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More citations:

http://awesci.com/the-astonish...

http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgag...

But the crooks are safe. They know very well that if they smear their faces with lemon juice, the cameras can't see their faces and they can't be caught.

burglars can then utilize some pretty sophisticated, yet surprisingly inexpensive and easy-to-use anti-facial-recognition technology when they get close.. .which by the way, are NOT suspicious in public, at all, in many parts of the world for months at a time each year (it's -20F/-29C outside as i type this)

And if it's too warm for a ski mask, there's always lemon juice.

Yup. There's a pretty nice analysis of the study on MindHacker. It looks like the authors of the study found what they were looking for. Whether it's meaningfully there is less certain.

[Facial recognition software] will probably NEVER achieve the reliability standard of a fingerprint, let alone DNA.

Fingerprint matching has no "reliability standard" to speak of, and is likely far less reliable than you may have been led to believe.

Actually, its far more reliable than you have been led to believe.

Whereas I gave you the benefit of the doubt, (and provided a source to support my position,) you've somehow definitively assessed the reliability of fingerprinting, and conclusively determined that I've been misled. As such, I provide the following sources discussing the poor reliability of fingerprinting (in chronological order, 2001-2013) so that others can steer clear and avoid being misled like I was:

Fingerprinting's Reliability Draws Growing Court Challenges
Will Fingerprinting Stand Up in Court?
Investigation: Forensic evidence in the dock
The Real Crime: 1,000 Errors in Fingerprint Matching Every Year
Study questions reliability of fingerprint evidence
Forensic Tools: What’s Reliable and What’s Not-So-Scientific
Deeper into forensic bias
Fingerprint [Validity]

Its just that the numbering system was only intended to allow a computer sort of likely
candidates for manual inspection, but because manual inspection takes some time
and training, some jurisdictions will go just by the numeric analysis, and further
they will accept fewer and fewer actual features to match, especially when partial
prints are all they have.

It's "just that," hm? Sounds legit — though I fail to see how this demonstrates that fingerprinting is "far more reliable than [I've]have been led to believe."

Defense lawyers delight in bringing in their own fingerprint expert and showing up
the state, especially when its as easy as showing the jury two full sets of
prints. Things become very obvious very quickly.

What has this got to do with the reliability of fingerprinting? You wanna know what I'd delight in, is you providing some evidence that supports your claim that fingerprinting is far more reliable I've been led to believe.

I'm not sure of any that really cover the brain as well as neural nets, but a book with decent neural net coverage, and an excellent overview of machine learning is this one:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/cmbishop/prml/

Depending on how far you wish to study the subject, the next stop is somewhere like the Cambridge university bookstore- I'm not sure if you live in the UK but if you do and are ever near Cambridge it's worth a look- their books can of course be ordered online, but in store they offer catalogs with upcoming books which always worth a peruse through too as it tends to cover books that are really cutting edge on the topics in question.

In fact, I just did a search on their site and found this, I've never read it but it may be exactly what you're looking for:

http://www.cambridge.org/uk/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521421249

A slightly more light hearted, much easier read that helps illustrate some of the quirks in the human mind is the following:

http://www.mindhacks.com/book/

Some of the examples are good as illustrations of how it's easy to feed the brain with certain stimuli that can make it come to the wrong conclusion, one example that comes to mind in that book is the listing of various words related to some topic I think their example was sleeping or something, and then asking someone to recall those words, people will almost always come up with a common word despite that word having never been in the list. I think their example was words related to sleeping like 'pillow', 'tired', 'yawn', 'night' and a bunch more yet they omit 'bed' or something like that, ask someone to do the activity and they will nearly always falsely conclude 'bed' was one of the words- effectively bed is a 'false' attractor in this case. It effectively illustrates that whilst the brain may come up with most of the correct words, it can come up with incorrect but related words too, for some problems this may be acceptable, for others not so.

Something like this? http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2010/06/mickeys_amphetamine.html

Mind Hacks, the author of which was misquoted when the BBC ran the original story, notes:

This meta-analysis found that there was a statistically reliable link between internet use and depression, but one so small as to be insignificant. In fact, it found that internet was responsible for between 0.02% and 0.03% of total changes in mood (stats geeks: the variance was not reported directly but I calculated it from the r by the coefficient of determination).

In other words, internet use explains so little of a person's depression that it's irrelevant. It's like knowing that hypothermia is a serious medical condition and that drinking a glass of water reliably lowers the body temperature, but by such a small amount as to be medically unimportant.

For the fun of it, I googled "vegetable state" and here's what I found: "The research suggests that some of these patients may be misdiagnosed as being unconscious, when, in fact, they are aware of their surroundings but trapped in their immobile bodies." Here's the link: http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2007/10/breaking_through_to_.html

Exactly. It's hard to even contemplate intelligence or consciousness without the concept of free will. I don't think you can have analytical thought, self-awareness, self-reflection, creativity, etc. without free will. Even the lower forms of intelligence associated with other animal species, like dogs, cats, cows, pigs, etc., require free will or free thought to some extent. Otherwise, you'd simply have an animal that just sits there idly until someone gives it a set of instructions to follow—much like modern, decidedly unintelligent, computers/robots.

On the other hand, it's debatable whether there really is such a thing as "free will" as most people think of it as. That is, most people assume they have the power of self-determination. They make their own decisions based on their own "free will." But time and time again this assertion has proven to be false.

A good example of this was a study conducted on how music influenced wine shoppers. The results of this study were interesting, not because it found that playing German music in the store boosted sales of German wines while French music boosted sales of French wines, but rather because of how the shoppers explained their wine choices. Nearly every shopper perceived their wine selection as a personal choice free from external influences, and barely 2.5% of the shoppers even mentioned the PA music in their decision-making process. However, the fact that 80% of the wine purchases on each day corresponded with the type of music being played seemed to contradict the customers' assertions.

What's most interesting to me about this experiment is the fact that, not only did the overwhelming majority of the shoppers have no clue as to why they made their wine choices, but they even went as far as to invent a fake rationale for their decision after the fact. This indicates that most people are capable of deceiving themselves as to why they do things and are quite willing to do this in order to maintain the illusion of free will and self-determination.

So this begs the question of whether free will truly exists or not, or if it's just an illusion, a quirk of human/animal psychology. All of our actions and decisions could very well be predetermined/dictated by external factors. But as long as our brain invents a motivation for each action, each decision, after the fact, then it will seem like we made all of those choices of our own volition.

Here's an interesting illustration of your excellent point - http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2009/02/sir_humphrey_teaches.html

that's an overly simplistic view of advertising.

it's true that most internet ads are hyperlinks to sites where you can directly purchase a product or service. but advertising has been in use long before the advent of the web. the primary purpose of an ad is to promote a product through increased exposure/visibility. a billboard doesn't sell you a product or service directly; you can't click on magazine or newspaper ads; nor do TV commercials take you to a retailer where you can purchase the advertised product. but companies still spend billions of dollars every year on marketing and advertising to passively promote their products. a superbowl ad that won't result in any click-through sales is still worth far more money than a linked banner ad that actually takes people to a retail site. that's because advertising/marketing is all about mind share & branding. it's about influencing consumers subconsciously.

advertising is a form of passive persuasion. we're bombarded with ads everyday, and most people claim that this has absolutely no effect on them. but the numbers tell a completely different story. that's what makes advertising so insidious. it has practically become a science that can influence consumers in consistently predictable ways by exploiting known psychological quirks and human behavioral patterns. yet this unconscious influence makes us think that we're the ones who are choosing to buy this product or use that service. free will is just an illusion. oftentimes we make subconscious decisions due to external influences and then rationalize the decision only after the choice has been made, giving us the impression that it was a spontaneous choice made autonomously. this is demonstrated most clearly in a study conducted on the effect that music has on wine shoppers.

basically, some researchers played different types of music at a supermarket on different days and found that this had a noticeable influence on the purchase decisions of the wine shoppers--French music sold French wine and German music sold German wine. despite the indisputable statistical correlation, only 1 in 44 surveyed customers acknowledged the store's ambient music as having an influence on their wine choice. this shows that people often fail to realize why they make their purchases, and will even make up reasons for "choosing" a particular product when in reality it was chosen for them by external influences.

so it's not just clickthroughs that advertisers are after. even if nobody clicks on the ads on a webpage, they are still fulfilling their purpose and influencing future purchase decisions. no one is immune to advertising, and especially not if you don't even recognize the power they have over you. time and time again studies have shown that consumers make purchase decisions based on irrational impulses instilled through advertising--like equating large vehicles to safety, or purchasing familiar brands that are a poorer value.

As pointed out on MindHacks, its not that urban environments are bad for your brain, just that they are not beneficial. That is, it does not impart the positive benefits of natural environments.

I recently published a law journal article that was featured on BoingBoing today that addresses many of these issues, particularly with respect to autonomous and brain-interfaced weapons. A summary can be found here: http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2008/04/neuroweapons_war_cr.html. The article itself can be found here: http://organizations.lawschool.cornell.edu/ilj/issues/41.1/CIN109.pdf.

A recent law journal article, featured on BoingBoing today, addresses the issue of the legality of brain-interfaced and autonomous weapons. A description of the article is available here and the article itself may be found here.

The article says the man is 'locked in', which means that he not only cannot speak, but he has no voluntary movement whatsoever, even blinking eyelids.

There was an article recently in New Scientist about this. One problem doctors studying this field have is that since it is an experimental treatment, they need consent of the patient, and how can they get consent if the patient can't communicate?

With some locked-in patients, they are able to respond based on the acidity of their saliva. They are told to either imagine eating lemons (for yes) or eating milk (for no), and their saliva sympathetically adjusts to their thoughts. Then their saliva is measured. See more here: http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2007/08/locked_in_with_the_b.html

Sad to say it, but I suspect the first thing the patient will say is "kill me".

A technique to cure trauma already exists, and is well known by yogi and shamans: you just need to continuously move your eyes from left to right and then from right to left !

See for example:

http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2007/07/shifting_eye _therapy.html
It's a serious technique !

A technique to cure trauma already exists, and is well known by yogi and shamans: you just need to continuously move your eyes from left to right and then from right to left !

See for example:

http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2007/07/shifting_eye _therapy.html
It's a serious technique !

> People have been trained since birth to observe human faces and we're experts. It makes us very aware of anything that's unnatural.

Apparently recognising facial expressions is not learned, but innate, and males and females have evolved different strategies to recognise emotional faces.

Otherwise, I completely agree. Animating faces is a Turing-complete (as in Turing's test, not Turing Machine) problem, that will only be achieved by machines when/if they achieve full humanlike intelligence.

how, what happens when I create a AI that is capable of reflection?
Create it first, and then we can talk.
Fair enough, it's going to take me a little while, but I have some very good plans for creating an AI system that it capable of reflection (infact the way it works is mostly through reflection)

But everybody knows the miracle, even sees in videos, yet still noone believes [appart from you?].

you obviously have no idea that the priest that does the ceremony inside the Jesus tomb enters the temple naked. Before that, the whole temple is searched, centimeter by centimeter for hidden objects by Jews, Arabs and priests of every other religion. Jews have devoted their best scientists to discover the trick. Don't you think that if it was a trick, it would have been discovered in the last 1700 years that this takes place?

What, like this

I'm not saying your gullable, you just haven't evaluated things correctly, don't believe what you see, for example take a look at this book on mind hacks.

Sine it does not seem to be posted above, here is a link to the Mind Hacks analysis of the IQ study.