So search engines could influence elections; but we have no evidence as yet that they are exploiting that capability, while newspapers, radio, and television have been doing their best in that area more or less since their respective introductions.
In general, people seem to have a strong distaste, often backed by substantial investigative resources, for mysterious mysteries cropping up in the course what what is supposed to be a routine and mature process.
Commercial aviation (at least the large-aircraft stuff, stats for dinky little aircraft are less reassuring) is ordinarily so well hammered out that basically every air crash has a strong element of mystery to it and so the investigators come and try to figure out what went wrong.
Compare to cars, which kill plenty more people (and, unlike malnutrition and ghastly tropical parasites) people we usually care about; but still get minimal investigative attention because so many of the accidents are either 'operator was piss-drunk and/or exhausted', 'operator was flagrantly disregarding the rules for that area of the road', or 'vehicle maintenance was somewhere between horrendous and nonexistent'.
Schistosomiasis has been around for hundreds of years, so why would it suddenly be related to HIV
Presumably because HIV wasn't present for it to be related to until recently.
The Norwegians' thesis is that schistosomiasis simply makes transmission easier because it damages intravaginal mucous membranes that would otherwise be more likely to impede viral infection.
They aren't postulating any recent changes in behavior for schistosomiasis, or even any special selectivity for HIV (the compromised membranes would presumably have much the same risk for assorted other sexually transmitted diseases), it's just that those two are now coexisting over a large area that they had not historically, since HIV is comparatively new.
I suspect two main classes of reason (in addition to purely visceral distaste):
1. Prosthetics tend to exploit whatever remnant limb is available, from relatively primitive 'cup' type attachments that fit over a stump all the way to cutting edge nerve interface implants that allow conscious control of the prosthesis. These just aren't available for limbs that humans never have: even in the case of complete amputation, you still get to take advantage of the skeleton being set up for a load-bearing attachment in a given location, not so if a limb doesn't go there.
2. In practice, humans use 'prosthetic' aids all the time, they just don't imitate limbs all that closely and are often left at the work site. Just think of all the various clamps, vises, jigs, tripods, stands, etc, etc, etc, that act as 3rd through Nth hands during operations that require them. It tends to be far easier and cheaper to skip trying to replicate the (highly complex, but very versatile) structure of the hand and just knock together some relatively simple, task specific, tool, possibly a collection of them used for a sequence of assembly operations.
Second: studio headphones aren't designed to listen to _music_, they are designed for listening to _sound_. It may be a surprise to many so called "audiophiles" and other elitists that that isn't the same thing
"An audiophile is someone who listens to his stereo rather than his music."
The poor HP Touchpad actually had surprisingly good almost everything (except the plastic back, it creaked a bit).
It's sad that Palm died; but it's downright tragic that Android, rather than WebOS, is the de-facto alternative to iOS. WebOS is a howling wasteland devoid of apps, and the builds that actually run on much of anything are too old to use really safely; but (especially for tablet-size UIs) it was embarassingly superior to Android.
It would actually be rather interesting if Apple were after the brand: conventional wisdom is that Apple is downright godlike in terms of brand recognition (and positive recognition). There are the gamer-kiddies who (correctly for their demographic) see Apple as overpriced and focused on the wrong features, and Corporate/Institutional buyers want cheap boxes, support contracts, image stability, and other stuff Apple doesn't really give a damn about; but they consistently wipe the floor with other computer and consumer electronics brands, have a sky-high wife-acceptance-factor, and so on.
If we hypothesize that they want the 'beats' brand, who is it that they feel they aren't currently getting through to, and why not? Are those people simply apathetic, or are they actively identifying with a different brand?
One, admittedly limited, blip in the 'size matters' relationship is fully sealed in-ear "canalphone" type headphones. They tend not to be terribly comfortable; but they effectively create a sealed tube, and a small one, with your eardrum on one end, the speaker cone on the other, and a tiny amount of air with nowhere to go in between.
Under those circumstances, a fairly teeny driver can beat up on your eardrum quite convincingly indeed, a great deal more effectively than a driver of similar size running in free air or partially free air conditions could.
Look on the bright side! if Apple starts pushing 'Beats' headphones, odds are good that the number of assholes wandering around in public with their cellphone's shitty little speaker emitting a tinny (but surprisingly loud and penetrating) generic crunk rap noise, like some lilliputan boombox from hell, should be reduced by at least 30% as those same people decide that horrendously inferior headphones are now cooler than inflicting their taste on everyone in the vicinity!
In fairness to 'Beats Audio', and the good 'Dr.' Dre, the 'Beats' brand is so shamelessly pimped that it even makes it onto products that aren't capable of artificially inflated bass. HP put out a 7 inch tablet allegedly with the sonic goodness of Beats, and something that size wouldn't know what 'bass' is, much less produce any, unless its battery exploded.
Say what you want about Google but I'd always turn to them before the likes of AT&T, Verizon, etc. I just with Google would come to where I live.
Given that pretty much every telco and ISP of any size is a known collaborator in surveillance and is either working on, or actively engaged in, commercial exploitation of customer data (only with their trusted partner companies, of course...), and their speeds are low and their prices are high, it's pretty hard not to root for Google.
Sure, they aren't exactly warm and cuddly; but if you get a dystopian panopticon either way, it might as well at least be fast and reasonably priced.
I don't know whether or not this is actually happening (if not, no problem); but the one possible negative would be if genetic techniques are pulling people away from field work in favor of sequencing stuff and then number-crunching on it.
While the classical taxonomists are mere stamp collectors by the standards of phylogenetics, the field did have the virtue of getting people to slog to the godforsaken malarial back end of nowhere to look for new and exotic stuff. Given the rate at which the godforsaken malarial back end of nowhere is being burned down to produce either cows or palm oil, we don't exactly have unlimited time on that score.
If people are still out looking for neat stuff while it remains available, the fact that they are using superior methods to analyze it is an improvement. If the availability of more advanced DNA based techniques means that people are being diverted into re-analyzing more easily available samples it isn't bad science or anything; but it is spending time on something that will be available more or less indefinitely while other windows of opportunity are closing, sometimes fast.
The one point in our favor, would be that a species capable of bridging the vast distances between the stars would presumably have vast technology and sufficiently advanced materials engineering and biological manipulation techniques that they would pretty much just need various useful atoms and lots and lots of energy. Our planet isn't worthless, in terms of material; but it's a hell of a lot less interesting than the solar system's larger objects in terms of volume, and it has a much more annoying escape velocity than the zillion-odd asteroids and comets and various bits of junk floating around.
This hardly means that they wouldn't consume earth in due time, possibly without even remarking on the fact that some of the carbon based macromolecules on the surface seemed pretty agitated about it, nor does it exclude the possibility that they'd fuck us up in some creative way just for the lulz, or because their hobby is eating as many different sentient organisms as possible; but, unlike the 'technologically advanced human culture kicks the shit out of primitive one, takes their stuff' story of history, anything that is doing interstellar travel might be advanced to the point of near-total disinterest. Pop out of treknobabble-travel-space in the vicinity of the sun, do a bit of scanning, consume the gas giants to refuel their world-ships, then leave to go do whatever it is has them traveling all this way in the first place.
Or they might drop a small singularity into our gravity well, just to watch us freak out on a global scale, knowing that it's sitting somewhere near the planet's core, steadily consuming it from the inside and there is nothing we can do except await an increasingly nasty series of geological upheavals and our inevitable doom; but that would be purely for spite's sake.
I assume that this depraved recourse to 'the empiricism' will soil my hands in the minds of the mathematicians; but we can and have demonstrated the degradation of memories during the recall process. That area of research(while it has serious applications to memory disorders, trauma treatment, and basic research in neuroscience) is practically a party game of 'who can achieve the most ridiculously false 'memories' in experimental subjects the fastest?
They might as well have just used some Schneier Facts in place of the paper: "SHA-256 is a hash algorithm, and not reversible." "Bruce Schneier uses SHA-256 as a compression algorithm for Alice and Bob's shared secret." "Therefore Bruce Schneier is not computable, except by himself."
It would have taken about ten minutes to email anybody in the psych department and this all could have been avoided. Good Work!
Sorry, I didn't make that clear: given a constant attempt rate, the firearm supply will strongly affect the resulting suicide rate. Guns are very good at what they are designed to do, while many of the DIY methods that people try are just plain ineffective, slow enough to permit medical response, or otherwise defective.
A sufficiently large difference in attempt rate can (and in this case does) swamp the effects of greater success rates; but people with easy access to explicitly lethal instruments succeed more often. (And it doesn't have to be guns, rural agricultural areas may have easy access to nasty organophosphate pesticides, say, but the US has easy access to guns and comparatively childproofed consumer goods, so here it's probably guns.)
Easy access to guns is a factor in suicide rates (largely because suicide attempts made with guns typically work, while there are a lot of ineffective attempts by non-firearm users). In terms of attempt rate, though, I don't think that there's much correlation of any sort(unless you buy the theory that some of the stupider acts of violence, with extraordinarily high risks and minimal rewards, are basically suicide for violent people, the 'suicide by cop' and such).
Chicago is a slightly curious case: city-wide, it has been getting safer, more slowly than some would like; but steadily, for some years. However, some of the parts that were always pretty nasty have actually been getting worse, they just aren't large enough or worse enough to drag down the citywide average.
The nicer bits were never as rough as 'Chicago's image suggested, and they've been improving. The rougher areas, though, earned the nickname 'Chiraq' honestly and messily.
Oh, indeed not. And you can get contraceptive vaccines (albeit only for certain non-human pest and livestock mammals at present, humans aren't quite working yet). As it happens, though, concerned parties have had the vaccine lots sent off for analysis in places they trust, and some campaigns have even deliberately emphasized use of vaccines sourced from 'friendly' countries rather than the US or similar, and nobody has ever come across a sterilization/fertility reduction agent hidden in one of these vaccines.
There's certainly no reason to trust our boundless benevolence and ironclad human decency(indeed, if you couldn't get at least 15% of congress to fantasize about actually having a covert sterilization program, if they thought the mic was off, I'd be a bit surprised); but if we are up to something, we've managed to hide it amazingly well.
Oh, I was referring to the CIA agents who were so myopic and/or ethically disinhibited as to compromise the fight against a rather nasty disease just to score a DNA sample. That's far worse than common murder.
The locals who are directly attacking health workers also need to be punished, of course; assault and/or murder are criminal acts and they deserve to suffer for them; but they are largely a symptom, just peons doing the grunt work for a situation above their heads. The people who hatched a plan that essentially uses healthcare workers as human shields, possibly for years to come until the memory eventually dies down? That's just abhorrent any way you slice it, even without the 'aiding and abetting polio' angle.
The CIA 'vaccination campaign' was actually for hepatitis B; but the locals obviously aren't terribly interested in allocating distrust according to the specific vaccine type. There have been assorted 'zOMG Western campaign to sterilize our wimmenz!' outbreaks from time to time before that one came to light; but an actual CIA vaccine conspiracy certainly didn't hurt the credibility of anyone who accused vaccination of being a cover for some sinister western agenda...
I'd advocate the 'poetic justice' approach myself.
A nice relaxing life sentence inside an iron lung would give the responsible parties plenty of time to think over the fact that the CIA's most serious targets, much less its biggest successfully averted incidents, are total chickenshit compared to what public health people (along with contemporary sanitation infrastructure) work to keep at bay.
Slashdot Mirror
So search engines could influence elections; but we have no evidence as yet that they are exploiting that capability, while newspapers, radio, and television have been doing their best in that area more or less since their respective introductions.
Sounds like we'd better start panicking now.
In general, people seem to have a strong distaste, often backed by substantial investigative resources, for mysterious mysteries cropping up in the course what what is supposed to be a routine and mature process.
Commercial aviation (at least the large-aircraft stuff, stats for dinky little aircraft are less reassuring) is ordinarily so well hammered out that basically every air crash has a strong element of mystery to it and so the investigators come and try to figure out what went wrong.
Compare to cars, which kill plenty more people (and, unlike malnutrition and ghastly tropical parasites) people we usually care about; but still get minimal investigative attention because so many of the accidents are either 'operator was piss-drunk and/or exhausted', 'operator was flagrantly disregarding the rules for that area of the road', or 'vehicle maintenance was somewhere between horrendous and nonexistent'.
Schistosomiasis has been around for hundreds of years, so why would it suddenly be related to HIV
Presumably because HIV wasn't present for it to be related to until recently.
The Norwegians' thesis is that schistosomiasis simply makes transmission easier because it damages intravaginal mucous membranes that would otherwise be more likely to impede viral infection.
They aren't postulating any recent changes in behavior for schistosomiasis, or even any special selectivity for HIV (the compromised membranes would presumably have much the same risk for assorted other sexually transmitted diseases), it's just that those two are now coexisting over a large area that they had not historically, since HIV is comparatively new.
You, um, don't interact with the financial sector much, do you?
I suspect two main classes of reason (in addition to purely visceral distaste):
1. Prosthetics tend to exploit whatever remnant limb is available, from relatively primitive 'cup' type attachments that fit over a stump all the way to cutting edge nerve interface implants that allow conscious control of the prosthesis. These just aren't available for limbs that humans never have: even in the case of complete amputation, you still get to take advantage of the skeleton being set up for a load-bearing attachment in a given location, not so if a limb doesn't go there.
2. In practice, humans use 'prosthetic' aids all the time, they just don't imitate limbs all that closely and are often left at the work site. Just think of all the various clamps, vises, jigs, tripods, stands, etc, etc, etc, that act as 3rd through Nth hands during operations that require them. It tends to be far easier and cheaper to skip trying to replicate the (highly complex, but very versatile) structure of the hand and just knock together some relatively simple, task specific, tool, possibly a collection of them used for a sequence of assembly operations.
I would wager that most people that pay a significant amount of money towards these games aren't happy... just compulsive...
And they aren't even getting comped drinks... They should put down the smartphone and head to Vegas.
Second: studio headphones aren't designed to listen to _music_, they are designed for listening to _sound_. It may be a surprise to many so called "audiophiles" and other elitists that that isn't the same thing
"An audiophile is someone who listens to his stereo rather than his music."
The poor HP Touchpad actually had surprisingly good almost everything (except the plastic back, it creaked a bit).
It's sad that Palm died; but it's downright tragic that Android, rather than WebOS, is the de-facto alternative to iOS. WebOS is a howling wasteland devoid of apps, and the builds that actually run on much of anything are too old to use really safely; but (especially for tablet-size UIs) it was embarassingly superior to Android.
It would actually be rather interesting if Apple were after the brand: conventional wisdom is that Apple is downright godlike in terms of brand recognition (and positive recognition). There are the gamer-kiddies who (correctly for their demographic) see Apple as overpriced and focused on the wrong features, and Corporate/Institutional buyers want cheap boxes, support contracts, image stability, and other stuff Apple doesn't really give a damn about; but they consistently wipe the floor with other computer and consumer electronics brands, have a sky-high wife-acceptance-factor, and so on.
If we hypothesize that they want the 'beats' brand, who is it that they feel they aren't currently getting through to, and why not? Are those people simply apathetic, or are they actively identifying with a different brand?
One, admittedly limited, blip in the 'size matters' relationship is fully sealed in-ear "canalphone" type headphones. They tend not to be terribly comfortable; but they effectively create a sealed tube, and a small one, with your eardrum on one end, the speaker cone on the other, and a tiny amount of air with nowhere to go in between.
Under those circumstances, a fairly teeny driver can beat up on your eardrum quite convincingly indeed, a great deal more effectively than a driver of similar size running in free air or partially free air conditions could.
Look on the bright side! if Apple starts pushing 'Beats' headphones, odds are good that the number of assholes wandering around in public with their cellphone's shitty little speaker emitting a tinny (but surprisingly loud and penetrating) generic crunk rap noise, like some lilliputan boombox from hell, should be reduced by at least 30% as those same people decide that horrendously inferior headphones are now cooler than inflicting their taste on everyone in the vicinity!
Haven't you ever watched Frankenstein? Nothing good ever comes of mixing lighting and monsters...
In fairness to 'Beats Audio', and the good 'Dr.' Dre, the 'Beats' brand is so shamelessly pimped that it even makes it onto products that aren't capable of artificially inflated bass. HP put out a 7 inch tablet allegedly with the sonic goodness of Beats, and something that size wouldn't know what 'bass' is, much less produce any, unless its battery exploded.
Say what you want about Google but I'd always turn to them before the likes of AT&T, Verizon, etc. I just with Google would come to where I live.
Given that pretty much every telco and ISP of any size is a known collaborator in surveillance and is either working on, or actively engaged in, commercial exploitation of customer data (only with their trusted partner companies, of course...), and their speeds are low and their prices are high, it's pretty hard not to root for Google.
Sure, they aren't exactly warm and cuddly; but if you get a dystopian panopticon either way, it might as well at least be fast and reasonably priced.
I don't know whether or not this is actually happening (if not, no problem); but the one possible negative would be if genetic techniques are pulling people away from field work in favor of sequencing stuff and then number-crunching on it.
While the classical taxonomists are mere stamp collectors by the standards of phylogenetics, the field did have the virtue of getting people to slog to the godforsaken malarial back end of nowhere to look for new and exotic stuff. Given the rate at which the godforsaken malarial back end of nowhere is being burned down to produce either cows or palm oil, we don't exactly have unlimited time on that score.
If people are still out looking for neat stuff while it remains available, the fact that they are using superior methods to analyze it is an improvement. If the availability of more advanced DNA based techniques means that people are being diverted into re-analyzing more easily available samples it isn't bad science or anything; but it is spending time on something that will be available more or less indefinitely while other windows of opportunity are closing, sometimes fast.
The one point in our favor, would be that a species capable of bridging the vast distances between the stars would presumably have vast technology and sufficiently advanced materials engineering and biological manipulation techniques that they would pretty much just need various useful atoms and lots and lots of energy. Our planet isn't worthless, in terms of material; but it's a hell of a lot less interesting than the solar system's larger objects in terms of volume, and it has a much more annoying escape velocity than the zillion-odd asteroids and comets and various bits of junk floating around.
This hardly means that they wouldn't consume earth in due time, possibly without even remarking on the fact that some of the carbon based macromolecules on the surface seemed pretty agitated about it, nor does it exclude the possibility that they'd fuck us up in some creative way just for the lulz, or because their hobby is eating as many different sentient organisms as possible; but, unlike the 'technologically advanced human culture kicks the shit out of primitive one, takes their stuff' story of history, anything that is doing interstellar travel might be advanced to the point of near-total disinterest. Pop out of treknobabble-travel-space in the vicinity of the sun, do a bit of scanning, consume the gas giants to refuel their world-ships, then leave to go do whatever it is has them traveling all this way in the first place.
Or they might drop a small singularity into our gravity well, just to watch us freak out on a global scale, knowing that it's sitting somewhere near the planet's core, steadily consuming it from the inside and there is nothing we can do except await an increasingly nasty series of geological upheavals and our inevitable doom; but that would be purely for spite's sake.
I assume that this depraved recourse to 'the empiricism' will soil my hands in the minds of the mathematicians; but we can and have demonstrated the degradation of memories during the recall process. That area of research(while it has serious applications to memory disorders, trauma treatment, and basic research in neuroscience) is practically a party game of 'who can achieve the most ridiculously false 'memories' in experimental subjects the fastest?
They might as well have just used some Schneier Facts in place of the paper: "SHA-256 is a hash algorithm, and not reversible." "Bruce Schneier uses SHA-256 as a compression algorithm for Alice and Bob's shared secret." "Therefore Bruce Schneier is not computable, except by himself."
It would have taken about ten minutes to email anybody in the psych department and this all could have been avoided. Good Work!
Sorry, I didn't make that clear: given a constant attempt rate, the firearm supply will strongly affect the resulting suicide rate. Guns are very good at what they are designed to do, while many of the DIY methods that people try are just plain ineffective, slow enough to permit medical response, or otherwise defective.
A sufficiently large difference in attempt rate can (and in this case does) swamp the effects of greater success rates; but people with easy access to explicitly lethal instruments succeed more often. (And it doesn't have to be guns, rural agricultural areas may have easy access to nasty organophosphate pesticides, say, but the US has easy access to guns and comparatively childproofed consumer goods, so here it's probably guns.)
Easy access to guns is a factor in suicide rates (largely because suicide attempts made with guns typically work, while there are a lot of ineffective attempts by non-firearm users). In terms of attempt rate, though, I don't think that there's much correlation of any sort(unless you buy the theory that some of the stupider acts of violence, with extraordinarily high risks and minimal rewards, are basically suicide for violent people, the 'suicide by cop' and such).
Chicago is a slightly curious case: city-wide, it has been getting safer, more slowly than some would like; but steadily, for some years. However, some of the parts that were always pretty nasty have actually been getting worse, they just aren't large enough or worse enough to drag down the citywide average.
The nicer bits were never as rough as 'Chicago's image suggested, and they've been improving. The rougher areas, though, earned the nickname 'Chiraq' honestly and messily.
Oh, indeed not. And you can get contraceptive vaccines (albeit only for certain non-human pest and livestock mammals at present, humans aren't quite working yet). As it happens, though, concerned parties have had the vaccine lots sent off for analysis in places they trust, and some campaigns have even deliberately emphasized use of vaccines sourced from 'friendly' countries rather than the US or similar, and nobody has ever come across a sterilization/fertility reduction agent hidden in one of these vaccines.
There's certainly no reason to trust our boundless benevolence and ironclad human decency(indeed, if you couldn't get at least 15% of congress to fantasize about actually having a covert sterilization program, if they thought the mic was off, I'd be a bit surprised); but if we are up to something, we've managed to hide it amazingly well.
Oh, I was referring to the CIA agents who were so myopic and/or ethically disinhibited as to compromise the fight against a rather nasty disease just to score a DNA sample. That's far worse than common murder.
The locals who are directly attacking health workers also need to be punished, of course; assault and/or murder are criminal acts and they deserve to suffer for them; but they are largely a symptom, just peons doing the grunt work for a situation above their heads. The people who hatched a plan that essentially uses healthcare workers as human shields, possibly for years to come until the memory eventually dies down? That's just abhorrent any way you slice it, even without the 'aiding and abetting polio' angle.
When can we expect the hellfire driver to make its way in-tree?
The CIA 'vaccination campaign' was actually for hepatitis B; but the locals obviously aren't terribly interested in allocating distrust according to the specific vaccine type. There have been assorted 'zOMG Western campaign to sterilize our wimmenz!' outbreaks from time to time before that one came to light; but an actual CIA vaccine conspiracy certainly didn't hurt the credibility of anyone who accused vaccination of being a cover for some sinister western agenda...
I'd advocate the 'poetic justice' approach myself.
A nice relaxing life sentence inside an iron lung would give the responsible parties plenty of time to think over the fact that the CIA's most serious targets, much less its biggest successfully averted incidents, are total chickenshit compared to what public health people (along with contemporary sanitation infrastructure) work to keep at bay.