Slashdot Mirror

How about some more factual information? NPR has done several stories on this kind of treatment, and how it is (and isn't) used. This is not "rats push the button to feel good". This treatment involves a very precise electrical impulse delivered to the malfunctioning area of the brain; it is to electro-shock therapy what a bonsai knife is to a lawnmower, so the side effects, while not well-characterized, are likely to be orders of magnitude less intrusive.

It's used in cases where the depression is not treatable with current drugs. These are people who are so seriously neurochemically depressed that suicide seems attractive for the relief it would offer. The best we could give them before was a hug and a doctor mumbling that they were "interesting," until eventually they gave up and killed themselves. Now we can offer them this, which has at least one major advantage over suicide.

segment in question
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=4762683

You can hear the interesting segment here. The expert is a jerk... it's pretty funny. And then go here if you're bored

I recently heard an interview with the youngest person on the manhatten project (he's now 85). Reminds me of hearing techno-babble on Star Trek except this stuff is real.

It can be found here

There's also a legnthy discussion about the life of times of the father of the A-bomb, Oppenheimer.

I recently heard an interview with the youngest person on the manhatten project (he's now 85). Reminds me of hearing techno-babble on Star Trek except this stuff is real.

It can be found here

There's also a legnthy discussion about the life of times of the father of the A-bomb, Oppenheimer.

"Water vapor, good old H2O is also a powerful greenhouse gas."

If water were produced by electrolysis (meaning a source of greenhouse pollution is also the source of the fuel), the net change greenhouse gasses introduced to the environment would be zero... compared to CO2 emmisions, where carbon is coming from carbon chains in fossil fuels that were not initially responsible for global warming. The net change is huge.

Also, I thought I heard on NPR a few months ago that gasoline powered cars produce comparable amounts of water to fuel cell cars in their emissions... but I didn't go back to check.

I was listening to NPR and they interviewed someone who finally made it clear to me: He said that the modern version of the death penalty is not effective as a deterrent. The theory behind the death penalty is:

1) It is cheaper than infinite incarceration.
2) It is a deterrent because most humans do not want to die.
3) It is a deterrent because it is swift and highly visible.

But in the U.S. today, the death penalty no longer does these things:

1) It takes decades of court appeals and decisions, so it is more expensive than life in prison.
2) It is only applied to people who are absolutely mind-boglingly insane, where deterrents do not matter to them.
3) It is so rare and boring that no one fears it.

These arguments are not meant to sway any one to be for or against the death penalty. The idea is to show that the current way the U.S. imposes the death penalty makes it completely worthless. It should either be eliminated, or fixed. But leaving it as-is just costs money and serves no purpose.

This all comes down to being a stakes game. Are the rewards worth the consequences? I honestly feel examples are going to have to be made with *severe* penalties. I recently heard on National Public Radio http://www.npr.org/ one county was raising the fine for littering from $1,000 to $10,000! It may seem ludicrous, but I bet you one thing -- Mr Trucker is going to think twice about throwing that cigarette butt out the window. Same holds true for Piracy... make the penalties so severe that nobody in their right mind will want to partake.

You are right. Why not up the ante a bit more? Looking at Islamic countries, why can't we copy their Shariah laws? Download an MP3 and get your hand chopped off. It's "stealing", right? Make the penalties so severe that nobody is willing to risk their limbs for a free tune?

Oh, wait. Theft is still an ongoing problem in Islamic countries. They have higher crime rates than Sweden. So, not even these extreme inhuman punishments deter crime 100%. All that happens is a great evil is being done in the name of justice and a lot of these punishments are actually being used for revenge and scapegoating.

Looking at the trend, is this sort of thing that you'll see in the future? And if you are happy about punishments that are increasingly unproportional to the crime for "deterrent" purposes, you may want to try moving to Islamic countries for a taste of that.

The governator guilty of ass smacking? Hah. How about smoking joints for recreation and with none other than Tommy Chong (of Cheech and Chong)?

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=4488902

All that crap about "Winners don't do drugs" was apparently a big lie or hypocrisy. I know lighting up marijuana is mild especially when compared to the combo of alcoholism, joint smoking, and coke snorting that Bush enjoyed as a Air National Guardsman.

You are wrong. I've seen that raising fines or penalties doesn't lower the crimes. What lower the crimes is when you know that you are going to be caught regardless. If you know there is a big posibility of nothing happening to you, then you will do anything that is ilegal. If every crime is being punished and nobody is learning not to do it, then you can raise the fine/penalty.

This all comes down to being a stakes game. Are the rewards worth the consequences? I honestly feel examples are going to have to be made with *severe* penalties. I recently heard on National Public Radio http://www.npr.org/ one county was raising the fine for littering from $1,000 to $10,000! It may seem ludicrous, but I bet you one thing -- Mr Trucker is going to think twice about throwing that cigarette butt out the window. Same holds true for Piracy... make the penalties so severe that nobody in their right mind will want to partake.

Granted, when you want vaccines, you go to drug companies, but this is fuel for conspiracy theorists. After all, who says you can't do good and make money at the same time.

No, I'm not on crack, but i did read the report. Perhaps you missed it, it was linked here on slashdot a while back. I'll see if I can find it, but while I'm doing that, here's an exercise for you. When you have a system, and apply a force (friction) to that system, what happens?

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/1 1/0056217&tid=126&tid=14

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=4161624

Enjoy.

As for solar power, perhaps you completely didn't pay any attention to what I said before, or have you come up with a solution for what to do when the sun goes down that doesn't involve batteries?

Furthermore, use of solar power means obstructions to prevent the sun from hitting the ground, which means less plant life and natural direct sunlight for the world. Ever seen the floor of a dense forrest? Now what do you think will happen when we cover all the open fields with solar panels?

As for using them together, perhaps you missed it, we already use them both, plus nuclear and hydro electric. And yet we're still heavily reliant on fossil fuels, and it isn't because of big oil.

So I looked on NPR's website and found this, which indicates NPR does not Podcast their shows. Yet you say you get the Podcast versions. Do you know something I don't, or were you just saying "Podcast" when you meant their RSS news feeds, some of which contain audio links?

I heard a report on this earlier in the week on NPR. The interview (sorry, RealAudio is the only option for listening to the report) seemed to indicate that all the recipients up to this point had really really serious health problems besides just having bad hearts. I wonder what choice someone has if they are deemed too unhealthy/high risk for a heart transplant? Sit and wait to die? Serious bummer...

If you think it would be worth it, try it. A few have. They didn't start with the resources Bruce Wane did, but I've read articles about a few. (Sorry, can't find them at the moment.) People who dedicated themselves to being the best hero they can be.

Ok, I can think of a few. But, maybe they aren't bad asses in the sense that the can take on crews of gangs single handed. I don't think you have to be able to do that to be a hero.

There are a ton of people in the community I live in who dedicate so much of their time and money volunteering in some noble causes.

I'd definitely mark Mother Teresa as one such hero. I know, this is slashdot, poo on anything religious. But, if you get past that you are still looking at a woman who spent her entire life looking into people and seeing beyond their destitute to see the human being underneath.

Father Greg Boyle is another such hero. Check out his story.

Anyways, my point is that both of the above dedicated their lives to something and made a difference. It can and does happen.

The solar wind is the stream of charged particles that gets caught in Earth's magnetic field to create the auroras. Solar sails simply use photons and solar radiation. To see how solar wind can be applied, however, you can read NPR's piece on plasma sails.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=4705698

and here is a link to a blog that refers to the photographer's rights: http://blog.photoblogs.org/2004/06/photographers_r .html

link (realaudio, wmp)

...what's really disturbing is how much we don't know ... they were storing names, addresses, credit card numbers, and the three digit security code on the back of the card...

You probably heard the story on NPR this morning.

This story on npr says that the credit card companies can actually wind up making money when a fraudulent charge is made. Does this create an incentive for them to keep things safe?

This story on npr says that the credit card companies can actually wind up making money when a fraudulent charge is made. Does this create an incentive for them to keep things safe?

I heard the NPR report (audio only) on Morning Edition yesterday (6/13/05). Unlike the BBC article, the NPR piece focused on one extremely likely use for the nanobrushes: increasing yields in high-density chip fabrication.

As the size of the features etched in silicon decrease, the importance of cleanliness increases. A single mote of dust landing on the chip will cause it to fail, leading to decreased yields as the devices become smaller and more powerful. These nanobrushes may be useful in cleaning out those bits of dust and other debris, turning formerly useless bits of melted sand into high-dollar microprocessors again.

If the little brushes turn out to be mass-producable, you could even see a cost decrease in the end product. Say a clean room has to be 99.9999% dust free (number pulled out of my a^Hhat). This is incredibly difficult when humans are involved, with all our shedding and outgassing and such. But if you can get rid of contaminants by running the wafers through a nanobrush unit, maybe your clean room only has to be 99.99% dust free... and you save whatever the cost difference is between .99 and .9999.

National Public Radio in the U.S. ran a story about how Merck ran a campaign to pressure M.D.s who were doing research showing Vioxx was a problem in patients, causing damage to the heart.

The story is right here and it outlines a major problem with all scientific research, but most acutely in the pharmaceutical industry, where the Bush administration has gutted the FDA and made them the lapdog of the drug companies. Capital markets use science and statistics as weapons, and objective evidence of problems exists only when other drug companies that compete fund research to show problems.

Bush said last week that he still wasn't interested in a Kyoto like treaty, because global warming needed more "research" and study. And, of course, the report that shows that an employee of the American Petroleum Council was sitting inside the EPA censoring reports that showed any causality between burning fossil fuels and global warming. Can't have that.

Corrupt scientists. No objective sources of information. And people wonder why there is a skyrocketing reliance on religion by our political leaders, who pander and are willing to teach nonsense like "Intelligent Creation" alongside scientific evidence of darwinism and natural selection. Divinity sells. And a assailable scientific community only makes it easier.

We seem to be leaving an age of reason, and entering a new Dark age. Instead of Thomas Aquinas we have Dr. Phil.

dams

The significant hydropower sites are fully exploited, often at great cost to the environment, archaeological sites, and so on. Glen Canyon is a prime example of what can be lost. Lake's Low Water Level Exposes Prized Canyons"

We fix our urban planning so that we walk short distances, cycle if we're going a mile, take different kinds of trains to go many miles

This conveniently ignores problems of weather and climate, the age distribution of the population, suburbanization and the decay of the urban core, etc. Henry Ford saw earlier than most that Americans do not like to be bound to the fixed routes and schedules of bus and rail.

Since the early 1900s we've had cars that work off of lead-acid batteries

But they were heavy, slow, and expensive, and first sold to the upper class as a replacement for a horse drawn coach, with roughly the same range and speed.

I heard about this on Morning Edition on NPR. My impression from the story was that Citibank wanted this shipped with minimal fanfare. If it looked like just another package no one would think to steal it. Security through obscurity and here's some proof that it doesn't work.

More importantly, Bill Clinton was featured on this past Friday's TOTN.
Mod this down, but it was a great show and a must listen.

link is here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=4677825 I heard about it this morning. It sounds better over coffee.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=1216161

This was on Talk of the Nation today (link goes right to the story; RM or WM, sorry). They had a TSA guy on, who alleged that the results are fuzzier than the stories make them out to be, and that they've developed algorithms to only show the concealed weaponry and such.

Here's a link to an NPR show about Erdos and a few others with commentary by someone who worked with him for a spell. Apparently, some of his prolific output can be attributed to amphetamines.

Yeah, NPR plays a lot of great music in between segments of their shows. You can find out what songs they play on their site though:

http://www.npr.org/templates/music/

Also, they even have a show dedicated to that same great music:

http://www.npr.org/programs/asc/index.html

Maybe you'll be able to find what you were looking for. Good luck.

Yeah, NPR plays a lot of great music in between segments of their shows. You can find out what songs they play on their site though:

http://www.npr.org/templates/music/

Also, they even have a show dedicated to that same great music:

http://www.npr.org/programs/asc/index.html

Maybe you'll be able to find what you were looking for. Good luck.

As long as Rush Limbaugh hasn't succeeded in brain-washing all the Americans, some of them may still have a chance to find such tidbits here

ICT issues? Not anymore.

Not since Slate (created to take out Salon) has taken over content in that area. But that's not alone, Chairman Bill's foundation dumps many hundreds of thousands of dollars on NPR each year. Probably those 'donations' have strings attached if places like India, Australia show us anything.

Add NPR , Legal too.

"...where else can you get such a diverse range of people, and pick up wonderful little tidbits like the true story behind that wonderful legend about solving unsolved problems?..."

Add NPR to the list. Though its on a show by show basis. On the Media and Talk of the Nation are both podcasted.

NPR covered this story yesterday.

There was coverage of this on NPR this morning as well.

Probably not:

"We're studying our options about what to do about the patent, but our primary strategy doesn't rely on patents. Our primary strategy is to have a service that works better than any other service -- that consumers not only like but rave about to their friends -- and that's what's propelling our growth"

From this link to an interview with Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings.

Here a link to radio interview with him as well.

I can't speak for Lucas but I did hear a similar sentiment from jazz clarinetist Artie Shaw. I'm a jazz fan and picked up on Artie Shaw in a history of jazz program, then later heard an extended series of interviews with him. He spoke of the right to fail as a prerequisite to great playing. He was of the opinion that people who play it safe and play to a known recipe aren't able to make great music. He went on to say his best playing always contained errors because he was reaching beyond his present abilities in an attempt to conquer new heights (my loose paraphrase). I think Lucas means something similar when he talks of the right to fail as the right to go beyond the status quo ante and break new ground even if in the attempt he is seen to fail.

cheers

Sorry to tell you this but real scientists in the real world usually dont base a whole lot of their research on hollywood movies...

Supposedly not, but:

Report: Paleontologist "fudged" discovery to promote movie
Museum of the Rockies paleontologist Jack Horner "fudged" information about a dinosaur discovery four years ago to promote the third "Jurassic Park" film, National Public Radio reported Wednesday.

Horner disputes altering dinosaur discovery for movie opening
BOZEMAN -- Paleontologist Jack Horner, who served as a science consultant for the "Jurassic Park" films, acknowledged that the announcement of a dinosaur find in eastern Montana was delayed to help promote the third installment of the dinosaur-flick franchise four years ago.

And the NPR report (audio) that broke the story:
Movie Marketers Turn to Subtle, Sophisticated Tactics
Advertisers are finding new and creative ways to sell their films. [...] One studio has even manipulated a scientific discovery to coincide with the opening of a film. A look at some of the tactics studios use to seduce moviegoers to their films.

So much for the universal integrity of scientists in the real world...

Forget MTV. Even sitcoms do it now. NPR's Morning Edition had a good story about advertising in TV and for movies yesterday morning. I knew about a lot of what went on, but it just got pretty disturbing at the end. Scientists changing dates on their discoveries to coincide with Jurassic Park releases? What has the world come to?

Roger Penrose was also interviewed on NPR about his book a few months ago.

As it's said in the interview, the book is about a young mathematician.

And while no one gets too riled up about foreign practices in foreign countries, when the polygamists move next door, people get upset

Finally, you're argument seems to be that just because some people somewhere else or long ago thought it was good, then most Americans now don't think it's bad, which seems to me to be faulty logic. By that rational, a doctor who suggests that patients should be regularly bled to rebalance the humors would be practicing what is called "good medicine", just because it was "good medicine" 200 years ago. (BTW, whether or not something really is good medicine ought to be a scientific question, IMHO, not subject to opinions or social consensus or religio-political debate or corporate lobbying or ad campaigns, but that doesn't seem to be the current state of things, if it ever was...)

Please note that I'm not arguing here for or against any of the aforementioned practices. I've definetly got pro or con opinions on all of 'em, but Slashdot just isn't the place. I'm just challenging the bare assertion that nothing the LDS does (or did) is considered extreme or offensive by others. This really isn't a Slashdot issue either, but if inaccurate information isn't challenged just because it's off-topic, the casual reader will get the idea that the claim is accurate and undisputed.

This aired on NPR a while ago: "A Texas game ranch that offers real-time hunting via the Internet is drawing criticism. Hunters such as Dale Hagberg, an Indiana man paralyzed from the neck down, can shoot animals with a rifle controlled by computer mouse."

The audio archive is here.

(I hope the Web UI follows accesibility standards...)

In short, the story is about a gentleman who used to be an avid hunter but is now paralyzed from the neck down. The story talks about the adrenaline rush the man experienced and how, for a moment, it gave him a sense of freedom and his old life back. The article also speaks about the mechanics of internet hunting - the 'hunt' isn't so much like a video game as someone is sitting there with the gun talking to the internet hunter.

"NPR's senior news analyst argues that the 'Real ID' proposal, as tacked onto the $82 billion supplementary spending bill for Iraq and foreign aid, is at best a half-mesaure that fails to undertake a full consideration of the merits of a national identification card."

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=4630875

As a side note, I found this story on NPR really troubling: "Religous Schools Train Lawyers for Culture Wars"