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Trouble is, the moment you step out of your role as a scientist to actually fight for something (stop gathering data, start inciting action), you're no longer considered a scientist, and are instead labelled an activist or politician.

Still, looks interesting. Has anyone read this an/or the (shorter) 2013 essay by the same authors, and of the same title? http://www.mitpressjournals.or...

"By definition it's only "terrorism" if its done for political or social objectives http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Political+terrorism. Threats of force to coerce desired behavior on an individual basis or to coerce desired behavior for personal objectives are simply threats of force."

The problem is that real terrorists almost never actually want to achieve political or social objectives. They just say they do. So that definition fails. (Similar to the way police "stated objective" is to protect and serve, but individual police motivations might be otherwise.)

See What Terrorists Really Want by M. Abrahms. If you don't have access to the MIT site you can find it online if you look around a bit.

• The emphasis on militarism
• The emphasis on nationalism. (Do you here that America was exceptional?)
• The emphasis on colonialism
• The emphasis on mysticism and the state
• The emphasis on warriorship
• Suppression of trade unions
• Foreign policy based on the myth of national power and greatness (covered above)
• Skepticism in democracy.

Here are some fascist traits associated with liberal politics:

• Broadened mandate for government intervention in the economy
• Anti-materialist -- but qualified that this is really not like liberal econuts -- since fascists are supposed to be sustained by their ideological commitment.

Here are some fascist traits that are identifiably both liberal and conservative (or a third rail in the two party system):

• the belief in the states role in monitoring its citizens.

Here are some fascist traits that are neither liberal nor conservative:

• endorsing terror to gain political power
• the notion that the entire population should be permanently and emotionally engaged in the political process.

DrHat, you are an ideologue, so don't bother me with logical contortions about how the Dems are really the more fascist of the two parties. But if there a legitimate argument, grounded in what Karl Rove pejoratively called the reality based community, then I'm all ears, because I love actually knowing things.

A year before Ronald Reagan took office, the United States was #1 in the world in social mobility, meaning the possibility that a person born in one class could move up in his lifetime. Today, the United States is #31 among OECD nations.

You should look at this cohort study:

Previous studies of recent U.S. trends in intergenerational income mobility have produced widely varying results, partly because of large sampling errors. By making more efficient use of the available information in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we generate more reliable estimates of the recent time series variation in intergenerational mobility. Our results, which pertain to the cohorts born between 1952 and 1975, do not reveal major changes in intergenerational mobility.

As best I can tell from the scant information in the article, this is merely a hardware implementation of standard neural network architectures. Many of these were described, as software implementations in the mid-1980s by Rumelhart, McClelland et. al. in their two volume work*Parallel Distributed Processing*. Many of the putatively revolutionary features of this implementation, like on-board memory and modifiable connections are described. Since that time, neural network technology has advanced quite a bit, as can be seen by inspecting journals such as *Connection Science*, or *Neural Computation*. So, despite all the hyperbole here, as best I an tell, this is not really news.

"Embrace, extend, extinguish.

Never forget. Microsoft has never helped open source. They have only contributed to their own version of it, which is very much unlike open source as it was defined 10+ years ago."

M$ loved bees, too. See where their satanic majesties' affection subsequently took the bees within a few years.

Not sure how they're doing it, but it's basically an open problem how to control a hugely multi-dimensional space like computer music via controllers people can use. One approach is to choose 2-3 axes of variation and map them to something like a Wii-style controller, which seems to be what they're doing here (or something more exotic, like a theremin controller). Plenty of other ideas--- even an entire yearly conference on it.

This (PDF) is a fairly widely cited paper that gives a brief overview. (There's a longer, better-formatted journal version here, but I think you have to be on a university campus that subscribes to the journal to get access to that one.)

Additionally, you may find this study interesting:

http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/jocn.2006.18.11.1947

It demonstrates that different parts of the brain are used to make decisions when using cold logic versus making decisions after having formed an emotional attachment aka taken a side aka closed your mind aka taken a stance, or whatever other term you want to use for committing to a view rather than keeping an open mind... once you take a side you use emotional centers in the brain when reaching conclusions about that issue or things related to that issue from there on.

When people say the ends justify the means, they are forgetting consider that the true ends include any side effects of the means. When you total it up in a fully utilitarian sense, then that statement is meaningless.

If we consider that in the future Western nations wane in power and dominance goes to, oh, say China and/or Russia, will there be not the likelihood of far more suffering and misery than a war that sets back those powers early on?

In 2006 the following paper was published by MIT Press: The End of MAD? The Nuclear Dimension of U.S. Primacy. Keir A. Lieber, Daryl G. Press International Security Spring 2006, Vol. 30, No. 4: 7-44. (pdf here: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/isec/30/4 )

Note that International Security is a top journal on its subject, so this is, in intrawebs speak, "serious business".

The authors argue that over the years US policy has moved from the goal of deterrence by mutually assured destruction towards the, what they argue, US military perceives as a possibility of achieving first strike capability with none or minimal possibility for taking damage from return fire. If you read the paper you will see that their argument is well supported.

While the authors themselves are writing from the point of view that this is a worrisome situation, I end up wondering, given what I wrote at the top of this post, whether this is not in fact a positive development. Despite all the faults of Western nations, I would feel far more comfortable in a world where Western civilization, Western values, and the Western way of life weren't threatened in the future on various fronts. But with a resurgent Russia carrying out technical upgrades to early warning systems and their nuclear arsenal, as well as a China with a very high economic growth, the window of opportunity for the US to take advantage of its nuclear primacy is short. As difficult as it is to say, I would rather millions die now than billions more suffer in the future.

... The most immediate, local scale is the intracellular chemical environment of the genes; so, for example, there is recent work on heritable methylation patterns which block the expression of some genes.

Kim Sterelny, Rethinking Inheritance, Journal of Biological Theory, 2007.

Does this include the MIT Press Journals e.g. Presence http://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/pres?

In Persuasive Games, I advance a theory of how videogames make arguments and influence players. Games represent how real and imagined systems work, and they invite players to interact with those systems and form judgments about them. Drawing on the history of rhetoric, the study of persuasive expression, I analyze rhetoric's unique function in software in general and videogames in particular. The field of media studies already studies visual rhetoric, the art of using imagery and visual representation persuasively. Here I argue that videogames, thanks to their basic representational mode of procedurality (rule-based representations and interactions), open a new domain for persuasion; they realize a new form of rhetoric.

I call this new form "procedural rhetoric," a type of rhetoric tied to the core affordances of computers: running processes and executing rule-based symbolic manipulation.

Basically, he looks at rule-based systems as a form of rhetoric, a method by which to artfully and effectively communicate ideas. Just as Melville had a point to make about life in Moby Dick, so too Bogost talks about how you can use rule-based systems to communicate in similarly effective ways through the rule-based systems of video games.

I bought it a few weeks ago and am partway through it -- so far it is really good.

If you're not interested in shelling out $$ for the book, you can get a free paper from MIT Press Journals entitled "The Rhetoric of Video Games", also by Ian Bogost.

I'm glad that you have a personal awareness of individuals with disabilities. Here is some stuff I found looking on the google scholar:

http://eric.ed.gov/ERICDocs/data/ericdocs2sql/content_storage_01/0000019b/80/17/11/aa.pdf
"Taken together, findings indicate that computers are neither a cure-all for problems facing schools nor mere fads without impact on student learning. When used properly, computers may serve as important tools for improving student proficiency in mathematics and the overall learning environment of the school".

http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/qjec.122.3.1235
"A computer-assisted learning program focusing on math increased math scores by 0.47 standard deviation." The paper presents the results of two randomized experiments conducted in schools in urban India.

I never said that computers were a panacea either; they are simply tools, just like a pencil or a piece of paper. There is no reason to call the laptops a failure and end their distribution.

> ... of experts who have not learned from history.

Exactly. Like the people who write these articles.

In all reality, as I see it, the modern US rules not with being cutting edge in science but with being unmatched in media. During the Cold War, and a techno-cultural exchange, the USSR sent impressive space tech to show in NY. The ball shifts to our (unfortunately, I now have to apologize to the world for being american) court. How does the US reply? Do we try to impress the USSR populace with our cutting edge technology No. We outfit a kitchen of the future [grey room, subscription], show movies, and give away Coca Cola. Long lines ensued.

For continued power, science is necessary (to make sure no new obliterating humanity technology emerges without our knowing) but other wise, hollywood is the united states's best weapon.

To paraphrase a friend of mine born amongst the 'Axis of Evil,' if you want to prevent 'terrorism', don't send in bombs, send in MTV.

The story about a paralyzed man (Matthew Nagle) controling a computer with his brain is definitely not new. There was a very good story in Wired in March 2005, and much more recently, a piece on NPR's The Infinite Mind. According to the piece, Matthew has since had the implant removed, since the trial has ended. I believe at least one other trial is in progress.

As for bugs controlling stuff with their mind, here's a sciencenews article from 2000 about a lamprey (not actually a bug I guess) steering a computer-controlled robot for no good reason. I saw the original paper in Artificial Life at some point, and it was easily the most ridiculous scientific journal article I've ever seen.