I get dozens of requests a week to submit papers to obviously fake journals or attend fake conferences. It is not hard to establish that they are, in fact, fake. If people submit to these places without doing any due diligence on where they are submitting, how can I trust their scientific results?
Scepticism is fundamental to science. This should also apply to where you choose to publish.
There must be a positive correlation between wealth and paranoia; here are the "richest" people in the world unable to distinguish between a largely make-believe techno-future, that contains both terrible disasters and miraculous benefits, and reality, and assuming that reality is going to hurt them badly.
But Viking technology was robust, wood, stone, cloth, earth. They could build shelters in the ground, survive days without food, and there were things they could eat. On mars, everything is going to be fragile:
a tiny hole in insulation means no air, you're dead in minutes a tiny fire that destroys a computer or air purifying system controller, you're dead in minutes a door/hatch jams open, dead in.... well you get the idea.
And everything will be monitored and controlled by software, and we know how robust that is. This will require redundancy on a scale never before used even in space. On satellites, where I used to work, redundancy was there to save you 50 million dollars, but here it would have to save you hundreds or thousands of lives. And the first people there will die early. There will be accidents. There may be murders. Even if they all live they will grow old. Is there going to be a care home on mars? Or do you just let them die when they cannot work any longer but consume resources? Or do you hope they've built a return ship by then?
"AT LEAST Dr Markram failed to manage the project in a way that allayed these fears and objections. I suspect that earlier publication of substantial results from his own project would have helped, but I could be wrong, maybe there was no avoiding this crisis, it was just purely a product of politics and ego."
I agree, but there were external pressures that meant that it was not easy to direct the project in a way that would prevent what happened. Some decisions were forced. And now that it has happened, people's views have got fixed and resetting the project's position in the minds of the neuroscience community is probably impossible. It has to evolve into a different kind of project. But at least now there are some results out there that people can test. There will be more software tools released over the next few years which will allow people to do their own computer "experiments". If they are useful to the wider community then maybe this will all die down and interesting work be done in the HBP. Here's hoping...
Thanks for your comments. I think maybe a lot of the management problems arose because the FET flagships were a new funding mechanism, and the EC may not have had clear ideas how they should be managed. Management problems have certainly loomed large in the HBP, but I think they have still been blown out of proportion. I wonder if the FET mechanism is only a beta version, and next time the EC will devise the release version. After all, the EC has many goals that are not only scientific, and 0.5 billion is not in european terms a huge amount (think Greece bailout funds). From the EC point of view, if side products of the HBP research led to a 1% increase in european employment and proved that brain simulations were not possible, the EC would be delighted.
"The objections were so serious, so widespread, and involved such highly successful and influential academics"
It is not clear to me that this is true. Some highly influential people have blown up a story that has flown in the press, but that does not mean the objections are serious. The press, including the scientific press, love a good battle, and being negative about something that costs a lot of money (waste!) is more saleable than describing the truth about a complex story. And even if some influential academics don't like the project, that is not evidence that they are right and the project is wrong. The HBP also has a lot of influential scientists on board, whose arguments do not get so much coverage.
" If something is known to be impossible or its value can't be established then maybe it isn't a suitable target for such large-scale research ". Clearly, if it is "known" to be impossible, there is no point doing it. But in the HBP case, a certain subset of neuroscientists think a cellular level simulation of the mammalian brain is either impossible or not worth doing. This is not the same as it being impossible, Maybe the HBP would demonstrate its possibility or impossibility. Its a judgement call whether that knowledge is worth 0.5 Billion euros ( not 1 billion as all the press report, as graphene gets the other half, and the partners in the project have to stump up the matching funds).
By comparison, when the Apollo missions started, rockets failed and people died, and it was not known that it was possible to survive a journey to the moon and back. But people building trains did not get to interfere in the development of rockets.
Finally, about publications: there are more papers that have been published now than just the Cell one. Maybe, earlier publication would have been better, but I doubt that it would have changed the minds of those scientists who object to the principle of a brain simulation. And this is, for me, the big point. Some arguments against the HBP are of the form "its badly managed, too concentrated in a few hands, not obviously worth the money" - these are reasonable arguments, and the mediation committee have addressed them and the HBP is taking them on board. But the other arguments, especially those expressed in the open letter, and Nature commentaries, are just invective and not subject to rational argument. Go and read some of the comments on the letter. These comment authors are not interested in the finer details of the argument, they just hate the idea of a brain simulation, or they hate Markram, or they hate the money going to someone else. And this, for me, is the depressing aspect for a community that is supposed to be made up of rational scientists.
1) " the whole rest of the neuroscience community pretty much rose up in rebellion."
156 people signed an open letter that was started by a tiny number of neuroscientists who disagreed with the HBP premises; fair enough. Disagreeing is good. But this is hardly " the whole rest of neuroscience". There are, I believe, more than 80 universities and research institutes in the HBP, and several hundred people work on it. So, several hundred people disagreed with several hundred other people.
After the letter was published, a lot more people signed it (800 or so) but not all of them are scientists as you can see here (http://www.neurofuture.eu). If you read some of these comments they are illuminating as to motives. I quote:
"As a clinical neuroscientist I am convinced that the human brain project does not succeed. The ressources should be used for more promising research in clinical neuroscience"
2) "HBP was pretty much entirely whatever Markram wanted it to be" "And one of the big issues is that Markram was just pushing his research agenda,."
If by "pushing his agenda" you mean writing a grant application that says " I am going to do X" and then getting the money and then doing "X", what's wrong with this? It's how science gets funded. The HBP won the contest (actually, half the context, the graphene flagship won the other half), so they get to spend the money in the way that they said they would.
3) " if we could execute his vision, but its simply not clear that it CAN be executed."
That's why it's called research. Some smart people think it can be done, other smart people don't. It takes a while to publish a paper based on 10 years work with dozens of collaborators. Now that the work is in Cell, let's see what people can make of it.
4) "he'd never formally published anything on the last 10 years of research with IBM! " "This publication is the VERY FIRST one that can be evaluated on its merits" " this publication is just a very interesting footnote to the greater story."
So, first you castigate Markram for not publishing anything, and then when he does, it's just a footnote.
In a project of this size, there are bound to be teething problems and probably mistakes. They can be corrected. What surprises me is the level of animosity, ad hominem arguments and plain spite against a project that won an open contest to pursue a well-publicised research goal. Why people who don't share that goal, and are not in the project, should dictate the terms of the project seems to defeat the point of giving the grant.
Perhaps not. They mutate quickly. Selection pressure will ensure that if you only kill 99% the other 1% will find a way to mutate around the mechanism that is supposed to kill them. Then you need a new mechanism to kill the mutated ones, and if 1% of them survive.....
You can't predict which mutationswill occur, so you can't guarantee that you can completely eliminate an organism once it is released/escapes into the wild. Even if you put "self-destruct" genes into it so that you can turn them on to cause it to kill itself, those genes may be suppressed in later generations. I would expect them to be so, as apoptosis is very tightly regulated in cells and there is no selection pressure to keep around some genese whose only function is to kill you. But there will be strong pressure to eliminate such genes.
It's not really "evidence produced by an unknown method" (the company that makes the kit knows it) just one that is not revealed to the defendant.
But this is stupid: does fraud over a telephone line become acquit-able because the defendant doesn't know how a (software-controlled) telephone exchange works and the telco wants to keep its code secret?
Why does the defendant have a right to know how equipment used to obtain evidence works? As long as there exists an independent process that has evaluated the equipment's operation, and found it to be valid and not biassed in favour of false positives, say, this should be enough. I assume that states do actually check the equipment used for breath tests (do they?)
If this position is taken to an extreme, any proprietary information that a company is reluctant to reveal in a court case could be cited as a reason for acquital.
I object! BAE Systems was a fine division when I worked for them (no causal implication intended there). We wrote satellite simulators AND they worked AND they came in on time and within budget. In F77. More than once, too. Happy days.
Oh, perhaps I should mention that this was in 1989. The following year they sacked most of my team, and a few years after that the remainder were bought by Marconi. They never looked up again.
After reading this story, I thought I would look at my T-mobile account in the UK. I have never been there before, so I tried www.t-mobile.com and got the US site, then found www.t-mobile.co.uk and it gave an error message when I tried to open the page:
Oops! There's a problem
We can't find the file or script you requested. This could be a temporary hitch, or maybe you put in the wrong address. Please check your bookmark links just in case.
Then a popup appeared asking for my login password??????? This is on my mac.
Needless to say, I didn't enter it. Anyone else have a UK T-online account and seen the above error?
They work because they aren't *states*. You're hung up on the notion that communist organizations must be nations; I'm not. If you want to restrict it to nations, then yes, there are no examples you can point to. See? I've acknowledged your point, now kindly acknowledge that communism does work under certain circumstances (limited reach, limited goals)
I agree with you here that Kibbutzim (as far as I have heard, as I have never lived in one) may practise some of the principles that are often called "communist". But this is much like my giving my children some money so they can play with the vegetables in the kitchen and buy and sell them to each other and calling it capitalism. Yes, the rules of how they buy and sell may look like capitalism, but the difference in scale is HUGE. How many people live in a kibbutz? 1000, 10,000? I doubt if 10,000 do. Of course, such a small group can exist and propagate itself, as long as the host country protects it. The only attempts to make this work on a national scale have FAILED. Everywhere. There is NO relation between the management of a kibbutz of 10,000 people and the running of a COUNTRY.
I think we ought to take the founders' of communism seriously when they define what they were trying to establish. The inevitable progress of history and class struggle is what communism is defined as. Not sharing things with 10,000 people while living in a capitalist country. This is not "being hung up" it means taking people seriously when they say what they are trying to do. And Marx SAYS that it is communist COUNTRIES that he is talking about. He would probably have been disgusted with the idea of "communist" communities co-existing within a capitalist country. He probably didn't think it was possible.
See, it's your parenthetical remarks that make it not "real". A communist country doesn't force population transfer; a totalitarian one masquerading as communist does.
No. In the Manifesto it states clearly that population transfer WILL occur. This has nothing to do with totalitarianism, and everything to do with Marx's ideal state. You cannot pick and choose which bits of the definition you like and call them "communist", then take the bits you don't like and call them "totalitarian"
Further, a democratic country has elections. Does that mean that, because the USSR had elections, it was a democratic country?
Er no, but not for the reason you give: a dog has a tail but does that mean all creatures with a tail are dogs?
The USSR was built along strongly authoritarian, totalitarian lines. Just because they took on trappings of communism doesn't make them any less totalitarian
This is the wrong way around: the 1917 revolution established COMMUNISM in the USSR. Initially, Trotsky, Lenin, Stalin et al all worked together. The totalitarianism came later with Stalin in the late 20's after he had killed or exiled all the original members of the politburo except himself. It is an interesting (hyperthetical) question whether communism would have been established in the USSR if, say, Trotsky had taken over instead of Stalin. I don't know, I am not an historian. But what made Stalin able to do what he wanted was the political structure of communism: the party controls everything. But who controls the party? Answer. The strongest, and most brutal person, namely Stalin. So, they did not "take on the trappings" of communism, the communist power structure was manipulated into being totalitarian because IT WAS EASY TO DO! There were no checks.
You are pretty obviously not familiar with kibbutzim. We may differ on our analysis of the USSR as a communist nation, but kibbutzim are very definitely communist in structure, as defined by the Manifesto.
True, I am not familiar with them. I have no quibble about how kibbutz-es (plural?) function, and they may even share things and have goods in common, but how can you say they satisfy the conditions in the Manifesto? The whole document is only defined in relation to whole COUNTR
>Real life implementations of communism that *work* and were >not based on party control exist - kibbutzim in Israel, >communes in the US and elsewhere. They aren't based on a >Party structure at all.
They "work" because they are tiny and powerless and are protected by the power of the state within which they exist. They also don't satisfy the conditions for being called "communist" in the sense described by Mark and Engels, ie "Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things."
>The totalitarian government you had in Eastern Europe was not >really communism, it just went by the name.
Oh, really? As far as I know, the USSR implemented the following:
1 Abolition of property in land (collectivisation) 2 Abolition of right of inheritance (at least houses, land and large amounts of money) 3 Confiscation of the property of rebels and emigrants (and I think rebel in reality just means anyone who upsets the party bosses) 5 Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly 6 Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State 7 Extension of factories annd instruments of production owned by the State; bringing in to production of wasteland and the improvement of the soil (I think they got a bit lost on the last one there, especially around Chernobyl) 8 Equal liability of all to labour 9 Combination of agriculture with manufactoringindustries..... a more equitable distribution of the population over the country (they just didn't ask the "people" if they wanted to be moved across several time zones) 10 Free education for all children in public schools (unless your parents upset the party bosses in which case, no education, at least at university level)
Now THAT is communism, according to its Manifest from 1848. And it looks pretty much like what I hear life in the USSR was like. It also does NOT look like any kibbutz I have heard about.
>Drawing conclusions about the validity of real communist >principles from the USSR is like drawing conclusions about the >lifespan of a human by studying how long penguins live.
I am not sure what you think are "real communist principles" if not the ones that Marx et al described and were implemented in the USSR, China etc. "Let's all share everything and be nice to each other" does NOT appear in the communist literature I have read.
So, an electron is 'both' a wave and a particle until you measure it when it appears to be either a wave or a particle, I think they say that the wave 'collapsed'
Sorry, this is also wrong. An electron is NOT both a particle and a wave. Those are both concepts that have well-defined properties on a MACROscopic length scale. We are not justified in using such concepts at MICROscopic scales unless experiments show them to be valid. All experiments involving QM show exactly the opposite: the idea of a "particle" with all the particle attributes (mass, size, can only be in one place at a time, cannot move from one position to another without passing through all intermediate positions, etc, etc) and the idea of a wave DO NOT apply to elementary particles. At best they approximate the behaviour of said particles under certain conditions.
An electron (and all other elem. parts) are NEITHER particles nor waves, they are themselves with their own peculiar propeties, which can be calculated using QM to almost arbitrary precision. What you can't do is attribute to them properties that only have meaning at a macroscopic length scale.
Semantics...
This is only semantics if you think the distinction between saying things precisely and correctly and making misleading and false statements is semantics.
'You don't "cause" an effect by making a measurement' 'the distant particle appears to "know"'
again Semantics, as no one knows how is does this you can not say that a signal does not pass via a collapsed dimension, when the particles become entangled because of the 'measurement' the dimension collapses, I'm sure someones thrown that around before and probably been slated but it still shows that you are stating a certainty where there is none, I however am stating that if you do not need God for any of these effects what the hell do you need God for? nothing!!
The connection between two particles in an EPR experiment contradicts local realistic theories. All of modern physics is based on local realistic theories, except QM. And even QM does not provide a good model for what happens in action-at-a-distance cases such as EPR. Hence, while the experiments show WHAT happens, there is no accepted model for HOW it happens yet.
So, until a model for how the signal can be transmitted is given to me, I will apply Occam's razor and say I don't accept that there is a signal. Your reasoning would allow one to say that because we don't know how something works, angels must pass the signal between the particles. Just substitute "angel" for "collapsed dimension"
No, I wasn't using science to support the fact that there is no good and evil, that should be obvious, I am using science to support that fact they there is no God, or at least no requirement for a God so if there is a God he's in your head. (like a mad man thinking he's Jesus) quote:
People sure as hell don't have a soul, or at least you can explain everything about a human without needing a soul, just like a stone doesn't have a soul.
There's no such thing as 'good' and 'evil'
you asserted it here.
You're misusing science to support your assertions, I am just pointing out the mistakes.
You sentence would then be 'Huh? No it doesn't. It shows that if you let an electon pass undetected through two slits >> you get an interference pattern.
It is not the case that an electron "is" a particle or "is" a wave, it exhibits both types of behaviour depending on the experimental conditions.
The distance between the dark and light lines on the screen is related to the separation of the slits, but has nothing to do with the "size" of the particle. It is related to the wavelength of the of particle but that take almost any value by changing the energy of the partical, wavelength = h/sqrt(2mE) where h is planck's constant and m is the mass of the particle and E its energy.'
SFAIK the wavelength of a partical is essencially related the probablity that a partical will be at one point or another when measured.
I think you mean the wave-function not the wave-length here.
When two particals become entangled, by modifying one you can cause an effect instantly in the other, even though they may be some distance appart and nothing can be detected passing between them.
Not really. You don't "cause" an effect by making a measurement on one of the particles as "causing" something would require a signal to pass from one to the other and that does not appear to happen. What can be said is that the distant particle appears to "know" what measurement you make and adjusts its own state accordingly. No one knows how it does this.
What these examples show is that the world is more complicated than we thought, and that our classical-mechanistic (enlightenment?) perspective is inadequate to explain all the observed phenomena. ie it's an incomplete world view. You should be more modest before making assertions like "there is no good and evil" and trying to use science to support this position.
I was trying to explain quantum entanglement to my girlfriend the other day. I think it's a great one to get at the mono-god people.
first give them a brief explanation and say the it proves God doesn't exist.
They'll either have a fit, or say something to the effect of 'no that is god'
Your original statement asserts that there is something in QM that can somehow be used to "get at" monotheists. I don't think there is. There are entities in sciences whose properties are completely counter-intuitive, yet scientists accept them and interact with them in experiments. It takes a lot of experience to be able to do so, and lots of study, and the theories are not obvious or free from apparent contradictions. Similar steps are involved, I think, in believing in God: being open to new ideas, willing to live with apparent contradictions, accepting that one will never know everything but still persisting in the path. I realise that many monotheists do not do this, but that is not important here. Some scientists fake their data, that does not invalidate the scientific method.
nd what exactly does this God do that requires existance, or to put it another way how would things be different if... and lets take a deep breath.... God doesn't exist.
This is a different question: let's first deal with what science says as you brought it up.
Are leptons descrite or probable,
this is meaningless.
Einstein or Plank. Einstine beleved in God too, he just couldn't handle probablity.
i don't think Einstein believed in a "God" that would be recognisable to most monotheists.
someone should have done the single photon interfearance experement with him (ref de Broglie) Basicly...
2 slits in a piece of card....
When photons/electrons[leptons] pass through the slits they will produce an interfearance pattern on the other side.
Now, do the same with one photon/election and you still get interfearance.
but if you try to measure which slit the photon/election went though it behaves like a partical and point like and only arrives at one of the slits.
I think this is quite an old experement, but it show a lepton behaving like a non-point.
Huh? No it doesn't. It shows that if you let electons pass undetected through two slits you get an interference pattern. The distance between the dark and light lines on the screen is related to the separation of the slits, but has nothing to do with the "size" of the particles. It is related to the wavelength of the beam of particles but that take almost any value by changing the energy of the beam, wavelength = h/sqrt(2mE) where h is planck's constant and m is the mass of the particle and E its energy.
p.s. You light examples quite good, did you know that people used to beleave that you could see because something came out of you eyes and reflected back, the thing is how did they explain night time?
Yes, I knew this.
People also once beleived that the earth was flat.
Irrelevent. Your original assertion was about QM and belief in God.
As a physicist, I acccept the existence of entities that have no size, but they do have mass, also have no angular velocity but do have angular momentum (e-), also that two particles that were once in contact can be separated by an arbitrarily large distance and still "know" what happens to the other one (EPR), that I'll never know what time it is on the sun when it is 4 pm here on earth, and that if I place two prisms in between me and a light source in the order A B, I see no light, but if I do it in the order B A light gets through (polarised light and two plain polarisors)
I don't find believing in God that difficult actually.
PS Don't tell me about the electromagnetic radius of the electron, it's only an effective size: leptons are point-like to all current experiments.
I read (almost) all of the comments and no one seemed to point out that if you publish an idea first, it cannot subsequently be patented. In science you publish a paper in a journal; in computing an open source project (with verifiable date stamps) would prevent the ideas being patented.
Granted, an awful lot of stuff is already patented, but if we are entering a new age of IP, we should get as much of it out into the public domain as soon as possible. Gabfests? Organise them online: online discussions are archived (with dates?) we could stop companies like this from grabbing patents if enough people contribute.
Gives me an idea for anew blog: everyone just submits their own ideas, they get recorded, and filed and eventually we have a huge repository of unpatentable ideas.
Last night at a party, drunk enough to make the discussion interesting, some folks objected to the extrapolation of the increasing rate of expansion of scientific knowledge. What guarantee is there, after all, to find all the secrets in that time? I would say first that the rate of growth in the number of researchers alone could do it. Also, increases in productivity, have always been accompanied with "this pace can't continue" claims, which have always been wrong.
Frustly, scientific breakthroughs of the magnitude discussed in this interview don't scale with the number of researchers in the world: otherwise we would have had many more Einsteins in the last 50 years of the 20th century than in the first.
Secondly, I don't think the usual concept of productivity works in research either. Getting more output per unit of input translates into a sicentist publising more papers per year that before. But this does not mean they discovered more breakthroughs, typically it just means they publish smaller papers and divide their results among them.
My guess is that their objection is not ideological, just that they don't want a lot of priviate citizens/companies making lots of money in ways that are difficult for the government to control and rake off a percentage.
Although as two principles of communism are that the State owns the means of production and there is no private property, one could imagine they oppose it just because it isn't being produced by the state and ends up being "owned" or distributed to any number of people without the government knowing.
But it reads very much like a design pattern (Strategy?) and they have been around since the 70's. Was this really new in 1993?
United States Patent 5,421,012
Khoyi , et al. * May 30, 1995
Multitasking computer system for integrating the operation of different application programs which manipulate data objects of different types
Abstract
An object based data processing system including an extensible set of object types and a corresponding set of "object managers" wherein each object manager is a program for operating with the data stored in a corresponding type of object. The object managers in general support at least a standard set of operations. Any program can effect performance of these standard operations on objects of any type by making an "invocation" request. In response to an invocation request, object management services (which are available to all object managers) identifies and invokes an object manager that is suitable for performing the requested operation on the specified type of data. A mechanism is provided for linking data from one object into another object. A object catalog includes both information about objects and about links between objects. Data interchange services are provided for communicating data between objects of different types, using a set of standard data interchange formats. A matchmaker facility permits two processes that are to cooperate in a data interchange operation identify each other and to identify data formats they have in common. A facility is provided for managing shared data "resources". Customized versions of resources can be created and co-exist with standard resources. A resource retrieval function determines whether a customized or a standard resource is to be returned in response to each request for a resource.
Inventors: Khoyi; Dana (Dracut, MA); Soucie; Marc S. (Tyngsboro, MA); Surppenant; Carolyn E. (Dracut, MA); Stern; Laura O. (Woburn, MA); Pham; Ly-Huong T. (Chelmsford, MA)
Assignee: Wang Laboratories, Inc. (Lowell, MA)
[*] Notice: The portion of the term of this patent subsequent to April 27, 2010 has been disclaimed.
There are two kinds of hot fusion I know of (it has been a while since I worked in the field, actually 1985, so things may have changed)
a) intertial confinement fusion in which small glass spheres containing heavy hydrogen are fired at each other to make the tritium fuse
b) plasma fusion in which a very hot plasma is confined by magnetic fields in a torus shape and heated so that nuclei fuse
the problem with the first method is that the stuff the small spheres are made of becomes highly radioactive and has to be removed continually; the problem with the second method is that hot plasmas don't like being confined in doughnut shapes and constantly try and escape, requiring very complicated, and fast, changes in magnetic field to keep them in the right shape. usually this cannot be maintained long enough to generate excess energy.
New information management tools to improve productivity, including fast desktop search and new, intuitive ways to organize files
- you can rapidly print them out and file them on your shelves
Major security advances that build on Windows XP SP2, such as new technologies to make clients more resilient to attack, viruses and malware
- it automatically disconnects from the internet every ten minutes to "prevent" others gaining access to your box
Flexible and powerful tools to reduce deployment costs for enterprise customers, including technologies for image creation, editing and installation; and much simpler upgrades for consumers
- comes with a free throw-away camera and photo album
Significant improvements in reliability, including a robust diagnostic infrastructure to detect, analyze and fix problems quickly, and new backup tools to keep data safe
- runs on linux, but as its proprietary code, sshhhh, no one will know
A platform that creates Developer excitement with the availability of rich APIs [application programming interfaces]
- they're finally including Java without all the MS mods
Slashdot Mirror
I get dozens of requests a week to submit papers to obviously fake journals or attend fake conferences. It is not hard to establish that they are, in fact, fake. If people submit to these places without doing any due diligence on where they are submitting, how can I trust their scientific results?
Scepticism is fundamental to science. This should also apply to where you choose to publish.
There must be a positive correlation between wealth and paranoia; here are the "richest" people in the world unable to distinguish between a largely make-believe techno-future, that contains both terrible disasters and miraculous benefits, and reality, and assuming that reality is going to hurt them badly.
I don't envy them.
There's something quite beautiful about this solution... let's call it Punk-Chain...
If it's applied, it's not philosophy
And when I come home drunk from a party?
ME: Alllixxxxooaa, lemme in!
Alexa: Voice unrecognised.
ME: Allexxx oh, sod it where's the hammer.
But Viking technology was robust, wood, stone, cloth, earth. They could build shelters in the ground, survive days without food, and there were things they could eat. On mars, everything is going to be fragile:
a tiny hole in insulation means no air, you're dead in minutes
a tiny fire that destroys a computer or air purifying system controller, you're dead in minutes
a door/hatch jams open, dead in.... well you get the idea.
And everything will be monitored and controlled by software, and we know how robust that is. This will require redundancy on a scale never before used even in space. On satellites, where I used to work, redundancy was there to save you 50 million dollars, but here it would have to save you hundreds or thousands of lives.
And the first people there will die early. There will be accidents. There may be murders. Even if they all live they will grow old. Is there going to be a care home on mars? Or do you just let them die when they cannot work any longer but consume resources? Or do you hope they've built a return ship by then?
"AT LEAST Dr Markram failed to manage the project in a way that allayed these fears and objections. I suspect that earlier publication of substantial results from his own project would have helped, but I could be wrong, maybe there was no avoiding this crisis, it was just purely a product of politics and ego."
I agree, but there were external pressures that meant that it was not easy to direct the project in a way that would prevent what happened. Some decisions were forced. And now that it has happened, people's views have got fixed and resetting the project's position in the minds of the neuroscience community is probably impossible. It has to evolve into a different kind of project. But at least now there are some results out there that people can test. There will be more software tools released over the next few years which will allow people to do their own computer "experiments". If they are useful to the wider community then maybe this will all die down and interesting work be done in the HBP. Here's hoping...
Thanks for your comments. I think maybe a lot of the management problems arose because the FET flagships were a new funding mechanism, and the EC may not have had clear ideas how they should be managed. Management problems have certainly loomed large in the HBP, but I think they have still been blown out of proportion. I wonder if the FET mechanism is only a beta version, and next time the EC will devise the release version. After all, the EC has many goals that are not only scientific, and 0.5 billion is not in european terms a huge amount (think Greece bailout funds). From the EC point of view, if side products of the HBP research led to a 1% increase in european employment and proved that brain simulations were not possible, the EC would be delighted.
"The objections were so serious, so widespread, and involved such highly successful and influential academics"
It is not clear to me that this is true. Some highly influential people have blown up a story that has flown in the press, but that does not mean the objections are serious. The press, including the scientific press, love a good battle, and being negative about something that costs a lot of money (waste!) is more saleable than describing the truth about a complex story. And even if some influential academics don't like the project, that is not evidence that they are right and the project is wrong. The HBP also has a lot of influential scientists on board, whose arguments do not get so much coverage.
" If something is known to be impossible or its value can't be established then maybe it isn't a suitable target for such large-scale research ". Clearly, if it is "known" to be impossible, there is no point doing it. But in the HBP case, a certain subset of neuroscientists think a cellular level simulation of the mammalian brain is either impossible or not worth doing. This is not the same as it being impossible, Maybe the HBP would demonstrate its possibility or impossibility. Its a judgement call whether that knowledge is worth 0.5 Billion euros ( not 1 billion as all the press report, as graphene gets the other half, and the partners in the project have to stump up the matching funds).
By comparison, when the Apollo missions started, rockets failed and people died, and it was not known that it was possible to survive a journey to the moon and back. But people building trains did not get to interfere in the development of rockets.
Finally, about publications: there are more papers that have been published now than just the Cell one. Maybe, earlier publication would have been better, but I doubt that it would have changed the minds of those scientists who object to the principle of a brain simulation. And this is, for me, the big point. Some arguments against the HBP are of the form "its badly managed, too concentrated in a few hands, not obviously worth the money" - these are reasonable arguments, and the mediation committee have addressed them and the HBP is taking them on board. But the other arguments, especially those expressed in the open letter, and Nature commentaries, are just invective and not subject to rational argument. Go and read some of the comments on the letter. These comment authors are not interested in the finer details of the argument, they just hate the idea of a brain simulation, or they hate Markram, or they hate the money going to someone else. And this, for me, is the depressing aspect for a community that is supposed to be made up of rational scientists.
Let's examine a few points:
1) " the whole rest of the neuroscience community pretty much rose up in rebellion."
156 people signed an open letter that was started by a tiny number of neuroscientists who disagreed with the HBP premises; fair enough. Disagreeing is good. But this is hardly " the whole rest of neuroscience". There are, I believe, more than 80 universities and research institutes in the HBP, and several hundred people work on it. So, several hundred people disagreed with several hundred other people.
After the letter was published, a lot more people signed it (800 or so) but not all of them are scientists as you can see here (http://www.neurofuture.eu). If you read some of these comments they are illuminating as to motives. I quote:
"As a clinical neuroscientist I am convinced that the human brain project does not succeed. The ressources should be used for more promising research in clinical neuroscience"
2) "HBP was pretty much entirely whatever Markram wanted it to be" "And one of the big issues is that Markram was just pushing his research agenda, ."
If by "pushing his agenda" you mean writing a grant application that says " I am going to do X" and then getting the money and then doing "X", what's wrong with this? It's how science gets funded. The HBP won the contest (actually, half the context, the graphene flagship won the other half), so they get to spend the money in the way that they said they would.
3) " if we could execute his vision, but its simply not clear that it CAN be executed."
That's why it's called research. Some smart people think it can be done, other smart people don't. It takes a while to publish a paper based on 10 years work with dozens of collaborators. Now that the work is in Cell, let's see what people can make of it.
4) "he'd never formally published anything on the last 10 years of research with IBM! "
"This publication is the VERY FIRST one that can be evaluated on its merits"
" this publication is just a very interesting footnote to the greater story."
So, first you castigate Markram for not publishing anything, and then when he does, it's just a footnote.
In a project of this size, there are bound to be teething problems and probably mistakes. They can be corrected. What surprises me is the level of animosity, ad hominem arguments and plain spite against a project that won an open contest to pursue a well-publicised research goal. Why people who don't share that goal, and are not in the project, should dictate the terms of the project seems to defeat the point of giving the grant.
Full disclosure: I work on the HBP.
Perhaps not. They mutate quickly. Selection pressure will ensure that if you only kill 99% the other 1% will find a way to mutate around the mechanism that is supposed to kill them. Then you need a new mechanism to kill the mutated ones, and if 1% of them survive.....
You can't predict which mutationswill occur, so you can't guarantee that you can completely eliminate an organism once it is released/escapes into the wild. Even if you put "self-destruct" genes into it so that you can turn them on to cause it to kill itself, those genes may be suppressed in later generations. I would expect them to be so, as apoptosis is very tightly regulated in cells and there is no selection pressure to keep around some genese whose only function is to kill you. But there will be strong pressure to eliminate such genes.
It's not really "evidence produced by an unknown method" (the company that makes the kit knows it) just one that is not revealed to the defendant.
But this is stupid: does fraud over a telephone line become acquit-able because the defendant doesn't know how a (software-controlled) telephone exchange works and the telco wants to keep its code secret?
Why does the defendant have a right to know how equipment used to obtain evidence works? As long as there exists an independent process that has evaluated the equipment's operation, and found it to be valid and not biassed in favour of false positives, say, this should be enough. I assume that states do actually check the equipment used for breath tests (do they?)
If this position is taken to an extreme, any proprietary information that a company is reluctant to reveal in a court case could be cited as a reason for acquital.
I object! BAE Systems was a fine division when I worked for them (no causal implication intended there). We wrote satellite simulators AND they worked AND they came in on time and within budget. In F77. More than once, too. Happy days.
Oh, perhaps I should mention that this was in 1989. The following year they sacked most of my team, and a few years after that the remainder were bought by Marconi. They never looked up again.
After reading this story, I thought I would look at my T-mobile account in the UK. I have never been there before, so I tried www.t-mobile.com and got the US site, then found www.t-mobile.co.uk and it gave an error message when I tried to open the page:
Oops! There's a problem
We can't find the file or script you requested. This could be a temporary hitch, or maybe you put in the wrong address. Please check your bookmark links just in case.
Then a popup appeared asking for my login password??????? This is on my mac.
Needless to say, I didn't enter it. Anyone else have a UK T-online account and seen the above error?
They work because they aren't *states*. You're hung up on the notion that communist organizations must be nations; I'm not. If you want to restrict it to nations, then yes, there are no examples you can point to. See? I've acknowledged your point, now kindly acknowledge that communism does work under certain circumstances (limited reach, limited goals)
I agree with you here that Kibbutzim (as far as I have heard, as I have never lived in one) may practise some of the principles that are often called "communist". But this is much like my giving my children some money so they can play with the vegetables in the kitchen and buy and sell them to each other and calling it capitalism. Yes, the rules of how they buy and sell may look like capitalism, but the difference in scale is HUGE. How many people live in a kibbutz? 1000, 10,000? I doubt if 10,000 do. Of course, such a small group can exist and propagate itself, as long as the host country protects it. The only attempts to make this work on a national scale have FAILED. Everywhere. There is NO relation between the management of a kibbutz of 10,000 people and the running of a COUNTRY.
I think we ought to take the founders' of communism seriously when they define what they were trying to establish. The inevitable progress of history and class struggle is what communism is defined as. Not sharing things with 10,000 people while living in a capitalist country. This is not "being hung up" it means taking people seriously when they say what they are trying to do. And Marx SAYS that it is communist COUNTRIES that he is talking about. He would probably have been disgusted with the idea of "communist" communities co-existing within a capitalist country. He probably didn't think it was possible.
See, it's your parenthetical remarks that make it not "real". A communist country doesn't force population transfer; a totalitarian one masquerading as communist does.
No. In the Manifesto it states clearly that population transfer WILL occur. This has nothing to do with totalitarianism, and everything to do with Marx's ideal state. You cannot pick and choose which bits of the definition you like and call them "communist", then take the bits you don't like and call them "totalitarian"
Further, a democratic country has elections. Does that mean that, because the USSR had elections, it was a democratic country?
Er no, but not for the reason you give: a dog has a tail but does that mean all creatures with a tail are dogs?
The USSR was built along strongly authoritarian, totalitarian lines. Just because they took on trappings of communism doesn't make them any less totalitarian
This is the wrong way around: the 1917 revolution established COMMUNISM in the USSR. Initially, Trotsky, Lenin, Stalin et al all worked together. The totalitarianism came later with Stalin in the late 20's after he had killed or exiled all the original members of the politburo except himself. It is an interesting (hyperthetical) question whether communism would have been established in the USSR if, say, Trotsky had taken over instead of Stalin. I don't know, I am not an historian. But what made Stalin able to do what he wanted was the political structure of communism: the party controls everything. But who controls the party? Answer. The strongest, and most brutal person, namely Stalin. So, they did not "take on the trappings" of communism, the communist power structure was manipulated into being totalitarian because IT WAS EASY TO DO! There were no checks.
You are pretty obviously not familiar with kibbutzim. We may differ on our analysis of the USSR as a communist nation, but kibbutzim are very definitely communist in structure, as defined by the Manifesto.
True, I am not familiar with them. I have no quibble about how kibbutz-es (plural?) function, and they may even share things and have goods in common, but how can you say they satisfy the conditions in the Manifesto? The whole document is only defined in relation to whole COUNTR
>Real life implementations of communism that *work* and were >not based on party control exist - kibbutzim in Israel, >communes in the US and elsewhere. They aren't based on a >Party structure at all.
They "work" because they are tiny and powerless and are protected by the power of the state within which they exist. They also don't satisfy the conditions for being called "communist" in the sense described by Mark and Engels, ie "Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things."
>The totalitarian government you had in Eastern Europe was not >really communism, it just went by the name.
Oh, really? As far as I know, the USSR implemented the following:
1 Abolition of property in land (collectivisation)
2 Abolition of right of inheritance (at least houses, land and large amounts of money)
3 Confiscation of the property of rebels and emigrants (and I think rebel in reality just means anyone who upsets the party bosses)
5 Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly
6 Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State
7 Extension of factories annd instruments of production owned by the State; bringing in to production of wasteland and the improvement of the soil (I think they got a bit lost on the last one there, especially around Chernobyl)
8 Equal liability of all to labour
9 Combination of agriculture with manufactoringindustries..... a more equitable distribution of the population over the country (they just didn't ask the "people" if they wanted to be moved across several time zones)
10 Free education for all children in public schools (unless your parents upset the party bosses in which case, no education, at least at university level)
Now THAT is communism, according to its Manifest from 1848. And it looks pretty much like what I hear life in the USSR was like. It also does NOT look like any kibbutz I have heard about.
>Drawing conclusions about the validity of real communist >principles from the USSR is like drawing conclusions about the >lifespan of a human by studying how long penguins live.
I am not sure what you think are "real communist principles" if not the ones that Marx et al described and were implemented in the USSR, China etc. "Let's all share everything and be nice to each other" does NOT appear in the communist literature I have read.
So, an electron is 'both' a wave and a particle until you measure it when it appears to be either a wave or a particle, I think they say that the wave 'collapsed'
Sorry, this is also wrong. An electron is NOT both a particle and a wave. Those are both concepts that have well-defined properties on a MACROscopic length scale. We are not justified in using such concepts at MICROscopic scales unless experiments show them to be valid. All experiments involving QM show exactly the opposite: the idea of a "particle" with all the particle attributes (mass, size, can only be in one place at a time, cannot move from one position to another without passing through all intermediate positions, etc, etc) and the idea of a wave DO NOT apply to elementary particles. At best they approximate the behaviour of said particles under certain conditions.
An electron (and all other elem. parts) are NEITHER particles nor waves, they are themselves with their own peculiar propeties, which can be calculated using QM to almost arbitrary precision. What you can't do is attribute to them properties that only have meaning at a macroscopic length scale.
Semantics...
This is only semantics if you think the distinction between saying things precisely and correctly and making misleading and false statements is semantics.
'You don't "cause" an effect by making a measurement' 'the distant particle appears to "know"'
again Semantics, as no one knows how is does this you can not say that a signal does not pass via a collapsed dimension, when the particles become entangled because of the 'measurement' the dimension collapses, I'm sure someones thrown that around before and probably been slated but it still shows that you are stating a certainty where there is none, I however am stating that if you do not need God for any of these effects what the hell do you need God for? nothing!!
The connection between two particles in an EPR experiment contradicts local realistic theories. All of modern physics is based on local realistic theories, except QM. And even QM does not provide a good model for what happens in action-at-a-distance cases such as EPR. Hence, while the experiments show WHAT happens, there is no accepted model for HOW it happens yet.
So, until a model for how the signal can be transmitted is given to me, I will apply Occam's razor and say I don't accept that there is a signal. Your reasoning would allow one to say that because we don't know how something works, angels must pass the signal between the particles. Just substitute "angel" for "collapsed dimension"
No, I wasn't using science to support the fact that there is no good and evil, that should be obvious, I am using science to support that fact they there is no God, or at least no requirement for a God so if there is a God he's in your head. (like a mad man thinking he's Jesus)
quote:
People sure as hell don't have a soul, or at least you can explain everything about a human without needing a soul, just like a stone doesn't have a soul.
There's no such thing as 'good' and 'evil'
you asserted it here.
You're misusing science to support your assertions, I am just pointing out the mistakes.
You sentence would then be
'Huh? No it doesn't. It shows that if you let an electon pass undetected through two slits >> you get an
interference pattern.
It is not the case that an electron "is" a particle or "is" a wave, it exhibits both types of behaviour depending on the experimental conditions.
The distance between the dark and light lines on the screen is related to the separation of the slits, but has nothing to do with the "size" of the particle. It is related to the wavelength of the of particle but that take almost any value by changing the energy of the partical,
wavelength = h/sqrt(2mE) where h is planck's constant and m is the mass of the particle and E its energy.'
SFAIK the wavelength of a partical is essencially related the probablity that a partical will be at one point or another when measured.
I think you mean the wave-function not the wave-length here.
When two particals become entangled, by modifying one you can cause an effect instantly in the other, even though they may be some distance appart and nothing can be detected passing between them.
Not really. You don't "cause" an effect by making a measurement on one of the particles as "causing" something would require a signal to pass from one to the other and that does not appear to happen. What can be said is that the distant particle appears to "know" what measurement you make and adjusts its own state accordingly. No one knows how it does this.
What these examples show is that the world is more complicated than we thought, and that our classical-mechanistic (enlightenment?) perspective is inadequate to explain all the observed phenomena. ie it's an incomplete world view. You should be more modest before making assertions like "there is no good and evil" and trying to use science to support this position.
Original quote:
I was trying to explain quantum entanglement to my girlfriend the other day. I think it's a great one to get at the mono-god people.
first give them a brief explanation and say the it proves God doesn't exist.
They'll either have a fit, or say something to the effect of 'no that is god'
Your original statement asserts that there is something in QM that can somehow be used to "get at" monotheists. I don't think there is. There are entities in sciences whose properties are completely counter-intuitive, yet scientists accept them and interact with them in experiments. It takes a lot of experience to be able to do so, and lots of study, and the theories are not obvious or free from apparent contradictions. Similar steps are involved, I think, in believing in God: being open to new ideas, willing to live with apparent contradictions, accepting that one will never know everything but still persisting in the path. I realise that many monotheists do not do this, but that is not important here. Some scientists fake their data, that does not invalidate the scientific method.
nd what exactly does this God do that requires existance, or to put it another way how would things be different if... and lets take a deep breath.... God doesn't exist.
This is a different question: let's first deal with what science says as you brought it up.
Are leptons descrite or probable,
this is meaningless.
Einstein or Plank. Einstine beleved in God too, he just couldn't handle probablity.
i don't think Einstein believed in a "God" that would be recognisable to most monotheists.
someone should have done the single photon interfearance experement with him (ref de Broglie)
Basicly...
2 slits in a piece of card....
When photons/electrons[leptons] pass through the slits they will produce an interfearance pattern on the other side.
Now, do the same with one photon/election and you still get interfearance.
but if you try to measure which slit the photon/election went though it behaves like a partical and point like and only arrives at one of the slits.
I think this is quite an old experement, but it show a lepton behaving like a non-point.
Huh? No it doesn't. It shows that if you let electons pass undetected through two slits you get an interference pattern. The distance between the dark and light lines on the screen is related to the separation of the slits, but has nothing to do with the "size" of the particles. It is related to the wavelength of the beam of particles but that take almost any value by changing the energy of the beam, wavelength = h/sqrt(2mE) where h is planck's constant and m is the mass of the particle and E its energy.
p.s.
You light examples quite good, did you know that people used to beleave that you could see because something came out of you eyes and reflected back, the thing is how did they explain night time?
Yes, I knew this.
People also once beleived that the earth was flat.
Irrelevent. Your original assertion was about QM and belief in God.
By the way, explain Quantum Entanglement to me.
As a physicist, I acccept the existence of entities that have no size, but they do have mass, also have no angular velocity but do have angular momentum (e-), also that two particles that were once in contact can be separated by an arbitrarily large distance and still "know" what happens to the other one (EPR), that I'll never know what time it is on the sun when it is 4 pm here on earth, and that if I place two prisms in between me and a light source in the order A B, I see no light, but if I do it in the order B A light gets through (polarised light and two plain polarisors)
I don't find believing in God that difficult actually.
PS Don't tell me about the electromagnetic radius of the electron, it's only an effective size: leptons are point-like to all current experiments.
I read (almost) all of the comments and no one seemed to point out that if you publish an idea first, it cannot subsequently be patented. In science you publish a paper in a journal; in computing an open source project (with verifiable date stamps) would prevent the ideas being patented.
Granted, an awful lot of stuff is already patented, but if we are entering a new age of IP, we should get as much of it out into the public domain as soon as possible. Gabfests? Organise them online: online discussions are archived (with dates?) we could stop companies like this from grabbing patents if enough people contribute.
Gives me an idea for anew blog: everyone just submits their own ideas, they get recorded, and filed and eventually we have a huge repository of unpatentable ideas.
Is there a flaw?
Last night at a party, drunk enough to make the discussion interesting, some folks objected to the extrapolation of the increasing rate of expansion of scientific knowledge. What guarantee is there, after all, to find all the secrets in that time? I would say first that the rate of growth in the number of researchers alone could do it. Also, increases in productivity, have always been accompanied with "this pace can't continue" claims, which have always been wrong.
Frustly, scientific breakthroughs of the magnitude discussed in this interview don't scale with the number of researchers in the world: otherwise we would have had many more Einsteins in the last 50 years of the 20th century than in the first.
Secondly, I don't think the usual concept of productivity works in research either. Getting more output per unit of input translates into a sicentist publising more papers per year that before. But this does not mean they discovered more breakthroughs, typically it just means they publish smaller papers and divide their results among them.
My guess is that their objection is not ideological, just that they don't want a lot of priviate citizens/companies making lots of money in ways that are difficult for the government to control and rake off a percentage.
Although as two principles of communism are that the State owns the means of production and there is no private property, one could imagine they oppose it just because it isn't being produced by the state and ends up being "owned" or distributed to any number of people without the government knowing.
Here's one of them from:
= PT O1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm &r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=5421012.WKU.&OS=PN/5421012&RS=PN/ 5421012
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1
But it reads very much like a design pattern (Strategy?) and they have been around since the 70's. Was this really new in 1993?
United States Patent
5,421,012
Khoyi , et al.
* May 30, 1995
Multitasking computer system for integrating the operation of different application programs which manipulate data objects of different types
Abstract
An object based data processing system including an extensible set of object types and a corresponding set of "object managers" wherein each object manager is a program for operating with the data stored in a corresponding type of object. The object managers in general support at least a standard set of operations. Any program can effect performance of these standard operations on objects of any type by making an "invocation" request. In response to an invocation request, object management services (which are available to all object managers) identifies and invokes an object manager that is suitable for performing the requested operation on the specified type of data. A mechanism is provided for linking data from one object into another object. A object catalog includes both information about objects and about links between objects. Data interchange services are provided for communicating data between objects of different types, using a set of standard data interchange formats. A matchmaker facility permits two processes that are to cooperate in a data interchange operation identify each other and to identify data formats they have in common. A facility is provided for managing shared data "resources". Customized versions of resources can be created and co-exist with standard resources. A resource retrieval function determines whether a customized or a standard resource is to be returned in response to each request for a resource.
Inventors:
Khoyi; Dana (Dracut, MA); Soucie; Marc S. (Tyngsboro, MA); Surppenant; Carolyn E. (Dracut, MA); Stern; Laura O. (Woburn, MA); Pham; Ly-Huong T. (Chelmsford, MA)
Assignee:
Wang Laboratories, Inc. (Lowell, MA)
[*] Notice:
The portion of the term of this patent subsequent to April 27, 2010 has been disclaimed.
Appl. No.:
066688
Filed:
May 20, 1993
There are two kinds of hot fusion I know of (it has been a while since I worked in the field, actually 1985, so things may have changed)
a) intertial confinement fusion in which small glass spheres containing heavy hydrogen are fired at each other to make the tritium fuse
b) plasma fusion in which a very hot plasma is confined by magnetic fields in a torus shape and heated so that nuclei fuse
the problem with the first method is that the stuff the small spheres are made of becomes highly radioactive and has to be removed continually; the problem with the second method is that hot plasmas don't like being confined in doughnut shapes and constantly try and escape, requiring very complicated, and fast, changes in magnetic field to keep them in the right shape. usually this cannot be maintained long enough to generate excess energy.
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