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Slashback: Passports, Microscopes, IQ Points
Actually, it's taking tests that reduces IQ. The guys at Mind Hacks have dissected the widely reported story that 'email destroys the mind faster than marijuana' [Posted on Slashdot a few days ago -- T.] and found that it is more spin than science. The results show simply that people do worse at IQ tests when distracted, although Hewlett-Packard are not releasing details of the experiment, so others cannot even evaluate if the research is sound. The use of psychobabble for marketing marches on.
One day this will all be commemorated as ... an opera. GreyPoopon writes "It looks like Jon's attempt at swimming the Atlantic has ended in early failure. Taking the blame once again is is PR Manager, Eskil Sivertsen. The raft he was using was somehow punctured this morning, and Jon had to abondon his trek to perform a heroic rescue. Perhaps someone should take on the task of sending our downtrodden adventurer a cup of Mom's hot chocolate."
PCP theorem simplified, still way over my head. Stridar writes "Sanjeev Arora's proof of the PCP theorem was a great acheivement. This theorem, a reduction of NP to PCP, allowed for many striking results on the difficulty of finding approximate solutions to NP-Hard problems. However, his original proof is long and technical, focusing on the arithmetization of booelan formulas. It has long been an open problem to simplify this result. Now Irit Dinur , a mathematician at the Hebrew University, has given a purely combinatorial proof of the PCP theorem, in her exciting paper "The PCP Theorem by Gap Amplification" ."
I think several other things end at death, too. microbee writes "The Register reports that Yahoo has complied with a court order to give a dead soldier's email account to his parents. It's not clear to me from the news whether they got direct access to the actual mail box, or just hard copy of those emails. If the former, it's a bit funny to read "the family complain they have only got emails received by Justin, not those he wrote." People have to wonder whether their privacy ends at death."
Haven't they ever seen The Killing Fields? valdean writes "Following up on past Slashdot stories, Wired News reports that the State Department is now considering adding a password to the new RFID passports, in response to 'criticism from computer security professionals and civil libertarians.' According to the article, 'The data... would be locked and unavailable to any reader that doesn't know a secret key or password to unlock the data. To obtain the key, a passport officer would need to physically scan the machine-readable text that's printed on the passport page beneath the photo... The reader would then hash the data to create a unique key that could be used to authenticate the reader and unlock the data on the RFID chip.'"
Anything with LEDs in it makes me happy. HunterD writes "Apparently a company called DigitalBlue purchased the rights to the Intel Play series, which included the Intel QX3 microscope. Well, DigitalBlue has released an upgrade called the QX5 that features an Ultrabright LED, a better camera, and a number of other upgrades."
Or how about just NOT using RFID in passports and instead using tried and tested chips or strips? And no, not having to replace worn out passports is does not take priority over privacy and security, most people don't use their passports more than a dozen times a year anyway, I use my debit card every day and the chip is fine, theres no excuse to use RFID.
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So, if it has to read "machine readable data" from in the passport before it can "unlock" the data on the rfid chip, what is the point?
Why not just read the machine readable data like they do now and skip all the security / privacy implications of RFID tags that might be secure now, and might be insecure tomorrow.
What about the people you exchanged email with? Email is not like a journal, there are at least 2 parties involved and the privacy of those people is equally as important of the privacy of the soldier. My solution would be that if the people with whom the deceased communicated with should decide whether or not they want to forward the email on to the parents.
Monstar L
Others with whom you've corresponded may do tho'.
130-95=35. The standard deviation for IQ is 15. So the difference is more than two standard deviations. That is a pretty substantial difference! The person with a 130 is in the top 20% of the population while the person with a 95 is in the bottom half.
Think of the economics, and the number of people earning their income from the current prohibition:
- Prisons and prison personnel, who hold convicted marijuana consumers and dealers.
- Police and police officers, who investigate marijuana "crimes".
- Judges, court personnel and public procutors, who judge marijuana "criminals"
- Marijuana dealers, who can sell their marijuana at a higher price because of the prohibition.
All of these groups will strongly oppose legalization of marijuana, as it threathens their income.The question is regarding long-term damage done to the brain. Not short-term. Read your own reports:
CONCLUSIONS: Heavy marijuana use is associated with residual neuropsychological effects even after a day of supervised abstinence from the drug. However, the question remains open as to whether this impairment is due to a residue of drug in the brain, a withdrawal effect from the drug, or a frank neurotoxic effect of the drug. from marijuana
I'd like to see a comparison done against alcohol, also. I am quite certain that marijuana pales in comparison to the detrimental effects brought on from alcohol abuse.
Bottom line, read all the reports you want, it'll never justify the criminalization currently assoicated with marijuana. Christ, half the OTC medications you can buy at the grocery store would do more harm to your brain than marijuana if used on a regular basis.
You have got to be joking, right? Lets start from the top:
- Prisons: Overcrowded as it is. Our local city lock-up in Baltimore doesn't even have the capacity to process possible *murder* suspects within the required 24 hours. Public defenders are getting people out of lockup EVERYDAY -- without charge -- because of this problem.
- Police: The last time a cop caught me with a joint, he told me to throw it out. The cops around here don't have the time to keep arresting kids for smoking pot. They have more serious problems to worry about.
- Judges: Don't know about your town, but in mine it may takes up to 6 months after being arrested before you even see a judge for a formal hearing. I don't think it is because of all the pot smokers.
- Marijuana dealers: I don't even know where to start with this one. I'll leave it alone.
That being said; I don't know if I think marijuana will be legalized in my lifetime, but I wouldn't be surprised if cops started treating it more and more like underaged drinking. Similar to, "OK, start dumpin 'em out, kid."
And just what kind of learning are you referring to? Sophiscated symbolic learning, inferential learning, and overall conceptual learning are very different from dry fact learning, and there is a *vast* difference between below average (95) and gifted (130) in their ability to do higher learning. This is generally at the very highest levels of skill; IQ is more a measure of potential mental capability. There's some overlap with harder work on something leading to more skills than high IQ and slacking, but when pushed to the limits the 130 IQ can go much farther than the 95 IQ. Also consider that a person with a 130 IQ is 2 full standard deviations above the mean, with their mental ability in the top 97th percentile of the population, if you're claiming someone in the 37th percentile has the same ability to learn... I'd be highly suspect of your coursework in psychology.
35 points is a HUGE difference. Now, a few points all within one standard deviation is a small difference. But a few points between scores both more than 3 standard deviations is also a huge difference. I really get tired of people thinking IQ tests are jokes, there's extensive research into it, tons and tons of science going into making each professional test. IQ is a very scientifically sound concept, if you doubt this you need to study psychology some more (as in, college courses, not mainstream therapy-only junk).
To obtain the key, a passport officer would need to physically scan the machine-readable text that's printed on the passport page beneath the photo
Ok, at this point, they're already scanning the passport, why not just put all the information on the magnetic strip, rather than waste money on an additional RFID chip?
Mean is 100. 15 points per standard deviation. There's a huge difference between 130 and 95.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
Unless your email is encrypted. If you care about privacy, make sure everyone has your pgp key and uses it.
It is up to users to protect email privacy, not ISPs and not mailbox hosts.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Wrong wrong wrong.
Federal law allows seizure of assets of people suspected of drug crimes.
Huge difference. Suspicion sufficient for asset seizure can be generated by anonymous sources. And heaven help you if you are a landlord and your tenant is caught for a drug crime--they can seize the landlord's property. It's seriously messed up.
Poke around, do some research. What you will find is one of the greatest perversions of the U.S. Constitution to come down the pike ever.
The lobbying done by alchohol, oil and forestry groups is where most of the US's info about the plant comes from.
I don't understand why people forget the biggest culprit in this debate, and the party that has most to lose from the legalization of marijuana: drug companies. Marijuana is superior to most of the pain-killing and/or anti-depressant drugs available, without the crippling side effects that accompany commercial drugs.
Also, don't forget that Marijuana is a MAJOR cash crop. It's a multi-billion dollar industry in British Columbia alone. At some point, governments are going to realize they can make more from taxing the use of marijuana than they receive from the pockets of the pharmaceuticals.
Quoth Opera's PR page "It was cold and wet and horrible and I was really, really scared," says Eskil Sivertsen, Opera's PR Manager who operated the raft. "The night had been crisp and starlit, and we had fallen asleep in the raft to the gentle movement of the waves. In the morning, I gave Jon two chocolate bars and some of those mini carrots he likes so much before he..." Is there something going on between Silvertsen and von Tetzchner? I'm half expecting some sort of talk about them laying on their beds, feet kicking in the air, as they talk on their princess phones to each other while listening to NSync.
[Of course it's client-server; it runs on a LAN]