My source is the book "The Language Instinct" by Steven Pinker. I expect if you look for 'language acquisition' on the web, you'll find out about this. The evidence comes from cases where children have not been exposed to language for some time, then exposed. Their grammar skill strongly depends on the age at which they acquired language. (Usually these are deaf children in a place where there was no sign-language community for them. Some cases are due to extreme parental neglect/abuse.)
But adults may still be out of luck
on
Mice Cured of Autism
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
They've reversed (something like) Rett Syndrome in mice, showing that the nerve malfunctioning is reversable. In humans, however, missing vital developmental milestones is not reversable. E.g. normally we acquire grammar by age three, but if for some reason we don't acquire it before the age of about 10, we never will (or only very poorly.) So even if this treatment transfers to humans, it is unlikely to be a complete miracle cure for adult Rett Syndrome (or autistic) people.
Indeed - I want to be able to change the world. I want to be able to wander off into the wilderness, find a harbour near some ore deposits, clear out the monsters, build a wharf, and in a while have a mining boom town, and still later a mercantile city. Or build a university of magic, or build my own kingdom, or lead an army of barbarians to sack the cities the game started with. (I'm thinking of single player Oblivion-like games rather than MMOs here. Well, it would be great in MMOs too, but it would be hard to have enough space for everyone to do their thing, and to prevent others interfering with what you've made.)
Yeah, because right-clicking a file or folder, selecting Properties, then choosing the confusingly labeled Security tab is difficult.
Too right it was difficult. My WinXP installation decided that a "security" tab was just too confusing so it didn't display it. There was some arcane ritual I needed to perform to enable it. The help files mostly just assumed this ritual had been performed, so they said "click on the security tab and then...", flatly contradicting what I could see (a Properties window with no security tab). There was a lot of frustration before I stumbled on the ritual.
I started a research career at age 37 in evolutionary molecular biology, having not studied any biology since I was about 14. However, I had two advantages over you: I do have a science PhD (in astronomy) and my employer was an old friend of the family. I'm sure he didn't hire me just because of that, but it did at least get me an opportunity to be seriously considered.
I'd spent the time between my PhD and the new job as a commercial programmer.
Getting an academic job is likely to be very difficult. Working as a programmer for scientists is a fair possibility, which you can possibly leverage into a real research job eventually. You WILL take a pay cut. In my case, it was by about 30%. I'm happy with that trade-off.
He's changing the direction of (turning) security, taking as fixed* what goes on in people's brains. It is pretty close to literal - the main problem being that it isn't (as implied by the phrase) security's head but rather the heads of people needing security. I think you'll find the journalist has a paid-up poetic license for this sort of minor stretch of truth (even though it doesn't rhyme.)
These actions will increase the entropy of the demon far more than he's decreasing the entropy of the gas (by sorting the gas molecules).
This is related to the Von Neumann-Landauer limit which specifies how much heat you have to dissipate to reset your Maxwell's Demon to a pristine state after it has made a decision. This in turn is related to Reversable Computing, which seeks to improve the energy efficiency of computers by avoiding such resets wherever practical.
Queue thousands of "640k is enough for anyone" and "I remember when my IBM XT had a 10 MEGABYTE hard disk" rejoinders....:-)
This is great! I've long been feeling oppressed by the fact that I can only fit the telephone directory of a single major city into my cell phone contacts list. Now I'll finally be able to scroll through whole country's telephone directories on a 50mm square display!
The article discusses several other Democrat candidates as at least somewhat pro-privacy.
Is it only Democrats who care about this? It seems like an issue (like pornography) which should cut across the traditional Dem/Rep. lines. (I can, however, see that ideologically we might expect Democrats to be comparatively more interested in imposing privacy regulations on industry, and Republicans comparatively more interested in imposing restrictions on government.)
If there are no pro-privacy Republicans (PPRs), has it always been this way? Perhaps since 2000 the PPRs are just afraid to speak out, as to do so would implicitly criticise Bush.
(I am not an American, so I don't follow US domestic politics so closely.)
Here is a directory of open access journals. One of the requirements for inclusion is "Quality control: for a journal to be included it should exercise quality control on submitted papers through an editor, editorial board and/or a peer-review system."
It is very hard to get the sun to do something on 40-100kyr timescales.
There are three fundamental timescales for stars:
The nuclear timescale, which is the total energy available from 'fuel' divided by the luminosity of the star (i.e. the rate at which it radiates energy.) For the sun, this is about 10 billion years - the expected lifetime of the star.
The thermal timescale is the total thermal energy of the star divided by its luminosity. This is the rate at which the star can react to changes in the energy production rate. For the sun this is on the order of 10 million years. (Before we knew about nuclear energy, physicists thought the sun couldn't be much older than this.)
The dynamic timescale is the time it would take the sun to collapse to a black hole if somehow all the gas pressure were removed, or equivalently the time it would take to orbit the sun at its surface. Vibrations (helioseismology) occur on this timescale, and it is the period of variability for pulsating variable stars. I think for the sun it is on the order of a few hours or less.
(Yes, there's also the 11 year sunspot cycle. I haven't studied that - it must have something to do with the amount of energy held in magnetic fields. It is inconsequential in terms of solar luminosity.)
I'm going on memory for the times, so they won't be exact. Also, the timescales are a somewhat fuzzy concept, and different definitions can give results out by a factor of a few. In any case, none of them are at all close to 100,000 years, so variations on that timescale would be quite surprising. (Maybe something to do with the kinetic energy in convection could do it, but that's just a wild guess.)
"Information security, as critical as it is, needs to be taken care of by organizations who live and die by it, who invest the money, time, resources and staff."
Security guru Bruce Schneier thinks the same way - which is why he founded a company to do exactly that.
"String theory is arguably the most popular theory in theoretical physics; that is, it cannot be proven."
Depending on how you read the intend of this sentence, there are up to three errors. As others have noted, nothing in science can be proven true - they can only be proven false. The word here should be "tested". It is not that it cannot be tested, but that it has been beyond our capability to do so. Even this isn't true - after much effort at developing the theory, it turns out to be compatible with current physics - this is a test, as it might not have happened. One might argue it is not a very arduous test. "String theory... has not been strongly tested" is a sentence I could agree with.
"... the proposed testing of the current string theory. I use "current" because string theory is just that, a theory; and it is constantly changing as more information becomes available."
Argh! The old "just a theory" boggie! "Theory" here means a logical structure which uses a small number of axioms/hypotheses to explain a large and disparate body of observation. It is independent of the level of experimental support the theory has. Newtonian gravity, evolution by natural selection, special relativity and quantum mechanics are all theories with sufficient experimental support to reguard them as fact (within suitable limits - e.g. we know Newtonian gravity fails in relativistic conditions.) General relativity is very nearly there. String theory is still hypothetical.
(Biological note: I'm an ex-astronomy student now doing mathematical evolutionary biology. I've attended string theory talks, and failed to understand them. Take the above with salt added to taste.)
I wouldn't call this "great news" - I think the spoilation claim was always a long shot by SCO, and was more a distraction than anything else. It is a victory in a very minor battle. (There was also a defeat in a very very minor battle. I'm not sure why they cared enough to fight it.)
Good news was when 2/3 of SCO's "evidence" was thrown out for being, well, non-evident. Great news is what we're hoping for from the summary judgement motions. I'm expecting a large portion (80-90%?) to go IBM's way.
The one huge drawback is low sensitivity and high noise - two, the two great drawbacks are low sensitivity, high noise and a fanatical devotion to the pope...
Each measurement has noise, and is the sum of a large number of pixels. To determine the value for a given pixel, you have to add and subtract a large number of measurements. Subtracting noisy values increases the relative noise in the result.
Actually, we already have a method whereby a given measurement (pixel) is influenced by a largish portion of the image - it is generally known as an "out of focus picture". Mathematically, it is straight forward to "undo" the blurring, but (as discussed above) inevitably this process magnifies noise.
You might be able to do something interesting with (e.g.) a 10Mpixel mirror array and three 1Mpixel detectors (R, G and B).
This is one of several pathologies in the current model of drug development:
* "Me too" drugs: large amounts of money spent to create a drug very similar to another one already on the market. This doesn't (usually) do anything to benefit humanity as a whole, it just gives a second drug company entry into some market.
* Lack of research on new uses for out-of-patent drugs
* Lack of research on drugs for diseases of poor people/countries
* Very high markups to recover research/testing costs
and arguably one might also include
* Very high costs and long times to get approval
* Development of drugs for "conditions" which aren't really that important, until drug company marketing departments make them so.
As usual, it is easier to see the problems than the solutions - I'm not offering any here. It may be that for some areas, the current system is working just fine, but it is clearly failing in other areas.
Having (for the first time) just read the "series of tubes" quote on Wikipedia, it doesn't seem so bad to me. The only glaring error is having been "sent an internet" (rather than e-mail) but this could just be a slip of the tongue - I take it this was off-the-cuff, not a scripted speach.
"Pipes" would have been a better word than "tubes" (stuff flows along pipes, but not necessarily along tubes) and I feel roads would be a better metaphor, but "tubes" isn't a bad one.
I confess I don't understand what incorrect interpretation of the internet he was trying to dispell with "not a big truck". That stuff arrives a bit at a time, rather than in one indivisible lump?
Perhaps there is other evidence beyond this showing that the senator is technologically clueless?
I like the units capability - having done astronomy, this can be very useful.
I'd like to see matricies having all sorts of flags to specify their properties - real, complex, double precision, hermitian, symmetric, diagonal, triangular etc. Linear algebra libraries have huge numbers of routines for various combinations of these (e.g. a different routine to solve a system of equations where the matrix is diagonal than when it is not, or eigenvectors of a symmetric matrix vs an asymmetric one.) With these flags, the compiler could quietly use the correct routine. It would also know how to assign flags to newly calculated matricies, e.g. a matrix times its transpose is always symmetric.
It would also be handy to allow matricies to quietly acquire and carry alternative representations: LU factorization, eigen-decomposition/diagonalization etc. Once the LU factorization has been done, it is cached, and any later operations with that matrix which can benefit from an LU factorization make use of it. (This automatic behaviour would need to be easily overriden, for memory efficiency reasons.)
Thanks - I've been out of the loop in astronomy for some time, so I didn't know about this. (I had a minute amount of involvement in planning for the SDSS.)
I don't like the idea of deleting the data - there's all sorts of ways it could be useful, most noticably you could add many images to get a deep field. (Hm, I suppose you could do that anyway - keep a 'running total' image.)
This is going to have a big effect on the microlensing surveys - they won't be able to compete with this rate of data aquisition, so I expect they'll be reduced to inserting themselves into the data analysis pipeline of projects like this, rather than running their own telescopes.
This isn't what is happening - the ability to read AutoCAD files with other programs is unaffected. It looks like what they're trying to do is to prevent third party software from producing files which will be accepted by AutoCAD.
First off, language is about communication, and requires transmitter and receiver to agree on the meanings of symbols/words. "Renewable energy" is a well recognised term, and does its communciation job perfectly well, even if it doesn't quite match your idea of what "renewable" means. "Kick the bucket" similarly communicates an idea, despite having a meaning unrelated to do with kicking or buckets.
Secondly, the word "renewable" is entirely justifiable in "renewable energy". It refers to energy souces which are constantly renewed, so that extracting energy from them depletes the source only for a short period of time (months or years for hydroelectric, hours for tidal, possibly minutes or hours for wind.)
Finally, why should it be that harnessing solar power by photosynthesis is renewable, but harnessing it by photoelectric cell is not?
Slashdot Mirror
Here.
It seems that df5jt is Peter Lemkin.
A usenet flamewar with conspiracy theorists, and then the conspiracy theorists are proved right! The end of the world is nigh!
My source is the book "The Language Instinct" by Steven Pinker. I expect if you look for 'language acquisition' on the web, you'll find out about this. The evidence comes from cases where children have not been exposed to language for some time, then exposed. Their grammar skill strongly depends on the age at which they acquired language. (Usually these are deaf children in a place where there was no sign-language community for them. Some cases are due to extreme parental neglect/abuse.)
They've reversed (something like) Rett Syndrome in mice, showing that the nerve malfunctioning is reversable. In humans, however, missing vital developmental milestones is not reversable. E.g. normally we acquire grammar by age three, but if for some reason we don't acquire it before the age of about 10, we never will (or only very poorly.) So even if this treatment transfers to humans, it is unlikely to be a complete miracle cure for adult Rett Syndrome (or autistic) people.
Here's another article about it.
Indeed - I want to be able to change the world. I want to be able to wander off into the wilderness, find a harbour near some ore deposits, clear out the monsters, build a wharf, and in a while have a mining boom town, and still later a mercantile city. Or build a university of magic, or build my own kingdom, or lead an army of barbarians to sack the cities the game started with. (I'm thinking of single player Oblivion-like games rather than MMOs here. Well, it would be great in MMOs too, but it would be hard to have enough space for everyone to do their thing, and to prevent others interfering with what you've made.)
Yeah, because right-clicking a file or folder, selecting Properties, then choosing the confusingly labeled Security tab is difficult.
Too right it was difficult. My WinXP installation decided that a "security" tab was just too confusing so it didn't display it. There was some arcane ritual I needed to perform to enable it. The help files mostly just assumed this ritual had been performed, so they said "click on the security tab and then...", flatly contradicting what I could see (a Properties window with no security tab). There was a lot of frustration before I stumbled on the ritual.
I started a research career at age 37 in evolutionary molecular biology, having not studied any biology since I was about 14. However, I had two advantages over you: I do have a science PhD (in astronomy) and my employer was an old friend of the family. I'm sure he didn't hire me just because of that, but it did at least get me an opportunity to be seriously considered.
I'd spent the time between my PhD and the new job as a commercial programmer.
Getting an academic job is likely to be very difficult. Working as a programmer for scientists is a fair possibility, which you can possibly leverage into a real research job eventually. You WILL take a pay cut. In my case, it was by about 30%. I'm happy with that trade-off.
He's changing the direction of (turning) security, taking as fixed* what goes on in people's brains. It is pretty close to literal - the main problem being that it isn't (as implied by the phrase) security's head but rather the heads of people needing security. I think you'll find the journalist has a paid-up poetic license for this sort of minor stretch of truth (even though it doesn't rhyme.)
* That is 'immovable', not 'repaired'.
Queue thousands of "640k is enough for anyone" and "I remember when my IBM XT had a 10 MEGABYTE hard disk" rejoinders.... :-)
This is great! I've long been feeling oppressed by the fact that I can only fit the telephone directory of a single major city into my cell phone contacts list. Now I'll finally be able to scroll through whole country's telephone directories on a 50mm square display!
The article discusses several other Democrat candidates as at least somewhat pro-privacy.
Is it only Democrats who care about this? It seems like an issue (like pornography) which should cut across the traditional Dem/Rep. lines. (I can, however, see that ideologically we might expect Democrats to be comparatively more interested in imposing privacy regulations on industry, and Republicans comparatively more interested in imposing restrictions on government.)
If there are no pro-privacy Republicans (PPRs), has it always been this way? Perhaps since 2000 the PPRs are just afraid to speak out, as to do so would implicitly criticise Bush.
(I am not an American, so I don't follow US domestic politics so closely.)
Here is a directory of open access journals. One of the requirements for inclusion is "Quality control: for a journal to be included it should exercise quality control on submitted papers through an editor, editorial board and/or a peer-review system."
It is very hard to get the sun to do something on 40-100kyr timescales.
There are three fundamental timescales for stars:
The nuclear timescale, which is the total energy available from 'fuel' divided by the luminosity of the star (i.e. the rate at which it radiates energy.) For the sun, this is about 10 billion years - the expected lifetime of the star.
The thermal timescale is the total thermal energy of the star divided by its luminosity. This is the rate at which the star can react to changes in the energy production rate. For the sun this is on the order of 10 million years. (Before we knew about nuclear energy, physicists thought the sun couldn't be much older than this.)
The dynamic timescale is the time it would take the sun to collapse to a black hole if somehow all the gas pressure were removed, or equivalently the time it would take to orbit the sun at its surface. Vibrations (helioseismology) occur on this timescale, and it is the period of variability for pulsating variable stars. I think for the sun it is on the order of a few hours or less.
(Yes, there's also the 11 year sunspot cycle. I haven't studied that - it must have something to do with the amount of energy held in magnetic fields. It is inconsequential in terms of solar luminosity.)
I'm going on memory for the times, so they won't be exact. Also, the timescales are a somewhat fuzzy concept, and different definitions can give results out by a factor of a few. In any case, none of them are at all close to 100,000 years, so variations on that timescale would be quite surprising. (Maybe something to do with the kinetic energy in convection could do it, but that's just a wild guess.)
Nothing suitable comes up from acronymfinder.
"Information security, as critical as it is, needs to be taken care of by organizations who live and die by it, who invest the money, time, resources and staff."
Security guru Bruce Schneier thinks the same way - which is why he founded a company to do exactly that.
"String theory is arguably the most popular theory in theoretical physics; that is, it cannot be proven."
... has not been strongly tested" is a sentence I could agree with.
Depending on how you read the intend of this sentence, there are up to three errors. As others have noted, nothing in science can be proven true - they can only be proven false. The word here should be "tested". It is not that it cannot be tested, but that it has been beyond our capability to do so. Even this isn't true - after much effort at developing the theory, it turns out to be compatible with current physics - this is a test, as it might not have happened. One might argue it is not a very arduous test. "String theory
"... the proposed testing of the current string theory. I use "current" because string theory is just that, a theory; and it is constantly changing as more information becomes available."
Argh! The old "just a theory" boggie! "Theory" here means a logical structure which uses a small number of axioms/hypotheses to explain a large and disparate body of observation. It is independent of the level of experimental support the theory has. Newtonian gravity, evolution by natural selection, special relativity and quantum mechanics are all theories with sufficient experimental support to reguard them as fact (within suitable limits - e.g. we know Newtonian gravity fails in relativistic conditions.) General relativity is very nearly there. String theory is still hypothetical.
(Biological note: I'm an ex-astronomy student now doing mathematical evolutionary biology. I've attended string theory talks, and failed to understand them. Take the above with salt added to taste.)
Actually NTSB tend to use phrases like "controlled flight into terrain".
IANAL, but I watch them on Groklaw.
I wouldn't call this "great news" - I think the spoilation claim was always a long shot by SCO, and was more a distraction than anything else. It is a victory in a very minor battle. (There was also a defeat in a very very minor battle. I'm not sure why they cared enough to fight it.)
Good news was when 2/3 of SCO's "evidence" was thrown out for being, well, non-evident. Great news is what we're hoping for from the summary judgement motions.
I'm expecting a large portion (80-90%?) to go IBM's way.
The one huge drawback is low sensitivity and high noise - two, the two great drawbacks are low sensitivity, high noise and a fanatical devotion to the pope...
Each measurement has noise, and is the sum of a large number of pixels. To determine the value for a given pixel, you have to add and subtract a large number of measurements. Subtracting noisy values increases the relative noise in the result.
Actually, we already have a method whereby a given measurement (pixel) is influenced by a largish portion of the image - it is generally known as an "out of focus picture". Mathematically, it is straight forward to "undo" the blurring, but (as discussed above) inevitably this process magnifies noise.
You might be able to do something interesting with (e.g.) a 10Mpixel mirror array and three 1Mpixel detectors (R, G and B).
This is one of several pathologies in the current model of drug development:
* "Me too" drugs: large amounts of money spent to create a drug very similar to another one already on the market. This doesn't (usually) do anything to benefit humanity as a whole, it just gives a second drug company entry into some market.
* Lack of research on new uses for out-of-patent drugs
* Lack of research on drugs for diseases of poor people/countries
* Very high markups to recover research/testing costs
and arguably one might also include
* Very high costs and long times to get approval
* Development of drugs for "conditions" which aren't really that important, until drug company marketing departments make them so.
As usual, it is easier to see the problems than the solutions - I'm not offering any here. It may be that for some areas, the current system is working just fine, but it is clearly failing in other areas.
Having (for the first time) just read the "series of tubes" quote on Wikipedia, it doesn't seem so bad to me. The only glaring error is having been "sent an internet" (rather than e-mail) but this could just be a slip of the tongue - I take it this was off-the-cuff, not a scripted speach.
"Pipes" would have been a better word than "tubes" (stuff flows along pipes, but not necessarily along tubes) and I feel roads would be a better metaphor, but "tubes" isn't a bad one.
I confess I don't understand what incorrect interpretation of the internet he was trying to dispell with "not a big truck". That stuff arrives a bit at a time, rather than in one indivisible lump?
Perhaps there is other evidence beyond this showing that the senator is technologically clueless?
I like the units capability - having done astronomy, this can be very useful.
I'd like to see matricies having all sorts of flags to specify their properties - real, complex, double precision, hermitian, symmetric, diagonal, triangular etc. Linear algebra libraries have huge numbers of routines for various combinations of these (e.g. a different routine to solve a system of equations where the matrix is diagonal than when it is not, or eigenvectors of a symmetric matrix vs an asymmetric one.) With these flags, the compiler could quietly use the correct routine. It would also know how to assign flags to newly calculated matricies, e.g. a matrix times its transpose is always symmetric.
It would also be handy to allow matricies to quietly acquire and carry alternative representations: LU factorization, eigen-decomposition/diagonalization etc. Once the LU factorization has been done, it is cached, and any later operations with that matrix which can benefit from an LU factorization make use of it. (This automatic behaviour would need to be easily overriden, for memory efficiency reasons.)
Thanks - I've been out of the loop in astronomy for some time, so I didn't know about this. (I had a minute amount of involvement in planning for the SDSS.)
I don't like the idea of deleting the data - there's all sorts of ways it could be useful, most noticably you could add many images to get a deep field. (Hm, I suppose you could do that anyway - keep a 'running total' image.)
This is going to have a big effect on the microlensing surveys - they won't be able to compete with this rate of data aquisition, so I expect they'll be reduced to inserting themselves into the data analysis pipeline of projects like this, rather than running their own telescopes.
The ion cooler fan casemod is linked to in comments hanging off the article.
version 1
version 2
This isn't what is happening - the ability to read AutoCAD files with other programs is unaffected. It looks like what they're trying to do is to prevent third party software from producing files which will be accepted by AutoCAD.
Sorry, but your distinctions are just silly.
First off, language is about communication, and requires transmitter and receiver to agree on the meanings of symbols/words. "Renewable energy" is a well recognised term, and does its communciation job perfectly well, even if it doesn't quite match your idea of what "renewable" means. "Kick the bucket" similarly communicates an idea, despite having a meaning unrelated to do with kicking or buckets.
Secondly, the word "renewable" is entirely justifiable in "renewable energy". It refers to energy souces which are constantly renewed, so that extracting energy from them depletes the source only for a short period of time (months or years for hydroelectric, hours for tidal, possibly minutes or hours for wind.)
Finally, why should it be that harnessing solar power by photosynthesis is renewable, but harnessing it by photoelectric cell is not?