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The paper seems to be about contact between fishes of poeciliid fish. They are commonly called "guppies".

Now...there happens to be another genus of fishes in the same family which are called crappies (Pomoxis sp.).

Coincidence?

I believe that, as far as a complacent company, or an agent in a company, is able to filter the information that people get from the other nodes in their network, the "powers that be" (make that wealth, US goverment, US agencies, whatever fits your bill) can even influence political changes in masses.

That is why the discussion about metadata was so stupid! Politically, metadata IS the ingredient that was missing. One does make political opinions widely available, but metadata allows someone with insight to the network to map influences, make profiles.
And as these two research papers explain, alter their impact in the political process of the mass. It's not the people who are controlled by social networks, but masses surely are:
Exploiting Network Structure in Enhancing Diusion of Complex Contagions: http://www.albany.edu/~ravi/pd...
Effects of Opposition on the Diffusion of Complex Contagions in Social Networks: An Empirical Study: http://link.springer.com/chapt...
Bear in mind that we do not know how edgerank selects information. It could well highlight favourable nodes and muffle problematic ones.

Interestingly, in recent years social movements favourable to western status quo have thrilled in social networks (think maidan, arab "spring", opposition to left leaning governments in South America, now Hong Kong revolts) yet the ones that oppose them have a much larger footprint in the real world than in the virtual world (Chile student revolts, Mexican "I am 132", spanish resistance to shock cuts, that gathered !4million people physically!, Occupy Wall Street). I really wonder if this asymmetry is random or coincidence

NOAA ignores its own satellite records (which it previously claimed were more accurate than surface temperature measurements) to make that claim.

Land based measurements are much more directly related to temperature, than satellites, and don't have the problems of interpreting the MSU readings as temperature, orbital drift, the fact that there have been fewer than three instruments in orbit for much of the time making calibration guesswork, and correcting for what the satellite orbits are passing over.

I would be very surprised if NOAA every claimed that satellite derived near-surface temperatures were more accurate than met stations. Do you have a link to one of the places that they make this claim? (Or did you just make it up yourself, and hope that people would believe you?)

And in what way did they ignore their own satellite records?

The satellite record has shown a slight but real cooling trend for a decade and a half, and a year that has actually been one of the COOLEST on record.

Okay, again you're going to need to provide a source. I know of two groups interpreting satellite data. There's a couple of skeptics at UHA, and their satellite temperatures show this over the last 15 years. As you can see, it shows a warming trend.

The other is by a private company called Remote Sensing Systems. Their data looks like this. A very slight cooling, that I cannot believe would be "real cooling trend", if by real you mean statistically significant.
(The fact that the difference in warming trends spans the difference in the warming trends of the land-based measurements is indicative that the satellite temperatures are in fact, less accurate than land based ones.)

Also, sea level is not rising. That is to say, it isn't rising any faster today than it has for the last couple of hundred years.

If the sea is rising, then it is warming. Sea level rise is caused by thermal expansion and by melting land ice. Both require energy in.

But your claim that it is not accelerating does not have any consensus from the scientific community. Most people would say that it is accelerating. For instance: There is considerable variability in the rate of rise during the twentieth century but there has been a statistically significant acceleration since 1880 and 1900 of 0.009 ± 0.003 mm year2 and 0.009 ± 0.004 mm year2, respectively. - Church and White (2011)

The amount of fudging that NOAA and its NCDC have to accomplish to make this year actually look warm, much less a record, is nothing short of incredible. I mean that word literally: in-credible.

Given your questionable points above, I also question this conclusion. What is the basis of your claim of "fudging". Are you one of these conspiracy theorists who claim that the vast majority of scientists advance their careers by producing papers that claim results that aren't reproducible? Because that is literally in-credible.

The easiest way to tell might be to compare cultures where normal pornography is easy to get, to those where it is very difficult to get, and see if the rates of sexual attacks and deviant acts vary between the cultures. Does anyone know if such a study has been done?

Comparing different cultures with each other doesn't work, you can't determine weather differences are due to the availability of pornography or to a wide range of other cultural factors.

What you do is compare a single culture with itself, before and after a major change in the availability and content-range of porn. In fact a substantial number of such studies have been done, across a substantial number of countries. The results are consistent. Increases in the availability and content-range of pornography are generally followed by a decrease in rape and other sex crimes, or at worst no change in those rates. This result also extends to a smaller number of country-cases that included child pornography becoming legal. In every such case rape, other sex crimes, and child molestation always decreased. Countries where child pornography changed from legal-to-illegal had increases in child molestation rates.

A Google Scholar search can turn up a variety of such studies. Here are links to one two of them.

Abstract one:
The Danish liberalization of legal prosecution and of laws concerning pornography and the ensuing high availability of such materials present a unique opportunity of testing hypotheses concerning the relationship between pornography and sex offenses. It is shown that concurrently with the increasing availability of pornography there was a significant decrease in the number of sex offenses registered by the police in Copenhagen. On the basis of various investigations, including a survey of public attitudes and studies of the police, it was established that at least in one type of offense (child molestation) the decrease represents a real reduction in the number of offenses committed. Various factors suggest that the availability of pornography was the direct cause of this decrease.

Abstract two:
Pornography continues to be a contentious matter with those on the one side arguing it detrimental to society while others argue it is pleasurable to many and a feature of free speech. The advent of the Internet with the ready availability of sexually explicit materials thereon particularly has seemed to raise questions of its influence. Following the effects of a new law in the Czech Republic that allowed pornography to a society previously having forbidden it allowed us to monitor the change in sex related crime that followed the change. As found in all other countries in which the phenomenon has been studied, rape and other sex crimes did not increase. Of particular note is that this country, like Denmark and Japan, had a prolonged interval during which possession of child pornography was not illegal and, like those other countries, showed a significant decrease in the incidence of child sex abuse.

I wonder what the world would look like if we had legislators who legislated on the basis of evidence and reality rather than ideologies and soundbites.

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There's probably nothing that prohibits anyone with capable intelligence from learning anything, but there may be underlying differences in the sexes due to the way our brains are physically different, which is just as good of an explanation as to why men and women have different writing styles. I lean towards that explanation as opposed to social factors, simply because there is other research that points to biological sex determining behavior. For example, young children of opposite sexes have different toy preferences. There's evidence to suggest that some things are certainly acquired due to social factors: color preference for example.

I've heard other interesting theories for the disparity as well such as autism-spectrum disorders being more prevalent in males than females and that people who are have more mild forms of disorders along that spectrum tend to be more attracted to computers and machines than they are to occupations that involve dealing with people. This also explains the stereotype of engineers and computer scientists being socially awkward, which there is some truth to.

From a quick google search: http://books.google.com/books?... and http://www.springer.com/engine...

PS: NASA uses the term "microgravity" for almost-zero-G, which is a different concept.

"The greenhouse effect is demonstrable in a test tube, therefore it is the primary factor directly controlling the temperature of Earth."

I think the line is more, from our knowledge of optics, discovered using experiments in labs, we know the optical properties of CO2. We would expect that increasing the atmospheric concentration of CO2 would therefore increase the global mean surface temperature.

Observations confirm this.

The proportion that the global mean surface temperature change is attributable to AGW is known from a very wide range of evidence.
We know from first principles that the greenhouse effect will cause warming, and we can compare that to the other things that change the radiative forcing on the surface of the planet and find that the greenhouse effect is the largest one.
We observe the effect of changing radiative forcing from volcanoes, and calibrate out understanding of how much changes in radiative forcing affect temperature.
We look at the distribution of the warming in time and space: We see a warming that is occurring mostly in winter and at night, showing the current warming to be a slowing of heat loss to space, not an increase in solar energy in. We can reach the same conclusion by observing the cooling of the stratosphere. We see greatly enhanced warming at the poles, and see the predicted feedbacks to greenhouse warming.

Climate models, too are an important tool for understanding and attribution of climate change, and these also provide evidence that the current warming is anthropogenic.

And even if you don't believe any physics whatsoever, and just throw all the observables into a neural net and get it to try to reproduce the global mean surface temperature by any functions of those variables, you still get that the current warming is primarily due to enhanced greenhouse effect.

Real scientists don't make such simplistic and unjustified steps in their logic.

Agreed. And they don't. Why are you making the simplistic and unjustified step of claiming that they do?

I kinda already did?

As for the 'Ted Talks' I kind of ignored them for a number of reasons:
1. No reason to believe that they're peer reviewed.
2. Audio would be incredibly rude where I was at the time.
3. I'm a visual learner - listening to youtube lectures is painful for me.
4. My conclusion from the earlier 3 was that the latter 3 would be more the same. On reaching home, I confirmed this.

Anyways, some more articles on antibiotic growth promotion:
It improves growth, but not enough to justify the cost in chickens grown in clean & sanitary environments
The Mode of Growth Promotion by Antibiotics
The European ban on growth-promoting antibiotics and emerging consequences for human and animal health. link
Alternatives to Antibiotic Use for Growth Promotion in Animal Husbandry link
Effect of Abolishment of the Use of Antimicrobial Agents for Growth Promotion on Occurrence of Antimicrobial Resistance in Fecal Enterococci from Food Animals in Denmark link
Antibiotic Usage in Animals link

Conclusion: The cattle industry isn't feeding billions of dollars of antibiotics to their animals for fun.

The 97% comment is a lie and people who repeat it are not interested in the truth.

The link I provided shows a study of over 11,000 scientific papers on climate change where only 0.3% expressed an opinion on if it was man-made or not. Their "global consensus" is based on 0.3% of published papers.

Please look up this consensus yourself and find out where the statements come from.

I guess it depends upon what you mean by the "primary purpose". Curiosity has met many, if not practically all, of it's primary goals within the landing ellipse, and it has traversed out of it. All of that was hoped to be achieved in the nominal mission lasting 1 Mars year (~2 Earth years), duration-wise. The thing is, what the selection process referred to as "go to" targets were also considered outside of the landing ellipse and factored into the final choice of the landing site. In Gale's case, the biggest "go to" target was the slope of Mount Sharp/Aeolis Mons. There's some cool-looking stratigraphy on those slopes, and that was one of the siren calls drawing scientists to chose Gale over the others. Some of those outside-the-ellipse "go to" targets have just been reached to date, in the outcrops on Gale crater's floor where bedrock is exposed, but the big one, the slope itself, is still not reached. It will happen within the longer mission, assuming it keeps going at the present rate. That's the good news from the wheel assessment. It will be slower going, but they think they will get there. But until then I still think that one of the primary reasons for visiting this site has not been met.

I like your emendment to the analogy, or maybe we can argue about whether the slope constitutes the main course or the dessert ("bonus"?), I suppose. Whatever the analogy chosen, the advocates for the Gale site always talked about the idea of following the stratigraphy and the changes in it up the sides of that peak that are detectable remotely (e.g., the apparent transition from clays to sulphates). If the mission doesn't actually get there in the end, I still argue that would be a significant disappointment. The lure was that a HUGE amount of stratigraphy was exposed and accessible compared to other sites where the exposure was much thinner.

Tons more on the selection process if people are interested. Unfortunately that article is behind a paywall, but if you search for "MSL site selection" you'll find plenty of other materials, including this one.

You can't. You just think you can because you over-estimate your abilities. I encourage you to do an internet search for the relevant research. There was a slashdot story about it ~ 5 years ago.

I did do an Internet search, and in fact found plenty of research that indicates humans and other mammals can in fact localize sound in the vertical plane (i.e. whether it comes from in front of behind of you). Of course, it doesn't work for all sounds, but the capability is there.

Don't take my word for it through. Talk to a real medical doctor about it.

This will get you no where, as most doctors are not familiar with this, and many that are will only know of industry standards based on LNT. I'm quite familiar with this considering I've spent more time in doctor's offices and hospitals than average, and doctors frequently start up conversations about my work in radiation safety. Even the x-ray techs and specialists can ask very basic questions and are not familiar with things outside of the calculations they are supposed to do and the exposures they are supposed to give as set by various standards and recommendations. Knowledge of arguments and issues with LNT is way more common with nuclear researchers, industry workers, and specific subsets of medical researchers.

And none of this changes that you are making very specific claims for a situation that has never been created or tested. The closest done are a limited number of cell culture based studies, some involving mammalian cells (like this one), that don't have any difficulty culturing cells under very low radiation environments. They do see subtle changes, including impact on ability to handle later exposures to a decent dose of radiation or slight variation in biological stress indicators and growth rates. NONE of this suggests that you, nor the living things in your body, would just keel over dead, especially in the case of bacteria in your body because that is one of the cases where testing has actually been a bit more varied and thorough. Otherwise, talks of building an ultra low radiation laboratory for testing these effects on cultures and small animals is still in the talking stage.

As said before, you are describing a rather specific consequence of something that has never been tested in the case of full animals, but has been studied in terms of bacteria and cell cultures. Even the most pro-radiation hormesis studies and results do not show that one would die without exposure to radiation. To say so is baseless and unscientific.

You can argue if you like that a ~ 27.3% increase is large but I disagree, since climate sensitivity to CO2... [Jane Q. Public, 2014-07-07]

Ocean acidification is independent of climate sensitivity, and it's another reason to be concerned about the unprecedented rapidity of our CO2 emissions.

I would also like to point out again that even if acidification is happening, the RESULTS of that acidification are probably less than alarmists have claimed. Example (2010 article): http://www.rationaloptimist.co... [Jane Q. Public, 2014-06-10]

Lonny Eachus also linked to that misinformation from Matt Ridley, a journalist with a long history of distorting climate science.

In contrast, I quoted from Honisch et al. 2012 (PDF), Knoll et al. 2007 (PDF), and Ken Caldeira’s 2012 AGU lecture. That last link was from my videos section which also includes:

• Andrew Dickson gave a technical 2009 presentation called “Acidic Oceans: Why Should We Care?”
• A series of panels at the 2011 AGU discussed declining reef health and tipping points.

I'm not a chemist or a marine biologist/ecologist, so I read peer-reviewed papers and go to conferences like the AGU to watch lectures by scientists who do specialize and publish in those fields. For instance, consider that 2011 AGU panel on declining reef health. Nina Keul observed one species of foramanifera Glas et al. 2012 (PDF) growing faster as carbonate ion concentration decreases (which happens when CO2 increases). She provided context by noting that this is one species from one experiment, noting that this is like looking at one puzzle piece of a big puzzle.

Then Adina Paytan provides further context by noting that most species aren't like this. She shows Fig. 2 from Crook et al. 2012 (PDF) which shows that only ~3 out of 9 species of coral are present in locations with naturally low pH and notes that "Because these three species are rarely major contributors to Caribbean reef framework, these data may indicate that today’s more complex frame-building species may be replaced by smaller, possibly patchy, colonies of only a few species along the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef."

Finally, Robert Ridin

If that phraseology works for you .. fine. I tried to make it as generic as possible and actually just grabbed the Wikipedia summary and the begthequestion.info tail.

If you really want to understand it then go look at J Woods / D Walton article which is a nice basic intro to the subject.

And the amount it has actually risen in the Marshalls is roughly about 3". Even then, attributing this to "Climate Change" is a bit of a leap. Even though water has risen there "more than the global average", that's really not saying much since the global average is something like 1/4" over the last century. (Roughly... I don't remember the exact figure.) [Jane Q. Public]

Quoting 3" for the Marshalls makes it clear that Jane is talking about the total sea level rise, not the annual rise. Total global average sea level rise over the last century (1914-2014) is more like ~6 inches (see fig. 5 of Church and White 2011. Jane obviously doesn't remember the exact figure, because the rise Jane's memory provides is ~24x smaller than the actual observed rise.

Anyway, sea level rise can vary regionally due to factors like the gravity of thinning ice sheets.

As a university faculty member I consider the cost of textbooks whenever I choose one for a course. I try to never require students to buy the book (I'm not always in charge of the course I teach, so I can't always do this), and I prefer books that are available on SpringerLink (whole-book DRM-free PDFs are available to all our students since our university subscribes). I doubt many faculty members will actually assign this textbook.

You should search for "feminist mathematics" and you'll get some interesting reading.

I don't know how mainstream it is, but there is a feminist movement that accepts that male and female brains work differently, and that therefore different approaches are needed to include women in science and mathematics. For example, check out this preview of a paper which discusses a need for a new philosophy, pedagogy, and epistemology for mathematics. I don't have access to the full text, but for me it's previewing page 1 (just an intro) and page 276 which is dealing with pedagogy. This is one of the critiques for why current mathematical teaching is unsuitable for women:

Mathematics tends to be taught with a heavy reliance upon written texts which removes its conjectural nature, presenting it as inert information which should not be questioned. Predominant patterns of teaching focus on the individual learner and induce competition between learners. Language is pre-digested in the text, assuming that meaning is communicated and is non-negotiable. [...]

Like science, therefore, mathematics is perceived by many students and some teachers as "a body of established knowledge accessible only to a few extraordinary individuals" (Rosser, op.cit. p. 89). Indeed, the supposed 'objectivity' of the discipline, a cause for questioning and concern by some of those within it, is often perceived by non-mathematician curriculum theorists as inevitable....

I mean what do you think of that? Boys do pretty well, apparently, with this type of teaching and the view that mathematical theory is objective and that by writing things down we can communicate knowledge. But there are "feminist mathematician curriculum theorists" who think that's BS and that it's a social construct resulting from the influence of male thinking in mathematics. There's a better way to teach it to girls.

True? Or do you think these feminists are as crazy as the guy you responded to in thinking that just maybe men and women think differently? They are taking two different approaches (one criticizes the female brain for not understanding it as presented when the male brain has no problem doing so, the other criticizes the material and its presentation as unsuitable for the female brain) but the underlying message is the same. I'm curious what you think about this.

. Yeah, your blood work tends to improve when you eat a simple vegan diet, and that's all soylent contains.

Because fish are just extremely fast moving vegetables? And commercially obtained calcium is never made from crushed bones?

A real vegan diet would kill a lot of people; some of us physically require animal-derived nutrition. Which is unsurprising, given our dental structure.

And the vegan ethical/moral argument appears to be bankrupt too. A mindful omnivore, who eats grass-fed beef, kills far fewer animals than a vegan who eats tofu.

Veganism aside, though, I have to agree with you that he's laying the pseudo-scientific health claims on with a trowel.

The comments on this story indicate that nobody has read the article or its citations, so here's a better summary for those of us who don't want to read the article.

First, the experimental evidence: While the paper linked to in the summary is in fact a math paper (and thus has no new experimental resutls), it does cite a few science papers, of which the best describes a real experimental setup:

Gray jays (Perisoreus canadensis) collecting food for storage violated this principle, and failed to support even weaker forms of transitivity. All subjects preferred option a (one raisin, 28 cm into a tube) over b (two raisins, 42 cm), and b over c (three raisins, 56 cm), but none of the subjects preferred a over c.

So we do have something concrete. Some birds are put in front of some tubes that have raisins in them. Some tubes have a few raisins near the front of the tube (easy to reach) and others have a larger number of raisins that are towards the back of the tube (difficult to reach). The birds must then evaluate the distance-versus-quantity tradeoff: is it worth crawling a little deeper into the tube to get more raisins? Birds were given three tubes to choose from and, like the article summary says, they thought tube A was better than tube B and that B was better than C, but they thought C was better than A.

What kept the birds from entering both tubes? Unfortunately, I don't know, but if someone will send me $40 I'll buy the Springer article and find out.

There was another experiment done on hummingbirds that did what the authors call a "binary/trinary" procedure: Three different types of fake flowers were created. All flowers were given sucrose in water, but the concentration of sugar and the total amount of available liquid varied between flowers. In A-type flowers, there was a small amount of high-concentration sugar water. In B-type flowers, there was a large amount of low-concentration sugar water. Then there were C-type flowers, which were strictly inferior to A-type flowers (less water and a lower concentration of sugar!) but only partially worse than B-type flowers (less water, but a higher sugar concentration). Then four experiments were run: Three binary experiments (where birds choose between A and B, between B and C, and between C and A), and one "trinary" experiment (where birds were given all three flowers at the same time). The binary experiments showed that birds consistently picked A over B, B over C, and A over C. That's perfectly consistent. But in the ternary experiment, six of sixteen birds decided that B was the best of the three. That's a violation of regularity because if A-type flowers are better than B-type flowers, then it shouldn't matter whether or not C-type flowers exist.

So... We have some experiments suggesting that birds don't rate their food sources consistently---what they pick depends on the context. There are a couple of ways to deal with this. One is to insist that an experiment on sixteen birds is too small to conclude anything (which is true) and therefore is too small to suggest that something is worth further investigation (which is silly). Another is to agree that the experiment shows that there's something complex about the way that birds rank their food sources, but to insist that it's non-news because "everybody knows the world is complex and that cows aren't spherical." That's a fascinating viewpoint---you could use it to trivialize all of science. Still another response is to make a post on Slashdot about how your options vary based on what's available because you need balanced nutition---at least you're thinking, but all of the experiments are careful to balance a single food type (e.g. raisins, sucrose) against a non-nutritional parameter (e.g. distance, concentration).

The authors of the present paper decided to present one mathematica

I guess you're saying that it's still a legitimate subject, and that progress is made by building on previous results. Nobody is disputing that.

But the TFA doesn't mention previous results or even the existence of the field, I have the impression that Norvig is not aware of it. So this is not contributing to the body of knowledge re automata induction, this is recreative CS. Nothing wrong with that per se, but there's also nothing wrong with providing some scientific background.

Btw in the blog post, the approximative approach is motivated by NP-hardness of the exact problem. Given the link (parameter-preserving reduction) with graph coloring already mentioned, the problem can't be approximated in polynomial time with arbitrary error, unless P=NP. This theoretical result is backed up by practical experiments with approximating coloring algorithms, which often find solutions 100% off from the optimal nr of colors. So good luck with that.

Also, informed regular inference is already NP-hard when restricted to DFAs with just 2 states:
http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-642-37064-9_25

Perhaps surprisingly, the problem becomes tractable when the data is `complete', in the sense that it is consistent with just one single automaton (google RPNI).

It says that supersymmertry predicts a larger dipole moment, that's why it would be in question.

If you want to know why supersymmetry makes that prediction then you aren't going to get that in a new article or a slashdot post. There are lots of resources available for learning SUSY, or jump in the deep end with something random like http://www.springer.com/physics/particle+and+nuclear+physics/book/978-4-431-54543-9

It's anecdotal and has no empirical backing. Pilot studies aren't showing promise, but a larger study is required to make any definitive conclusions.

It's likely because of the incidence of intestinal disorders, namely celiac disease, switching the diet is providing treatment for the specific disorder improves their children's symptoms, but isn't actually affecting the underlying autism.

I have been in academia for more than twenty years and can say without a doubt that being around experts in a field cannot be replaced.

What happens if you want to do something interesting in the field and can't afford to chill with experts for twenty years?

Then computational neuroscience is not going to be your bag. I also learned in this time that coming to college doesn't always mean graduating with a degree in order to find out what you want to do with the rest of your life. But, if you want to do scientific research and have any impact then you should go the research and academia route. If you want to just play, go play. You don't have to be an enrolled student to go to the library and read journals, although a lot of them are no longer printed so sooner would be better. If you're that enthusiastic about it you could always subscribe to a few journals. Here's a few to look at:

http://www.springer.com/biomed/neuroscience/journal/10827
http://www.frontiersin.org/computational_neuroscience
http://www.cnsorg.org/journals

That last one is a list of pertinent journals in the field.

The most important thing to get out of college *is* figuring out what you want to do with the rest of your life. If that's dropping out to start your own neuroscience company then by all means go forth and conquer!

Yet everyone is affected. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2026922/

Alcoholic impairment of judgement is something that is much riskier than being able to stay in your lane, and is something most people (including you, apparently) either don't think about or don't know about. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00213-005-0057-9 Even small amounts of alcohol impair your ability to make risk/reward decisions. When driving, this means you damage your ability to decide to go ahead and hit the dog in the road when swerving would hit a pedestrian.

That is the problem with low amounts of alcohol. Not reaction time, but rather your ability to make the *correct* snap decision under pressure.

Ok so you add a unique hardware ID (burned into the card when its manufactured and unchangeable) and the data stored on the card is tied to it. If the card data is cloned, the card its cloned to wont have the correct ID and will fail to work.

Its not like the people cloning these cards to get free bus travel are going to be spending dollars on equipment that can somehow create cards with the correct unique ID for the cards they are copying. Plus, a cloned card wont have the correct transit company logos on it (unless you can replicate that too which also costs dollars to do properly) meaning inspectors or drivers looking to see your card (which happens on the transit network in my city which also has a card system) will see that its a fake.

How do you propose to practically achieve this "burned" ID?

How can you prevent the attacker from obtaining cards from a different manufacturer who doesn't do this "burning in" and lets the users to set any value in any stored field?

The whole aim of having the cards being "smart" is that they can be equipped with a protected private key that they don't allow to be read from the outside world and that these cards perform cryptographic signing internally, without letting any secret information about performed cryptography out.

That's also why there's so much effort put into making smart cards tamper-evident (see Design principles for Tamper-Resistant Smartcard Processors (1999)) and withstand electromagnetic eavesdropping (see ElectroMagnetic Analysis (EMA): Measures and Counter-measures for Smart Cards) - so that you can't just put a receiver close to them when a transaction is being performed and steal their private key.

As far as I understand, the flaws in various public transit card systems are mostly due to weak implementations of cryptography. Your proposed solution, on the other hand, is completely wide open to attacks, so it's much worse.

Just a few very well known samples. That is not even the tip of the iceberg. http://www.geek.com/science/robot-swarms-self-assemble-into-flying-units-of-any-shape-or-size-1562961/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkvpEfAPXn4
http://naturalrobotics.group.shef.ac.uk/research.html

(Pay-walled articles) http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=4108264&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fxpls%2Fabs_all.jsp%3Farnumber%3D4108264
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11431-012-4748-2

This is a pretty popular research topic nowadays. I have no idea why this MIT news is literally in every tech-blog on the net(other than their excellent PR department, I wished the PR guys in my university had the same enthusiasm...). I'm not trying to discredit them or anything, but while their approach is somewhat novel, similar results have been achieved in many different ways.

That's just the business end. If you actually read the article, you'd know that the whole buoy-shaped contraption at the top of the page is the robot; it uses a camera to identify jellyfish and plots its own path to efficiently patrol through the swarm. It's an impressive computer vision and AI achievement.

http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-37374-9_38

Unless they're perfect dice (and they certainly won't be after generating gigabytes of material), there may still be a bias in the pad you generate with them.

You're wrong.

http://360biometrics.com/faq/fingerprint_scanners.php
http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F0-387-21685-5_2#page-1
http://www.hanscan.com/en/radio-frequency-sensors

I don't know about you but I can't seem to find ANY studies besides the one done by the 9th graders on the effects of wifi on low order plants.

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02861092 finding that under 60kW of radiation of the same type as wifi, 90+ hours of exposure is required to prevent plant growth over a radius of 50 metres. So say you're looking at 900 hours exposure (i.e. about the length of time the referenced expirement would have taken) and for simplicities sake 60mW (which is more power than a wifi router actually emits), the radius receiving plant-killing levels of exposure would be about 0.5cm. If you put your plants right on top of the router, they may suffer a touch. Otherwise, they'll be fine -- which suggests something went wrong in the reported experiment other than wireless interference with the plants.

To perform the analysis, the team had to sift through millions of letters of genetic code using a computer program developed
to calculate the probability of convergent changes occurring by chance, so they could reliably identify ‘odd-man-out’ genes.

I was following a different train of thought; trying to support it came across this:

"In the traditional approach, the dynamic programming based pair-wise alignment is used for measuring the similarity between two sequences.
This method does not work well in a large data set."
http://link.springer.com/static-content/lookinside/465/chp%253A10.1007%252F3-540-45554-X_47/000.png

Paywall, the above is all there is. Text mining techniques were used in the research.

http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F3-540-45554-X_47
Hoang Kiem and Do Phuc (snicker, he said...).

To perform the analysis, the team had to sift through millions of letters of genetic code using a computer program developed
to calculate the probability of convergent changes occurring by chance, so they could reliably identify ‘odd-man-out’ genes.

I was following a different train of thought; trying to support it came across this:

"In the traditional approach, the dynamic programming based pair-wise alignment is used for measuring the similarity between two sequences.
This method does not work well in a large data set."
http://link.springer.com/static-content/lookinside/465/chp%253A10.1007%252F3-540-45554-X_47/000.png

Paywall, the above is all there is. Text mining techniques were used in the research.

http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F3-540-45554-X_47
Hoang Kiem and Do Phuc (snicker, he said...).

There are a bunch of technical challenges. Basically what you're talking about is a notion called identity-based encryption, which has been achieved efficiently and securely only fairly recently (Boneh et al., somewhere around 2000). IBE, at least as proposed commonly, requires a central server that administrates users and issues key pairs, thus inherently providing key escrow. This makes it useful in business environment, but in a setting like private mail, the authority is a vulnerability, and it is difficult to build a secure and actually practical system with multiple providers because the providers' private keys are indirectly used to generate private keys for users.
There have been proposals to get rid of the key escrow issue; see for example this excellent paper by Craig Gentry, but as far as I know the multiple provider issue still stands. For the purpose of secure and private email, PGP would probably be the way to go, at least if you are either paranoid enough or have a good reason to sacrifice usability for security against the provider.

There are plenty of other studies around using more common forms of glass (e.g. fused silica). You analogy to rock and metal is flawed though. A glass is defined as any material that shows a glass transition, which would include amber. Your complaint is more along the lines of a paper that says "Metal tested to have property X" and you are complaining it may not be relevant to steel when it used copper as a convenient example. The main merits of that study are that it was a test over very long time scales. If you are interested in short time scale, high precision tests, there are a bunch around, using interferometer setups to measure small changes. These are used to measure viscosity of various solids for testing viscoelasticity models.

Bitcoin does not employ 'secure multiparty computation' in any part of its design

Bitcoin is a multiparty computation system. The fact that it does not build on previous work does not change what Bitcoin is, nor how it can be analyzed.

the concept of digital cash in cryptography this is also well defined

Yeah, and guess what? The security definitions of those systems assume a central bank that issues the money. You do not have to believe me; here, you can read the actual work on it:

http://rd.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F11889663_20

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.44.8279

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=5443458&tag=1

That was 2007 (your link). I believe there have been lots of studies with positive results (and perhaps improvements in technology) since then.

Here's a recent article about using it for tinnitus (an area with more quackery then most others combined):
"The Effects of Neurofeedback on Oscillatory Processes Related to Tinnitus"
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10548-013-0295-9

Article(s) are devoid of any useful information on what techniques were used. The only useful information to be found is in the book he co-wrote (Here is a table of contents). Assuming the techniques in the book are the ones used to develop the heuristic, I don't see anything new here. Also, being a IT Security graduate from Deakin myself, I found the people involved CompSec there to be very underwhelming and years behind the times...

Someone posted above: GMO in crops such as tobacco has been around for that long but in food crops only since ~1994. But anyway,

There is plenty of documentation about nutrient density and pesticide residue in organic products. Just like any other subject this charged, you can find a study that says anything you like. But to claim there is no documentation is to discredit yourself. E.g., in 30 seconds I founda review of such studies with varying results along several dimensions: http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-007-0394-0_7

Secondly, many of the more grounded concerns I have followed regarding current use of GMOs has little to do with direct health benefits (that's just an easy point to use by media to scare people) and more to do with mono-culture and the economic ramifications. While use of GMO does not necessarily imply these things, in practice it does and you can't separate them from each other in a practical debate

Lastly, to claim that all people who are against GMOs share a certain trait, like lack of knowledge in some field of science, is not a convincing argument. What do you know about my educational background?

but I remember a paper that hypothesized that religious disposition is instinctual and a product of evolution since the population that believed in a higher being were more successful than the population with no such beliefs (Google "Evolutionary psychology of religion").

You don't need to read a paper, Springer published a whole monograph on the topic

And to be fair, as a computer programmer, it's much less tedious to write a program to solve a particular goal than to write a system that incorporates genetic algorithms, and wait for it to evolve and to that goal on its own.

First of all, it's less tedious when you're around. When you're not around, there's no one to write it in the first place!

Second, people have tried and the results look completely different in both cases. Evolved units are sensitive to initial conditions and their internal working is often unclear, with no separation of functional concerns - both features often observed in biological systems (try fully replacing H2O in your body fluids with D2O!) and almost never seen in engineered designs.

Really, then just go to a random math springer journal. Go to editorial board. I'll even do that for you Editorial Board of acta mathematica . I didn't selectively chose one I clicked on one at random. See, all academics with university(or research center) affiilation. These are the ones who manage peer review. The technical editors who are paid by the publishers don't manage peer reviews, they only manage a paper once it has been accepted. Astroturfer like to confuse the public about the difference between academic editors who manage peer review and technical editors who don't manage peer review.

Homo Sapiens seems quite "stupid and brutish" most of the time. Just saying.

Actually, even when compared to our closest relatives the great apes, humans get along remarkably well. The frequency of violence in human communities is remarkably low compared to many other species. Chimpls for example have have rates of aggression between two and three orders of magnitude higher than humans. .

What about bonobos? We are closely related to them as well.

Homo Sapiens seems quite "stupid and brutish" most of the time. Just saying.

Actually, even when compared to our closest relatives the great apes, humans get along remarkably well. The frequency of violence in human communities is remarkably low compared to many other species. Chimpls for example have have rates of aggression between two and three orders of magnitude higher than humans. .

Do animals build prisons to hold and torture fellow animals? Do animals build concentration camp to hold and kill millions of it's own kind? Do animals build nuclear bombs to destroy fellow animals far away?

Animals might be more aggressive, but they sure as fuck aren't as evil as humans...

Homo Sapiens seems quite "stupid and brutish" most of the time. Just saying.

Actually, even when compared to our closest relatives the great apes, humans get along remarkably well. The frequency of violence in human communities is remarkably low compared to many other species. Chimpls for example have have rates of aggression between two and three orders of magnitude higher than humans. .

"Yet I doubt you can point to a reputable, peer-reviewed, study making those claims, AFAIK it's standard practice around the world that neither the dog nor the trainer know where the drugs are hidden during the training sessions, often they don't know what they are looking for, it could be drugs, explosives, even apples if your a certain Beagle working Hobart airport."

Hmmm. I think maybe this paper from UC Davis in 2011 might qualify. It was published in Animal Cognition, and it took me all of about 15 seconds to find it with Google.

If A.C. and UC Davis are not sufficiently reputable or peer-reviewed for your taste, then I challenge you to show me a paper that shows that they ARE reliable, and is more reputable and peer-reviewed.

Granted the top layer, which is all we have studied up until now will be nothing exciting (likely layers of dust deposited over millennia), but unexposed layers have a lot of historic potential.

The stuff they're looking at is rock that's (very) slowly being further exposed through erosion by the wind - the rocks formed early in the history of Mars, then newer, upper layers have eroded away, exposing this particularly old stuff dating from around the time life began on Earth. If Mars had similar conditions, then it's a good place to look for remnants of organic molecules...

The aim of the drill is to get to rock that's not been significantly irradiated by cosmic rays. From this paper on The Sample Analysis at Mars Investigation and Instrument Suite:

Ancient indigenous organic molecules could be also destroyed or transformed by the ionizing radiation in the shallow subsurface of Mars. Due to a thin martian atmosphere and lack of magnetic field, the surface of Mars has been bombarded continuously by the energetic particles of the galactic and solar cosmic rays (GCRs and SCRs) for much of its history. Unlike UV radiation which is absorbed in the first mm of soil (Mancinelli and Klovstad 2000; Cockell et al. 2005), GCRs can penetrate down to 1 meter below the surface (Dartnell et al. 2007). Over the long period of exposure, cosmic rays particles have the capacity to transform complex organic compounds into macromolecules having different, more refractory chemistry and/or into smaller molecules broken from a parent molecule. The latter case may occur either by direct impacts or by secondary reaction with oxidative radicals produced by radiation in the immediate vicinity of the organic molecules (Dartnell et al. 2008). It is not clear how such long-term degradation would affect SAM’s measurements of organic compounds at the ancient geologic outcrops because the rates of erosion are highly variable on Mars (Golombek et al. 2006). Erosion of the ancient rock would naturally expose “fresh” (less irradiated) material to the surface with potentially “unbroken” organic molecules. Furthermore, SCRs, which are less energetic than GCRs, cannot penetrate and destroy organic matter deeper than 2 cm below the surface (Pavlov 2011). Therefore, MSL’s drilling and sampling of outcrops from 5 cm below the surface will exclude the effects of degradation of organic matter by solar cosmic rays. Finally, using the radiolysis constants of amino acids Kminek and Bada (2006) and Pavlov (2011) demonstrated that simple organic compounds with masses below 100 amu, should have a good chance to survive long-term exposure to GCRs in the shallow subsurface even extremely low surface erosion rates. Results from Curiosity’s Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD) will provide modern radiation characteristics that will help improve long-term modeling of the surface radiation on Mars and possibly constrain its affects on near surface organic chemistry.

There are many existing studies that have already proven several things about marijuana use:

1. Smoking (anything) raises your risk of oral and lung cancers, including marijuana.

In fact studies show the opposite for marijuana.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=large-study-finds-no-link
Cannabis smoking appears to protect against lung cancer. This study is now seven years old, and an even larger one fifteen years ago found the same thing:
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023%2FA%3A1018427320658
Can't be cannabis interfering with your ability to process information. I guess we will just have to chalk it up to prejudice and willful ignorance.

3. Marijuana causes psychosis in healthy people...

Link please?

4. Marijuana is addictive. It's a hotly debated point but the fact is that many people really struggle to stop using it and relapse.

Meaning... you know there is no real support for this, but you want to throw it out there as a claim anyway. You do know that by this same standard tanning is addictive too, right?

Marijuana advocates reject all criticism, and assume all scientific studies are somehow flawed or are the result of anti-marijuana conspiracies. To them marijuana _has_ to be the perfect drug, even if reality contradicts that viewpoint. Sounds crazy, but it's roughly what you'd expect from people who are no longer living in our reality.

Looking glass time. You are describing your own rejection of scientific evidence.

At least one study agrees with you:
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF01542085?LI=true#page-1

Apology accepted. Now, where were we?

Summary of my position : Panspermia is not impossible, in the strict sense, but unnecessarily complex given that you've got to have an origin of life somewhere, and only a limited number of cycles available in a universe of finite age. So, if you want a Copernican universe ("we're nowhere unusual"), you'll still have to have lots of separate panspermia origins to put us in an average part of an average galaxy. At the very minimum, you need an origin of life in every galaxy, and really you need a lot more than that. So that's billions of origins in the observable universe.

At that number of origin of life events, it's much simpler to work on the assumption that life originated where you find it. i.e., on Earth. Fr Occam would approve.

The detailed theories about the chemistry of OOL (I'm getting tired of typing "origin of life") cover quite a wide range of chemistries, indicative of the fact that we don't really know WTF happened. But my reading is that it's not a serious problem. Chemistry can happen fast, and several of the chemical ideas are not mutually exclusive. To my mind, the most interesting likely result of penetrating the ice on Europa or the lakes of Titan is going to be giving us a better idea of what chemistries were actually plausible, even if these places didn't ever generate life. Or maybe some people's buckets will start generating bugs. It's worth watching.

I was forgetting that I (intermittently) have access to "the literature" through a formal library. I don't at the moment, so I'm only seeing marginal access to Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres but I recall finding it very interesting when I browsed it. I just checked, and I'd downloaded volumes 39 to 30, averaging 42 articles per issue. (Obviously, it's an incomplete project ; I'll get back to it one day.) Hmm, "panspermia" gets 6 mentions in volume 33 (after a conference?) pllus the TOC, and 3 more in volume 34 (but not the TOC, comments and references?), 1 in vol 35, 3 more plus a TOC in vol 37, five in vol 38 and a couple in vol 39. Two points from that : "panspermia" is not ignored by the scientific community (30 items in 10 years) but it isn't considered terribly important or interesting (7% of a relevant sample of papers mention it, and many of them will be tangential).

That's a 12MB zip file.

Annoyingly, I haven't got round to titling the PDFs with the title of each paper, so I'd have to read or at least scan each paper. Which I may do, but not today. (I had a quick scan, dumped about 1/5 of the files that contained book reviews etc. But the general picture doesn't much change.)

"1) Why would a *biology* journal publish physics work?"

'Biology' is a mistranslation. The word Naturwissenschaft literally means 'natural sciences' and means any science dealing with the natural world - eg. biology, physics and chemistry, as opposed to social science (Sozialwissenschaft), the arts/humanities (Geisteswissenschaft) and other branches of science.

http://www.springer.com/life+sciences/journal/114 makes it clear that this journal deals with physics too.

Still open-minded scepticism is the way to go until there are independently verified results.