Autograph scores? As in, a facsimile of the original manuscript? Maybe for purposes of reference or scholarship. They tend not to be very useful as working scores (assuming they are available to the performer at all). Or did I misunderstand what you are saying?
It's perhaps more fantasy than sci-fi, but his space trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength) is vastly underrated.
The trick is to probably to skip the first volume. It's not as inspired as the other two and can be a little bit preachy. Perelandra is brilliant-- Lewis thought it was the best thing he'd written at the time, and Jorge Luis Borges apparently was a fan (he quotes from it extensively in his Bestiary of Imaginary Animals). That Hideous Strength is deeply eccentric and contains some mildly horrifying philosophical asides about the proper role of women. It's still worth reading, for the good bits.
It's unfortunate that Lewis is remembered today chiefly for his Narnia books, which hardly represent him at the top of his game. I'm pretty sure Lewis would feel the same way.
"To impress his father, he wanted to be the world's best."
Swap out gaming with piano and would the media be so concerned?
Funny you should ask.
I've known a few South Koreans socially, and many of them had a very odd relationship with music. They had achieved great technical proficiency at an early age and they had had the stereotypical "dragon lady" mothers who forced them to practice and to take part in high-pressure competitive events. Here's how technically-obsessed their training had been: one of them commented that she "would have been laughed at" if she had played a Mozart piano sonata in public, since these works were considered insufficiently challenging and were thought of as pieces "for children".
The funny part is, most of them were simply indifferent to playing music as adults. They liked listening to music but got no particular enjoyment out of playing it. In one particular case, sitting down at a piano evoked nausea and panic attacks.
That being said... I've also known a couple of South Koreans who were quite happily and successfully employed as professional musicians. I don't know whether those folks were subjected to similar training regimens or not... I never asked.
Late to the discussion, I know, so I hope this isn't too redundant... but I have some opinions on this.
First: Using a laptop or tablet for note-taking is a REALLY good idea in med school; I would have HATED to go through med school without it. You'll need to memorize a ton of material, and a lot of the material will be presented to you more than once from different angles. You'll need to be able to go back and review old stuff in detail on a number of occasions-- like when you take the various steps of the USMLE. It was a great advantage for me to be able to hit control-F and pull up my old notes on a topic. I could also edit my notes for clarity, correct errors and misunderstandings (of which there were plenty), insert new mnemonics, and so on.
I don't think you need any special "note taking software". I just used Word. I had a little trick of using a special character (I used ">") to mark something as an index entry. So if I wanted to review (let's say) meningitis, I could go straight to the main set of notes on meningitis and not have to look at all the notes where meningitis was just mentioned in passing.
Laptops are also great for storing textbooks and, again, a simple search function will save you lots of time/frustration thumbing around in tables of contents. The downside there is that the textbooks are overpriced and half of them are absolute shit. I don't know how easy it is to buy (or pirate) used e-textbooks.
As others have pointed out, you can't always take notes while in class or on a rotation (wouldn't want to bring my laptop to Gross Anatomy...) and it's also possible that the rattling of a keyboard might bother others. Maybe a tablet would work better... I don't know. But at any rate, you're going to be doing a lot of studying/reviewing outside of the classroom, where a laptop works fine.
The Danish study is just the latest in a long series of studies which demonstrate a correlation between toxoplasmosis seropositivity and psychiatric problems-- it's been linked to schizophrenia and ADHD, and so on. Wikipedia has a good article on the topic.
It's pretty interesting. Apparently something like 10% of the US population is seropositive for toxo. The infection is thought to be "contained" immunologically, but encysted organisms are still present in muscle and nervous tissue, and the process of "containment" may induce a subtle inflammatory state which affects a broad variety of neurotransmitters (not just dopamine). It's also possible that the causation works the other way-- the people who get chronic infections may have something about their immune system that is different to begin with, and the difference might predispose them to psychiatric problems independently of toxo infection. Good discussion of all that in the Danish study, which was published in Archives of General Psych and seems to be non-paywalled.
What will be really interesting is to see what happens if you identify psychiatric patients with chronic toxo and try to eradicate the toxo with antibiotics-- do their psych symptoms improve? There have been at least two studies I could find (one where it helped and one where it didn't), and apparently there's a large-scale study getting started in the UK.
I don't think an fMRI interface is going to be very useful for controlling robots, because of the issue of temporal resolution. I think you can only acquire an fMRI image once every couple of seconds (at most). The above poster referred to the "granularity" issue with data gloves and joysticks, but it's a thousandfold worse with fMRI and probably always will be.
A better choice might be magnetoencephalography (MEG). Nearly instantaneous "image" acquisition, and as a side benefit, there are no health risks to the user (fMRI bombards you with intense magnetic fields and no one really knows if that's safe).
Exactly. For instance, I'd like to use a tablet as an e-reader for musical scores. (You can buy specialized devices that do this, but they're insanely overpriced and don't offer the same resolution as the Ipad). I'd also like to be able to read technical journals in the format they were designed to be read.
A bigger screen (11" or 12") and/or a foldable double screen would be awesomely useful. It's weird to me that *NONE* of the tablet manufacturers have tried bringing one to market.
Since this is machine learning, what does this accuracy measure mean? That for a batch of unknown voices, he predicted the right outcome (parkinson or not-parkinson) 86% of the time?
Here is my algorithm with a precision over 99%:
Parkinson( voice_x) = false;
Mod parent up, please. The phrase "86% accuracy" could mean 4 totally different things:
86% of Parkinson's patients are positively flagged by the algorithm (86% sensitivity) 86% of normal patients are NOT positively flagged by the algorithm (86% specificity) A positively-flagged result implies that you have an 86% chance of having Parkinson's (86% positive predictive value) A negatively-flagged result implies that you have an 86% chance of not having Parkinson's (86% negative predictive value)
I think that's right (posting with the certainty that someone will correct me if I screwed it up). Anyway, as the parent points out, "86% accuracy" is entirely meaningless without clarification. Such is the state of science journalism.
Also, what's the point of collecting 10,000 voiceprints (or whatever it was) if you don't have actual data on whether the owners of said voiceprint have (or later develop) Parkinson's disease (or similar dysphonia-causing diseases, like benign tremor/tardive dyskinesia/whatever)? How does that possibly help?
So, if I understand this right, the chess game tree can be pruned by an incredible amount if you're willing to make a simple compromise: just assume that the player resigns whenever he is >5 points down. Without this compromise you have 10^100 possible games from the King's Gambit Accepted; with the compromise you have... whatever it was, but obviously a lot less.
I wonder if you could "solve" all the other openings as well by making the same compromise (which would mean that chess had been kind-of "solved", at least for practical purposes)? Or is there something about this particular opening that gives it a less extensive game tree?
Also, I wonder if anyone collects statistics on the percentage of games that are actually won/lost/drawn by White, in tournament play, for specific gambits such as this one.
The assumption that someone who is unable to work due to being mentally ill would be unable to "spend money the right way" is disgusting.
To begin with, that's not the assumption that was being made. The parent poster was talking about subsets of people who are *homeless* due to serious mental illness or due to drug/alcohol abuse. Both of these subsets are distinct from, although overlapping with, the group of "people who can't work due to mental illness".
And it's entirely reasonable to wonder whether a homeless schizophrenic is capable of spending money "the right way".
Anyway. What really bothers me about this homeless-wi-fi-hotspot scheme is that it doesn't seem to offer *meaningful* work to the homeless volunteers. They are essentially being used as what, exactly-- portable tripods for an electronic widget? I suppose you could argue that there are a lot of jobs which are equally meaningless, but still...
Yeah, I know! (It also can make you fat and can occasionally cause neurological side-effects). I was sort of expecting this question-- "how can you say quietiapine, AKA Seroquel, is one of the safer sleeping meds?"
Well, three things-- first of all, notice that I specified low-dose. Usually like 25 mg, which is less than a tenth of the typical dose used for schizophrenia. In most cases 25 mg doesn't seem to cause obesity or diabetes. (You still monitor weight and glucose, of course, and you stop the med if things start to go south). Secondly, notice that I listed it fourth on the list and not first. (Actually it's fifth place because I forgot to list ramelteon). I don't need to resort to it all that often. And third... well, most of the other alternatives (Ambien, temazepam, etc.) are really pretty crappy. They're *addictive*, man.
What surprised me about the study was *which* sleeping pills the subjects were taking. #1 was Ambien, #2 was temazepam (which is a benzodiazepine-- same category as Valium, Ativan, Xanax, Klonopin etc.) And looking in the "supplemental data" section, it turns out that the other sleeping pills were either a) more benzodiazepenes, b) antihistamines like Benadryl, or c) barbiturates (which you'd have to be nuts to use for sleep).
As someone who prescribes sleepers all the time, I was wondering why none of my preferred sleeping pills-- which would be trazodone, melatonin, doxepin, and maybe low-dose quetiapine-- were included. (I prefer them because I think they're the safest ones). It turns out that they excluded most of these because they were "dual use" medications. (E.g. trazodone is technically an antidepressant, doxepin is an antidepressant, quetiapine is FDA-approved as both an antidepressant and an antipsychotic). And melatonin was excluded (I guess) since it's technically considered a food supplement rather than a medication.
So, in short, they excluded all the best choices and studied a bunch of sleeping pills that many would consider to be relatively problematic. It's not the only problem with the paper (or even the only serious problem), but it's a biggie.
patients to expensive months-long rounds of a talk therapy, even when the best type seems to be the relatively efficient CBT.
99% of your post was fine, but I have to jump down your throat for this. *Please* don't perpetuate the myth that CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) is "better" or "more efficient" than other forms of therapy. There is simply no meaningful evidence to support this claim.
I don't necessarily dislike CBT, I think it contains some useful ideas, but it is one approach among many.
What if, in addition to the pleasure due to heroin, it also diminishes other sorts of pleasure?
This sounds like it could be a small slice of hell.
Exactly. If it interferes with endogenous opioids, the risk is that it will make the user less capable of experiencing pleasure. Some docs suspect that naltrexone (an opiate antagonist which is used to treat various addictions) already does this. No one has done the necessary studies to confirm this suspicion, but there is some strong circumstantial evidence-- e.g. if you look at the dropout rates for naltrexone trials, it's much higher than it is for comparable meds like acamprosate. A lot of people just "don't feel right" on naltrexone. But at least with naltrexone, you can just stop taking it! Not so easy to go back once you've permanently altered your immune response.
Also, I wonder if this vaccine could produce an autoimmune disorder, since you are encouraging the immune system to react to something which resembles a number of endogenous neurotransmitters.
It's a fascinating idea, but I wonder how to reconcile it with what we know about melatonin (and other hormones like cortisol) which are implicated in sleep/wakefulness and which seem to go up and down on a 24-hour cycle...
I guess if both "first" and "second" sleep take place in the same 12-hour period, it's not a big contradiction. But what if the first and second bedtime are equally spaced (twelve hours apart)? (I've actually done this at times, due to a strange work schedule, and it seemed to work well. It also seemed logical. Why *not* recharge your batteries at equal intervals?)
Let me start by arguing that "realism" does in fact matter and that it is a key problem with this scene. Yes, a movie can ask you to suspend disbelief and watch improbable things-- but the degree of improbability needs to be established early on and it needs to be consistent. You can't suddenly up the ante and insert a sequence which belongs in a Road Runner cartoon.
The scene could have been fixed, or at least improved. Instead of showing the fridge hurtling a hundred yards through the air (which of course would have reduced Indy to a pulp), they could have thrown it twenty feet and shown the walls of the house buckling (but not vaporizing) from the overpressure. And maybe had the mannequins catch fire, just to further establish the lethality of the blast. And they should have gotten rid of the cute little fucking CGI gopher.
>A person's ethical concerns are limited to the realm of people.
If you carry this argument to its logical conclusion, it follows that we should not have any laws against animal cruelty, and you should be OK with it if I torture animals for amusement.
The thing is that I agree with much of your post, but nothing destroys a valid argument quicker than careless overstatement.
Yeah, I always felt the flight school in San Andreas was a classic example of a design flaw. It's much harder and much less fun than anything else in the game (landing the plane after the hoops was a bitch), and you can't unlock the last 25% of the game without completing it. There are other gameplay bottlenecks in the GTA series-- like the mandatory car race in Vice City-- but this was the worst.
The great thing about GTA though was for *some* missions, you could ignore the directions and get to your objective in a creative and unexpected way. Too many gangsters coming out of that mansion in GTA3? Block all the exits with school buses. Trouble with the mission in San Andreas where you have to ride your motorbike alongside a train and shoot a guy on top of the train? Jump the bike on top of the train from an overpass, jump over to the guy's train car, and shoot him at close range. These are (admittedly) baby steps towards the development of a new type of game-- one where you are no longer following a "story", but instead are creating your own story out of the emergent properties of the game universe.
I suppose EVE Online was another baby step, too, in that direction. I admire it for that reason. (Unfortunately I got bored with playing it when I figured out you can't actually *fly* the damn ships).
Well, the article itself points out that the technology is useless for driving, since it is based on EEG readings (with 64 leads!) and EEGs only work if you keep still. I once spent an evening fucking around with a 5-lead EEG hooked up to my head (it was part of some silly "neurofeedback" apparatus that I borrowed from a clinic) so I can attest to this personally. If I made a sudden movement, or even furrowed my brow the wrong way, I would get all kinds of crazy artifacts that completely swamped the actual signal. Good luck distinguishing those artifacts from the "stop" signal.
You're right, and I love the phrase that Pharma uses: "discontinuation syndrome". It means exactly the same as "withdrawal syndrome", but if you call it a withdrawal syndrome then you are suggesting the medications might be addictive.
That said, usually the withdrawal from these meds isn't a big deal. With antidepressants the withdrawal symptoms are usually gone in a week if they happen at all (and if you taper gradually you can avoid any withdrawal symptoms in, oh, 99% of people). Withdrawal symptoms from the antipsychotics (usually movement disorders associated with dose reduction) do exist but they are rare-- I'm not sure I've ever really seen a case.
The bigger issue is whether these medications have more subtle and long-lasting aftereffects, especially when given for long periods or to developing brains-- e.g., if I stay on Prozac for 10 years and then stop it, am I more likely to get depressed later in life than if I had never taken Prozac? Unfortunately, it's damn near impossible to prove one way or the other.
How can Big Pharma so easily influence the minds of doctors? It is true that doctors are only human beings and subject to the same psychological foibles as most other people, but they are also quite different in having been intensively educated and trained. Doctors are supposed to have attained a greater level of consciousness and should be able to remain exclusively scientific in their prescribing of drugs. It may be possible for big companies to brainwash and delude the average (or below average) citizen, but doctors, as well as all professionals that serve our society, should be immune to such deceptive practices.
Listen, man, it's not just big Pharma that is trying to influence us (although God knows they do their bit).
The pressure comes from all sides. Staffers at nursing homes and group homes, social workers, the patient's family, and-- this is the part that gets me-- very often from the patients themselves. It doesn't matter to them that they weigh 300 pounds, that they are going to die early from uncontrolled diabetes. It also doesn't matter whether the medication is "working" in any reasonable sense. The medicines zonk them out and keep them from getting too feisty. And that, to many people, is success.
There are a lot of other pressures too-- there is subtle pressure from the legal system (you will get sued if someone flips out and hurts someone, but you don't get sued for making them fat and lethargic). There's also a kind of pressure from within. Doctors like to feel that they're doing something, and they like to feel that their treatments are helpful. And the kind of interventions that would actually make sense (talk therapy, behavioral interventions, a nicer place to live) are often just not available to us.
The expansion of antipsychotic use has nothing to do with the number of people being diagnosed with psychotic disorders. AFAIK, that number hasn't increased much.
The real reason is that over the past 10 or 15 years, antipsychotic meds (i.e. dopamine antagonists) have been used with increasing frequency in patients who do NOT have psychotic symptoms. ("Psychotic symptoms" basically means either hallucinations or delusional thinking). Many of these meds are marketed as "mood stabilizers" for bipolar disorder-- and the criteria for bipolar disorder are so broad and so subjective that just about anyone can be diagnosed with it. Indeed, one of the popular "screening tools" for bipolar disorder is something called the Mood Disorders Questionnaire, which is a bit like those Scientology quizzes that tells you whether Scientology is right for you. (It always is). The MDQ was designed by doctors who work for drug companies-- I've met one of them.
There are three other groups who tend to get lots of antipsychotics-- the elderly (especially in nursing homes), the mentally retarded, and people with plain old depression. The last one is actually the easiest to justify, since there are some studies which suggest that certain antipsychotics can work as adjunctive treatment for depression-- they have managed to get FDA approval for that indication. The first two-- elderly and MR-- are impossible to defend. They don't benefit the patient, they cause cognitive slowing and deterioration of functioning, and they increase overall mortality. Lilly in particular has been guilty of marketing their antipsychotic (Zyprexa) to nursing homes and claiming that it improves "behavioral disturbances of dementia". It doesn't, and they eventually had to pay out billions of dollars in fines.
Any psychiatrist with half a brain knows what's going on here. In the mid 90s all the new antidepressants (Prozac, etc) started to go off-patent and the drug companies lost a major cash cow. Ever since then, the drug companies have sought new indications for dopamine blockers, since they are mostly still on-patent, and most of them are fiendishly expensive.
"Baton Hero"? You'd need two controllers, one for each hand-- in traditional conducting technique, the right hand dictates the rhythm and the left hand is free to point at individual sections and give them interpretive cues (dynamics, articulation etc). You could probably develop an interface that was quite usable, e.g. assigning different interpretive cues to each controller button.
It's a silly idea in some ways, but one which Glenn Gould might have approved of. Towards the end of his life he became interested in producing interactive recordings where the listener could fine-tune the performance to his liking. At the time-- and this was in the late 1970s, before MIDI-- this meant giving the listener multiple "takes" of each musical segment so that he could edit them together as he pleased. Today other solutions are possible.
I know you're kidding-- but I think the answers are "yes" and "quite possibly, but not by much".
From the article, it sounds like many of their American clients are looking for hired help rather than companionship. One guy hired a "friend" to help him rent a car and do online research for him. Another hired a "friend" to visit her mother in a nursing home while she was away. Etc.
If all the clients wanted was someone to hang out with, you wouldn't need a fee-for-service model-- just a matchmaking service to connect them with each other. And we already have plenty of websites like that.
Slashdot Mirror
Autograph scores? As in, a facsimile of the original manuscript? Maybe for purposes of reference or scholarship. They tend not to be very useful as working scores (assuming they are available to the performer at all). Or did I misunderstand what you are saying?
It's perhaps more fantasy than sci-fi, but his space trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength) is vastly underrated.
The trick is to probably to skip the first volume. It's not as inspired as the other two and can be a little bit preachy. Perelandra is brilliant-- Lewis thought it was the best thing he'd written at the time, and Jorge Luis Borges apparently was a fan (he quotes from it extensively in his Bestiary of Imaginary Animals). That Hideous Strength is deeply eccentric and contains some mildly horrifying philosophical asides about the proper role of women. It's still worth reading, for the good bits.
It's unfortunate that Lewis is remembered today chiefly for his Narnia books, which hardly represent him at the top of his game. I'm pretty sure Lewis would feel the same way.
"To impress his father, he wanted to be the world's best."
Swap out gaming with piano and would the media be so concerned?
Funny you should ask.
I've known a few South Koreans socially, and many of them had a very odd relationship with music. They had achieved great technical proficiency at an early age and they had had the stereotypical "dragon lady" mothers who forced them to practice and to take part in high-pressure competitive events. Here's how technically-obsessed their training had been: one of them commented that she "would have been laughed at" if she had played a Mozart piano sonata in public, since these works were considered insufficiently challenging and were thought of as pieces "for children".
The funny part is, most of them were simply indifferent to playing music as adults. They liked listening to music but got no particular enjoyment out of playing it. In one particular case, sitting down at a piano evoked nausea and panic attacks.
That being said... I've also known a couple of South Koreans who were quite happily and successfully employed as professional musicians. I don't know whether those folks were subjected to similar training regimens or not... I never asked.
Late to the discussion, I know, so I hope this isn't too redundant... but I have some opinions on this.
First: Using a laptop or tablet for note-taking is a REALLY good idea in med school; I would have HATED to go through med school without it. You'll need to memorize a ton of material, and a lot of the material will be presented to you more than once from different angles. You'll need to be able to go back and review old stuff in detail on a number of occasions-- like when you take the various steps of the USMLE. It was a great advantage for me to be able to hit control-F and pull up my old notes on a topic. I could also edit my notes for clarity, correct errors and misunderstandings (of which there were plenty), insert new mnemonics, and so on.
I don't think you need any special "note taking software". I just used Word. I had a little trick of using a special character (I used ">") to mark something as an index entry. So if I wanted to review (let's say) meningitis, I could go straight to the main set of notes on meningitis and not have to look at all the notes where meningitis was just mentioned in passing.
Laptops are also great for storing textbooks and, again, a simple search function will save you lots of time/frustration thumbing around in tables of contents. The downside there is that the textbooks are overpriced and half of them are absolute shit. I don't know how easy it is to buy (or pirate) used e-textbooks.
As others have pointed out, you can't always take notes while in class or on a rotation (wouldn't want to bring my laptop to Gross Anatomy...) and it's also possible that the rattling of a keyboard might bother others. Maybe a tablet would work better... I don't know. But at any rate, you're going to be doing a lot of studying/reviewing outside of the classroom, where a laptop works fine.
That was more or less my first thought. I'd pay real money to play Grand Theft Auto in this.
The Danish study is just the latest in a long series of studies which demonstrate a correlation between toxoplasmosis seropositivity and psychiatric problems-- it's been linked to schizophrenia and ADHD, and so on. Wikipedia has a good article on the topic.
It's pretty interesting. Apparently something like 10% of the US population is seropositive for toxo. The infection is thought to be "contained" immunologically, but encysted organisms are still present in muscle and nervous tissue, and the process of "containment" may induce a subtle inflammatory state which affects a broad variety of neurotransmitters (not just dopamine). It's also possible that the causation works the other way-- the people who get chronic infections may have something about their immune system that is different to begin with, and the difference might predispose them to psychiatric problems independently of toxo infection. Good discussion of all that in the Danish study, which was published in Archives of General Psych and seems to be non-paywalled.
What will be really interesting is to see what happens if you identify psychiatric patients with chronic toxo and try to eradicate the toxo with antibiotics-- do their psych symptoms improve? There have been at least two studies I could find (one where it helped and one where it didn't), and apparently there's a large-scale study getting started in the UK.
I don't think an fMRI interface is going to be very useful for controlling robots, because of the issue of temporal resolution. I think you can only acquire an fMRI image once every couple of seconds (at most). The above poster referred to the "granularity" issue with data gloves and joysticks, but it's a thousandfold worse with fMRI and probably always will be.
A better choice might be magnetoencephalography (MEG). Nearly instantaneous "image" acquisition, and as a side benefit, there are no health risks to the user (fMRI bombards you with intense magnetic fields and no one really knows if that's safe).
Exactly. For instance, I'd like to use a tablet as an e-reader for musical scores. (You can buy specialized devices that do this, but they're insanely overpriced and don't offer the same resolution as the Ipad). I'd also like to be able to read technical journals in the format they were designed to be read.
A bigger screen (11" or 12") and/or a foldable double screen would be awesomely useful. It's weird to me that *NONE* of the tablet manufacturers have tried bringing one to market.
Since this is machine learning, what does this accuracy measure mean? That for a batch of unknown voices, he predicted the right outcome (parkinson or not-parkinson) 86% of the time?
Here is my algorithm with a precision over 99%:
Parkinson( voice_x) = false;
Mod parent up, please. The phrase "86% accuracy" could mean 4 totally different things:
86% of Parkinson's patients are positively flagged by the algorithm (86% sensitivity)
86% of normal patients are NOT positively flagged by the algorithm (86% specificity)
A positively-flagged result implies that you have an 86% chance of having Parkinson's (86% positive predictive value)
A negatively-flagged result implies that you have an 86% chance of not having Parkinson's (86% negative predictive value)
I think that's right (posting with the certainty that someone will correct me if I screwed it up). Anyway, as the parent points out, "86% accuracy" is entirely meaningless without clarification. Such is the state of science journalism.
Also, what's the point of collecting 10,000 voiceprints (or whatever it was) if you don't have actual data on whether the owners of said voiceprint have (or later develop) Parkinson's disease (or similar dysphonia-causing diseases, like benign tremor/tardive dyskinesia/whatever)? How does that possibly help?
So, if I understand this right, the chess game tree can be pruned by an incredible amount if you're willing to make a simple compromise: just assume that the player resigns whenever he is >5 points down. Without this compromise you have 10^100 possible games from the King's Gambit Accepted; with the compromise you have... whatever it was, but obviously a lot less.
I wonder if you could "solve" all the other openings as well by making the same compromise (which would mean that chess had been kind-of "solved", at least for practical purposes)? Or is there something about this particular opening that gives it a less extensive game tree?
Also, I wonder if anyone collects statistics on the percentage of games that are actually won/lost/drawn by White, in tournament play, for specific gambits such as this one.
The assumption that someone who is unable to work due to being mentally ill would be unable to "spend money the right way" is disgusting.
To begin with, that's not the assumption that was being made. The parent poster was talking about subsets of people who are *homeless* due to serious mental illness or due to drug/alcohol abuse. Both of these subsets are distinct from, although overlapping with, the group of "people who can't work due to mental illness".
And it's entirely reasonable to wonder whether a homeless schizophrenic is capable of spending money "the right way".
Anyway. What really bothers me about this homeless-wi-fi-hotspot scheme is that it doesn't seem to offer *meaningful* work to the homeless volunteers. They are essentially being used as what, exactly-- portable tripods for an electronic widget? I suppose you could argue that there are a lot of jobs which are equally meaningless, but still...
quetiapine causes diabetes!
http://www.jabfm.org/content/16/3/251.full
Yeah, I know! (It also can make you fat and can occasionally cause neurological side-effects). I was sort of expecting this question-- "how can you say quietiapine, AKA Seroquel, is one of the safer sleeping meds?"
Well, three things-- first of all, notice that I specified low-dose. Usually like 25 mg, which is less than a tenth of the typical dose used for schizophrenia. In most cases 25 mg doesn't seem to cause obesity or diabetes. (You still monitor weight and glucose, of course, and you stop the med if things start to go south). Secondly, notice that I listed it fourth on the list and not first. (Actually it's fifth place because I forgot to list ramelteon). I don't need to resort to it all that often. And third... well, most of the other alternatives (Ambien, temazepam, etc.) are really pretty crappy. They're *addictive*, man.
What surprised me about the study was *which* sleeping pills the subjects were taking. #1 was Ambien, #2 was temazepam (which is a benzodiazepine-- same category as Valium, Ativan, Xanax, Klonopin etc.) And looking in the "supplemental data" section, it turns out that the other sleeping pills were either a) more benzodiazepenes, b) antihistamines like Benadryl, or c) barbiturates (which you'd have to be nuts to use for sleep).
As someone who prescribes sleepers all the time, I was wondering why none of my preferred sleeping pills-- which would be trazodone, melatonin, doxepin, and maybe low-dose quetiapine-- were included. (I prefer them because I think they're the safest ones). It turns out that they excluded most of these because they were "dual use" medications. (E.g. trazodone is technically an antidepressant, doxepin is an antidepressant, quetiapine is FDA-approved as both an antidepressant and an antipsychotic). And melatonin was excluded (I guess) since it's technically considered a food supplement rather than a medication.
So, in short, they excluded all the best choices and studied a bunch of sleeping pills that many would consider to be relatively problematic. It's not the only problem with the paper (or even the only serious problem), but it's a biggie.
patients to expensive months-long rounds of a talk therapy, even when the best type seems to be the relatively efficient CBT.
99% of your post was fine, but I have to jump down your throat for this. *Please* don't perpetuate the myth that CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) is "better" or "more efficient" than other forms of therapy. There is simply no meaningful evidence to support this claim.
I don't necessarily dislike CBT, I think it contains some useful ideas, but it is one approach among many.
What if, in addition to the pleasure due to heroin, it also diminishes other sorts of pleasure?
This sounds like it could be a small slice of hell.
Exactly. If it interferes with endogenous opioids, the risk is that it will make the user less capable of experiencing pleasure. Some docs suspect that naltrexone (an opiate antagonist which is used to treat various addictions) already does this. No one has done the necessary studies to confirm this suspicion, but there is some strong circumstantial evidence-- e.g. if you look at the dropout rates for naltrexone trials, it's much higher than it is for comparable meds like acamprosate. A lot of people just "don't feel right" on naltrexone. But at least with naltrexone, you can just stop taking it! Not so easy to go back once you've permanently altered your immune response.
Also, I wonder if this vaccine could produce an autoimmune disorder, since you are encouraging the immune system to react to something which resembles a number of endogenous neurotransmitters.
It's a fascinating idea, but I wonder how to reconcile it with what we know about melatonin (and other hormones like cortisol) which are implicated in sleep/wakefulness and which seem to go up and down on a 24-hour cycle...
I guess if both "first" and "second" sleep take place in the same 12-hour period, it's not a big contradiction. But what if the first and second bedtime are equally spaced (twelve hours apart)? (I've actually done this at times, due to a strange work schedule, and it seemed to work well. It also seemed logical. Why *not* recharge your batteries at equal intervals?)
Let me start by arguing that "realism" does in fact matter and that it is a key problem with this scene. Yes, a movie can ask you to suspend disbelief and watch improbable things-- but the degree of improbability needs to be established early on and it needs to be consistent. You can't suddenly up the ante and insert a sequence which belongs in a Road Runner cartoon.
The scene could have been fixed, or at least improved. Instead of showing the fridge hurtling a hundred yards through the air (which of course would have reduced Indy to a pulp), they could have thrown it twenty feet and shown the walls of the house buckling (but not vaporizing) from the overpressure. And maybe had the mannequins catch fire, just to further establish the lethality of the blast. And they should have gotten rid of the cute little fucking CGI gopher.
>A person's ethical concerns are limited to the realm of people.
If you carry this argument to its logical conclusion, it follows that we should not have any laws against animal cruelty, and you should be OK with it if I torture animals for amusement.
The thing is that I agree with much of your post, but nothing destroys a valid argument quicker than careless overstatement.
Yeah, I always felt the flight school in San Andreas was a classic example of a design flaw. It's much harder and much less fun than anything else in the game (landing the plane after the hoops was a bitch), and you can't unlock the last 25% of the game without completing it. There are other gameplay bottlenecks in the GTA series-- like the mandatory car race in Vice City-- but this was the worst.
The great thing about GTA though was for *some* missions, you could ignore the directions and get to your objective in a creative and unexpected way. Too many gangsters coming out of that mansion in GTA3? Block all the exits with school buses. Trouble with the mission in San Andreas where you have to ride your motorbike alongside a train and shoot a guy on top of the train? Jump the bike on top of the train from an overpass, jump over to the guy's train car, and shoot him at close range. These are (admittedly) baby steps towards the development of a new type of game-- one where you are no longer following a "story", but instead are creating your own story out of the emergent properties of the game universe.
I suppose EVE Online was another baby step, too, in that direction. I admire it for that reason. (Unfortunately I got bored with playing it when I figured out you can't actually *fly* the damn ships).
Well, the article itself points out that the technology is useless for driving, since it is based on EEG readings (with 64 leads!) and EEGs only work if you keep still. I once spent an evening fucking around with a 5-lead EEG hooked up to my head (it was part of some silly "neurofeedback" apparatus that I borrowed from a clinic) so I can attest to this personally. If I made a sudden movement, or even furrowed my brow the wrong way, I would get all kinds of crazy artifacts that completely swamped the actual signal. Good luck distinguishing those artifacts from the "stop" signal.
You're right, and I love the phrase that Pharma uses: "discontinuation syndrome". It means exactly the same as "withdrawal syndrome", but if you call it a withdrawal syndrome then you are suggesting the medications might be addictive.
That said, usually the withdrawal from these meds isn't a big deal. With antidepressants the withdrawal symptoms are usually gone in a week if they happen at all (and if you taper gradually you can avoid any withdrawal symptoms in, oh, 99% of people). Withdrawal symptoms from the antipsychotics (usually movement disorders associated with dose reduction) do exist but they are rare-- I'm not sure I've ever really seen a case.
The bigger issue is whether these medications have more subtle and long-lasting aftereffects, especially when given for long periods or to developing brains-- e.g., if I stay on Prozac for 10 years and then stop it, am I more likely to get depressed later in life than if I had never taken Prozac? Unfortunately, it's damn near impossible to prove one way or the other.
How can Big Pharma so easily influence the minds of doctors? It is true that doctors are only human beings and subject to the same psychological foibles as most other people, but they are also quite different in having been intensively educated and trained. Doctors are supposed to have attained a greater level of consciousness and should be able to remain exclusively scientific in their prescribing of drugs. It may be possible for big companies to brainwash and delude the average (or below average) citizen, but doctors, as well as all professionals that serve our society, should be immune to such deceptive practices.
Listen, man, it's not just big Pharma that is trying to influence us (although God knows they do their bit).
The pressure comes from all sides. Staffers at nursing homes and group homes, social workers, the patient's family, and-- this is the part that gets me-- very often from the patients themselves. It doesn't matter to them that they weigh 300 pounds, that they are going to die early from uncontrolled diabetes. It also doesn't matter whether the medication is "working" in any reasonable sense. The medicines zonk them out and keep them from getting too feisty. And that, to many people, is success.
There are a lot of other pressures too-- there is subtle pressure from the legal system (you will get sued if someone flips out and hurts someone, but you don't get sued for making them fat and lethargic). There's also a kind of pressure from within. Doctors like to feel that they're doing something, and they like to feel that their treatments are helpful. And the kind of interventions that would actually make sense (talk therapy, behavioral interventions, a nicer place to live) are often just not available to us.
The expansion of antipsychotic use has nothing to do with the number of people being diagnosed with psychotic disorders. AFAIK, that number hasn't increased much.
The real reason is that over the past 10 or 15 years, antipsychotic meds (i.e. dopamine antagonists) have been used with increasing frequency in patients who do NOT have psychotic symptoms. ("Psychotic symptoms" basically means either hallucinations or delusional thinking). Many of these meds are marketed as "mood stabilizers" for bipolar disorder-- and the criteria for bipolar disorder are so broad and so subjective that just about anyone can be diagnosed with it. Indeed, one of the popular "screening tools" for bipolar disorder is something called the Mood Disorders Questionnaire, which is a bit like those Scientology quizzes that tells you whether Scientology is right for you. (It always is). The MDQ was designed by doctors who work for drug companies-- I've met one of them.
There are three other groups who tend to get lots of antipsychotics-- the elderly (especially in nursing homes), the mentally retarded, and people with plain old depression. The last one is actually the easiest to justify, since there are some studies which suggest that certain antipsychotics can work as adjunctive treatment for depression-- they have managed to get FDA approval for that indication. The first two-- elderly and MR-- are impossible to defend. They don't benefit the patient, they cause cognitive slowing and deterioration of functioning, and they increase overall mortality. Lilly in particular has been guilty of marketing their antipsychotic (Zyprexa) to nursing homes and claiming that it improves "behavioral disturbances of dementia". It doesn't, and they eventually had to pay out billions of dollars in fines.
Any psychiatrist with half a brain knows what's going on here. In the mid 90s all the new antidepressants (Prozac, etc) started to go off-patent and the drug companies lost a major cash cow. Ever since then, the drug companies have sought new indications for dopamine blockers, since they are mostly still on-patent, and most of them are fiendishly expensive.
"Baton Hero"? You'd need two controllers, one for each hand-- in traditional conducting technique, the right hand dictates the rhythm and the left hand is free to point at individual sections and give them interpretive cues (dynamics, articulation etc). You could probably develop an interface that was quite usable, e.g. assigning different interpretive cues to each controller button.
It's a silly idea in some ways, but one which Glenn Gould might have approved of. Towards the end of his life he became interested in producing interactive recordings where the listener could fine-tune the performance to his liking. At the time-- and this was in the late 1970s, before MIDI-- this meant giving the listener multiple "takes" of each musical segment so that he could edit them together as he pleased. Today other solutions are possible.
I know you're kidding-- but I think the answers are "yes" and "quite possibly, but not by much".
From the article, it sounds like many of their American clients are looking for hired help rather than companionship. One guy hired a "friend" to help him rent a car and do online research for him. Another hired a "friend" to visit her mother in a nursing home while she was away. Etc.
If all the clients wanted was someone to hang out with, you wouldn't need a fee-for-service model-- just a matchmaking service to connect them with each other. And we already have plenty of websites like that.