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Here's a link to Merker's "Consciousness without a cerebral cortex"

http://www.summer12.isc.uqam.c...

Note the evidence cited. Try some Damasio too: "The Feeling of What Happens" is most interesting, but you should be able to locate some articles of his about brainstem consciousness. Here's one:

http://www.federaljack.com/ebo...

The Philosophers of Consciousness have decided that consciousness is created by the cortex, a completely evidence-free proposition ... (philosophy and evidence don't get along, hence Hawking's remark that, "Philosophy is dead.") Contrast that gaseous guess with the brainstem (the "reptilian brain") consciousness hypothesis that is supported by a great deal of evolutionary, experimental, and observational evidence.

Cortical consciousness hypotheses have created all sorts of confusion and nonsense "problems," like "back-dating", for instance, the fact that a cortical stimulation of a touch done prior to a physical touch is nevertheless experienced *after* the physical touch. Duh! Look at the wiring - everything that happens to and within the body reaches the brainstem first.

Merker reasonably proposes that the brainstem complex creates the relatively low bandwidth conscious experience and the cortex (which is suggestively "activated" by the brainstem), with its vast parallel processing elaborates the content of consciousness in a way specific to a particular species. In my hypothesis, resolved cortical pre-conscious "images" are transmitted to the brainstem for "display".

Of course, almost all of consciousness research and funding are focused on the cortex, which is always illustrated with numerous "blinkenlights" and is probably shiny too ... ;-) Your cited "manipulate individual neurons" is one example - those are cortical neurons. So it may be awhile before brainstem consciousness is examined with the same rigor and intensity. My own theory is that consciousness is equivalent to a pattern of activation and connectivity involving a brainstem neuronal cluster (and/or other related cells), such that a conscious feeling IS that structure. In that view, consciousness remains completely physical - there's nothing else to it - so it'll likely take a nanotechnological level of examination (and a singular lapse of ethics) to see if a feeling of the color blue might be changed to a feeling of the color red with a tiny brainstem tweak..

Just because we haven't yet achieved that level of experimental capability is no reason to turn to religious/spiritual suggestions like Panpsychism, which seems to lead to a belief in a consciousness that's some ghostly infinity. Don't give up on science so easily ... it's the best thing humanity has going for itself. Aside from empathy.

someone should tell them about plouffe's inverter, it already does what they want.

Plouffe inverter will give you a formula for your number, though it doesn't do physical constants.

Create a butt-ugly program where every feature is easy to find and compare it with a beautiful interface where every button is hidden behind layers of hoops. Most people will claim the beautiful one is more usable.

This happens in many fields. In education it's known as the Dr. Fox Effect, after a study in which a "Doctor Fox" gave an expressive and interesting lecture and was rated higher than another professor who gave a less entertaining lecture with more content.

Nothing new to see here, folks! Sorry!

(Yes, I am an electrochemist)

I hope this isn't lost at the end of the thread but if anyone wants to leave an imprint on these boobs who think it's that easy to "prove evolution". I have some email addresses you might enjoy.

Links that have emails for the SSHRC members who rejected Alters application:
http://www.english.ucalgary.ca/faculty/s_bennett.h tm
http://www.ucs.mun.ca/~lfelt/oldindex.html
http://www.uottawa.ca/academic/arts/history/prof_h eap.html
http://www.uqac.ca/aemeir/articles.php?lng=fr&pg=6 5
http://www.economie.uqam.ca/fich_profs_html/prof_r _ruth.html

I was tempted to paste the emails directly but I didn't want to get in trouble for that. If you care about this, send them an email and tell them how you feel and if you're Canadian cc your MP, you never know if your MP might get involved. I cc'ed mine, I hope he does something because this just hurts. I'm without words to convey how pissed I am.

(1/16)^n is positioning the rest as the nth hexadecimal digit, if you are reciting the digits you obviously skip it. Note that this formula is for hexadecimal digits. There is a formula for base 10 but it is not as pretty.

According to the Plouffe Inverter, 125 ~= Bernoulli(42,x). Draw your own conclusions.

In two weeks, either Sunday the 3rd or Monday the 4th of July, Montreal will receive the visit of Richard Stallman for a presentation, followed by a panel with Russell McOrmond and other experts on canadian legislation. See the Stallman in Montréal 2005 page for more info as it becomes available. Organized by FACIL, Koumbit and LabCMO. The presentation will be in french, but the panel will be bilingual.

• Netherlands $14.57
• US $14.20 (That's the OECD's number; the AFL-CIO says $12.03.)
• UK $13.33
• Australia $13.14
• Japan $12.83

For the US, that number has been flat for well over a decade. For the European countries, it's climbing. That data is four years old.

That study is worth a look. The US has the lowest level of legal employment protection, and the lowest level of collective bargaining for wages, of any of the OECD countries.

More recent data is available, but not for free. The OECD Database requires a paid subscription.

Oh, the glorious days of hypercard. . .

Don't know anything about it - just followed the links.

If you're so worried about computer ethics, why do you have a Hotmail account and use Macromedia products running on Windows to create your web pages? Do you believe that ASPL is morally worse than MS-EULA, or are you being hypocritical?

I disagree.

Canada (greatest country on earth) was the second country in the world with the power to make Nukes.

Yet We Are still Nuclear Free.

We canadians actually value life....150,000 people is a fucking lot, do not belittle them.

The US could/Should have Fired a Warning shots first, (Let the first 1 or 2 off in the ocean).

The Use of nukes had something to do with ending the war early (about 6 months), and something to do with the US Beating its chest like a gorilla to warn the Russians that they mean buisness.

as for countries that would use them
I have to believe your right most countries would have, Rusia would have, Japan Would have, Germany would have used them, But I don't think Britan would have, not that late in the war.

There citizans acutally knew what war was ....and I don't think they liked it much.

any way....

ignore the rest of my ramble ..can you tell I'm bitter at the US over a lot of things, ..

mostly its tendancy to break treaties and when ever the hell they feel like it.
Specifically:
Kyoto
NAFTA


Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treat

Actually there is a better candidate for who Pangloss is a caricature of.

Noël Antoine Pluche (1688-1761), the author of a highly popular work, Le Spectacle de la Nature (1732), took Leibnitz's ideas and ran with them, and ran, and ran, and ran.

As I said before, not giving something to someone is not the same as taking away something that they already own. If someone chooses not to work, no-one is forcing them to starve - they have made the choice themselves.

The tax system is unfair because the people who contribute the most receive the least, and the people who contribute the least receive the most. In a truly fair system, most tax would be paid by the poor, since they are the biggest users of the government's services

why should people who pay for private healthcare, education, pensions etc, have to pay for everyone elses? After all, they're saving the government money by providing for themselves!

If you get insurance that covers you for more than a few million then as soon as you go to your Doctor, he'll see you as a cash cow and say that everything is wrong with you, other Doctors will tacitly co-operate with him as they'll refer people to him to make money for themselves as well. Thus it'll be impossible to get an honest and impartial opinion. When he wants to milk your cash cow insurance policy he'll diagnose you with schizophrenia, inject you with Lardactyl (Glaxo Smithkleine?) to make you look and act schizophrenic, then he'll lock you up in a mental asylum for the rest of your lifetime.

The Doctors will make money from the insurance company, you'll be a sacrifice in the name of commerce.

You keep using the word "slavery" but I don't think you know what it means. Slavery means forcing someone to produce economic value and confiscating it from them, without allowing them any control over its use. Slaves worked in fields or mines or building pyramids. People who do not work produce nothing, therefore, the term slavery is irrelevant.

there's no need to interact with them at all. Let the live the lives they choose - well away from decent folk, and with their own money.

It takes weeks to bring a reactor from cold to a working state, so your example is nonsensical - the excess power would simply be met from reserves. That's why your TV doesn't go out during the interval when everyone in the country switches their kettles on.

The corporations pay for their use of employees, and pay tax for the care of the people who are not their employees. If the corporations didn't pay this tax then there would be anarchy and the business would collapse, likewise if the business didn't pay its employees then they would revolt and run away.

At the end of the day every corporation needs two services -
1. Employees to provide productivity
2. A stable business environment

Paying salaries provides (1). Paying tax provides (2) (the business purchases the Government's service). And yes, providing a good business environment does entail taking care of the destitutes as otherwise we'll have a situation like Bombay India where peasants come and beg in the streets and steal, murder and thieve from the workers. If you don't pay you taxes take my word for it, like in India there'll be 1000 starving beggars attacking you and stabbing you as soon as you walk out of the office, eventually all the workers would have been stabbed to death, and having zero workforce will collapse the economy.

Fair enough. Perhaps the solution is to grant loans to asylum seekers rather than writing them a blank cheque.

Simple analysis shows that isn't true. What could be simpler than a burger flipping job at McDonalds? Surely simple jobs will move first? No, because a burger flipper in Bangalore can't flip burgers for a customer in London!

Actually, the reason is that bankers like to be close to other bankers (videoconferencing is no subsititute for being there except for the most trivial of conversations) so they tend to cluster in banking hotspots like London, Frankfurt, NYC, etc. When banks do move, it's only to go to another hotspot. That isn't going to change any time soon

Any job that does not require interacting directly with people can be moved offshore - but any job that does is perfectly safe here.

the "confirmation of results" & peer review point I was making had to do with crypto and offsite backup software more than with statistical software. When we're talking about crypto or storing someone else's data, it's super important to be transparent. Re: stats, well, one of my slides pointed out that up 'til now, I've always hacked numbers & graphs in Stata, which is proprietary (though most of the really good stuff is published freely, but that's another matter). We should use R, but for cost & "who controls the license" reasons as much as (if not more) than verifiability.

While we're on the verifiability point, human rights data organization techniques tend to be pretty complicated, and it helps to be able to use free software. While distributing the data (via XML) may or may not be useful, it is very important to open the data specifications. I think that means opening SQL scripts, too, and all the database software (in our current mix, the backend is postgres, the front end is Java). That's coming in about a month.

But human rights folks are pretty underfunded, and the "free as in beer" part of open source and free software is a big help, too.

slashdotters might be interested in the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, Article 15(b), which states that everyone has the right "To enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications." This is a real, live, human right.

But the real bottom line to human rights and free software has to do with power. Our core rights -- to freedom of speech and free association -- are increasingly exercised in electronic media. Who controls the online world? Can any contractual obligation resulting from a license abridge your human rights? IMHO, these questions make software a human rights concern.

-- PB.

"like the French government's purchase and placing in the public domain of the first photographic patents in the early nineteenth century... The work of Harvard economist Michael Kremer ( 1998, 2000), both with respect to the possibility of public purchase of patents at auction and of shifting some public research and development funding from effort-oriented to result-oriented processes (that is, holding contests for private companies to develop vaccines instead of funding research directly), is especially intriguing in its attempts to develop institutions that have all the advantages of market competition, natural monopoly, and public provision."

I've had great results with my method for handling spam - I use a great little Windows utility called Bounce Spam which sends an email to the spammer looking very much like a message from the server indicating that the message couldn't be delivered. I don't know if a similar utility exists for Linux but I wouldn't be surprised to find one.

Dead email addresses are less than useless to spammers - making them think yours is dead is the fastest way to get off their mailing lists.

Despite the trolls, Instant Runoff Voting (IRV, aka Preferential Voting) is generally considered far superior to plurality winner-take-all. In the US, there is no constitutional problem with IRV (in fact, it has been endorsed in a consenting opinion by the Supreme Court, and by figures as diverse as Ralph Nader and Rush Limbaugh).

Due to a recent supreme court decision which invalidated blanket primary systems, the state of WA is revamping its primary system. Instant runoffs, due to their ability to collapse multiple virtual runoffs into a single round, are a cheaper replacement for primaries. It is very possible that the many groups interested in better democracy in WA (the Grange, the League of Women Voters, and the minor parties) will use the citizen interest in this issue to run IRV as a state initiative. If you're interested in this issue, contact me via email (it's not even obscured; leave the cookie in, please, even though I can handle it with or without).

ObOnTopic:
Anyone interested in voting systems should know about Arrow's Theorem, which states that there are no "perfect" ; voting systems. The only way to have a group of people preferentially rank a group of options so

1) new options will fit neatly into the ranking without mixing things up;

2) if everybody agrees on a ranking that ranking is chosen;

and 3) new voters who prefer A to B never cause B to win over A

is to have a dictatorship (ignore all voters except one). My personal choice of "ideal" system is to elect executives via borda selection among the condorcet-winning group. And then a house selected by proportional representation and a senate by approval voting. Hey, a boy can dream.

I'd be interested to see that proof, since a formula for calculating the nth digit of pi does exist.The only catch is, the formula calculates the nth digit of pi in hexadecimal.

If there really is a proof that it's impossible, then presumably that's for base 10 numbers? Do you have a reference?

A formula exists to compute it in any base.

Here is a link that will lead you to several numbers like (Pi, e or the Golden Ratio) and how they were calculated http://www.lacim.uqam.ca/piDATA/

Here is a billion of decimals digits of Pi !!!! http://www.lacim.uqam.ca/piDATA/PI/

here is an explanation on they're latest record ... 206,158,430,000 digits .... http://www.lacim.uqam.ca/piDATA/pi 206billion.txt

A lot of things to explore... and memorize

Here is a link that will lead you to several numbers like (Pi, e or the Golden Ratio) and how they were calculated http://www.lacim.uqam.ca/piDATA/

Here is a billion of decimals digits of Pi !!!! http://www.lacim.uqam.ca/piDATA/PI/

here is an explanation on they're latest record ... 206,158,430,000 digits .... http://www.lacim.uqam.ca/piDATA/pi 206billion.txt

A lot of things to explore... and memorize

Here is a link that will lead you to several numbers like (Pi, e or the Golden Ratio) and how they were calculated http://www.lacim.uqam.ca/piDATA/

Here is a billion of decimals digits of Pi !!!! http://www.lacim.uqam.ca/piDATA/PI/

here is an explanation on they're latest record ... 206,158,430,000 digits .... http://www.lacim.uqam.ca/piDATA/pi 206billion.txt

A lot of things to explore... and memorize

With programs like this.
Bounce Spam
I also understand that some unix and linux email programs have a "bounce" capability built in. I guess some might say this increases the problem by increasing the amount of traffic and bandwidth used. But my guess is that the spammer's servers and network would be the only ones to suffer any real slowdown and then maybe they would stop.