No kidding! So, about a year ago, a friend and I were having a late-night dinner at a local ramen restaurant in LA. The tables were positioned quite close to each other, so despite the loud background noise, I could not help but overhear the conversation of the young man and woman sitting directly to my right. Apparently, they were on a date.
Their conversation was unremarkable until I heard the intonation of the woman change. I heard her speak excitedly about how much she loved to read. She kept going on about how she reads whenever she has a spare moment, clearly in some sort of attempt to impress her date or at the very least convey to him that she is not illiterate. Well, I think she went a little overboard because she claimed, "I even read in the car--you know, at stop lights."
I visibly rolled my eyes when I heard that, at which point my friend asked me, "What was that look for?" I told him I'd explain later. Granted, she never said she reads while the car's moving. But come on--if you're so utterly engrossed in that Danielle Steel paperback that you just can't bear to waste a spare moment waiting for the light to turn green, exactly how is this impressive to your potential boyfriend? Give yourself a gold star for being so educated. Bra-vo.
Again, you seem to lack basic reading comprehension skills, because you continue to draw conclusions that are not based upon what I have said. As such, I find it largely pointless to continue explaining what I consider very basic logical points to you, but will make one last attempt.
"Predictive" refers to predictive of loss, not predictive of sleepiness. As I have already pointed out, I do not know if our accident data contains information on whether the driver(s) involved were sleepy, and even if they did, I expect it to be self-censored. I raised other predictive factors because I believe it would be difficult to adjust for changing trends in these factors when comparing aggregate accident year statistics from one political administration to the next. Also, discussion of accident frequency and severity and cause of loss is only one indirect measure of what could be measured more directly, which is the hypothesis that Americans are sleepier because they are overworked and underpaid, and that this phenomenon has grown to alarming proportions under the economic policies of this current administration.
That is right--it is a HYPOTHESIS, one that I believe would be interesting to explore further. I had assumed that a reasonable individual would have recognized that I do not have data to substantiate this belief, and although my assertion was couched in much stronger language, it was done so for persuasive, political, and comedic effect, something that has apparently been completely lost upon you. I think that driver alertness is a significant problem, and I do think that the case is strong for the trend being highly correlated with recession. Whether recessions are caused by the political climate is dependent on who you ask, and my company's data would not be able to help there.
I blamed my sleepiness on my boredom while driving. Not on not getting enough sleep. Again, a failure of reading comprehension on your part. As I have stated, I solve the problem to my satisfaction by listening to NPR, in effect, responding to the original article by bringing up that looking at driver inattention as a single dimension of driving risk, rather than a multidimensional approach that includes driver alertness, is over-simplistic.
No, I did not directly advocate people move. My example was an ANALOGY to illustrate that your response was misdirected at me. I pointed out various problems with American car culture, and left it as an exercise for the intelligent reader to formulate possible solutions. However, you then responded to my comments as if they were self-referential when in fact they were not! That is what I objected to, not the particular solution you advocated.
As I work for a major US insurer, I could conceivably obtain data about the frequency and severity of auto accidents--whether the cause of loss data is specific enough to mention sleepy drivers, I do not know. It is not a question of whether a correlation exists--it is merely a question as to the strength of that correlation. It is likely that other factors are far more predictive (geographical location, credit score, prior accidents).
Again, you seem to misinterpret my comments as being self-applied. Where in my post have I said or even implied that my comments about American car culture apply to me? In fact, your response is puzzling, because it's as if I had said, "People live too far away from their jobs," and then you say, "Then move!" Huh??? Isn't that what I had suggested people do? So why are you telling ME to do it when I'm not talking about myself?
I get bored on the freeway, and that's about it, because if my mind isn't actively engaged (and sorry, driving on a freeway just doesn't do it for me, nor does fooling myself into being scared while on the road), I get bored. In fact, that's pretty much the definition of boredom. Local driving is better because I have more to interact with. But don't tell me that you've never felt the soporific effects of highway hypnosis. Try driving the I-5 up from LA to SF sometime.
Some advice: (1) Don't jump to conclusions. (2) Read carefully.
You misunderstand. Any purported media bias does not change the fact that reporting on the news requires at least some coverage of individuals who are Republican. NPR devotes plenty of air time talking about the Bush Administration, and regardless of whatever political slant you or I might think the reporting might have, just hearing about their (in)actions is enough.
Besides, the goal is to keep me alert, not give me road rage. If I wanted the latter I'd listen to Rush Limbaugh or Fox News. And I don't need any more stress than I already have.
Regarding your comment about sleepy drivers, monitoring is neither necessary nor reasonable. You want to know what causes it? It's called not getting enough sleep. It's called your typical, middle-class, hardworking American being stretched so thin they have no time to sleep. It's called being overworked and underpaid because salaries are not increasing in proportion to inflation. If being ass-raped by the Bush Administration's economic policies could be considered a medical condition, that's your answer.
The most delicious irony? Many of those same hardworking Americans were the ones who voted for Bush in the first place.
Finally, let's give a little thought to how American car culture has led to urban sprawl, massive environmental pollution, hazardous driving conditions, and lost productivity due to congested roads. Maybe fewer drivers would be falling asleep at the wheel if average commute times were shorter, people wouldn't jump at the chance to buy overpriced houses in "suburban" (read: BFE rural) developments with subprime mortgages they can't afford, and corporate America moved away from the traditional 9-5 factory worker model.
I don't know about other drivers, but personally, I get BORED when I drive, especially on freeways (traffic or no traffic). And when I get bored, I get SLEEPY. Driving has to be one of the most complex yet automatic tasks that my brain does on a daily basis. So I have to find some way of keeping myself alert and occupied...and that might include listening to NPR (Republicans tend to piss me off, thereby keeping me alert). If I have a passenger in the car (especially a cute one!), I have no problem staying alert.
But anyway, the point is that I think making sweeping generalizations about the nature and complexity of the driving task is problematic not only from a scientific and cognitive point of view, but also from a social and legal standpoint. People have been driving for, well, since driving was INVENTED--with passengers in the vehicle, or with distractions present. You can't enforce drivers to focus solely on the driving task, and for the reasons described above, even if you did, you'd probably INCREASE the risk, because half of the population will fall asleep at the wheel from the sheer boredom of it.
But as for those drivers who I've seen sending TEXT MESSAGES while driving--argh, I just want to smack them. Seriously, they aren't even looking at the road. I've had to lay on the horn several times because they're weaving erratically, or stopped in traffic.
My statement was specifically about the current Bush administration. As such, your statement about someone not in that administration is irrelevant, because it is factually correct that Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rove, and the rest of the neocons in power are all rich, white men.
If most clouds are white, that does not imply that a marshmallow, which is white, is a cloud. Nor does it imply that things which are not clouds are necessarily black.
In a similar vein, not all rich, powerful white men seek to circumvent the principles set forth in our Constitution. Neither is it the case that Bush & Co. are doing what they're doing simply because they are rich, powerful, and white. They're doing it because they are rich, powerful, white, greedy, hypocritical, and not held accountable.
Well, remember that Bush is on his way out anyway. If a Democrat gets elected President, then their administration will be held to a higher standard of accountability through this legislation. So who knows? There's a tiny (tiny) possibility that Bush could conceivably sign such legislation just before he leaves office. He's already gotten away with murder (quite literally).
The thing is, what would you have Congress and the courts do, anyway? The time for action has long passed, and it's useless to now look back in hindsight and accuse them of playing along. Their power to enact change comes from their respective constituencies, and when the people were shaking in their boots over 9/11, that's when the administration struck.
So yeah, the legislation is likely to fail. Yeah, it's probably dead in the water, and as such it's just more politics as usual. But again, what would you have them do? They've been neutered and cowed into submission by a group of very rich and powerful white men and their cronies, who have trampled upon our Constitution with impunity.
I say that, even as a piece of political theatre, the introduction of this piece of legislation is more useful than not having introduced it. Granted it's too little to late to make any REAL difference. But for as low as our nation's so-called "elected" officals have sunk, lip service is all we can get right now.
I submit that if a TSA screener should be entitled to such a scan, that I should be entitled to see them do the same. Unfortunately, given the appearance and physical fitness of your average screener, I think I'm getting the short end of the stick even in that case.
In all seriousness, though, these sorts of violations by our governments upon the governed is the intent of terrorism. Civilians are the indirect target. By making them afraid, the government is pressured or motivated to enact increasingly restrictive laws and methods of enforcement to assuage that fear and protect the populace. The terrorists know that full protection is impossible, so they continue until the loss of freedom becomes so intolerable that the people overthrow the government. The politicians and so-called elected officials know this, but play into their hands anyway--in the short term, the power grab is irresistible.
The entire focus on security (and technology to improve such security) is wrongheaded, and is a convenient diversion from the real issue, which is why people become terrorists in the first place. People don't explode themselves for no reason whatsoever. No amount of technology, legislation, or vigilance will ever address the root cause that incites an individual to such fervor that they are willing to DIE to achieve their aims.
But again, the politicians know this--so one must call into question their own motivation for pushing these measures on the public. When I have the ability to subject each and every last one of our elected officials, corporate officers, and whomever is telling me I'm supposed to be OK with being scanned and exposed in such a humiliating fashion, to the exact same treatment, then and only then would I consider accepting such a practice. When I can see Dick Cheney's ugly-ass flaps of man-tits hanging over his oversized belly obscuring his undersized privates (mind you, not that I would ever risk the subsequent psychological scarring), I might reconsider. And if even one scan ever gets leaked or misused in any way, I'd like to see the scans of each and every one of those people involved in promoting this technology released all over the internet for everyone to laugh at as punishment. Otherwise, their promises and reassurances mean nothing.
It is not a question of trust, freedom, modesty, or security. It is a question of accountability; because without that, everything else is meaningless. To the extent that those that watch us do not desire to be watched by us is the precise extent to which we are not a free and just society.
Back in my college days, I visited the library and looked up Lorenz's paper, "Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow." On the face of it, the presentation was not particularly striking, nor did it seem significant on a superficial reading. That it was buried in a meteorology journal, rather than a mathematics or physics journal, only further obscured its importance.
Lorenz's discovery was not so much about the specific nonlinear differential system (now named after him) that he discussed in the paper, nor was it about chaos theory as we now know it. The significance lay entirely in the notion that even simple dynamical systems can display sensitive dependence on initial conditions, and that when extrapolated to real-world phenomena, the intrinsic complexity of their behavior was all but inevitable.
A chaotic system is not merely disordered, or random. There is an underlying structure. Call it a kind of orderly disorder. Prior to (and indeed, for some time after) Lorenz's work, physicists largely dismissed this possibility as absurd. We can, in such a system, model its state at some infinitesimal time t+dt after some given state at time t. We can do this quite accurately. But as Lorenz showed, the deterministic property is insufficient to imply that one can know the state of the system at any arbitrary time in the future. There is a difference between knowing how the future is calculated from the past, versus knowing what the future will actually be.
Hence the chosen title. "Deterministic" = future states are well-defined from a known prior state. "Nonperiodic" = does not display cyclical behavior. "Flow" = fluid dynamics, in Lorenz's case, atmospheric convection.
The blame lies with everyone involved:
(1) The banks who do not strive to achieve adequate protection against fraud or identity theft because there is a point at which the amount of effort needed to further reduce the risk exceeds the financial benefit to do so.
(2) Law enforcement and government, whose primary concern is punishment, employ an antiquated bureaucracy that is ill-suited to correct issues arising from identity theft, and are too reliant on numbers, databases, and records when taking action.
(3) The systems designers, who share little if any accountability for their product, because users of such systems (be it government, corporations, or the people) only seem to care when those systems break.
(4) The criminals--you know, the ones who perpetrate the actual theft or fraud.
(5) The consumer, who, through ignorance and blind faith, does not educate and protect themselves.
But you know what? As long as everyone keeps pointing fingers at everyone else, the real loser here is (5). That's why (1-4) do what they do--at the end of the day, none of them lose through their action or inaction, because (5) does not hold them accountable. And that, my friends, is the only crime they are ultimately guilty of.
I keep seeing these two concepts being confused. Jailbreaking is the act of circumventing the original OS to run arbitrary code. Unlocking is the act of disabling the link between the handset and the AT&T SIM, thereby allowing the use of other mobile providers. The former does not imply the latter.
I have said it before and I will say it again. Apple is a publicly held corporation. Their fiduciary duty is to their shareholders. Their goal is to be profitable. However, their business model (strategy of doing business in order to be profitable) centers around making well-designed, elegant, easy-to-use, robust products. (By 'robust' I mean in a design/UI sense, not necessarily in a hardware sense.) They believe that controlling and streamlining the entire consumer experience from start to finish is the best way to deliver their product--this is the reason behind the Apple Retail Stores, the near-obsessive attention to the packaging, and the restrictions of the iPhone OS. Make no mistake; Apple doesn't do this out of the goodness of their hearts. They do it because it is a way to stand out in a competitive and rapidly shifting industry, and be profitable. But this long-held strategy of attention to the consumer experience and design excellence has created a community of Apple enthusiasts, and they often misinterpret Apple as being more altruistic than they actually are.
The hacker philosophy runs completely counter to Apple's view because they believe devices are meant to be experimented on, each component dissected, analyzed, and understood. They are unafraid of taking something apart and reassembling it to meet their needs. Apple's model is geared not towards these hackers, but to the average consumer, who, if allowed to tinker, would probably break something and have no idea how to fix it. The wildly popular success of iPods and the increasing market share of Macs in the face of the MS monopoly demonstrates that Apple's strategy is the correct one to adopt--the average user values stability and predictability over the ability to play Dr. Frankenstein with their precious, beautifully designed Mac/iPod/iPhone. The idea that "it just works" is in itself a kind of freedom.
Apple knows they can't keep the iPhone OS locked down forever. They knew it before they even had built the thing. They realized, however, that (1) upon initial release, the OS would not be complete, (2) they needed to buy themselves time to establish a user base and fix stability issues, (3) locking the OS would prevent the casual user from messing around and then complaining that the iPhone sucks because it's too easy to break, (4) it fits with their business model. The only good thing the hackers/jailbreakers have done is to push Apple to develop the SDK faster, and put more emphasis on security. I don't see their actual jailbreaking as being particularly relevant, because it is still not something that most users would do. Many users so strongly enjoy the integrated, streamlined Apple experience that the last thing they want to do is run some "shady" code and open themselves up to the unknown. It all goes back to the philosophical dichotomy mentioned above.
After reading through the uncharacteristically informal language of the motion, I was not at all surprised to see that it was authored by Morrison and Foerster LLP. They're known for being rather...unconventional. After all, their web address is http://www.mofo.com/.
Take every possible unique configuration of the cube (those that are obtainable by legal moves--no rearranging stickers or disassembling allowed). Represent each configuration by a vertex. Now join two vertices by an edge if and only if the configurations represented by those two vertices differ by a single move (we will elaborate on what constitutes a "single move" later). The result is a mathematical object called a graph. A horrendously giant graph.
One, and only one vertex in this graph corresponds to the solved configuration of the cube.
Note that this graph represents all possible moves and positions--any scrambled cube is a vertex somewhere in the graph, and solving that cube is equivalent to traversing a path in this graph to the "solved" vertex. In general, many paths to the solution exist, some of which will be shorter than others.
The question of interest is this: Which vertex/vertices of this graph is/are farthest away (i.e., requiring the most edge traversals) from the solved vertex, and how far is it? As of this latest discovery, this maximum distance is 25. It means that every possible scrambled configuration of the cube can be solved in 25 moves or less.
Wikipedia notes that we know that at least 20 moves are required to solve the cube for every configuration--that is to say, we know that this maximum distance is at least 20 (there exists some vertex that is at least 20 steps away from the solved vertex). It is believed that the true "least upper bound" is closer to 20 than it is to 25.
Finally, we should clarify that a "single move" can either mean a rotation of a face by either a quarter- or half-turn, or it could mean a quarter-turn only. These different metrics of what constitutes a "move" leads to different answers.
I'm not Christian and don't observe Easter, but I am a mathematician, and even I found the calculation interesting. In particular, I was interested to see the variety of algorithms used, as well as their relationship to astronomy.
One should not forget that astronomy--and much of science in general--historically were motivated by religious belief, not just in Western Judaeo-Christian cultures, but all cultures. That this is no longer the case speaks to the power of rational thought over pre-rational mythologies; but it is also a disservice to apply a revisionist view towards the origins of science--which was born from our innate human desire to not merely accept the mechanisms of nature, but to understand it.
I can't respect the reasoning of someone who says that the end-to-end user experience is irrelevant or that the desire to design it is wrong or unrealistic--and then, in the same breath, talk about all the people who want iPhones. It's the same kind of thinking as people who say iPods should support WMA just because they're popular.
To be absolutely clear--the whole REASON why there's such demand for Apple products is because, unlike many tech companies, they DO care about the entire user experience. It makes using the product simple, easy, convenient. Would people buy Apple products if they WEREN'T easy to use, if that end-to-end experience WASN'T designed? It frustrates me to no end to hear people gripe about "user choice and freedom" but at the same time they covet the simplicity and elegance of Apple's design approach, not realizing that their interfaces and hardware are what they are precisely because it doesn't allow you to customize the crap out of it and ultimately break it in a million ways.
I've owned products by many different companies--Motorola, Samsung, Sony (and those are just mobile phones). And not a single one of them has been anywhere near as successful at designing a mobile phone interface as Apple has. It is called attention to detail. As a former loyal T-Mobile customer, do you think I was happy about having to switch to AT&T for an iPhone? I weighed my decision carefully, and like a mature adult, I made an informed choice. I am not sitting around with my old crappy UNLOCKED Motorola V3x with an indecipherable interface, whining about how the choices presented to me are not the choices I want. Would you be any happier if Apple simply decided not to develop the iPhone at all?
Some people just want to find any reason to complain.
The single biggest problem in epidemiology facing us today is antibiotic resistance. For all our advances, we are losing the race against pathogenic bacteria species that are mutating beyond our ability to treat them in vivo, thanks to the very techniques we have invented to fight them. This is an incredibly serious threat, one that is only recently gaining attention in the public consciousness because of the headlines about MRSA and XDR TB.
In light of our current state of knowledge of infectious disease as a whole, I can only conclude that despite all our advances, we have truly only begun to scratch the surface of the kind of insight, technology, and science we must yet discover in order to make a significant impact on the way humankind deals with disease. For instance, only relatively recently was it realized that certain viral infections once thought to be of minor importance actually have long-term health consequences for those who acquire them (e.g., cancer). We have yet to fully appreciate the complex relationship between the infectious agent and its host. The discovery that self-replicating misfolded proteins could cause disease was also shocking to the scientific community. The lesson to be learned, I believe, is that our discoveries so far have largely served to demonstrate to us that mankind has far, far more to learn--it is a bit like trekking that first mile up a steep mountain, only to look up and realize just how much further it is to the top.
I think the larger issue that American society is presented with is not the ways parents must adapt to new technologies to keep up with their kids and teens, but rather, all the ways in which despite the promise of "convenience" of these technologies, middle-class American families have less time to foster the kind of physically present, interpersonal relationships with their children that are necessary for proper social development. We are inundated by the tidal wave of information and content, overstimulated by the omnipresent reach of media--whether it is in the form of television, print, internet, wireless, radio, or film, there can be no doubt that these technologies have enriched our lives in profound ways. However, parents across the country are conducting on a heretofore unprecedented and massive scale a social experiment with their children, raising them from the cradle to adulthood amidst this sea of instant communication, because they are either unwilling or unable to actually spend the time to be, well, parents. To be fair, the kids don't make it any easier--they see what their friends are doing, and for them, hanging out online is the equivalent (or better) to hanging out in person. They will naturally gravitate to those methods that are least understood by their parents.
In short, over the last 20 years, the interaction between parent and child has significantly degraded in both the quality of communication as well as its duration. As technologies to facilitate virtual socialization advance, their effect on the nuclear family structure will have long-lasting social and cultural effects.
Again, this is not to say that technology is bad, or that the only "true" way to raise a family is to completely sever one's connection to the wired (and wireless) world. It is, however, a wake up call. Is it really necessary to put television screens and DVD players in those minivans and SUVs? Do children really need to be babysat like this in a car? What ever happened to learning how to sit patiently? What ever happened to learning to develop one's imagination? I grew up without these toys; my parents drove me around all the time and I didn't need to be entertained. When it comes to MySpace or the internet in general, the genie's already out of the bottle. These measures are laughable, because it's not merely too little too late--talking about how easily circumvented such measures are is actually irrelevant, because the fact of the matter is, we wouldn't be in this mess if parents actually parented, and kids weren't so addicted to media. Playing email games and spying on one's children is not parenting. Taking the time to learn and understand them is far more effective. But that's easier said than done--corporate America has had us passive consumers in the palm of their hands for quite some time now. They are the ones bringing up today's children, grooming them to be the indentured servants of tomorrow's economy. And to prove my point, I think it's particularly telling that when the "threat level" is raised to "orange" or some other stupid color of the week, signifying that we should all be scared into signing our rights away, the government has the gall to tell us in the very same breath to "continue shopping and act like everything is normal."
This MySpace situation is not about trust or technology. It's really only one small facet of the greater reality that we are living in a society so fueled by rampant consumerism and debt that parents have lost the ability to raise well-adjusted children.
1. Organized, predictable, uniform. This means things are easy to find in the store, services are reliable, and the shopping experience is consistent from store to store.
2. Open, bright. Stores are well-lit, spacious, have an inviting entrance, and allow visitors to browse.
3. Products sell themselves. Rather than relying on salespeople to pressure customers to purchase goods, the stores consistently showcase the products and let the customer try it in order to make the purchasing decision on their own terms. Salespeople are there to answer questions, not push visitors into buying.
4. Availability of customer service. The customer-oriented services (Genius Bar, Studio, kids' area, demos) demonstrate that Apple is interested in making the shopping experience comfortable.
Now, bear in mind, Apple is in it to make money. That's just the reality. But the company's philosophy is that money is made by creating the best possible product and the best possible consumer experience. They don't do these things out of the goodness of their hearts; rather, these things are the consequence of the particular business model they have chosen. That their motives are sometimes misunderstood is unfortunate, not because of how it reflects upon Apple, but rather, how it is symptomatic of the fact that we as a society of consumers have become so jaded by the way the rest of corporate America approaches profitability in a free-market system that we DO get confused when a company DOESN'T believe that the easiest way to make money is to rape us for every last penny they can lie, cheat, and steal from us.
So, to be certain, the Apple Retail Stores are a classic example of retail design through careful analysis and re-evaluation of consumer behavior. They don't do these things because they make you feel good; they do them because, as a way of increasing profitability, it just plain WORKS. For instance, in-store cameras do not merely monitor visitors for security purposes--these are used to analyze traffic flow patterns, how long people spend in the various sections of the store, and so forth. This data is then used in research towards redesigning the stores or figuring out how marketing efforts should be distributed.
Finally, regarding those who have missed the point.... Every time I've been to Fry's I feel like I want to scream. Customer service is HORRIBLE; the crowds are rude; dealing with exchanges/returns is downright insane; and most of all, the whole place reeks of cheapness. I feel like I can't trust whatever I buy there, and even if I were to, I don't feel like I've saved much if anything at all. I'd rather buy online. And the whole "techie" thing--let's be honest, Apple isn't interested in marketing to the uber-nerd DIY hacker, whose "can I take it apart and customize the crap out of it" mentality runs counter to Apple's "we want to make everything work together seamlessly, including the shopping experience" philosophy. You may take great pride in those hacker skills, and that's great, but the article isn't about you. It's about the consumer who would've gotten a cheap-ass Dell not because they wanted to spend as little as possible and put Ubuntu on it, but because they just don't know any better. After all, this is the age of consumer electronics.
The problem I have with this technology being used for advertising purposes is not so much the invasion of privacy issue, but rather the obvious safety issue. The key here is that people aren't expecting to hear these sounds. There is no obvious source, the sound is projected narrowly, and most of all, as an advertising medium, it fails to satisfy a basic standard of expectation--and so, used in this manner, this sort of remote sound projection is a safety hazard. We generally don't go around surprising people in the middle of the street. Such actions can cause a great deal of distress, followed by anger once the victim realizes it's a f***ing advertisement. It's entirely plausible that someone could start behaving belligerently towards other strangers, demanding to know who is whispering into his ear.
The distinction of voluntary vs. involuntary forms of communication is important but actually not quite the central problem, because many forms of visual advertising are so pervasive as to constitute a de facto involuntary, non-consensual form of communication. The real problem, in my opinion, is that this technology effectively deprives the recipient of the message from having an awareness of its source. At least, with television, radio, and print, while one may not be able to avoid these messages, at least you know where they are coming from. Should society become increasingly aware of this technology, people might come to accept it, but this leads me to ask whether we should accept it in the first place, and whether anyone, including the advertisers (who will literally go to any length to make a buck), have fully thought through the social consequences. So we're all supposed to walk around in public, allowing rooftop speakers to project voices into our heads wherever we go? What's next, retinal projection units inside your car making you see ads while you drive?
Advertisers would cut their right nut off if they could invent a device that alters the minds of consumers to force them to purchase a product of their choice. Oh wait, they've already done that, it's called Britney Spears.
The article mentions things called "prime roots." This is not a standard mathematical term. Rather, considering the context, quantum computing, and its most discussed potential application--quantum cryptography--it is likely that what was actually computed were primitive roots.
For the sake of completeness, a primitive root of a prime p is an integer r such that the smallest positive value of k such that p divides r^k - 1 is k = p-1. For large primes, finding primitive roots is not a trivial task. For example, r = 2 is a primitive root of p = 5, since the positive integer powers of 2 are 2, 4, 8, 16, 32,..., and modulo 5, this becomes 2, 4, 3, 1, 2,.... The first occurrence of 1 is for 2^4, hence k = 4 = 5-1.
You might want to read my response in another thread before you jump to conclusions about what I am or am not saying about intelligent design. I am hardly brainwashed.
I stand by my claim that the DI misrepresented and distorted the original content of the video, precisely because the original narration does not make any statement about how these biochemical mechanisms came into being, and because it is reasonable to presume that the video's content was developed by scientists, they could not legitimately believe that intelligent design furnishes a valid scientific framework for these mechanisms' existence. The logical conclusion is that the subsequent use is a distortion.
Furthermore, to compare this misrepresentation to an AMV on YouTube may be valid from a legal standpoint, but invalid from a sociopolitical standpoint. For instance, you would not want the media to similarly play fast and loose with content they did not author or to fail to cite or document their sources (though quite unfortunately, they often do--hence the introduction of the word "truthiness" in our modern lexicon). It is not reasonable to hold all such forms of content manipulation to the same standard, as those with a background in journalism and/or art history could point out.
I find it interesting that so few people seem to have a problem with the failure to make the proper attribution, and the implications thereof. There is no reason not to, unless the intent is to mask the true authorship of the original work. That this is something that happens on YouTube does not make it less egregious, or any more justifiable. Perhaps these increasingly lax attitudes towards plagiarism is an unfortunate reflection of the great ease with which information is replicated and manipulated nowadays, and the corresponding difficulty in determining the original source.
Ah, Godwin's Law rears its ugly head once again....
Invoking Nazi Germany as a defense of religion against the atrocities of science is laughable, because it reveals that you know almost nothing of the actual historical events that led to the rise of fascism leading up to World War II. Your use of this historical incident is all the more telling because there are far better examples of science gone wrong, but you chose to bring out the Nazis to inflame passions.
What you have conveniently neglected to mention is that one of the major reasons why millions of Jews were exterminated in the concentration camps is because the non-Jews (read: Christians) were just glad they weren't being made the scapegoats, and too unwilling to intervene on their behalf--that is, until it was their own livelihoods that were being threatened. I make no apologies for those atrocities that were conducted in the name of science. But let's not make apologies for those atrocities that were--and continue to be--conducted in the name of religion. Politics makes for convenient allies, and the depravity of mankind knows no bounds.
Your post is misleading, because the controversy over intelligent design, and the problem that scientists have with it, is not that it is true or false. The creationists/ID proponents would like people to frame it in such a context, because it pits scientists against dogmatic faith in a supernatural creator. I will only say this once, because it is so obvious that it is a wonder that it needs to be said at all:
The problem is that the theory of Intelligent Design* is not science.
Note that this statement does not say anything about the truth of ID. It merely states that ID as a proposed explanation of the origin of life does not satisfy fundamental criteria necessary to be called science. I cannot tell you whether ID is true or false, because I DO NOT KNOW. But I can tell you that it isn't a scientific theory. Why its proponents seem so desperate to enshrine it as science and somehow believe that shrouding it in the mantle of science would increase its legitimacy, I cannot understand. I am perfectly willing to entertain the notion that the universe had a divine creator, as I am also willing to entertain the notion of a supernatural origin of life, as are many scientists. But as scientists, none of us can rationally place those notions in a scientific framework.
*Note that I use the phrase "Intelligent Design" here in its broadest context--that the origin of life is supernatural, rather than in its specific statements that strive to demonstrate this claim (e.g., the argument of irreducible complexity).
Slashdot Mirror
No kidding! So, about a year ago, a friend and I were having a late-night dinner at a local ramen restaurant in LA. The tables were positioned quite close to each other, so despite the loud background noise, I could not help but overhear the conversation of the young man and woman sitting directly to my right. Apparently, they were on a date.
Their conversation was unremarkable until I heard the intonation of the woman change. I heard her speak excitedly about how much she loved to read. She kept going on about how she reads whenever she has a spare moment, clearly in some sort of attempt to impress her date or at the very least convey to him that she is not illiterate. Well, I think she went a little overboard because she claimed, "I even read in the car--you know, at stop lights."
I visibly rolled my eyes when I heard that, at which point my friend asked me, "What was that look for?" I told him I'd explain later. Granted, she never said she reads while the car's moving. But come on--if you're so utterly engrossed in that Danielle Steel paperback that you just can't bear to waste a spare moment waiting for the light to turn green, exactly how is this impressive to your potential boyfriend? Give yourself a gold star for being so educated. Bra-vo.
Again, you seem to lack basic reading comprehension skills, because you continue to draw conclusions that are not based upon what I have said. As such, I find it largely pointless to continue explaining what I consider very basic logical points to you, but will make one last attempt.
"Predictive" refers to predictive of loss, not predictive of sleepiness. As I have already pointed out, I do not know if our accident data contains information on whether the driver(s) involved were sleepy, and even if they did, I expect it to be self-censored. I raised other predictive factors because I believe it would be difficult to adjust for changing trends in these factors when comparing aggregate accident year statistics from one political administration to the next. Also, discussion of accident frequency and severity and cause of loss is only one indirect measure of what could be measured more directly, which is the hypothesis that Americans are sleepier because they are overworked and underpaid, and that this phenomenon has grown to alarming proportions under the economic policies of this current administration.
That is right--it is a HYPOTHESIS, one that I believe would be interesting to explore further. I had assumed that a reasonable individual would have recognized that I do not have data to substantiate this belief, and although my assertion was couched in much stronger language, it was done so for persuasive, political, and comedic effect, something that has apparently been completely lost upon you. I think that driver alertness is a significant problem, and I do think that the case is strong for the trend being highly correlated with recession. Whether recessions are caused by the political climate is dependent on who you ask, and my company's data would not be able to help there.
I blamed my sleepiness on my boredom while driving. Not on not getting enough sleep. Again, a failure of reading comprehension on your part. As I have stated, I solve the problem to my satisfaction by listening to NPR, in effect, responding to the original article by bringing up that looking at driver inattention as a single dimension of driving risk, rather than a multidimensional approach that includes driver alertness, is over-simplistic.
No, I did not directly advocate people move. My example was an ANALOGY to illustrate that your response was misdirected at me. I pointed out various problems with American car culture, and left it as an exercise for the intelligent reader to formulate possible solutions. However, you then responded to my comments as if they were self-referential when in fact they were not! That is what I objected to, not the particular solution you advocated.
As I work for a major US insurer, I could conceivably obtain data about the frequency and severity of auto accidents--whether the cause of loss data is specific enough to mention sleepy drivers, I do not know. It is not a question of whether a correlation exists--it is merely a question as to the strength of that correlation. It is likely that other factors are far more predictive (geographical location, credit score, prior accidents).
Again, you seem to misinterpret my comments as being self-applied. Where in my post have I said or even implied that my comments about American car culture apply to me? In fact, your response is puzzling, because it's as if I had said, "People live too far away from their jobs," and then you say, "Then move!" Huh??? Isn't that what I had suggested people do? So why are you telling ME to do it when I'm not talking about myself?
I get bored on the freeway, and that's about it, because if my mind isn't actively engaged (and sorry, driving on a freeway just doesn't do it for me, nor does fooling myself into being scared while on the road), I get bored. In fact, that's pretty much the definition of boredom. Local driving is better because I have more to interact with. But don't tell me that you've never felt the soporific effects of highway hypnosis. Try driving the I-5 up from LA to SF sometime.
Some advice: (1) Don't jump to conclusions. (2) Read carefully.
You misunderstand. Any purported media bias does not change the fact that reporting on the news requires at least some coverage of individuals who are Republican. NPR devotes plenty of air time talking about the Bush Administration, and regardless of whatever political slant you or I might think the reporting might have, just hearing about their (in)actions is enough.
Besides, the goal is to keep me alert, not give me road rage. If I wanted the latter I'd listen to Rush Limbaugh or Fox News. And I don't need any more stress than I already have.
Regarding your comment about sleepy drivers, monitoring is neither necessary nor reasonable. You want to know what causes it? It's called not getting enough sleep. It's called your typical, middle-class, hardworking American being stretched so thin they have no time to sleep. It's called being overworked and underpaid because salaries are not increasing in proportion to inflation. If being ass-raped by the Bush Administration's economic policies could be considered a medical condition, that's your answer.
The most delicious irony? Many of those same hardworking Americans were the ones who voted for Bush in the first place.
Finally, let's give a little thought to how American car culture has led to urban sprawl, massive environmental pollution, hazardous driving conditions, and lost productivity due to congested roads. Maybe fewer drivers would be falling asleep at the wheel if average commute times were shorter, people wouldn't jump at the chance to buy overpriced houses in "suburban" (read: BFE rural) developments with subprime mortgages they can't afford, and corporate America moved away from the traditional 9-5 factory worker model.
I don't know about other drivers, but personally, I get BORED when I drive, especially on freeways (traffic or no traffic). And when I get bored, I get SLEEPY. Driving has to be one of the most complex yet automatic tasks that my brain does on a daily basis. So I have to find some way of keeping myself alert and occupied...and that might include listening to NPR (Republicans tend to piss me off, thereby keeping me alert). If I have a passenger in the car (especially a cute one!), I have no problem staying alert.
But anyway, the point is that I think making sweeping generalizations about the nature and complexity of the driving task is problematic not only from a scientific and cognitive point of view, but also from a social and legal standpoint. People have been driving for, well, since driving was INVENTED--with passengers in the vehicle, or with distractions present. You can't enforce drivers to focus solely on the driving task, and for the reasons described above, even if you did, you'd probably INCREASE the risk, because half of the population will fall asleep at the wheel from the sheer boredom of it.
But as for those drivers who I've seen sending TEXT MESSAGES while driving--argh, I just want to smack them. Seriously, they aren't even looking at the road. I've had to lay on the horn several times because they're weaving erratically, or stopped in traffic.
My statement was specifically about the current Bush administration. As such, your statement about someone not in that administration is irrelevant, because it is factually correct that Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rove, and the rest of the neocons in power are all rich, white men.
If most clouds are white, that does not imply that a marshmallow, which is white, is a cloud. Nor does it imply that things which are not clouds are necessarily black.
In a similar vein, not all rich, powerful white men seek to circumvent the principles set forth in our Constitution. Neither is it the case that Bush & Co. are doing what they're doing simply because they are rich, powerful, and white. They're doing it because they are rich, powerful, white, greedy, hypocritical, and not held accountable.
Well, remember that Bush is on his way out anyway. If a Democrat gets elected President, then their administration will be held to a higher standard of accountability through this legislation. So who knows? There's a tiny (tiny) possibility that Bush could conceivably sign such legislation just before he leaves office. He's already gotten away with murder (quite literally).
The thing is, what would you have Congress and the courts do, anyway? The time for action has long passed, and it's useless to now look back in hindsight and accuse them of playing along. Their power to enact change comes from their respective constituencies, and when the people were shaking in their boots over 9/11, that's when the administration struck.
So yeah, the legislation is likely to fail. Yeah, it's probably dead in the water, and as such it's just more politics as usual. But again, what would you have them do? They've been neutered and cowed into submission by a group of very rich and powerful white men and their cronies, who have trampled upon our Constitution with impunity.
I say that, even as a piece of political theatre, the introduction of this piece of legislation is more useful than not having introduced it. Granted it's too little to late to make any REAL difference. But for as low as our nation's so-called "elected" officals have sunk, lip service is all we can get right now.
I submit that if a TSA screener should be entitled to such a scan, that I should be entitled to see them do the same. Unfortunately, given the appearance and physical fitness of your average screener, I think I'm getting the short end of the stick even in that case.
In all seriousness, though, these sorts of violations by our governments upon the governed is the intent of terrorism. Civilians are the indirect target. By making them afraid, the government is pressured or motivated to enact increasingly restrictive laws and methods of enforcement to assuage that fear and protect the populace. The terrorists know that full protection is impossible, so they continue until the loss of freedom becomes so intolerable that the people overthrow the government. The politicians and so-called elected officials know this, but play into their hands anyway--in the short term, the power grab is irresistible.
The entire focus on security (and technology to improve such security) is wrongheaded, and is a convenient diversion from the real issue, which is why people become terrorists in the first place. People don't explode themselves for no reason whatsoever. No amount of technology, legislation, or vigilance will ever address the root cause that incites an individual to such fervor that they are willing to DIE to achieve their aims.
But again, the politicians know this--so one must call into question their own motivation for pushing these measures on the public. When I have the ability to subject each and every last one of our elected officials, corporate officers, and whomever is telling me I'm supposed to be OK with being scanned and exposed in such a humiliating fashion, to the exact same treatment, then and only then would I consider accepting such a practice. When I can see Dick Cheney's ugly-ass flaps of man-tits hanging over his oversized belly obscuring his undersized privates (mind you, not that I would ever risk the subsequent psychological scarring), I might reconsider. And if even one scan ever gets leaked or misused in any way, I'd like to see the scans of each and every one of those people involved in promoting this technology released all over the internet for everyone to laugh at as punishment. Otherwise, their promises and reassurances mean nothing.
It is not a question of trust, freedom, modesty, or security. It is a question of accountability; because without that, everything else is meaningless. To the extent that those that watch us do not desire to be watched by us is the precise extent to which we are not a free and just society.
Back in my college days, I visited the library and looked up Lorenz's paper, "Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow." On the face of it, the presentation was not particularly striking, nor did it seem significant on a superficial reading. That it was buried in a meteorology journal, rather than a mathematics or physics journal, only further obscured its importance.
Lorenz's discovery was not so much about the specific nonlinear differential system (now named after him) that he discussed in the paper, nor was it about chaos theory as we now know it. The significance lay entirely in the notion that even simple dynamical systems can display sensitive dependence on initial conditions, and that when extrapolated to real-world phenomena, the intrinsic complexity of their behavior was all but inevitable.
A chaotic system is not merely disordered, or random. There is an underlying structure. Call it a kind of orderly disorder. Prior to (and indeed, for some time after) Lorenz's work, physicists largely dismissed this possibility as absurd. We can, in such a system, model its state at some infinitesimal time t+dt after some given state at time t. We can do this quite accurately. But as Lorenz showed, the deterministic property is insufficient to imply that one can know the state of the system at any arbitrary time in the future. There is a difference between knowing how the future is calculated from the past, versus knowing what the future will actually be.
Hence the chosen title. "Deterministic" = future states are well-defined from a known prior state. "Nonperiodic" = does not display cyclical behavior. "Flow" = fluid dynamics, in Lorenz's case, atmospheric convection.
He is truly missed.
The blame lies with everyone involved: (1) The banks who do not strive to achieve adequate protection against fraud or identity theft because there is a point at which the amount of effort needed to further reduce the risk exceeds the financial benefit to do so. (2) Law enforcement and government, whose primary concern is punishment, employ an antiquated bureaucracy that is ill-suited to correct issues arising from identity theft, and are too reliant on numbers, databases, and records when taking action. (3) The systems designers, who share little if any accountability for their product, because users of such systems (be it government, corporations, or the people) only seem to care when those systems break. (4) The criminals--you know, the ones who perpetrate the actual theft or fraud. (5) The consumer, who, through ignorance and blind faith, does not educate and protect themselves.
But you know what? As long as everyone keeps pointing fingers at everyone else, the real loser here is (5). That's why (1-4) do what they do--at the end of the day, none of them lose through their action or inaction, because (5) does not hold them accountable. And that, my friends, is the only crime they are ultimately guilty of.
I keep seeing these two concepts being confused. Jailbreaking is the act of circumventing the original OS to run arbitrary code. Unlocking is the act of disabling the link between the handset and the AT&T SIM, thereby allowing the use of other mobile providers. The former does not imply the latter.
I have said it before and I will say it again. Apple is a publicly held corporation. Their fiduciary duty is to their shareholders. Their goal is to be profitable. However, their business model (strategy of doing business in order to be profitable) centers around making well-designed, elegant, easy-to-use, robust products. (By 'robust' I mean in a design/UI sense, not necessarily in a hardware sense.) They believe that controlling and streamlining the entire consumer experience from start to finish is the best way to deliver their product--this is the reason behind the Apple Retail Stores, the near-obsessive attention to the packaging, and the restrictions of the iPhone OS. Make no mistake; Apple doesn't do this out of the goodness of their hearts. They do it because it is a way to stand out in a competitive and rapidly shifting industry, and be profitable. But this long-held strategy of attention to the consumer experience and design excellence has created a community of Apple enthusiasts, and they often misinterpret Apple as being more altruistic than they actually are.
The hacker philosophy runs completely counter to Apple's view because they believe devices are meant to be experimented on, each component dissected, analyzed, and understood. They are unafraid of taking something apart and reassembling it to meet their needs. Apple's model is geared not towards these hackers, but to the average consumer, who, if allowed to tinker, would probably break something and have no idea how to fix it. The wildly popular success of iPods and the increasing market share of Macs in the face of the MS monopoly demonstrates that Apple's strategy is the correct one to adopt--the average user values stability and predictability over the ability to play Dr. Frankenstein with their precious, beautifully designed Mac/iPod/iPhone. The idea that "it just works" is in itself a kind of freedom.
Apple knows they can't keep the iPhone OS locked down forever. They knew it before they even had built the thing. They realized, however, that (1) upon initial release, the OS would not be complete, (2) they needed to buy themselves time to establish a user base and fix stability issues, (3) locking the OS would prevent the casual user from messing around and then complaining that the iPhone sucks because it's too easy to break, (4) it fits with their business model. The only good thing the hackers/jailbreakers have done is to push Apple to develop the SDK faster, and put more emphasis on security. I don't see their actual jailbreaking as being particularly relevant, because it is still not something that most users would do. Many users so strongly enjoy the integrated, streamlined Apple experience that the last thing they want to do is run some "shady" code and open themselves up to the unknown. It all goes back to the philosophical dichotomy mentioned above.
Yes, of course, you are correct. Have to be more careful with my wording.
After reading through the uncharacteristically informal language of the motion, I was not at all surprised to see that it was authored by Morrison and Foerster LLP. They're known for being rather...unconventional. After all, their web address is http://www.mofo.com/.
Take every possible unique configuration of the cube (those that are obtainable by legal moves--no rearranging stickers or disassembling allowed). Represent each configuration by a vertex. Now join two vertices by an edge if and only if the configurations represented by those two vertices differ by a single move (we will elaborate on what constitutes a "single move" later). The result is a mathematical object called a graph. A horrendously giant graph.
One, and only one vertex in this graph corresponds to the solved configuration of the cube.
Note that this graph represents all possible moves and positions--any scrambled cube is a vertex somewhere in the graph, and solving that cube is equivalent to traversing a path in this graph to the "solved" vertex. In general, many paths to the solution exist, some of which will be shorter than others.
The question of interest is this: Which vertex/vertices of this graph is/are farthest away (i.e., requiring the most edge traversals) from the solved vertex, and how far is it? As of this latest discovery, this maximum distance is 25. It means that every possible scrambled configuration of the cube can be solved in 25 moves or less.
Wikipedia notes that we know that at least 20 moves are required to solve the cube for every configuration--that is to say, we know that this maximum distance is at least 20 (there exists some vertex that is at least 20 steps away from the solved vertex). It is believed that the true "least upper bound" is closer to 20 than it is to 25.
Finally, we should clarify that a "single move" can either mean a rotation of a face by either a quarter- or half-turn, or it could mean a quarter-turn only. These different metrics of what constitutes a "move" leads to different answers.
I'm not Christian and don't observe Easter, but I am a mathematician, and even I found the calculation interesting. In particular, I was interested to see the variety of algorithms used, as well as their relationship to astronomy.
One should not forget that astronomy--and much of science in general--historically were motivated by religious belief, not just in Western Judaeo-Christian cultures, but all cultures. That this is no longer the case speaks to the power of rational thought over pre-rational mythologies; but it is also a disservice to apply a revisionist view towards the origins of science--which was born from our innate human desire to not merely accept the mechanisms of nature, but to understand it.
I can't respect the reasoning of someone who says that the end-to-end user experience is irrelevant or that the desire to design it is wrong or unrealistic--and then, in the same breath, talk about all the people who want iPhones. It's the same kind of thinking as people who say iPods should support WMA just because they're popular.
To be absolutely clear--the whole REASON why there's such demand for Apple products is because, unlike many tech companies, they DO care about the entire user experience. It makes using the product simple, easy, convenient. Would people buy Apple products if they WEREN'T easy to use, if that end-to-end experience WASN'T designed? It frustrates me to no end to hear people gripe about "user choice and freedom" but at the same time they covet the simplicity and elegance of Apple's design approach, not realizing that their interfaces and hardware are what they are precisely because it doesn't allow you to customize the crap out of it and ultimately break it in a million ways.
I've owned products by many different companies--Motorola, Samsung, Sony (and those are just mobile phones). And not a single one of them has been anywhere near as successful at designing a mobile phone interface as Apple has. It is called attention to detail. As a former loyal T-Mobile customer, do you think I was happy about having to switch to AT&T for an iPhone? I weighed my decision carefully, and like a mature adult, I made an informed choice. I am not sitting around with my old crappy UNLOCKED Motorola V3x with an indecipherable interface, whining about how the choices presented to me are not the choices I want. Would you be any happier if Apple simply decided not to develop the iPhone at all?
Some people just want to find any reason to complain.
The pessimist's view:
The single biggest problem in epidemiology facing us today is antibiotic resistance. For all our advances, we are losing the race against pathogenic bacteria species that are mutating beyond our ability to treat them in vivo, thanks to the very techniques we have invented to fight them. This is an incredibly serious threat, one that is only recently gaining attention in the public consciousness because of the headlines about MRSA and XDR TB.
In light of our current state of knowledge of infectious disease as a whole, I can only conclude that despite all our advances, we have truly only begun to scratch the surface of the kind of insight, technology, and science we must yet discover in order to make a significant impact on the way humankind deals with disease. For instance, only relatively recently was it realized that certain viral infections once thought to be of minor importance actually have long-term health consequences for those who acquire them (e.g., cancer). We have yet to fully appreciate the complex relationship between the infectious agent and its host. The discovery that self-replicating misfolded proteins could cause disease was also shocking to the scientific community. The lesson to be learned, I believe, is that our discoveries so far have largely served to demonstrate to us that mankind has far, far more to learn--it is a bit like trekking that first mile up a steep mountain, only to look up and realize just how much further it is to the top.
Worse yet, we still cannot even see the top.
I think the larger issue that American society is presented with is not the ways parents must adapt to new technologies to keep up with their kids and teens, but rather, all the ways in which despite the promise of "convenience" of these technologies, middle-class American families have less time to foster the kind of physically present, interpersonal relationships with their children that are necessary for proper social development. We are inundated by the tidal wave of information and content, overstimulated by the omnipresent reach of media--whether it is in the form of television, print, internet, wireless, radio, or film, there can be no doubt that these technologies have enriched our lives in profound ways. However, parents across the country are conducting on a heretofore unprecedented and massive scale a social experiment with their children, raising them from the cradle to adulthood amidst this sea of instant communication, because they are either unwilling or unable to actually spend the time to be, well, parents. To be fair, the kids don't make it any easier--they see what their friends are doing, and for them, hanging out online is the equivalent (or better) to hanging out in person. They will naturally gravitate to those methods that are least understood by their parents.
In short, over the last 20 years, the interaction between parent and child has significantly degraded in both the quality of communication as well as its duration. As technologies to facilitate virtual socialization advance, their effect on the nuclear family structure will have long-lasting social and cultural effects.
Again, this is not to say that technology is bad, or that the only "true" way to raise a family is to completely sever one's connection to the wired (and wireless) world. It is, however, a wake up call. Is it really necessary to put television screens and DVD players in those minivans and SUVs? Do children really need to be babysat like this in a car? What ever happened to learning how to sit patiently? What ever happened to learning to develop one's imagination? I grew up without these toys; my parents drove me around all the time and I didn't need to be entertained. When it comes to MySpace or the internet in general, the genie's already out of the bottle. These measures are laughable, because it's not merely too little too late--talking about how easily circumvented such measures are is actually irrelevant, because the fact of the matter is, we wouldn't be in this mess if parents actually parented, and kids weren't so addicted to media. Playing email games and spying on one's children is not parenting. Taking the time to learn and understand them is far more effective. But that's easier said than done--corporate America has had us passive consumers in the palm of their hands for quite some time now. They are the ones bringing up today's children, grooming them to be the indentured servants of tomorrow's economy. And to prove my point, I think it's particularly telling that when the "threat level" is raised to "orange" or some other stupid color of the week, signifying that we should all be scared into signing our rights away, the government has the gall to tell us in the very same breath to "continue shopping and act like everything is normal."
This MySpace situation is not about trust or technology. It's really only one small facet of the greater reality that we are living in a society so fueled by rampant consumerism and debt that parents have lost the ability to raise well-adjusted children.
1. Organized, predictable, uniform. This means things are easy to find in the store, services are reliable, and the shopping experience is consistent from store to store.
2. Open, bright. Stores are well-lit, spacious, have an inviting entrance, and allow visitors to browse.
3. Products sell themselves. Rather than relying on salespeople to pressure customers to purchase goods, the stores consistently showcase the products and let the customer try it in order to make the purchasing decision on their own terms. Salespeople are there to answer questions, not push visitors into buying.
4. Availability of customer service. The customer-oriented services (Genius Bar, Studio, kids' area, demos) demonstrate that Apple is interested in making the shopping experience comfortable.
Now, bear in mind, Apple is in it to make money. That's just the reality. But the company's philosophy is that money is made by creating the best possible product and the best possible consumer experience. They don't do these things out of the goodness of their hearts; rather, these things are the consequence of the particular business model they have chosen. That their motives are sometimes misunderstood is unfortunate, not because of how it reflects upon Apple, but rather, how it is symptomatic of the fact that we as a society of consumers have become so jaded by the way the rest of corporate America approaches profitability in a free-market system that we DO get confused when a company DOESN'T believe that the easiest way to make money is to rape us for every last penny they can lie, cheat, and steal from us.
So, to be certain, the Apple Retail Stores are a classic example of retail design through careful analysis and re-evaluation of consumer behavior. They don't do these things because they make you feel good; they do them because, as a way of increasing profitability, it just plain WORKS. For instance, in-store cameras do not merely monitor visitors for security purposes--these are used to analyze traffic flow patterns, how long people spend in the various sections of the store, and so forth. This data is then used in research towards redesigning the stores or figuring out how marketing efforts should be distributed.
Finally, regarding those who have missed the point.... Every time I've been to Fry's I feel like I want to scream. Customer service is HORRIBLE; the crowds are rude; dealing with exchanges/returns is downright insane; and most of all, the whole place reeks of cheapness. I feel like I can't trust whatever I buy there, and even if I were to, I don't feel like I've saved much if anything at all. I'd rather buy online. And the whole "techie" thing--let's be honest, Apple isn't interested in marketing to the uber-nerd DIY hacker, whose "can I take it apart and customize the crap out of it" mentality runs counter to Apple's "we want to make everything work together seamlessly, including the shopping experience" philosophy. You may take great pride in those hacker skills, and that's great, but the article isn't about you. It's about the consumer who would've gotten a cheap-ass Dell not because they wanted to spend as little as possible and put Ubuntu on it, but because they just don't know any better. After all, this is the age of consumer electronics.
Ah yes, in retrospect you are absolutely correct. 15 = 3(5). Silly me.
:D
Would've been more interesting to compute primitive roots, though.
The problem I have with this technology being used for advertising purposes is not so much the invasion of privacy issue, but rather the obvious safety issue. The key here is that people aren't expecting to hear these sounds. There is no obvious source, the sound is projected narrowly, and most of all, as an advertising medium, it fails to satisfy a basic standard of expectation--and so, used in this manner, this sort of remote sound projection is a safety hazard. We generally don't go around surprising people in the middle of the street. Such actions can cause a great deal of distress, followed by anger once the victim realizes it's a f***ing advertisement. It's entirely plausible that someone could start behaving belligerently towards other strangers, demanding to know who is whispering into his ear.
The distinction of voluntary vs. involuntary forms of communication is important but actually not quite the central problem, because many forms of visual advertising are so pervasive as to constitute a de facto involuntary, non-consensual form of communication. The real problem, in my opinion, is that this technology effectively deprives the recipient of the message from having an awareness of its source. At least, with television, radio, and print, while one may not be able to avoid these messages, at least you know where they are coming from. Should society become increasingly aware of this technology, people might come to accept it, but this leads me to ask whether we should accept it in the first place, and whether anyone, including the advertisers (who will literally go to any length to make a buck), have fully thought through the social consequences. So we're all supposed to walk around in public, allowing rooftop speakers to project voices into our heads wherever we go? What's next, retinal projection units inside your car making you see ads while you drive? Advertisers would cut their right nut off if they could invent a device that alters the minds of consumers to force them to purchase a product of their choice. Oh wait, they've already done that, it's called Britney Spears.
The article mentions things called "prime roots." This is not a standard mathematical term. Rather, considering the context, quantum computing, and its most discussed potential application--quantum cryptography--it is likely that what was actually computed were primitive roots.
..., and modulo 5, this becomes 2, 4, 3, 1, 2, .... The first occurrence of 1 is for 2^4, hence k = 4 = 5-1.
For the sake of completeness, a primitive root of a prime p is an integer r such that the smallest positive value of k such that p divides r^k - 1 is k = p-1. For large primes, finding primitive roots is not a trivial task. For example, r = 2 is a primitive root of p = 5, since the positive integer powers of 2 are 2, 4, 8, 16, 32,
You might want to read my response in another thread before you jump to conclusions about what I am or am not saying about intelligent design. I am hardly brainwashed.
I stand by my claim that the DI misrepresented and distorted the original content of the video, precisely because the original narration does not make any statement about how these biochemical mechanisms came into being, and because it is reasonable to presume that the video's content was developed by scientists, they could not legitimately believe that intelligent design furnishes a valid scientific framework for these mechanisms' existence. The logical conclusion is that the subsequent use is a distortion.
Furthermore, to compare this misrepresentation to an AMV on YouTube may be valid from a legal standpoint, but invalid from a sociopolitical standpoint. For instance, you would not want the media to similarly play fast and loose with content they did not author or to fail to cite or document their sources (though quite unfortunately, they often do--hence the introduction of the word "truthiness" in our modern lexicon). It is not reasonable to hold all such forms of content manipulation to the same standard, as those with a background in journalism and/or art history could point out.
I find it interesting that so few people seem to have a problem with the failure to make the proper attribution, and the implications thereof. There is no reason not to, unless the intent is to mask the true authorship of the original work. That this is something that happens on YouTube does not make it less egregious, or any more justifiable. Perhaps these increasingly lax attitudes towards plagiarism is an unfortunate reflection of the great ease with which information is replicated and manipulated nowadays, and the corresponding difficulty in determining the original source.
Ah, Godwin's Law rears its ugly head once again....
Invoking Nazi Germany as a defense of religion against the atrocities of science is laughable, because it reveals that you know almost nothing of the actual historical events that led to the rise of fascism leading up to World War II. Your use of this historical incident is all the more telling because there are far better examples of science gone wrong, but you chose to bring out the Nazis to inflame passions.
What you have conveniently neglected to mention is that one of the major reasons why millions of Jews were exterminated in the concentration camps is because the non-Jews (read: Christians) were just glad they weren't being made the scapegoats, and too unwilling to intervene on their behalf--that is, until it was their own livelihoods that were being threatened. I make no apologies for those atrocities that were conducted in the name of science. But let's not make apologies for those atrocities that were--and continue to be--conducted in the name of religion. Politics makes for convenient allies, and the depravity of mankind knows no bounds.
Your post is misleading, because the controversy over intelligent design, and the problem that scientists have with it, is not that it is true or false. The creationists/ID proponents would like people to frame it in such a context, because it pits scientists against dogmatic faith in a supernatural creator. I will only say this once, because it is so obvious that it is a wonder that it needs to be said at all:
The problem is that the theory of Intelligent Design* is not science.
Note that this statement does not say anything about the truth of ID. It merely states that ID as a proposed explanation of the origin of life does not satisfy fundamental criteria necessary to be called science. I cannot tell you whether ID is true or false, because I DO NOT KNOW. But I can tell you that it isn't a scientific theory. Why its proponents seem so desperate to enshrine it as science and somehow believe that shrouding it in the mantle of science would increase its legitimacy, I cannot understand. I am perfectly willing to entertain the notion that the universe had a divine creator, as I am also willing to entertain the notion of a supernatural origin of life, as are many scientists. But as scientists, none of us can rationally place those notions in a scientific framework.
*Note that I use the phrase "Intelligent Design" here in its broadest context--that the origin of life is supernatural, rather than in its specific statements that strive to demonstrate this claim (e.g., the argument of irreducible complexity).