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If I wrote something like that, I would not attach my name to it. He's basically asking to be fired from his job. Hard drive failures are something everyone has dealt with for decades. What if a bus driver said that he/she had a hard time navigating in traffic, but other than that, they were great?

After looking into his homepage and blog, I can't help but get the impression this guy slacks off a lot, while thinking a lot of himself. The following parts struck me as interesting:

please do not send him unsolicited mail touting your good deals or your good cause; he will just become irate

I take that to mean he loves to pontificate, but doesn't want to hear anyone else.

His current amusement is to have as many home pages around the University of Toronto as possible; he will let finding them be your amusement.

If I told any employer my favorite pastime was to waste their time (and thus money), I could not imagine having a job much longer.

Then again, that home page was written 22 years ago. Maybe he's matured in the mean time, but I doubt it. Someone at the same job for 2 decades, who still doesn't understand basic stuff like hard drives, probably hasn't improved much. Those sort of people tend to do the absolute minimum possible, at all times.

If I wrote something like that, I would not attach my name to it. He's basically asking to be fired from his job. Hard drive failures are something everyone has dealt with for decades. What if a bus driver said that he/she had a hard time navigating in traffic, but other than that, they were great?

After looking into his homepage and blog, I can't help but get the impression this guy slacks off a lot, while thinking a lot of himself. The following parts struck me as interesting:

please do not send him unsolicited mail touting your good deals or your good cause; he will just become irate

I take that to mean he loves to pontificate, but doesn't want to hear anyone else.

His current amusement is to have as many home pages around the University of Toronto as possible; he will let finding them be your amusement.

If I told any employer my favorite pastime was to waste their time (and thus money), I could not imagine having a job much longer.

Then again, that home page was written 22 years ago. Maybe he's matured in the mean time, but I doubt it. Someone at the same job for 2 decades, who still doesn't understand basic stuff like hard drives, probably hasn't improved much. Those sort of people tend to do the absolute minimum possible, at all times.

https://nrcgt.uconn.edu/newsle...
https://tspace.library.utoront...
https://www.tandfonline.com/do...

The last one is the most directly applicable but requires access to the journal to read it.

In essence, having been asked to choose the child more likely to be gifted from two profiles, a teacher will, in statistically significant degree select the male student.

In most school districts the selection criteria for choosing a student for further testing is that the teacher refers the student, and then a screening test is administered (e.g. CCAT) to confirm the teacher's initial assessment. Then a full spectrum IQ test is administered - typically a WISC V at the moment.

If you pre-select at the first gate, your overall statistics will be skewed at the last gate.

Add onto this the social issues cited in the other two papers, (e.g. a social predisposition away from competitive activities (I'll leave nature vs nature discussions aside as 1) they're not germane to the discussion, and 2) I'm unaware of any well regarded research on the matter) influencing the result of most(*) testing situations.

(* This can be reduced through a testing environment divorced from the classroom environment with an appropriately trained test administer, but these aren't available to most parents as typically such testing is provided through the school system)

If you have appropriate evidence to support your implied position, I'd be interested in reading them.

Thanks/Min

...a 0.1% reduction in car emissions is much better for the total environment then if all emissions were eliminated from leaf blowers, lawn mowers, construction vehicles, etc.

A slight bit of critical thinking would do you a world of good.

A slight bit of researching the issue is also a great idea.

Motor scooters with 2-stroke engines pollute about three orders of magnitude more than a modern gasoline car. There are enough of these scooters that in many cities they are now a worse problem than gasoline cars yet they remain barely regulated.

Two-stroke scooters are a dominant source of air pollution in many cities

Scooters: Europe's Pollution Machines

If the scooters by themselves are enough to be a problem, it can only be worse if we add up all the 2-stroke engines of all sorts.

I pretty much hate 2-stroke engines. I am in favor of allowing them where nothing else will do, like professional chain saws. But modern battery tech has gotten to a place where an electric scooter ought to be a practical replacement for a 2-stroke scooter and I'd like to see the 2-stroke scooters aggressively taxed or outright banned.

Also, I am now very dubious about the value of additional restrictions on cars. If the goal is to maximize the net benefits to society, then it's better to take old clunkers off the road than to have the new cars pollute 0.1% less.

It's literally true that one old clunker pollutes more than dozens of new cars. (A study found that the worst 25% of cars produce over 90% of pollution!) If you can get clunkers off the road, and their owners start driving anything even remotely modern, it's a huge win for air quality. Making new cars more expensive will only encourage people to keep their clunkers running as long as possible, so I am dubious about anything that makes new cars more expensive. Is it better for new cars to cost $3000 more each but pollute 0.1% less? Or is it better to leave the standards alone, let the car makers get their factories well set up to make cars to that standard, and let the costs of new cars gradually fall over time? My gut instinct says the latter is preferable.

I first started thinking along these lines when I read this essay in 2009: https://keithhennessey.com/2009/05/19/understanding-the-presidents-cafe-announcement/

On the other hand, if the government forces insane emissions standards, the only way to meet them will be electric cars. So companies like GM that make the minimum number of electric cars they can get away with will be forced to make more electric cars. So maybe it's better in the really long run?

Just as I'd like to ban 2-stroke scooters I would like to see aggressive taxes on old clunkers that make them no-longer-affordable to run. However, I am well aware that the burden of those taxes would fall on the poorest people in our society. That's a problem. But it's also a problem that old horribly-polluting clunkers are exempted from emissions standards.

P.S. I don't actually care if the Trump Administration wants to do the right thing for the wrong reasons. If it's the right thing I want to stand back and let it happen. IMHO, leaving standards where they are is the right thing.

You are right. Since the 1906 earthquake sea-level at San Francisco has risen at 2.0 ±0.2 mm/year (7.1 to 8.7 inches per century), and there's been no "acceleration" in rate, at all.

The claim that higher CO2 levels cause significantly accelerated coastal sea-level rise is falsified by the measurement data.

Here's a graph showing sea-level measured at San Francisco juxtaposed with CO2 level:

https://www.sealevel.info/MSL_graph.php?id=san+francisco&boxcar=1&boxwidth=3&c_date=1906/5-2019/12

That includes both global sea-level rise (about 1.5 mm/yr) and local subsidence (my guess is about 0.5 mm/yr, though Prof. Richard Peltier estimates 0.32 mm/yr [ICE6G/VM5a] or 0.42 mm/yr [ICE5Gv1.3/VM2]).

As you can see from the graph, CO2 level has no perceptible effect on the (minuscule) rate of sea-level rise.

The rate of sea-level rise at San Francisco is slightly higher than average (because of subsidence), but the lack of acceleration is typical. Most sites have seen little or no sea-level rise acceleration since the 1920s or earlier. Coastal sea-level is rising no faster now, with CO2 level at 407 ppmv, than it was nine decades ago, with CO2 level 100 ppmv lower.

Although the Earth's climate has warmed modestly, the increase in CO2 level and the resultant warming have had no detectable effect on the rate of sea-level rise.

It's most likely water currents causing this phenomenon.

You should email the atmospheric physicist quoted in the article and let him know.

https://www.utm.utoronto.ca/cp...

I recall how in the eary 70's emmissions standard were going to destroy the automobile with engines getting terrible gas mileage, and no power.

It's true that engines have come a long way since the early 70's. It's also true that back then, most people didn't imagine just how far it would be possible to go.

However, I think we really are running up against some hard limits here. You can keep ratcheting the laws upward but at some point it really is impossible to comply.

In my opinion, the best way to clean up the air is to look at the whole system and try to get the area under the curve to shrink. The strategy being pursued by the Obama administration is to demand the cleanest engines they can get away with demanding, even if this makes cars more expensive; combine that with a sucky economy and new cars are selling more slowly. That means that older cars are staying on the road longer. I would favor a strategy of leaving the standards where they are, or possibly even easing them just a little, and watching competition float the cost of a new car downward a bit. Less-expensive cars means more cars being sold means more clean cars being driven.

At the same time, we need to get more serious about punishing drivers of really polluting old cars. This disproportionately punishes the poor, as for the most part only the poor will be driving the really polluting really old cars. I read somewhere that the nasty blue smoke from just one of those old cars is polluting like three dozen new cars; I just Googled for a reference on that, and while I didn't find one, I did find this: 25% of cars produce 90% of car pollution

Suppose a car is 99.7% clean. Suppose that you could force the car company to make the car 99.9% clean, but the cost of the car would go up $3000. Would you do it? I'm not sure I would, but the Obama administration I believe would go for it.

Those cheating VW diesels emit too much pollution, but they are much cleaner than older diesel cars. It is a better deal for me if my neighbor gets rid of his old diesel and buys a new cheating VW diesel. Even better still if he gets one of the cars that doesn't cheat, but those cost more.

I hate it when I see an old "beater" car go by with a noxious cloud of blue smoke coming from the tailpipe. I would love to see all those cars off the road. To speed up the process, stop making new cars more expensive.

P.S. I can't take credit for the idea of looking at the effect of the cost of new cars on the total behavior of the system; I got the idea from this blog post.

P.P.S. I look forward to electric cars becoming common. If electricity is cheap and electric cars are cheap, pollution will drop even more.

You can get a little something from a piezo with less give than asphalt, which by the way could be laid on top. Probably not worth the cost though, not unless oil goes back up to a hundred bucks, which it won't. But you know, we could at least paint the lines...

When opponents to sth have to lie through their teeth, hoping that noone will go read and understand their links, they're immediately disqualified in my view.
You clearly are not qualified to understand what you're talking about, but at least you made the work to fool people that won't ever read the links provided because they're not qualified either. Unfortunately for you, some people will read them. And they'll see your lies, which explains why you posted as AC.

Let's run down the list of "why":

- Systemd contains an unchecked null reference pointer that segfaults PID 1.
Lennart Poettering states he won't fix it
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/s...

No, systemd doesn't have such a thing, and LP never said what you're saying. The link show a very non civil hater (the systemd devs kept their cool), that wants the devs to tackle at high priority an unsupported setup, which became badly handled by systemd because of a kernel change. One thing that is legitimate, is that systemd should at least gracefully quit when in such an unsupported setup. Which has been done and fixed by the systemd devs. They asked for a patch from the guys who insist on using an unsupported setup, and of course, never got anyhting, and had to do it themselves. Classic "the setup you told me won't work, that's what I want to use, or systemd is crap". Why a sysadmin would do that, I can't understand.

- Systemd and Gnome allow bypassing gnome-shell password prompts granting root
Left unfixed for over a year
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.p...

Another big lie, systemd has nothing to do with this problem, it's only Gnome Shell that is the problem in some distro setups, and that was introduced because users were locked out of their desktop. To sum it up, Gnome-shell made a kludge to remove the security systemd provides, so as not to lockup users.

- Systemd segfaults during upgrades of itself, combined with the new log files that can't be retrieved Mr Poettering says are required to fix the bug, but he will not provide any method for Systemd to generate the logs he demands from it.
https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/...
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/...

Yet, the true sysadmins that reported it managed to provide logs and debug the systemd-208 version, which is the version we're talking about here, which is an arbitrary version that some distros took as a supported one in their distro. LP never said anything of what you're lying about here, especially as what you say makes no sense when PID one segfaults, then the core deump is important, and that's one of the thing that has been provided by competent sysadmins, not by incompetent whiners. This bug has been fixed in the 208 version used by this distro, using true debug means recommended by systemd devs or distro maintainers, not your nonsense. The upgrade was also fixed by the distros, as they were in charge of supporting the version, with the help of systemd devs.
And yes, it happened once with a systemd version, that it crashed on live updating itself.

- Systemd distros can not boot if no ethernet link is present
https://lists.debian.org/debia...

Actually that's not true at all, it will boot just fine. It's just a clueless user there that tuned his laptop with an antiquated configuration that is static instead of dynamic, and perhaps that's Debian's fault. There must be a long timeout, but eventually, he would have arrived to emergency console.
Systemd is dynamic if you use its native tools, not if you use the compatibility static tools of Debian. But it boots

If you're allergic to trimming your neckbeard and running a modern init, just switch to *BSD where they adopted the features that people are whining about decades ago. ;)

Haters hate, but do they know why? Do they have a choice? Do they have Free Will, or were they born unable to tell the difference between choosing software they want to run, and being forced to run software that... they chose?

Let's run down the list of "why":

- Systemd contains an unchecked null reference pointer that segfaults PID 1.
Lennart Poettering states he won't fix it
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/s...

- Systemd and Gnome allow bypassing gnome-shell password prompts granting root
Left unfixed for over a year
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.p...

- Systemd segfaults during upgrades of itself, combined with the new log files that can't be retrieved Mr Poettering says are required to fix the bug, but he will not provide any method for Systemd to generate the logs he demands from it.
https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/...
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/...

- Systemd distros can not boot if no ethernet link is present
https://lists.debian.org/debia...

- Systemd distros can not boot if using certain DNS servers
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bi...

- Systemd distros can not boot if using certain NTP servers
https://github.com/systemd/sys...

- Enabling the kernel "debug" command line option results in boot storage being filled with thousands of dmesg log entries per second from Systemd, and a non-booting system results
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/s...

- Systemd disables SysRq keys to ensure data loss after any of the many many instances it is coded to fail under
https://lists.debian.org/debia...

Unlike, say, insulin?

> http://heritage.utoronto.ca/in...

The patent was apparently first patented in England and Ireland in 1922, though the original research was done in Canadaa.

Does it really matter? I could show you evidence for the moon landings and you'd still argue it was faked. But if you feel the need to nitpick, here you go: http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/u...

Wow, this sounds like a nice university...

University of Toronto is an internationally regarded research university, the "Higher Education Ranking" by The Times (UK) ranks UoT at 20th in 2015 in "World University Ranking", and 16th in "World Reputation Ranking",

That's why the issue of the complaints, and the report are indeed newsworthy. It is not some obscure backwater university, but a school of medicine with a history of Nobel Laureates including Frederick Banting and J.J.R. Macleod who were the first Canadians to win a Nobel prize; for their isolation of insulin.

I imagine that this article is simply worded to make the course seem more controversial than it is

Ah, if only:

We will delve into a quantum physics’ understanding of disease and alternative medicine to provide a scientific hypothesis of how these modalities may work. Quantum physics is a branch of physics that understands the interrelationship between matter and energy. This science offers clear explanations as to why homeopathic remedies with seemingly no chemical trace of the original substance are able to resolve chronic diseases, why acupuncture can offer patients enough pain relief to undergo surgery without anesthesia, why meditation alone can, in some instances, reduce the size of cancerous tumors.

In any case, the course will now not be taught this year (or hopefully ever):

http://www.provost.utoronto.ca...

Fortunately, wiser heads have finally prevailed:

    http://www.provost.utoronto.ca...

From the article:
=====
The UTSC Health Studies Program has indicated that the course in question will not be taught in the 2015-16 academic year, or over the summer term.

As Provost of this academic institution, I must at all times respect the diversity of opinions and views of academic colleagues and sessional instructors. However, I do note with respect that the Deans of the University’s Faculty of Medicine and Dalla Lana School of Public Health have released a statement commenting on the education of their students regarding vaccinations. It includes the following:

“As deans of two of the health sciences faculties at the University of Toronto, we teach our students that vaccines are safe, effective and vital to children’s health. Vaccines are one of history’s most important and significant achievements in public health and medicine. The best evidence that science can provide proves that the health benefits of vaccines far outweigh their potential side effects, and we instruct our students accordingly.”
=====

Here is a country comparison: http://news.engineering.utoron...

[OP] I, along with my twenty million or so neighbors, help New York City use more energy, suck down more water, and spew out more solid waste than any other mega-metropolitan area.

It is difficult to tell from your description whether you regret it all or are boasting about this amazing human accomplishment.

The real question might be Is New York City worth it? On the positive side, you cannot easily disentangle its worth from that of the people who emerge from it. Could there be such people if if not for their environment, be it one of splendor (and/or) squalor? Some of the world's finest bartenders come from the ranks of burned-out New Yorkers.

Bad examples have merit too. In an era where science was convinced cholera was carried by miasma, during the 1858 Great Stink of London John Snow, a physician, mapped mortality rates to discover a geographical waterworks explanation as described in The Sewer King. NYC has excellent waste water treatment --- but it is also home to some modern cesspool-like conditions, such as the economic parasites who skim the world's financial system with High Frequency Trades, creating global dysentery via a false liquidity. Some future John Snow might manage to isolate and trace this scourge back to individual boroughs or even buildings, so these may be torn down or isolated from the rest of the world by shutting them and sealing the cracks with expanding foam.

Imagine if my specific silly examples were all that could be said of New York. Overgeneralization is just as silly. Since New York is exactly what it is, having nothing to do with good or evil, acceptance or rejection, one may well burst out in laughter.

It's something about Americans that make them measure their dicks from the balls up.

Not that any of the authors of the paper are working at universities in the U.S.. The first author in the list of authors got his degrees from universities in the UK and Canada, so I'm guessing he's not a fellow Yank.

"in many developing countries, there is strong suspicion that the TRIPS Agreement is a component of a policy of technological protectionism intended at consolidating an international division of labor where the industrialized nations generate innovations and developing countries are the market for the resulting products ."

The Global Politics of Intellectual Property Rights and Pharmaceutical Drug Policies in Developing Countries

Oh yeah, I totally know how peoples bodies can operate complex mechanical tasks like that without any sort of cognition.

Now a recent study has shown that tasks involving complex numerical cognition lower altruism, but come on. Thinking altruistically and quickly is still thinking.

It's so simple that it's broken. See for example http://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/s... for a nice overview of all the limitations of SysV init, the most important being that it doesn't actually keep track of what services are running and what processes belong to what services.

It's not supposed to - a *properly* written service would/could/should keep track of it's own processes, that isn't something init was ever supposed to do (be the 'micro-manager' of everything). If run the rc script to stop a service, and it doesn't stop all the associated processes, that is *NOT* a "problem with init", that is a problem of a poorly written/debugged service, and the code for the service should be fixed - not a whole new massively complex init system to "handle" it (or, in simpler terms, to continue to allow the people writing services to write shitty code because now "systemd will handle it").

It's so simple that it's broken. See for example http://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/s... for a nice overview of all the limitations of SysV init, the most important being that it doesn't actually keep track of what services are running and what processes belong to what services.

Sorry friend, I read your link but it's immediately apparent that this guy hasn't even read the inittab manual. The answer to many of the statements made in that blog are answered in the subject line of this post. Others are implementation issues with the application.

He may have a point with parallelism in the boot sequence, but I only care about boot speed if I am on a desktop - in which case I can just re-write how rc starts things. On a server rc's runlevel and service ordering K and S answer the question of service dependencies in a much easier and *transparent* way. And why are dependencies such a big deal - the application should be able to cope with a required service missing in an intelligent way. And if the dependency doesn't start it has a problem that systemd or init can't handle, so I'm back to wondering what systemd is actually doing for me.

Please don't see this as me defending init. I am trying to see what the justification is in choosing to run systemd with my servers - which I am trialling. I'm finding the unnecessary complexity of systemd can put me in a bad situation when I am trying to control the uptime of commercial services.

If you just want the system to boot faster - you can already achieve that with rc tweaks and implementing your service startup better instead of hacking it. The way I see it with systemd I now have three problems to deal with instead of one. 1. I still have crappy start-up implementations for services. 2. I have to now manage systemd's characteristics (obviously init isn't perfect) 3. When I have downtime I have to manage 1&2 at the worst time. Frankly operating init is so much faster and more transparent than systemd.

I see no tangible benefit for the expenditure of effort I've sincerely made, so far and I'm still wondering if there is a compelling reason. I'd rather have a discussion based on merit of the two systems, however what is compelling is that many people haven't used init to it's full capacity.

It's so simple that it's broken. See for example http://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/s... for a nice overview of all the limitations of SysV init, the most important being that it doesn't actually keep track of what services are running and what processes belong to what services.

And also, SysV init is not a pony. Which means it sucks, right?

Seems like sysadmins have been trivially solving the things you're complaining about for decades now, with less effort than systemd currently requires from the sysadmin, and far less complexity.

This systemd reminds me of grub vs lilo. Since everyone seems to have abandoned the simple and robust elegance of lilo (because it's impossibly hard to remember to run one cli command after a kernel recompile, apparently) for the bloated complexity of grub, I think history will repeat and systemd will win the day.

The thing everyone complained about in lilo was actually already managed by package install scripts, of course, just like all the stuff that systemd supposedly manages was already well managed, but that won't stop the revolution.

It's so simple that it's broken. See for example http://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/s... for a nice overview of all the limitations of SysV init, the most important being that it doesn't actually keep track of what services are running and what processes belong to what services.

find out that Jane is actually a man posing as a woman

Does that mean he/she wins the Imitiation Game ?

So.... if a machine can talk like we can, if it can communicate well enough that we suspect it also has an internal cosciousness, then isn't our evidence for it every bit as strong as the real evidence that anyone else does?

Not even close, because our conclusion about other humans is based on a huge amount of non-verbal communication and experience, starting from the moment we are born. AI researchers (and researchers into "intelligence" generally) conveniently forget that the vast majority of intelligent behaviour is non-verbal, and we rely on that when we are inferring from verbal behaviour that there is intelligence present.

Simply put: without non-verbal intelligent behaviour we would not even know that other humans are intelligent. Likewise, we know that dogs are intelligent even though they are non-verbal (I'm using an unrestrictive notion of "intelligent" here, quite deliberately in contrast to the restrictive use that is common--although thankfully not universal--in the AI community.)

With regard to the Turing test as a measure of "intelligence", consider it's original form: http://psych.utoronto.ca/users...

Turing started by considering a situation where a woman and a man are trying to convince a judge which one of them is male, using only a teletype console as a means of communication. He then considered replacing the woman with a computer.

Think about that for a second. Concluding, "If a computer can convince a judge it is the human more than 50% of the time we can say that it is 'really' intelligent" implies "If a woman can convince a judge she is male more than 50% of the time we can say she is 'really' a dude."

The absurdity of the latter conclusion should give us pause in putting too much weight on the former.

It has nothing to do with actual artificial intelligence and everything to do with writing deceptive scripts. It's not just this incident, it's a problem with the goal of the Turing test itself. I always found the Turing test a kind of stupid exercise due to this.

Yes. TechDirt's points 3 and 6 are basically the same thing I wrote here the other day:

First, that the "natural language" requirement was gamed. It deliberately simulated someone for whom English is not their first language, in order to cover its inability to actually hold a good English conversation. Fail.

Second, that we have learned over time that the Turing test doesn't really mean much of anything. We are capable of creating a machine that holds its own in limited conversation, but in the process we have learned that it has little to do with "AI".

I think some of TechDirt's other points are also valid. In point 4, for example, they explain that this wasn't even the real Turing test.

The antenna array is actually solid engineering and science. Saying each element belongs to one person is a hoot.

The dime size antenna (that looks to approximate the LC values in each small section of a lossy transmission line used as a receive Metamaterial antenna) for each listener.
http://individual.utoronto.ca/...

This is what happens when engineers and lawyers talk.

SailfishOS, running on the current Jolla device, is quite smooth and nice, in a way that my N9 (despite the slickness of the design of the UI) never was. Both were underpowered hardware for their times, but Wayland allows the kinds of GPU-accelerated and compositing-oriented display that allow for what people are increasingly used to from other OSes.

Now, in terms of systemd I'm more on your side, there's certainly a baseline of arrogance that the primary devs have shown. On the other hand, they seem sometimes to be justified, and while there was some shouting and mudflinging in the recent Debian decision, there were also some extremely thoughtful and thorough considerations that I read from Debian developers which convinced me that, despite some of its shortcomings, systemd is a needed improvement and is well thought out. Err, I can't seem to find any of them right now, but from a system administration perspective I do see this blog as a fairly succinct list of reasons why systemd is good for sysadmins. As one myself, who until now has worked merely on SysV or Upstart systems, many of those reasons do seem pretty compelling to me. So far I've only toyed with systemd in the phone that now resides in my pocket, however, so I certainly can't speak from direct experience yet. But I'm very interested to try it out.

If knowing one's sources is a good thing, then you should know that Spencer is the 500th entry in the list of most-cited scientists on climate change and Christy is the 747th (see http://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~p...). Personally, I pay more attention to the more cited individuals.

You sure know how to make a fool of yourself. Why do you have to go talking about what you don't know/understand?

Begin here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...
Then here:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.1148
http://www.physics.utoronto.ca...
http://www.opticsinfobase.org/...

http://psych.utoronto.ca/users/reingold/courses/ai/consciousness.html

Would that fit the bill?

It would in fact fit the bill of confirming my statement that there is no such axiom in the field of AI.

First: the quote above stated:

Any sufficiently complex system is, by definition, intelligent.

Your article states:

In general then, the idea is that consciousness is just a by-product of any sufficiently complex brain

Note the article refers to brains, not "any system."

Second, the article also states:

Currently, there is no general consensus as to how to define or measure conscious awareness.

The article states that some people believe consciousness is an inevitable emergent behavior of complex brains, but other people disagree. The viewpoint is not generally accepted, and its not an axiom either way. Axioms are statements that are (as far as anyone knows) intrinsically unprovable but accepted to be true without proof.

http://psych.utoronto.ca/users/reingold/courses/ai/consciousness.html

Would that fit the bill?

I've got to consider Oxford's own Mathew Arnold (1822-1888) as a plausible candidate for "Nightingale". His "The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems" (1849), and "Empedocles on Etna and Other Poems" (1852) were published under the pseudonym "A.", but they certainly seem characteristic. Odd that he hasn't been made mention of. http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poems/strayed-reveller http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/172862 http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/matthew-arnold

Because evidence indicates that roadway expansions do not reduce congestion, but increase it in the medium term: study. You know what reduced congestion in my city? Mass transit. They put in a train and more buses, and the congestion in the area dropped substantially.

Starches break down to glucose. sugar (sucrose) breaks down to fructose and glucose. Glucose can be used by most of the cells in the body. Fructose is mainly processed by the liver (a few other things can use it). Again calories are not all the same.

It is easier to get a fatty liver from consuming sucrose or fructose (or alcohol for that matter), than from consuming starch (which is still harmful in excess). http://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletters/Harvard_Heart_Letter/2011/September/abundance-of-fructose-not-good-for-the-liver-heart
You are more likely to get gout too: http://www.bmj.com/content/336/7639/309

If you don't have an active lifestyle consuming lots of starch is likely bad for you, but consuming lots of sugar or fructose is a lot worse.

For a similar serving, spaghetti has about the same glycemic index as apples, for double the carbs, and pasta is low fructose. So if it weren't for the other nutrients eating al-dente spaghetti (GI goes up if you over-boil ;) ) would be healthier than apples- especially since you only need to eat half the amount for the same calories. And if you can get similar nutrients from other sources (berries) you can skip the apples. Apples aren't that nutritious a food. Even potatoes are more nutritious. If you want a lower glycemic index for your potato - consume them cold ( https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/25731/1/Kinnear_Tara_S_201011_MAST_thesis.pdf ). Then you end up with more resistant starch (however that may make you fart more ;) ). Or switch to yam/sweet potatoes.

For reference: http://www.health.harvard.edu/newsweek/Glycemic_index_and_glycemic_load_for_100_foods.htm

"GE’s Vscan is a handheld, pocket-sized visualization tool that allows for non-invasive ultrasounds."

I can only imagine the military-grade ultrasound cannon required for an invasive ultrasound exam.

No cannons ( they didn't say invasion ultrasound...) but :

Transesophageal echocardiograpy (heart) : http://pie.med.utoronto.ca/TEE/TEE_content/TEE_standardViews_intro.html

Endobronchial ultrasound (lung and mediastinum) : http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/455720_7

Endoscopic ultrasound (pancreas liver etc) : http://www.asge.org/patients/patients.aspx?id=380

Intravascular ultrasound (coronoary arteries etc) : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intravascular_ultrasound

Transrectal ultrasound(guess) : http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/457757-overview

As mentioned by others trans vaginal is pretty common.

Most of these are usefull technologies but not the priority for resource constrained environments. The device featured in the TFA is intriguing. The question is how flexible a crystal they'll put in it, eg how specialized a device will it be will it see only very shallow structures only deep? Can they make a device at this cost with a useful resolution? The answer is probably yes but it will be interesting to see.

It is going to be interesting to see what impact the Supreme Court's decision is going to have on this:

http://media.utoronto.ca/media-releases/u-of-t-and-western-sign-agreement-with-access-copyright/

U of T and UWO both signed into this agreement while every other university in Ontario refused to sign and were willing to fight it.

the Liberals are .. well the liberals, but their last leader didn't do them any favours with his here again, back to america tomorrow antics.

Fucking liar. Ignatieff accepted a position at U of Toronto.

Why do conbots like free trade and the ability of the most talented to be able to accept the highest paid, most prestigious positions anywhere in the world... except when it's to their political advantage to smear someone for doing exactly that? (Note, I'm not a big fan of Ignatieff, but compared to what we've got, he's several orders of magnitude better.)

For just once I wish these guys could stop slinging mud and do something productive, but this is politics we're talking about.

For just once I wish a conbot would knock it off with the false equivalencies about how murderers and speeders are the same because they both broke a law. (Conbots being the murderers in this analogy, in case you're too intellectually challenged to understand it.)

IIRC: it has to do with William the Conqueror (from Normandy) who invaded and took over England in mid 1000s. They brought French as their language, and set it up as the language of the royal court and of business. English was the language of illiterate peasants, back in those days if you knew how to write you would not speak English in dealing with people at or above your level in the society, neither would you write it. The problem with English was that it couldn't very well express the more complex abstract notions (it would be impossible to translate quite a few ancient works into it, for example): it just didn't work too well for much else besides a rather simple, uneducated life. This lasted for ~400 years. Those Normans were pretty much what shaped the development of written middle English. See this and that.

Here you go http://www.utoronto.ca/ethnicstudies/Putnam.pdf

Is this racist dribble? Dunno, maybe.

Basically Mr Putnam advances a theory about a postulated metric of social capital and how much you claim that you trust your neighbor and how much that socally isolates you. The data is mostly extrapolated from aggregate data and the author even admits that many of the speculations do not follow from data that passes statistical significance as he makes the leap from corellating trust with aggregate neighborhood ethnic diversity.

Mr Putnam's earlier work was called "Bowling Alone" which essentially claimed (without the racist overtones), that this so called social capital has declined since the 1950's and blamed technology for that (just like many other sociologists prior to him). I guess blaming technology wasn't controversial enough, he had to blame ethnic diversity now.

Perhaps Mr Putnam should have just blamed reduced "social capital" on drug use, divorce rate, reduction in family size, reduction in prevalence of nearly extended family, dispersion of extended families to chase job opportunities. All seems like those are all just as likely to fit exactly the same data...

I haven't read Mr Schneier's new book yet, but hopefully he didn't stoop to this level.

Yeah, I upgraded my FreeBSD 8.1 box to 9.0-RC2 so I could start playing with ZFS v28. Madly sacrificing chickens in triplicate, after a Gentoo-like recompile of 400 ports, freebsd-upgrade left me a somewhat hosed system where basic services (startx, portupgrade) won't run complaining that libz.so.5 is missing. I guess I'm looking at a fresh install.

As far as I got with ZFS, it totally rocked. In my test I set up a three drive mirror (which I think of as a plain mirror with a presilvered hot spare). Seeing 35MB/s copying over the LAN with rsync/ssh. A test involving recursive scp starting following symlinks recursively on a 20GB file set, which put the gears to deduplication. It ran great. I finally killed it at a duplication level of 7.8. Doubt dedup will do much for me in production on my little LAN.

My biggest worry is that you really need ECC to protect the long-duration content in the ARC cache, not to mention critical ZFS memory structures themselves. On the Intel side, for ECC you're looking at an X3400 chipset, or an expensive Xeon chip. Apparently there are somewhat cheaper solutions on the AMD side. For the ZIL cache, people recommend mirrored SLC.

For a while we enjoyed 60% annual drive capacity growth rate, but this is projected to fall to 20% annual growth as we head toward bit patterned media. I wouldn't assume vastly greater capacities in the near term.

Here is a nice paper, sans authorship date (which the author will regret when his time comes in the Beetlejuice afterlife lobby) :
End-to-end Data Integrity for File Systems: A ZFS Case Study

He cites a recent analysis of Google server farm metrics:
DRAM Errors in the Wild: A Large-Scale Field Study

It's a little unclear how to translate this for a home-use ZFS box. Error rate is usage dependent and seems to depend on the quality of the mainboard memory access path.

A feature that might help ZFS outside of the enterprise is an ARC cache scrubber using the ZFS checksum data.

I'm still figuring this stuff out, but my impression so far is that ZFS makes the most sense where data preservation must coexist with high availability and there are fall-back measures in place on the preservation front.

What about your driver's license?

... the study takes into account a rebounding of the Earth's crust called glacial isostatic adjustment, a continuing rise of the crust after being smashed under the weight of the Ice Age. [Slashdot summary]

Here the summary implies that previously published GRACE ice mass balance estimates didn't take GIA into account. At first I assumed this ridiculous implication must have been a mistake on Slashdot's part. Then I read the article:

... according to the new study, published in the September issue of the journal Nature Geoscience, the ice estimates fail to correct for a phenomenon known as glacial isostatic adjustment. ... Often ignored or considered a minor factor in previous research, post-glacial rebound turns out to be important, says the paper. [AFP, Sep 8]

No, previous research didn't ignore (see section 2.2.4) GIA/PGR. These news stories are reporting on a paper by Xiaoping Wu et al. (free PDF). In table 2, Dr. Wu shows that his estimates are half as big as those in papers published separately by Velicogna, Chen et al. and Luthcke et al.

Luthcke et al. corrects for GIA using the ICE-5G model which combines many proxies and other empirical evidence regarding ice history since the Last Glacial Maximum, mantle viscosity and the Earth's various Love numbers. Chen et al. used the similar IJ05 model. Velicogna used multiple independent models to estimate uncertainty in the GIA signal. After reading Dr. Wu's paper, it's clear he never claimed that previous research had ignored or failed to correct for GIA.

That would have been a real surprise, because he wouldn't make a claim that can be disproven simply by skimming the papers he referenced. Nor is he rude enough (or at all, for that matter) to imply that the rest of the GRACE community ignored this important issue. Coincidentally, Dr. Wu worked for my advisor as a postdoc in the 1990s, in the same office that I'm currently using. I met him several months ago at the WP-AGU conference in Taiwan, and as far as I can tell he's overwhelmed by the bizarre attention his paper has gotten from the general public:

RUSH: There's a global warming story out. Guess what? Greenland and some of the ice floes, they're only going to melt half as much as originally forecast. So the polar bears are still going to have a place to live. I don't think they're going to melt, period. All of this is a sham.

"Estimates of the rate of ice loss from Greenland and West Antarctica, one of the most worrying questions in the global warming [hoax], should be halved, according to Dutch and US scie

And if you read Beowulf, not the cluster, the c1000 year old English poem it was named after, then you see that English has evolved so much in that time that it may as well be another language.
http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/19.html

Anglo-Saxon -> 1066 (William the Conqueror) -> Anglo-Norman

And if you read Beowulf, not the cluster, the c1000 year old English poem it was named after, then you see that English has evolved so much in that time that it may as well be another language.
http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/19.html

You may want to start here:
http://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~prall/climate/

(Also, unless you consider all scientists, statements like 30k scientists don't believe AGW are meaningless.)

I wish I could find the references I'm looking for, but 10 minutes of google seems to be failing me.

There was an environmental scientist who had his own show in the 70's and 80's, one of the first pro-environmental shows, big into opposing deforestation, one of the first to advocate recycling, and so on. When global warming started becoming a hot topic, he said;

1) I don't see conclusive evidence it's caused by man
    and
2) If it is happening, the best way to fight it isn't emission controls, it's protecting the rainforests.

He lost his show, was removed from the public eye, any further work was mostly ignored; he was blacklisted.

There's a few people that agree with him, of course, (Here and here for example), but by and large he's been ostracized because he didn't toe the line. In the parlance of grant work, emission studies were sexy, and pushing protection of rain forests was not.

There are many environmental scientists that have been blacklisted for having dissenting views. This is what I really have a problem with.

I find that the debate about whether global warming is due to man or not is being handled with politics, not with reason. Perhaps this is why even in the small group of posters here, I see obvious evidence of closed minds. When I see an individual state a hypothesis (even one with good evidence) as a fact, it's bad enough, but when it is followed up with a statement indicating that anyone doubting them is an idiot - that is not science or rationality. I see individuals making a claim, and then stating that because no argument they accept disproves it, that it must be true - a negative proof, and a fallacy.

That's not science. That's a religion.

I vote for microfluidics (lab-on-a-chip). There are new approaches (supplementary info) that will cost you very little money to get started, and an enormous problem space that is sorely in need of some open-source hacking to move the field forwards (disclaimer - I am an author on that paper). As an added bonus, you can choose problem areas within the field that interest you (energy? water purification? bacterial analysis? glucose monitoring? it's all there)

I vote for microfluidics (lab-on-a-chip). There are new approaches (supplementary info) that will cost you very little money to get started, and an enormous problem space that is sorely in need of some open-source hacking to move the field forwards (disclaimer - I am an author on that paper). As an added bonus, you can choose problem areas within the field that interest you (energy? water purification? bacterial analysis? glucose monitoring? it's all there)