Scientists Achieve Mental Body-Swapping

SpaceAdmiral notes the news that scientists have succeeded in convincing experiment subjects that a mannequin's body is their own, and even feeling at home in the body of someone of the opposite sex. The effect could prove useful in virtual reality applications and in robot technology. Here's the paper on PLoS ONE.

Comments

Malkovich

[reginaldo]

Malkovich? MALKOVICH!

Do the test patients inexplicably end up at the New Jersey turnpike once the experiment has concluded?

What the heck happened to meta-moderation?

[Anonymous Coward]

As reported, there have been a lot of bad moderations recently. It seems this is due to CmdrTaco and chums turning meta-moderation into a weird Digg clone.

Please CmdrTaco, just bring the old meta-moderation system back. It worked, very well, by allowing people to vote on whether a moderation was fair. The new system simply asks the user to Agree/Disagree with a post (don't fool yourselves into thinking it will be used in any other way), ergo it cannot perform the job of meta-moderation.

Brought to you by the: Discussions About Slashdot Itself are not Off-Topic, Troll, Flamebait or Redundant Dept.

Re:What the heck happened to meta-moderation?

[Ethanol-fueled]

Seconded, the old metamod system and user pages were fast, simple, and very effective. I used to meta-mod every day, now the metamods and user pages have become so bloated and unwieldy I've lost all motivation to participate despite having excellent karma. I'm considering letting my subscription expire and becoming a full-time lurker.

Please, head honchos of Slashdot, revert to the old style metamods and user pages or at least allow us the option to control what cruft is grafted to our user page. Slashdot would lose a lot of cred if it degenerated into digg.

Re:Ghost in the Shell

[bigstrat2003]

but I would dispute the "perfectly acceptable" part of your point too... many people commit suicide every year because they are unable to accept their sexuality, many more are assaulted, raped or murdered by others who lash out because of their internalized homophobia. Call me a leftist nutter, but anything that gets thousands of people killed yearly is not something I would tag as "perfectly acceptable".

I won't call you a leftist nutter, but I will call you wrong. There are many things in our world which are "perfectly acceptable", but get people killed because people misuse them or react badly to them. I'm sure more than one person has committed suicide because of their unrequited love for someone, but that doesn't make being in love unacceptable, nor does it make non-reciprocity of love unacceptable. It just means that it's unfortunate that someone couldn't cope with something adequately, and made a bad choice about how to resolve the issue.

Re:Dear Developers

[TheSpoom]

I strongly get the feeling that the Slashdot and/or Slashcode developers are succumbing to feature creep, and adding things to the system just for the sake of adding them, even when the system works fine. This seems to have started after the CSS redesign.

Slashdot isn't perfect. However, it's a damn sight better than a lot of other discussion sites out there, especially the moderation system.

Please don't fuck with it when it's not broken. There are things in it that are obviously broken, such as the fact that Funny mods don't grant karma. However, fundamentally changing a system that previously worked fine is, well, stupid.

Someone in the development chain seems to have the notion that metamoderation was too hard. It wasn't. The reason for this is that the people doing metamod are already committed to making Slashdot better. They will deal with the compexities involved because due the system's limits on who can access mod / metamod, they're already used to them.

Making it "easier" by removing features simply doesn't make sense.