They record calcium activity in neurons. Calcium is a marker of neuronal activity (although the dynamics are slower than electrical ones). Calcium recording in the nematode is difficult, because the neurons are small, and the spread of calcium is very broad. The method is impressive and a great breakthrough. However...
1. A brain is a center of the nervous system. It's not strictly correct to speak of brains of nematodes. They don't have this separation of their nervous system. In the article they write of the anterior nervous system of the nematode, and say that their technique could be applied to brains of other animals.
2. The short clip is not a recording of all neurons. It's 70% of the neurons contained in the head ganglia.
Some people here speak of the mapping of the network. This was already done in 1986. The nematode is highly stereotypic. It's known what neurons there are (they all have acronyms), how many, and what they are connected to. The weight of these connections is not clear yet however. What is not clear are the associated neurotransmitters to these synapses and the strength of synapses. This determines how strongly neurons modulate each other and if the modulation is excitatory or inhibitory.
With some caveats in place, the potential of the recordings based on this technique is to help to get to the connection strengths, and to a functional connection diagram that then can potentially be used for predicting the animals behavior.
Linked with means related to. There's no causation implied, sorry. Xkcd's comic had a lot of success and since then it's a knee jerk reaction to accuse people of confusing the two terms, but it often pays off to count to three.
Well... you are right, partly, I think, in pointing out that there's still a lot of bullshit around. However, it is known that culture is, in fact, a very powerful mechanism (I think you can come up yourself with a bunch of examples). It is sometimes quite difficult to distinguish between cultural and biological factors, however, what is interesting in this study, I think, is that did an international comparison of boys vs girls' math scores and compared these to different socio-economic factors. I have to admit, I didn't take the time to read all of it, but they actually show a pretty convincing scatter plot between gender equality index and girls' math performance relative to boys'. If you don't look at anything else, look at that plot.
What about other factors that are different between genders?
I don't know about relative levels of aggression, I guess it is pretty much established that aggression level is at least partly determined by testosterone level and related hormones. An elevated level of aggression (btw, Lorenz defines aggression as social dominance behavior) would affect professional (or leadership) ambition, but I would guess that a lot of that (missing ambition) has to do with gender roles and legislation (parental leave, etc). Language ability? I think, somebody should do a study showing that the more time female caretakers spend with the child, the bigger the gender gap. Sounds like a challenge.
I wouldn't assume is was deliberate. He's probably just incompetent and was showing off. Now he tries to give the blame to somebody else: wikileaks, Assange. Just guessing: after the relationship between the guardian and Assange got bad (after they published critical stories about the rape charges), he doesn't have to work so hard to convince people around him.
I just RTFA. It says the money is to repay the city for its efforts in trying to regain control over the FiberWAN network and later test it for vulnerabilities. City officials had been worried that Childs, who helped set up the network but clashed with his supervisors, might try to sabotage it.
Mind, he already spent 2 years in custody and was convicted to 4 years of jail.
I agree that C should not be the way to go for application programming. Developers should value their own time more than they value the computer's time, even more so that computers get so fast and interpreter implementations so good that the difference is hardly noticeable. When I am looking for applications to use and have the choice of one programmed in C/C++/C#/Java and one programmed in python, I'll choose python, because I assume that the code quality is better.
So he uses cell cultures as controllers for robots. I don't have access to his article now to see what he did exactly, but I doubt he can make this work efficiently.
I remember a talk about some DARPA projects after 9/11 for chemical sensing that used also alive cell cultures. Advanced chemical sensing could serve to detect explosives and chemical weapons and therefore shield again terrorist attacks. They would take a cell culture from a rat brain put it onto a dish and then characterize the responses to different kinds of currents (output from chemical sensors), so they could implement a computational model that separated these responses and made sense of them. The problem they had was that the cultures are difficult to maintain in the same state. For chemical sensing they had to be transported which was problematic, because even slight jerks would change the culture. They are very sensitive to temperature and then of course they change over time (as the introduction states). So, the would have to be adjusted again, which is time consuming and expensive. Until he finds a way to maintain the state of the network and control the intrinsic changes of the network (culture) he will have problems with stability and it will not be very useful.
Most Swiss banks won't take Americans as clients, because they don't want to get into problems with American authorities. (I learned this from "Emergency - this book will save your life.")
I was very impressed by the video, but I also worry about how to change the lange when under the "bus."
In the video they say it is much faster to build such a highway than building subway. And the bus is driven by both solar energy and electricity.
What I find also cool, if not better, is the suspended railway in the German town Wuppertal. It seems to me it as all of the advantages, minus maybe time and money, and avoids the trap problem.
Mandela was classified as a terrorist by South African apartheid regime and was on US terrorism lists until 2008 and arrested with the help of the CIA. He was involved in para-military activities, however I can find no evidence that he ever harmed people. In court the charges were sabotage and conspiracy. Had there been anything else than rumors charges would have been different.
[MacOS...] are covered by software license
2 agreements that provided that the software is “licensed, not sold to [the user] by Apple Inc.
3 (“Apple”) for use only under the terms of this License” (Chung Exh. 26 at 1). Apple’s license
4 agreements restricted the use of Mac OS X to Apple computers, and specifically prohibited
5 customers from installing the operating system on non-Apple computers.
Both of these methods that you propose already help to protect your privacy. However, the IP you use probably would already be associated with you, if its not a shared ID, etc. That's why it's better to have the scraper run from a remote server.
I wrote it would be difficult for google to track you. There is no cookie that identifies your google account, no javascript that tracks your usage data or your history. They can track searches by server IP, however if they want to associate these searches with you they need some to look for the whois entry of the server, which you can leave anonymous.
If you want to be even more private you can share the server with other people, as you do with scroogle.
It's very easy to build something like scroogle yourself. You need a server with support for php (or maybe java or python) that performs your searches server side and there you go. Three years ago, with no knowledge of php to start with, I wrote a simple program to send and fetch queries to and from google in about a day. It didn't even use the google search API it just parsed the returned HTML. I think anybody who just looks at the search API could put something together very fast.
In the (unlikely) case anybody should ever be interested in who is behind your server you can share your server publicly to increase anonymity.
Ok... given you stipulate users have to use your applications and it is practical to do so (otherwise the calculation becomes void). You assume that you can collect more data to target ads better in order to increase significantly the cost per thousand impressions (CPM) of the ads. Can you really collect more data? The device would be marketed most successfully to people already using google accounts, I think. Other people would not be so much interested in a google netbook ("where is the internet here? where is word?"). If netbook users are already google users there would be not so much to gain. If you don't annoy people with additional ads, you would hardly gain any more to get returns from your investment.
Let's assume to the contrary that CPM will not significantly increase. Though there are stories about people gaining about $25 CPM, I think adsense CPM is usually much lower, say about $0.4. Now if you want to get back your money for the netbook in one year (say $150) you'll have to show many additional ads to people. I calculate 375000 impressions/year at a CPM of $0.4 or 1027 a day. If people use their netbooks in their free time, 4 hours a day (sounds ok?), that would be 4 ad impressions per minute. That sounds very high and unrealistic. I would think that in order to get back your money from the netbooks they'd really have to annoy people with full screen ads and more. I am skeptical about the business model.
Good picks. National Portrait Gallery is also worth a visit. London has about 300 museums where entry is free, guided tours included. Usually there are boxes at the exits where you can donate.
Summary from TFA: Samsung is sponsoring Enlightenment so that they can obviously deploy this lightweight and robust window manager on some of their mobile devices, but we do not yet have confirmation on what devices or when they may start surfacing... It sounds as though Samsung is still early on into their love affair with Enlightenment and that many more changes and work are still to come, which means that it may be some months before seeing any devices.
We also have been forwarded some YouTube videos of recent Enlightenment advancements (user-interface improvements) that have been made possible through this hardware company's sponsorship. The video demos are quite interesting and worth checking out.
Video here.
That's probably true for all areas, not just programming (although you should make allowances for dyslexic and so on). This is also mentioned in TFA. The original article is BTW 30 years of C. It's actually only a paragraph there: 2. Good programs do not contain spelling errors or have grammatical mistakes. I think this is probably a result of fractal attention to detail; in great programs things are correct at all levels, down to the periods at the ends of sentences in comments.
“Aw, c’mon! You’re kidding!” You might think that nit-picking like this is beneath you, whereupon I will start pointing out errors in your code. It was embarrassing the first couple times this happened to me.
I think this categorical statement ("does not contain") is a bit harsh, but there's certainly a relationship between clear thinking in language and style and the quality of content (the code).
You are playing to the popular image of Neanderthals uncultured. They were long believed to lack complex culture (language, etc.), however this is slowly changing. Neanderthals had a bigger brain volume than humans, were physically capable of speech and practiced ceremonial burial. If anything, they maybe lacked social skills. So your joke is not to the point.
Larry Ellison, September 2008: "The interesting thing about cloud computing: it is either going to be or already is the most computing architecture in the world, because we redefine cloud computing to include everything that we currently do. It has already achieved dominance in the industry. I can't think of anything that isn't cloud - with all these announcements."
Slashdot Mirror
They record calcium activity in neurons. Calcium is a marker of neuronal activity (although the dynamics are slower than electrical ones). Calcium recording in the nematode is difficult, because the neurons are small, and the spread of calcium is very broad. The method is impressive and a great breakthrough. However...
1. A brain is a center of the nervous system. It's not strictly correct to speak of brains of nematodes. They don't have this separation of their nervous system. In the article they write of the anterior nervous system of the nematode, and say that their technique could be applied to brains of other animals. 2. The short clip is not a recording of all neurons. It's 70% of the neurons contained in the head ganglia.
Some people here speak of the mapping of the network. This was already done in 1986. The nematode is highly stereotypic. It's known what neurons there are (they all have acronyms), how many, and what they are connected to. The weight of these connections is not clear yet however. What is not clear are the associated neurotransmitters to these synapses and the strength of synapses. This determines how strongly neurons modulate each other and if the modulation is excitatory or inhibitory.
With some caveats in place, the potential of the recordings based on this technique is to help to get to the connection strengths, and to a functional connection diagram that then can potentially be used for predicting the animals behavior.
Linked with means related to. There's no causation implied, sorry. Xkcd's comic had a lot of success and since then it's a knee jerk reaction to accuse people of confusing the two terms, but it often pays off to count to three.
Ron Paul: "Evolution is a theory and I don't accept it". For me he's out.
Well... you are right, partly, I think, in pointing out that there's still a lot of bullshit around. However, it is known that culture is, in fact, a very powerful mechanism (I think you can come up yourself with a bunch of examples). It is sometimes quite difficult to distinguish between cultural and biological factors, however, what is interesting in this study, I think, is that did an international comparison of boys vs girls' math scores and compared these to different socio-economic factors. I have to admit, I didn't take the time to read all of it, but they actually show a pretty convincing scatter plot between gender equality index and girls' math performance relative to boys'. If you don't look at anything else, look at that plot.
What about other factors that are different between genders?
I don't know about relative levels of aggression, I guess it is pretty much established that aggression level is at least partly determined by testosterone level and related hormones. An elevated level of aggression (btw, Lorenz defines aggression as social dominance behavior) would affect professional (or leadership) ambition, but I would guess that a lot of that (missing ambition) has to do with gender roles and legislation (parental leave, etc). Language ability? I think, somebody should do a study showing that the more time female caretakers spend with the child, the bigger the gender gap. Sounds like a challenge.
I wouldn't assume is was deliberate. He's probably just incompetent and was showing off. Now he tries to give the blame to somebody else: wikileaks, Assange. Just guessing: after the relationship between the guardian and Assange got bad (after they published critical stories about the rape charges), he doesn't have to work so hard to convince people around him.
I just RTFA. It says the money is to
repay the city for its efforts in trying to regain control over the FiberWAN network and later test it for vulnerabilities. City officials had been worried that Childs, who helped set up the network but clashed with his supervisors, might try to sabotage it.
Mind, he already spent 2 years in custody and was convicted to 4 years of jail.
Many politicians and media personalities have been arguing similarly..
I agree that C should not be the way to go for application programming. Developers should value their own time more than they value the computer's time, even more so that computers get so fast and interpreter implementations so good that the difference is hardly noticeable. When I am looking for applications to use and have the choice of one programmed in C/C++/C#/Java and one programmed in python, I'll choose python, because I assume that the code quality is better.
I could be wrong, but shouldn't novely be a criterion for submission? ACO has been used since the early 1990s.
So he uses cell cultures as controllers for robots. I don't have access to his article now to see what he did exactly, but I doubt he can make this work efficiently.
I remember a talk about some DARPA projects after 9/11 for chemical sensing that used also alive cell cultures. Advanced chemical sensing could serve to detect explosives and chemical weapons and therefore shield again terrorist attacks. They would take a cell culture from a rat brain put it onto a dish and then characterize the responses to different kinds of currents (output from chemical sensors), so they could implement a computational model that separated these responses and made sense of them. The problem they had was that the cultures are difficult to maintain in the same state. For chemical sensing they had to be transported which was problematic, because even slight jerks would change the culture. They are very sensitive to temperature and then of course they change over time (as the introduction states). So, the would have to be adjusted again, which is time consuming and expensive. Until he finds a way to maintain the state of the network and control the intrinsic changes of the network (culture) he will have problems with stability and it will not be very useful.
Most Swiss banks won't take Americans as clients, because they don't want to get into problems with American authorities. (I learned this from "Emergency - this book will save your life.")
I was very impressed by the video, but I also worry about how to change the lange when under the "bus."
In the video they say it is much faster to build such a highway than building subway. And the bus is driven by both solar energy and electricity.
What I find also cool, if not better, is the suspended railway in the German town Wuppertal. It seems to me it as all of the advantages, minus maybe time and money, and avoids the trap problem.
Mandela was classified as a terrorist by South African apartheid regime and was on US terrorism lists until 2008 and arrested with the help of the CIA. He was involved in para-military activities, however I can find no evidence that he ever harmed people. In court the charges were sabotage and conspiracy. Had there been anything else than rumors charges would have been different.
Is Windows sold or licensed?
From November's ruling:
[MacOS...] are covered by software license
2 agreements that provided that the software is “licensed, not sold to [the user] by Apple Inc.
3 (“Apple”) for use only under the terms of this License” (Chung Exh. 26 at 1). Apple’s license
4 agreements restricted the use of Mac OS X to Apple computers, and specifically prohibited
5 customers from installing the operating system on non-Apple computers.
Both of these methods that you propose already help to protect your privacy. However, the IP you use probably would already be associated with you, if its not a shared ID, etc. That's why it's better to have the scraper run from a remote server.
I think you didn't get my point.
I wrote it would be difficult for google to track you. There is no cookie that identifies your google account, no javascript that tracks your usage data or your history. They can track searches by server IP, however if they want to associate these searches with you they need some to look for the whois entry of the server, which you can leave anonymous.
If you want to be even more private you can share the server with other people, as you do with scroogle.
It's very easy to build something like scroogle yourself. You need a server with support for php (or maybe java or python) that performs your searches server side and there you go. Three years ago, with no knowledge of php to start with, I wrote a simple program to send and fetch queries to and from google in about a day. It didn't even use the google search API it just parsed the returned HTML. I think anybody who just looks at the search API could put something together very fast. In the (unlikely) case anybody should ever be interested in who is behind your server you can share your server publicly to increase anonymity.
Improve it! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hghpuxCHTc&feature=player_embedded
Ok... given you stipulate users have to use your applications and it is practical to do so (otherwise the calculation becomes void). You assume that you can collect more data to target ads better in order to increase significantly the cost per thousand impressions (CPM) of the ads. Can you really collect more data? The device would be marketed most successfully to people already using google accounts, I think. Other people would not be so much interested in a google netbook ("where is the internet here? where is word?"). If netbook users are already google users there would be not so much to gain. If you don't annoy people with additional ads, you would hardly gain any more to get returns from your investment. Let's assume to the contrary that CPM will not significantly increase. Though there are stories about people gaining about $25 CPM, I think adsense CPM is usually much lower, say about $0.4. Now if you want to get back your money for the netbook in one year (say $150) you'll have to show many additional ads to people. I calculate 375000 impressions/year at a CPM of $0.4 or 1027 a day. If people use their netbooks in their free time, 4 hours a day (sounds ok?), that would be 4 ad impressions per minute. That sounds very high and unrealistic. I would think that in order to get back your money from the netbooks they'd really have to annoy people with full screen ads and more. I am skeptical about the business model.
Good picks. National Portrait Gallery is also worth a visit. London has about 300 museums where entry is free, guided tours included. Usually there are boxes at the exits where you can donate.
Summary from TFA:
Samsung is sponsoring Enlightenment so that they can obviously deploy this lightweight and robust window manager on some of their mobile devices, but we do not yet have confirmation on what devices or when they may start surfacing... It sounds as though Samsung is still early on into their love affair with Enlightenment and that many more changes and work are still to come, which means that it may be some months before seeing any devices.
We also have been forwarded some YouTube videos of recent Enlightenment advancements (user-interface improvements) that have been made possible through this hardware company's sponsorship. The video demos are quite interesting and worth checking out.
Video here.
most searched: google
That's probably true for all areas, not just programming (although you should make allowances for dyslexic and so on). This is also mentioned in TFA. The original article is BTW 30 years of C. It's actually only a paragraph there:
2. Good programs do not contain spelling errors or have grammatical mistakes. I think this is probably a result of fractal attention to detail; in great programs things are correct at all levels, down to the periods at the ends of sentences in comments.
“Aw, c’mon! You’re kidding!” You might think that nit-picking like this is beneath you, whereupon I will start pointing out errors in your code. It was embarrassing the first couple times this happened to me.
I think this categorical statement ("does not contain") is a bit harsh, but there's certainly a relationship between clear thinking in language and style and the quality of content (the code).
You are playing to the popular image of Neanderthals uncultured. They were long believed to lack complex culture (language, etc.), however this is slowly changing. Neanderthals had a bigger brain volume than humans, were physically capable of speech and practiced ceremonial burial. If anything, they maybe lacked social skills. So your joke is not to the point.
Larry Ellison, September 2008: "The interesting thing about cloud computing: it is either going to be or already is the most computing architecture in the world, because we redefine cloud computing to include everything that we currently do. It has already achieved dominance in the industry. I can't think of anything that isn't cloud - with all these announcements."