fine to climb up to the top of the ivory tower and declare NATs are bad and your protocol should not be bothered with them, please do not be surprised to hear that hundreds of expensive networking software engineers in scores of different networking companies have to read a 70 page Masters Thesis to understand how to parse your protocol, and of course, then write and maintain tricky, mission critical network protocol software for years on end to deal with it properly. http://www.cs.columbia.edu/sip/drafts/Ther0005_SIP.pdf

Is it any wonder SIP has grown much slower than it should have given the underlying wonderful flexibility of the higher level semantics? But no, a budding internet phone service provider ends up buying and setting up complex and expensive SIP NAT traversal devices (google that phrase) just to get going. I suppose protocol researchers do not spend a lot of time working with corporate networks. Unfortunately, the cost of this ignorance has been enormous. Fortunately for most, it was swallowed by large networking companies who have not complained enough perhaps.

By the way, protocol researchers should look at SCTP as the basis for signaling protocols. It is based on IP and is an alternative to TCP and UDP see http://www.isoc.org/briefings/017/ , and every operating system is on board ... except Microsoft, of course. But there is a standard 3rd party library available ala winsock. Perhaps, just as they hated winsock and the internet (and still do, IMHO) until it became too popular to ignore, perhaps so it will be with SCTP.

--
I do not want to write forever, but reviving the question from my first paragraph, it is interesting to think about whether corporations will be comfortable giving up the anonymity and security benefits (if only illusionary) of their NATs when they are presented with the opportunity to provide an unlimited number of cheap, routable IPv6 addresses to their employees. I honestly have no idea. It would make my job easier, but surfing slashdot with my personal corporate IP address would make it hard for me to be ... an Anonymous Coward

I will just dump a mess of links from an old E-mail I did on this some time ago. It's all good stuff, Solar two in Mojave was also molten salt based. I knew someone who bought it after it failed and got to explore it before it was partly dismantled.

---------

Solar two was a flat mirror array.

Search google image search with
            "solar two" Mojave

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=yermo,+ca&ie=UTF8&ll=34.871919,-116.83416&spn=0.005915,0.010042&t=h&z=17&om=1

Take the link above and zoom out, just below and to the right is a Parabolic glass mirrors plant

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Two

http://www.powerfromthesun.net/Chapter10/Chapter10new.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Solar_Two_2003.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Solar_Two_Heliostat.jpg

http://theothersolar.com/?m=200702

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/1101-10.htm

http://www.global-greenhouse-warming.com/solar-central-power-towers.html

http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/edu/dees/U4735/projections/pitman/solar.elec.jpg

http://fixedreference.org/2006-Wikipedia-CD-Selection/wp/s/Solar_power.htm
(search for "Solar two")

http://www.reia-nm.org/HTML_Docs/Solar_Thermal_Electrical.html

http://greatgreengadgets.com/gadgets/category/solar/

http://www.answers.com/topic/solar-thermal-energy

http://blogs.business2.com/greenwombat/2006/week44/index.html

Excellent page on many technologies - Sorry it's in Spanish.
      http://g3nergy.blogspot.com/2006_11_01_archive.html
      Search for "Australia to Build 154 MW Solar Energy Plant"
      This one is identical in design to the one in the Mojave Dessert here.

http://ludb.clui.org/ex/i/CA4965/ Abandoned Solar Power Plant

Stephen Mitchell Yeates had the first telephone call where voice could be distinguished. More than 10 years before Bell claimed the same.

http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/ad+hominem

As for the definition of the word "racist": There are only a tiny handful of peoples who are capable of producing a man who can win a Fields Medal or a Nobel Prize in Physics: Largely they are Caucasians [to include the Ashkenazim & the Lebanese Christians], Pacific Rim Asians, and [only] the very highest castes from the Indian Subcontinent; conversely, the finals of the 100 meter dash at the Olympics will always consist almost entirely of men who are descended from the tribes of West Africa [or at least the finals would consist almost entirely of such men if national quotas didn't unfairly and unnaturally limit and restrict the participants at the Olympics].

No one - not even the most ardent marxist academic - bothers to try to convince himself otherwise anymore.

But, of course, the modern definition of "racist" does not identify, as the villain, he who notices these differences - we all notice them - but rather the word "racist" has come to apply to anyone who has the temerity [or foolhardiness] to verbalize the observation.

On the other hand, that's not what the word "racist" is supposed to mean: A racist is supposed to be someone who believes that a government should enforce [with the barrel of a gun] an agenda which:

1) Involves seizing the private property of dis-favored races.

2) Involves setting aside educational appointments and business opportunities for favored races.

3) Involves denying taxpayer-subsidized goodies to dis-favored races.

4) Involves the racialization of criminal arrests, prosecutions, and convictions.

5) Involves the seizure of entire continents from dis-favored races.

6) Involves the enslavement of dis-favored races.

7) Involves the slaughter of dis-favored races.

Etc etc etc.

So it's impossible for any classical liberal - one who believes that men should be judged not by the color of their skin, but by rather the content of their character, and who believes that governments, and their gun barrels, really ought not exist in the first place - it is impossible for him to be a "racist" within the bounds of any meaning which that word was intended to connote.

But, again, as I have said over and over in this little conversation of ours: NONE OF THE SEMANTIC DISTINCTIONS ARE OF ANY IMPORTANCE WHATSOEVER.

What is important is the underlying truth of the matter: Barring some unforseen tragedy [your being struck by lightning, etc], YOU WILL LIVE TO EXPERIENCE THE IMMINENT TRAGEDY [& CATASTROPHE] OF DYSGENIC FERTILITY.

In the meantime, perform your very small - yet almost infinitely important - role in making the future a better place for us all [both we who are already born, and those of us who are yet-to-be-born]: Go find the smartest girl yo

The computer speed varied based on what operation has been done. According to the Columbia 650 page, the machine could do addition and subtraction in 0.4 Msec, which translates into 2.5kHz. Division was the slowest operation, at 25 Msec, which is 40Hz.

Jim: As a Jew, who is sensitive about misuse of references to the holocaust, I found no problem with your metaphor... nor to your response to the CEO...except for the reference to "creation"!

You've got to love that 'Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb' reference at http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/nsam-160/pal.html

Hint: Last line...

Types of PALs
There have been a number of different types of PALs used over the years.

Combination lock
        The earliest control mechanism was a three-digit combination lock. Later versions were four-digit locks designed to accommodate split-knowledge, where two different individuals could each have half the key. The combination lock can do different things. Some block the volume into which firing components must be inserted, others block electrical circuits, while still others prevent access to the fuzing and arming mechanisms.

These locks were in use at least as recently as 1987. In 1981 -- almost 20 years after PALs were invented -- about half of the U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe were still protected by mechanical locks [SF87].
CAT A
        CAT A PALs, intended for use on missiles, were electromechanical switches. The arming input was a 4-digit decimal number. (Some sources say it was a 5-digit number.) Crews used a portable electronic device that plugged into the weapon to arm it.
CAT B
        The CAT B PAL, used on bombs, was similar in spirit to the CAT A, but used fewer wires. This permitted remote control of the PAL from an airplane cockpit. With the CAT B, it is also possible to check the code, relock the weapon, or rekey it. Later models of the CAT B included a limited-try feature, rekeying, and a code-controlled lock.
CAT C
        The CAT C PAL accepts 6-digit keys. A limited-try feature disables the bomb if too many incorrect keys are entered. Most references omit the CAT C. It may just be a later model of the CAT B.
CAT D
        The CAT D PAL accepts 6-digit keys. A given PAL can accept a number of different keys, permitting different groups of weapons to be unlocked with one transmission. Some keys are used for training; others are used to disarm the weapon or to disable it. One source [CAH84] suggests that PAL codes can also be used to vary the yield on some weapons. There are a number of selectable mechanisms to disable the bomb. In addition, there are "violent or nonviolent methods for destroying the warhead or making it irreparably nonfunctional" [C87c]. (One report, which I have not yet seen confirmed in the literature, is that the violent option involves a shaped charge which destroys the symmetry of the pit. It is thus no longer able to fission until it has been remachined -- and machining plutonium is non-trivial.) One reference suggests that there is a remote disable option on some PALs.
CAT F
        The CAT F PAL appears to be similar to the CAT D, but it accepts a 12-digit key.

The 1984 price for a CAT D PAL was $50,000 [CAH84].

I haven't yet found anything about setting C.R.M.-114 discriminators to "FGD 135", let alone "OPE"...

That's because the "rogue insider" in the U.S. was never really the threat that PALs were designed to protect against. Or at least, they weren't the top priority. If you read the paper on PALs and the declassified memos that it links to, the real perceived threat were NATO allies.

The reason PALs were developed was mostly for forward-deployed weapons, particularly those in the hands of other armed forces besides the U.S.'s. The idea was to keep the Greeks from nuking the Turks, or vice versa, using U.S.-supplied nuclear weapons. (Interestingly, France in the early 60s was also thought to be a loose cannon.) Also, it was to keep weapons in parts of Eastern Europe that would probably be overrun by the Soviets during an invasion from being able to be turned around and used against the West.

Nuclear weapons in silos in North Dakota, where the only access was (theoretically) by very carefully vetted personnel, probably benefited the least from PALs, and it's not surprising that the military saw them more as an impediment there. On forward-deployed weapons, you could get the military to buy into such a system, because it means that you can be more aggressive in handing them out and positioning them; in the U.S., from the military perspective, they're just one more thing to have to worry about going wrong when you have 10 minutes to get the missiles in the air before you get vaporized.

http://www.scienceblog.com/community/older/2000/B/200001082.html
http://www.dhs.vic.gov.au/humanservicesnews/may06/study.htm
http://www.goaskalice.columbia.edu/0791.html
http://209.189.226.235/stories/080107/health_20070801002.php

The jury is out on emphysema, but there is no question that smoking marijuana (or probably anything else) is harmful to your lungs.

Also the article used the phrase 'non-toxic alternative to chemotherapy'. That is bullshit. For a drug to treat cancer it must be at toxic to at least cancer cells. And if a drug is used to treat cancer it is by definition chemotherapy.

Hi again.

I wholeheartedly agree that computational neuroscience is an exciting field with lots of potential. Indeed, as you assumed in your previous post, "if you can build [i.e. model mathematically] it, then you know it"; and that certainly applies to the field.

Neural network modeling (the mathematical theory part of this issue) are a bottom-up approach, while experimental neuroscience as a top-down approach. The former tries to figure out the forest by examining possible trees and groups of possible trees, and the latter tries to figure out the tree by examining extant forests. I'm not sure where you are in your course of learning, but I would identify 3 broad areas that I think you could probably (surprisingly enough) treat sequentially with some success:

1) A broad and hopefully moderately deep understanding of neural network theory including topologies and learning techniques
Read lots, play lots with both *pen/paper* and computer programming application. "Parallel Distributed Processing" by McClelland and Rumelhart is a cornerstone and I think the the two volumes' software is available on their site. Yes, it's a bit of a misnomer because their ideas are not really what the field of computer science would consider either "parallel" or "distributed", and the physiological speculation is a bit dated in a fast-moving field, but the basics are there. You'll need tons of "tools" to work with, from simple sequential networks to more complex recurrent networks, pattern recognition techniques, and thus a healthy tolerance for the precise mathematical analysis of these problems. For someone versed in classical computer hardware, there's the occasional analogy with combinatoric circuits, sequential circuits, and the like (but not so much with Von Neumann's memory); just don't go overboard.

2) With the basics in hand, time to look at the behaviors people have observed, and also the models people are working on. This is broad enough that there is always someone coming up with previously unexplored arrangements of the basic theories, even if the topological arrangements of their networks are relatively similar. You seem to be somewhere in (1) and (2) at the same time, which is fine and a more interesting way of learning, but I suspect the stereotype of computational neuroscientists as "scruffy" comes from people running before they can walk, or running without bothering to tie their shoelaces. With regard to your specific question, I think it is asked on new legs, and you would be interested in this if you are comfortable with its underpinnings and style:
"Cascade Models of Synaptically Stored Memories" (Fusi/Drew/Abbott)
I asked google and this is an easy place to read it (not my site):
http://neurotheory.columbia.edu/~larry/FusiNeuron05.pdf
There are other relevant (or at least interesting) things in that directory.

3) Cognitive neuroscience. It's a bit more experimental/observational than the other, theoretical, areas. For my little ternary classification, I'm grouping the extremely wide field of computational linguistics in here instead of in (2) because it has a particularly direct association with the observed phenomenon of natural language. Behavioral and physiological study, especially of non-healthy or damaged/lesioned brains is of course not really the same thing as the modeling you're interested in (we are the same in that regard, incidentally).

Computational linguistics (and machine learning/AI in general) requires such breadth and depth of knowledge that it's (IMO) the most interesting aspect of cognition after logic itself; it encompasses logic, and other neat things. There is TONS of relevant reading here, though it's only sort of browsable:
http://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/
You'll find one paper that interests you, exhaust every leaf in its citation tree (web), and have enough ideas to jump to any other tree. It's enough for serious academic study, and way more than you'll need to get your feet wet.

Good luck and happy reading, programming, and whatever else you decide.

Serious mining can move serious amounts of material in a short time, and if the moon became Earth's primary source of material for power, I suspect we'd make a measurable impact within decades.

You can already run a climate model on your run-of-the-mill laptop: http://edgcm.columbia.edu/

Of course, it is a 10 year old climate model, but that is about right because a modern laptop is equivalent in to a 10 year old super computer. And it is all relative... The climate models today are limited in resolution by the supercomputers (don't run anything that takes more than 3 months) and next years supercomputer development will in part be driven by the climate modeler requests and desires for more hardware.

Disclaimer: I'm the EdGCM developer.

I've forgotten who said it, but a while "supercomputer" is a relative term, it always costs at least 2 million dollars. My first supercomputer http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/ibm709.html cost $2.6M [in 1960 dollars]. It was a 5 KFLOP system with a megabyte of memory.

I don't accept that lawyers working for someone else have my best interests at heart, and I also don't presume that a court would interpret clear English in the same way that I would.

Who wrote the GPL3? Gosh; lawyers! And that lawyer is working for the FSF; as I don't work for them, well, that's a lawyer working from someone else. So you're abandoning the GPL?

These guys spent decades and millions of dollars of their own and investors' money creating this machine. When they get it to market, General Electric and Hitachi just steals the idea and markets it. Pretty much destroying the company that was started by the inventors. They then sued over another decade or so finally getting a settlement. IF they just sat back, others would have profited off of their work. That's an injustice if I've ever seen one!

Without the inventor with the hopes of making it big and getting a return to their investors, they WILL BE NO INCENTIVE TO INNOVATE. Some of the MRI Story. (Wikipedia has some of the business stuff wrong)

more history

I don't care about the very few patent trolls or whatever, I know there's abuse, but we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bath water.

http://www.columbia.edu/~ss957/whenchoice.html

[The hotter the field of research the more likely its published findings should be viewed skeptically, he determined.] ...
[No one knows how much shoddy research is out there.]


I'm not sure what the point of this article is besides fear mongering. The goal of most scientific research is to prove a set of assertions - and sure this set may not be fully encompassing or comprehensive - but you've got a model and you try see what fits - and its not always exact.

Take for example the recent debacle /wrt Steve McIntyre and climateaudit.org. The point was "NASA's stats and calcs are wrong." This started an anti-global warming fiesta and many neoconservatives/anti-Dole hopped on the bandwagon to discount, rather than disprove, McIntyre's findings. NASA Hansen responded with http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/realdeal.16aug20074.pdf pointing out that the error was insignificant in overall trending and a correction was posted. But very little media attention was given to that.

So now I see a new wave of WSJ luddites missing the point.

(Oh please tag this as a troll, I've bashed WSJ again.)

I'm not a parent, but here's what I am thinking: We all have limited time. Everything we can do has a different priority or importance. So, we have to invest our time in whatever has the highest priority or return on investment (ROI). If educating your teenager about sexually transmitted diseases has a ROI of 100, then what is the ROI of controlling their access to online pornography at home? 1? 5? 10? Perhaps 15 at the maximum? If my gut feeling regarding these numbers is correct, then this means that the parent should first educate the teenager about STDs, then manage access to pornography, or at least do both at the same time (if you believe access to pornography ought to be managed), but surely not first deal with the pornography and later (or worse, never) with the STDs. There are some sites with information on educating teenagers on sexual issues, such as Scarleteen and places where your teenager can ask questions and get answers rom people who probably know much more than you, such as GoAskAlice.

Because that question doesn't seem to exclude non-commercial, non-graphical applications, or specify particular operating systems, my response might be painfully boring (and just as painfully obvious) to some people, but I would have to say the original Berkeley vi and, of course, c-kermit. Sorry vim people, but with GNU Emacs available for extensibility, I honestly don't know why you would want to bloat something as lean, mean and beautiful as vi.

Neither the GPL nor any other piece of paper constitutes a contract without more. A "contract" is the total legal obligations of the parties arising out of their agreement as enforced in law. Papers or digital records are neither agreements, nor obligations. [..] How the license is used in the context of a particular transaction controls whether it creates or becomes part of a contract.

Repost of my AC post:

Lots of data at NCDC.

Simple interactive Java climate model JCM5.

3D general circulation model EdGCM (based on NASA GISS Model II, state of the art in 1983 and what James Hansen himself used in his famous 1988 testimony to Congress).

For more modern and advanced models ... they're not so easy for laymen to run themselves, but ...

There are a variety of Earth System Models of Intermediate Complexity (EMICs) which are not fully 3D models but represent a lot of physics and don't require a supercomputer. One such is UVic; there are many more (here).

You can even get full blown state of the art GCMs which run on supercomputers, like NASA GISS Model E or NCAR CCSM, but expect to run them for most of a year to get any kind of result ...