Depends on how you slice up your "OS". Some operating systems don't need to know about multi-touch, because their applications are mostly running on X Windows, and X knows (or will very soon) about multi-touch.
psychology researchers are often averse to math
"poor / less able psychology researchers are often averse to math... Sadly, these statements are not mutually exclusive.
The percentages were a joke. But I do mean in all seriousness to suggest that psychology researchers are often averse to math and tolerate math errors in papers. Psychology is often only quantitative insofar as there are certain numerical rituals associated with null hypothesis significance testing that researchers must use to be accepted by other researchers.
It's kind of depressing, so I try to make light of it when I can.
As someone who majored in psychology, worked in two labs, and read countless psychology papers, I can tell you that 99% of psychologists avoid math when possible, and the other 10% try to use it but make obvious errors.
To the psychology researcher, it's more about getting the "story" right than actually quantifying anything.
A possibility to consider- use software to do your effects. The key to realtime software effects is low latency. To achieve this, look for soundcards that have ASIO-capable drivers, and look for software that can take advantage of ASIO as well. With the right configuration, you can get your latency down to 5-10ms (maybe lower these days), which is essentially imperceptible.
On the software end, iirc FruityLoops can handle ASIO, and it can host a huge variety of effects that can be chained with great versatility. It's been too long since I've looked at getting a sound card for me to give you any hardware recommendations.
I wonder whether gerrymandering could be hindered by specifying that each district must have at most a particular perimeter/area ratio in miles^-1. This could force districts into rounder/ more convex shapes.
The point was that not everything that gives us reproductive benefit works all the time. We have genes that give us ears. Those genes don't always actually get to provide us with their benefit. No one goes around claiming that the genes that spur our ears to develop don't have a purpose just because they occasionally fail at that purpose.
As long as dreams are even slightly more useful then not, they'll be selected for over time. It's not that anyone's brain-damaged at night- my point is that when people have crazy, useless dreams, then the sometimes-useful activity of dreaming has happened at that moment to be not useful.
The confusion is that the ear/deaf example is a failure that occurs at a different scale than the useful dream/ insane dream example. The ear/deaf example is one where the failure has the scope of an individual's entire lifetime. The useful dream/insane dream example is one where the failure has the scope of one night within an individual's lifetime. That difference has probably confused people, but I don't see it as terribly damaging to the analogy, because from the long-term perspective of the gene, both ears and dreams are adaptations that sometimes fail but provide net benefit anyway.
Your analogy doesn't work. People who are born deaf are born with a missing part of the ear or the brain that processes auditory information. People who become deaf usually are deaf for a reason that we know about. In the latter case, action and result are directly observable. Point taken. But there are certainly cases where the "purposes" of evolution are not 100% reliable. For example, if you want to believe some evolutionary psychologists, you'd think that men do silly stunts to impress women. They don't impress every woman, but they impress enough that they get to spread their seed around, and that's good enough.
Maybe, just maybe, these rats were tired too. They gave the rats amphetamines specifically to counteract the tiredness. Whether or not that manipulation actually does what they're hoping, I couldn't say- but my main point is that this was certainly not a case where a single false result takes down the whole hypothesis.
-------
I think a bigger issue with this is that dreaming is probably great training for other animals, but humans have a capacity for coming up with hypothetical scenarios (lying, roleplaying, prediction, etc...) that other animals probably lack. The addition of that capability (and who knows what other capacities) could make what was once useful now less useful.
This is one of those cases where a single "false" result precludes a "true" result from the rest of the experiment. I propose that the purpose of our ears is to help us hear. But some people are born congenitally deaf. These "false" results don't render my idea incorrect- and my suspicion is that this is because "purpose" means something different in an evolutionary context than it does when we speak of other intelligent agents that have purposes.
So what sense does it make to say that a behavior or phenomenon produced by evolution has a "purpose"? I think "the purpose of X is Y" is verbal shorthand for saying "Y is an effect of X, which accrues some net reproductive benefit". In that interpretation, a single "false" result is not sufficient. Some dreams don't do their "job". But as long as enough of them do, and you live incrementally longer and have more long-lived children as a result, then the dreams will have fulfilled their evolutionary "purpose".
That's not to say that this work has some outstanding merit. Under this interpretation, to claim that something has a particular evolutionary purpose is a pretty weak statement.
You suggest optimizing for one quality of user interfaces- "discoverability". But that's certainly not the only user interface design objective. Asking about the user experience after the interface has been learned is quite appropriate, because that's the circumstance that the user will spend the vast majority of their time in, assuming they've stuck around past the learning phase.
The question of whether someone will stick around long enough to learn the software is less one of usability than it is one of marketability. I make no statement about the relative importance of usability and marketability.
When I programmed for some psych labs at UW, they were running an experiment on Macs where participants indicated their responses by pushing a lever forward until it hit a stop. Now, every once in a while, this caused the program that drove the experiment to behave in strange ways.
We eventually determined that every once in a while, a participant would hit the lever's stop hard enough that the vibrations would propagate through the table and cause the puck mouse to click itself. This could happen because the button (i.e. the entire top half of the mouse) was massive enough that when the bottom portion was driven upward by the table vibration, the top moved less, and the halves' relative motion could click the mouse. This would never have happened with a normal mouse, because in a normal mouse, the buttons have low enough mass that if the bottom of the mouse moved upward, the buttons would just move right with it.
I'm not saying that this is something that anyone else in the world had to deal with. But damn did I hate those mice after learning how much data they'd cost the lab.
One reason we could do the aforementioned mapping with C. elegans is that the worm's neurons are always laid out the same way from worm to worm. This is not the case for humans, and probably not the case for any vertebrate.
I was recently charged $3000 for a CT scan. Talking to an Indian coworker, I found out that a CT scan in his country would've cost less than $50. So I guess I could've flown out to India, gotten the CT, and flown back, for less money than getting the CT in America.
It's a good thing I did get that expensive modern medical advance in America, though, because of the high-quality analysis and follow-up I got from the clinic. In total, I got one sentence out of it- "Your intestines are a little constricted." I don't think they could provide that kind of advanced analysis in India with their cheap CT scans.
I guess I'm wondering- are modern medical advances really as expensive as we're led to believe they are in America?
To put it shortly, EVERYBODY gets incredibly angry sometimes, that's just the way it is. We have violent fantasies to allow that anger to vent in a non-destructive socially agreeable manner. What I don't understand is, how does that make any aspect of the anger "go away"? The provoking situation is there until you change your appraisal of the situation (i.e. learn to accept it), you've done something about it, or external forces render the situation moot.
Real-world example: I missed the last bus to get to work today. This pissed me off, because I was at the stop and the driver made eye contact with me and blew right by me. How should I deal with that anger? One way would be to have a violent fantasy about the driver, but that is fixating my attention on the obstacle and really doing nothing to get me to work on time. In my mind, a higher-expected-utility strategy is to back up, find out what need the obstacle is hindering, and find an alternative course that satisfies that need. Putting alternative strategies into effect takes energy- but thankfully, your anger just gave you energy!- so if you react to it constructively, it all works out.
I mean to highlight the following:
''Talking out an emotion doesn't reduce it, it rehearses it,'' wrote Dr. Tavris, a social psychologist who has gathered hundreds of research references to support her views. ''People who are most prone to give vent to their rage get angrier, not less angry.'' [emphasis mine]
Who is your true self? What constitutes "hiding" your true self, when self-control is an act of the self?
I believe that your midbrain can light up with anger, and your motor cortex can get pumped up, and your frontal lobe can say "whoa, let's figure out a constructive way to deal with this". All of those are "you"; none are delusions.
I get this sense that you're not making the distinction between anger and aggression (which to me is a very important distinction). Aggression is but one response to anger; if you only let yourself get angry when aggression would be acceptable, you'll probably end up depressed but quick. When constructive responses to anger within yourself are available, then being angry can be a normal, natural part of life.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed, nothing says UNIX like a binary format.
My best guess at a phoenetic spelling would be "Roh-lanh peek-a-pie-uh".
Depends on how you slice up your "OS". Some operating systems don't need to know about multi-touch, because their applications are mostly running on X Windows, and X knows (or will very soon) about multi-touch.
The percentages were a joke. But I do mean in all seriousness to suggest that psychology researchers are often averse to math and tolerate math errors in papers. Psychology is often only quantitative insofar as there are certain numerical rituals associated with null hypothesis significance testing that researchers must use to be accepted by other researchers.
It's kind of depressing, so I try to make light of it when I can.
As someone who majored in psychology, worked in two labs, and read countless psychology papers, I can tell you that 99% of psychologists avoid math when possible, and the other 10% try to use it but make obvious errors.
To the psychology researcher, it's more about getting the "story" right than actually quantifying anything.
(This comment assumes you're using Windows.)
A possibility to consider- use software to do your effects. The key to realtime software effects is low latency. To achieve this, look for soundcards that have ASIO-capable drivers, and look for software that can take advantage of ASIO as well. With the right configuration, you can get your latency down to 5-10ms (maybe lower these days), which is essentially imperceptible.
On the software end, iirc FruityLoops can handle ASIO, and it can host a huge variety of effects that can be chained with great versatility. It's been too long since I've looked at getting a sound card for me to give you any hardware recommendations.
Dance-pads, guitars, and guns have shown that people are willing to buy alternative input devices of many stripes, which had been a niche for arcades.
I wonder whether gerrymandering could be hindered by specifying that each district must have at most a particular perimeter/area ratio in miles^-1. This could force districts into rounder/ more convex shapes.
The point was that not everything that gives us reproductive benefit works all the time. We have genes that give us ears. Those genes don't always actually get to provide us with their benefit. No one goes around claiming that the genes that spur our ears to develop don't have a purpose just because they occasionally fail at that purpose.
As long as dreams are even slightly more useful then not, they'll be selected for over time. It's not that anyone's brain-damaged at night- my point is that when people have crazy, useless dreams, then the sometimes-useful activity of dreaming has happened at that moment to be not useful.
The confusion is that the ear/deaf example is a failure that occurs at a different scale than the useful dream/ insane dream example. The ear/deaf example is one where the failure has the scope of an individual's entire lifetime. The useful dream/insane dream example is one where the failure has the scope of one night within an individual's lifetime. That difference has probably confused people, but I don't see it as terribly damaging to the analogy, because from the long-term perspective of the gene, both ears and dreams are adaptations that sometimes fail but provide net benefit anyway.
-------
I think a bigger issue with this is that dreaming is probably great training for other animals, but humans have a capacity for coming up with hypothetical scenarios (lying, roleplaying, prediction, etc...) that other animals probably lack. The addition of that capability (and who knows what other capacities) could make what was once useful now less useful.
So what sense does it make to say that a behavior or phenomenon produced by evolution has a "purpose"? I think "the purpose of X is Y" is verbal shorthand for saying "Y is an effect of X, which accrues some net reproductive benefit". In that interpretation, a single "false" result is not sufficient. Some dreams don't do their "job". But as long as enough of them do, and you live incrementally longer and have more long-lived children as a result, then the dreams will have fulfilled their evolutionary "purpose".
That's not to say that this work has some outstanding merit. Under this interpretation, to claim that something has a particular evolutionary purpose is a pretty weak statement.
The real question is- how can we be sure that the real Linda Foley did and said all these things?
Hopefully this means the malware industry will begin hemorrhaging money by hiring consultants.
You suggest optimizing for one quality of user interfaces- "discoverability". But that's certainly not the only user interface design objective. Asking about the user experience after the interface has been learned is quite appropriate, because that's the circumstance that the user will spend the vast majority of their time in, assuming they've stuck around past the learning phase.
The question of whether someone will stick around long enough to learn the software is less one of usability than it is one of marketability. I make no statement about the relative importance of usability and marketability.
When I programmed for some psych labs at UW, they were running an experiment on Macs where participants indicated their responses by pushing a lever forward until it hit a stop. Now, every once in a while, this caused the program that drove the experiment to behave in strange ways.
We eventually determined that every once in a while, a participant would hit the lever's stop hard enough that the vibrations would propagate through the table and cause the puck mouse to click itself. This could happen because the button (i.e. the entire top half of the mouse) was massive enough that when the bottom portion was driven upward by the table vibration, the top moved less, and the halves' relative motion could click the mouse. This would never have happened with a normal mouse, because in a normal mouse, the buttons have low enough mass that if the bottom of the mouse moved upward, the buttons would just move right with it.
I'm not saying that this is something that anyone else in the world had to deal with. But damn did I hate those mice after learning how much data they'd cost the lab.
One reason we could do the aforementioned mapping with C. elegans is that the worm's neurons are always laid out the same way from worm to worm. This is not the case for humans, and probably not the case for any vertebrate.
Could this process be accelerated by allowing the bees to shoot from the mouths of barking dogs?
I don't believe ISPs in general have historically been classified as common carriers in the first place.
Of course not- it's because he can use his deer rifle to get a college education.
I was recently charged $3000 for a CT scan. Talking to an Indian coworker, I found out that a CT scan in his country would've cost less than $50. So I guess I could've flown out to India, gotten the CT, and flown back, for less money than getting the CT in America.
It's a good thing I did get that expensive modern medical advance in America, though, because of the high-quality analysis and follow-up I got from the clinic. In total, I got one sentence out of it- "Your intestines are a little constricted." I don't think they could provide that kind of advanced analysis in India with their cheap CT scans.
I guess I'm wondering- are modern medical advances really as expensive as we're led to believe they are in America?
Real-world example: I missed the last bus to get to work today. This pissed me off, because I was at the stop and the driver made eye contact with me and blew right by me. How should I deal with that anger? One way would be to have a violent fantasy about the driver, but that is fixating my attention on the obstacle and really doing nothing to get me to work on time. In my mind, a higher-expected-utility strategy is to back up, find out what need the obstacle is hindering, and find an alternative course that satisfies that need. Putting alternative strategies into effect takes energy- but thankfully, your anger just gave you energy!- so if you react to it constructively, it all works out.
I should have spoken with more tentativeness, it's true, but my statements are not ungrounded. See a reply below for some sources.
I mean to highlight the following: ''Talking out an emotion doesn't reduce it, it rehearses it,'' wrote Dr. Tavris, a social psychologist who has gathered hundreds of research references to support her views. ''People who are most prone to give vent to their rage get angrier, not less angry.'' [emphasis mine]
These are questions of some subtlety.
Who is your true self? What constitutes "hiding" your true self, when self-control is an act of the self?
I believe that your midbrain can light up with anger, and your motor cortex can get pumped up, and your frontal lobe can say "whoa, let's figure out a constructive way to deal with this". All of those are "you"; none are delusions.
I get this sense that you're not making the distinction between anger and aggression (which to me is a very important distinction). Aggression is but one response to anger; if you only let yourself get angry when aggression would be acceptable, you'll probably end up depressed but quick. When constructive responses to anger within yourself are available, then being angry can be a normal, natural part of life.