In the regretful, embarrassing, yet immortal words of Dick Cheney...... " Go F$@% yourself ".
I personally take offense at the allegation that there is *any* stolen music on my iPod or any of my computers. All of my music has been purchased on CD or the iTunes Music store as it is on most of the peoples iPods and computers that I know of. Your allegation suggests that you actually do not know about your potential customers, their desires, technology or most disturbingly, the music industry itself. Apparently, you also don't seem to be able to understand that you need to out-compete the piracy industry by offering a quality product at a reasonable price and in a manner that is easy for people to pay for. Marketing 101 tells us that the way to make money is to create a product people want and then remove any barriers that will prevent people from *willingly* giving their money to you in exchange for those goods or services. The iTMS has shown you how it is done, yet you get in bed with Microsoft who apparently cannot design a device that will compete in the same arena with the iPod, then you force people to buy points that they can then exchange for music *and* you want a slice of the hardware market. If you want into that market, why not create your own hardware? To do anything else is leveraging your monopoly to extort money from another industry and the last time I checked, that behavior is illegal.
So, quit whining about all the pirates and do something constructive that adds to your product or services rather than placing restrictions on your product that makes it less appealing to the end user or customer. Oh, and while you are at it, you might want to put more energy on finding good musical talent for the music industry. Its out there, but you need to stop focusing on engineered pretty boy and girl acts and put more effort into finding and promoting real talent.
And this ladies and gentlemen is why we need better education funding and resources with a greater focus on math and science in schools, not to mention spelling and grammar.:-)
One might also wonder about some of the biological effects of energy this high, especially with animals that contain more water. Heating is always a concern and something that many high powered ultrasound devices have not adequately addressed with developing biological systems.
As an aside, I seem to remember that former Admiral Bobby Inman served on the board of directors for (SAIC) and was involved in some acoustic work along these lines, but I think they were focusing on inanimate objects. I could be wrong about that, but it came out of a conversation I had years ago with members of the science directorate.
Never mind that Andy is usually an advocate for Apple's products, however, as he is often, Andy is right on and I agree with his sentiments. In addition to his comments, I got to spend a little time with a Zune and initially liked the large screen until I actually turned the device on. I found it to be clunky, awkward, irritating, non-intuitive, completely incompatible with previous Microsoft music standards, and has none of the features that make the iPod so completely useful (ability to hold various media and data, even allowing you to boot from Firewire iPods). And forcing users to rely on the Zune application to move data onto or off the device is infuriating (kind of like the Creative devices. Is it possible to "open" a Creative media player and put data onto it without having to use the Creative application?).
I simply cannot believe that Microsoft *ever* asked itself how users might interface with such a device and it's obsequious pandering to the music industry in an effort to out-compete Apple in this space rather than putting the effort into making a better product to the iPod quite simply offends. Hey Microsoft, how much did you spend coming up with this marketing, because I am simply stunned at how bad this is. If Microsoft *really* was interested in making a better product and not acting as a pimp for the record industry, they would also not have relied on "Zune Points" to purchase music. As anybody who has ever taken Marketing101 knows, you should always facilitate the process of getting people to spend money on your products and anything that steps in-between or slows this process down had better have a damn good reason for existing. Why do I have to buy "Zune Points" to then make music purchases? It's just stupid.
Oh, and Microsoft..... Just a suggestion: Very few end users want their products to "squirt" anything at them. That is just bad marketing.
This is correct as the first link in the post is not directly concerned with the paper. I actually know Paul Bressloff pretty well and his work is pretty exciting. Of course the next step is biological validation of the data and we've talked a bit about how to go there. The trick will be to find funding in this current political climate for this work.....
But other studies have indicated increased performance in those subjects allowed REM sleep versus those subjects who have been selectively deprived of REM sleep. Other studies still have shown a reduction (higher efficiency) in brain metabolism in those subjects performing tasks who have been allowed REM sleep versus those other subjects who have been selectively sleep deprived. I am on a very narrow connection here and out of time for posting for now or I would find those references for you. But a simple Medline search should bring them up.
Actually, you *are* a eukaryote and most of us posting here on Slashdot are with the exception of those that have foed me I suspect.:-)
Seriously though, worms, jellyfish and other "lower" invertebrates do exhibit periods of inactivity as do even prokaryotes such as bacteria. This period of "inactivity" is often crucial for normal physiological processes to occur. The important thing to note here is that through evolution, "higher" organisms appear to have accumulated a number of circadian clocks related to a variety of physiological functions and the "higher" up an organism is, the more clocks for various functions are accumulated.
Some people only need 4-5 hours of sleep a night. Why is that?
There can be some play in actual sleep requirements. Whereas most people need 8-9 hours of sleep per night, in long term situations, you can "economize" your sleep by appearing to make it more efficient in that latencies to certain periods of sleep may be reduced over time. But like any other economizing you see in life/financials etc...etc...etc... there are tradeoffs. For instance, I typically get about 4-5 hours of sleep per night during the week, but it does catch up with me and I have to once or twice a week get a full nights sleep to recover or there is a price to pay and I suspect that those who claim they only *need* 4-5 hours of sleep per night are doing much the same thing as I am. There are very few people in the world who have been truly documented to maintain lifestyles where they get much less sleep than on average and to remain effective long term, you need your sleep.
You might be surprised at how art imitates *real life* with respect to sleep projects that have acquired a black status within certain government agencies in the not too distant past. I'm not kidding...
Speaking as a scientist who used to study sleep and sleep disorders, I have to say this is troubling. Sleep has evolved for a purpose and a number of studies have shown that sleep is necessary or crucial to consolidate long term memories, stabilize mood and more. If you are a simple automaton in your job, then *perhaps* you might be able to get away with something like modafinil for short periods of time, but if your job requires thought and the use of memory and higher cognitive function, then you are doing yourself a disservice by taking these drugs. I worry that the long term effects will not become apparent until years later, like I suspect might happen with PDE inhibitors like Viagra, Cialis and Levitra.
Humans have evolved an organized architecture of sleep where we progress through a number of stages of sleep. In other words, sleep is an active state that is not homogenous in that there are five generally accepted states of sleep separate from consciousness. Stages 1 and 2 are light sleep whereas 3 and 4 are deeper, more restful states of sleep with lower brain metabolic rates and more cortical synchronization. Stage 5 or REM sleep is actually a very active stage of sleep with very high metabolic requirements rivaling that or exceeding wakefulness and its thought that REM sleep may be necessary for memory consolidation. The trick is that the architecture of sleep is broken up into various stages and you do not really approach the most intense REM periods until after you have progressed back and forth through some of the other stages including a more brief period of REM sleep earlier in the night. So, the most intense REM period is late into sleep and often early in the morning. If you short change yourself of the other sleep periods, you reduce the quantity and quality of your REM sleep period.
I wonder how the airlines are going to keep inappropriate video (i.e. porn or even just movies like "Snakes on a Plane" or "Alive") from appearing on the seat-back displays."
That's funny as I was wondering the same thing when Apple's press announcement appeared in my inbox. Of course the issue of other movies like those you mentioned should not even be an issue as it is content that the user has loaded on their own iPods (and you should not be looking at your neighbors content anyhow). As to porn and other questionable content, this really comes down to etiquette and if there are those on the flight that will display such content where others may see it (like kids), they are likely pissing people off for other reasons. All told, this is a great idea and I'd rather have to deal with other people's movies than having to listen to them talk on their cell phones (Please! FAA, Nnnoooooooo!) or worse. Flying anywhere is becoming more and more onerous these days and at the very least, having airlines support ways to charge laptops or iPods during long flights would be a huge benefit as Empower outlets are pretty hard to find on many flights in coach and sometimes even in first or business class.
Say that to yourself again, really slow this time. What about writing novels, movie scripts, or what about those individuals in police agencies and federal agencies that think about planning crimes to prevent them. What you are saying is that it is illegal to think about carrying a crime out. There should be nothing illegal about that. However, if you go about carrying those plans out, then it becomes a crime. Or at least that is how it should be.
Say for just the fun of it have some blueprints for making bombs then on the same table have a postcard with the parliment buildings on it.
If you really believe this, then you are part of the problem.
The cops don't just go searching random computers hoping they'll stumble on some terrorist then they can arrest them.
But these are just the sorts of things the US and UK governments have been moving towards. Datamining through any available database available to them to search for incriminating evidence and calculate likelihood indices for incrimination.
I am hoping that there were other lines of evidence against this woman as this is what we need to be very careful about here in the US. The concept of a thought crime is not new and any society that starts prosecuting individuals for books they may possess or for studying things is becoming a a darkness right out of an Orwellian nightmare.
Hell, as kids we had copies of the Anarchists cookbook and manuals that the US government printed for crafting insurgencies and survival that had all sorts of directions for creating improvised munitions and such. It makes me wonder if we would have been suspects back then. Of course the early 80's were a different time when a couple of 14-15 year olds could carry a rifle out in the Texas countryside to shoot cans without even a second glance. Now, we have bastardized Republicans (Neocons) who are out to create National IDs, document any passage in and out of the country, search our personal information including credit files and library files, and some even propose to index all of the information on personal computers in an effort to screen out "enemy combatants" not to mention revoking Constitutional rights such as Habeus Corpus. It's a strange time.
1) The ganglion cells are the projection cells of the retina. If you assume that the visual cortex is already mapped, and the ganglion cells survive, the mapping remains intact.
2) Which brings up problem #2 What everybody needs to realize is that if you wait until the photoreceptors degenerate, it is too late in that downstream changes are taking place in the bipolar cells, amacrine cells, horiztonal cells, Muller cells and ganglion cells. The retina remodels and alters the existing circuitry to corrupt any subsequent inputs and any intervention biological or bionic is going to have to take this into account. We showed this back in 2001 and 2002 at the ARVO vision conferences and published it formally starting in 2003. I am not criticizing the work of this particular study however, in that it is a tour de force. All I am saying is that there is much more to the biology than simply finding new inputs to replace the degenerate ones.
As to the mice, human eyes are hard to get, particularly the diseased eyes. Also we can engineer mouse eyes to have the same biochemical/genetic/proteomic defect as in the human instances and get much more science done with mice.
If you were shooting film on a SLR before, didn't you already have the tripod, backpack, filters (maybe the wrong size, maybe not), and books, and maybe the flash as well?
I had to sell off all my 35mm gear for tuition money when I was an undergraduate. And even though I had one of the first digital cameras made for consumers, the Apple Quicktake 100, its not been until the last couple of years though that I've been getting back into photography seriously.
Those film SLR lenses will also serve well (after factoring in the +60% or so magnification factor) on the DSLR, though you are going to need specialized DSLR wide-angle lenses.
There are a number of other technological advances such as Image Stabilization that make the new lenses worthwhile. Also ultrasonic auto-focus really helps with the fast motion stuff.
Personally I would like to get a digital back for my old manual-focus Canon A-1
I loved the A-1. Mine went with me to a lot of places including the cargoholds of aircraft, the desert, mountain peaks etc...etc...etc... It was an awesome camera and I was sorry to have to sell it.
I can't agree with this article more. Since moving from film to digital SLRs my photography has really grown because shooting digital blows away all of the risk and gives you much more creative freedom when it comes to experimental exposures such as low light photography, action photography and more. I find myself taking far more pictures and experimenting more with digital and then simply throwing away the bad experiments than I did with film because of the costs associated with film. The other thing about Digital SLRs is that in addition to the higher quality optics, the actual imaging sensors on the CCD are physically larger leading to much higher quality images than are possible with point and shoots that may possess higher megapixel counts, but have smaller physical sensor sizes.
If you are going to make the move to a digital SLR, I also highly recommend the Canon 20d/30d cameras as a good system to begin exploring a variety of different photographic styles from outdoors to action to macro and still life. You really cannot go wrong with some of the other manufacturers like Nikon with their D70/D80 and Sony, but Canon, like Apple tends to build the entire widget from the glass to the camera to the imaging chips. Additionally, I tend to like the color representation from the Canon Digic imaging chips. If you are planning on shooting less outdoor work or in less rigorous environments, I'd suggest introducing yourself to digital SLRs with the lower end Rebel (or Nikon D50) series which is still pretty nice hardware, just not as ruggedly built. (I've also heard rumors that Nikon is going to introduce a new lower cost D40).
For a sample of some of the images possible with the Canon 20d/30d, almost all of the images on my blog that were taken by me have been captured with the Canon 20d and associated hardware. I also have a Canon hardware list at the top of my FAQ here that may be helpful for those that are interested in some of the lens options.
The negatives that the author of the linked article writes about are also true. Hauling around all of your camera gear to various spots on the globe does get a bit harder with more (and heavier) gear. I just got back from a trip to Argentina at the foot of the Andes (pics to be posted tomorrow morning) and it does take a bit more effort to pack everything you need to take with you. The gear addiction and associated costs do not stop at the camera body and lenses either. You will find yourself buying tripods, monopods, backpacks, filters, flashes, books, more books etc...etc...etc....
What is wrong with paper ballots?!!!??!? Canada seems to be able to handle paper balloting followed up with results within 24 hours, so what is the deal with all of the money and risk associated with trusting our politics to hackable solutions?
I was out this morning at 7:00am voting and predictably, two of the ten voting machines (20% folks!) at our location would not take their programs...... Take their programs! And how many times do we have to be shown how easy it is to hack the system? When I left after voting, we were still looking at machines that were not working.
Again, paper ballots folks. It's a simple, cost effective solution that is easier to secure than electronic voting. I have yet to see a valid statistical study that demonstrates that electronic voting is inherently more reliable/statistically valid than paper ballot voting. How much is this move towards electronic voting costing the US taxpayer? Was this a favor for political contributors? I think that the evidence is pretty strong for it which might give even more credibility to the FBI in their new focus on corruption in Washington DC politics.
Does the visual cortex also 'remodel' when being deprived of input?
It is an interesting question that nobody has yet (unbelievably) addressed adequately. My guess is that we are going to see cortical and subcortical remodeling in any system that has been deafferented much like we see from the learning and memory literature or the epilepsy literature. Wanna job doing some of the research?:-)
If so, would it 'remodel' back after a period of time once input has been restored?
Again, surprisingly, given all of the money that has flowed into bionic retinal implants, this is work that needs to be performed.
Perhaps an alternative, although understandably more complex alternative would be to interfere with the optic nerve directly.
There are some approaches that people are working on to couple bionic implants directly into the optic nerve, but they are going to run into problems with selective stimulation of appropriate channels given that we only consciously "see" with a subset of our ganglion cells that contribute axons to the optic nerve.
Because of this I doubt very much that an adult with regular vision can have their vision "enhanced" at all.
Ah, but if we introduce all of the "enhancements", such as additional spectral filters or channels into the existing channels as biological additions (or bionic implants), then we can piggyback enhancements on existing circuitry.
It turns out that for things such as hitting a fastball etc..., the visual system actually performs predictive processing and helps you to kinesthetically program a response based upon a prediction of where an object, such as a baseball will be at the appropriate time. You don't actually "see" the ball along its entire path.
Well, we (the community of vision scientists) are working on vision rescue strategies and one of the goals at the Moran Eye Center is to assemble the best possible team we can to begin coherently working on solutions that will help resolve vision loss through development, disease and trauma. The problem with vision rescue approaches in the past little while is that they have not truly examined at a fundamental level some of the basic science involved in the neural processing of the retina. But now that we are aware of some of the complexities, we are now able to refine many of the approaches (biological and bionic) to construct better interventions.
Actually, we only consciously "see" with about 20% of our ganglion cells. The other 80% project to other areas of cortex and subcortical regions that mediate percepts of movement and circadian timing among other things. The other thing that you should remember is that it is not compression of information per se, so much as it is filtering and pre-processing of information in a parallel fashion prior to transmission to other CNS regions.
While this is very cool research (and we are looking at hiring one of the graduate students involved in this project as a post-doc when he graduates), they are still not addressing many of the fundamental issues related to retinal degeneration such as retinal remodeling that we have addressed for the past couple of years. The problem is that the retina (like any other neural system) will remodel its connections when the inputs have been lost. In retinal degenerations, when the photoreceptors degenerate, you lose your inputs and any new input you put in, either bionic implant or biological transplant will have to deal with corrupted circuits.
Slashdot Mirror
Doug Morris,
In the regretful, embarrassing, yet immortal words of Dick Cheney...... " Go F$@% yourself ".
I personally take offense at the allegation that there is *any* stolen music on my iPod or any of my computers. All of my music has been purchased on CD or the iTunes Music store as it is on most of the peoples iPods and computers that I know of. Your allegation suggests that you actually do not know about your potential customers, their desires, technology or most disturbingly, the music industry itself. Apparently, you also don't seem to be able to understand that you need to out-compete the piracy industry by offering a quality product at a reasonable price and in a manner that is easy for people to pay for. Marketing 101 tells us that the way to make money is to create a product people want and then remove any barriers that will prevent people from *willingly* giving their money to you in exchange for those goods or services. The iTMS has shown you how it is done, yet you get in bed with Microsoft who apparently cannot design a device that will compete in the same arena with the iPod, then you force people to buy points that they can then exchange for music *and* you want a slice of the hardware market. If you want into that market, why not create your own hardware? To do anything else is leveraging your monopoly to extort money from another industry and the last time I checked, that behavior is illegal.
So, quit whining about all the pirates and do something constructive that adds to your product or services rather than placing restrictions on your product that makes it less appealing to the end user or customer. Oh, and while you are at it, you might want to put more energy on finding good musical talent for the music industry. Its out there, but you need to stop focusing on engineered pretty boy and girl acts and put more effort into finding and promoting real talent.
Come on. A spider ISN'T an aminal. (sic)
:-)
And this ladies and gentlemen is why we need better education funding and resources with a greater focus on math and science in schools, not to mention spelling and grammar.
One might also wonder about some of the biological effects of energy this high, especially with animals that contain more water. Heating is always a concern and something that many high powered ultrasound devices have not adequately addressed with developing biological systems.
As an aside, I seem to remember that former Admiral Bobby Inman served on the board of directors for (SAIC) and was involved in some acoustic work along these lines, but I think they were focusing on inanimate objects. I could be wrong about that, but it came out of a conversation I had years ago with members of the science directorate.
Never mind that Andy is usually an advocate for Apple's products, however, as he is often, Andy is right on and I agree with his sentiments. In addition to his comments, I got to spend a little time with a Zune and initially liked the large screen until I actually turned the device on. I found it to be clunky, awkward, irritating, non-intuitive, completely incompatible with previous Microsoft music standards, and has none of the features that make the iPod so completely useful (ability to hold various media and data, even allowing you to boot from Firewire iPods). And forcing users to rely on the Zune application to move data onto or off the device is infuriating (kind of like the Creative devices. Is it possible to "open" a Creative media player and put data onto it without having to use the Creative application?).
I simply cannot believe that Microsoft *ever* asked itself how users might interface with such a device and it's obsequious pandering to the music industry in an effort to out-compete Apple in this space rather than putting the effort into making a better product to the iPod quite simply offends. Hey Microsoft, how much did you spend coming up with this marketing, because I am simply stunned at how bad this is. If Microsoft *really* was interested in making a better product and not acting as a pimp for the record industry, they would also not have relied on "Zune Points" to purchase music. As anybody who has ever taken Marketing101 knows, you should always facilitate the process of getting people to spend money on your products and anything that steps in-between or slows this process down had better have a damn good reason for existing. Why do I have to buy "Zune Points" to then make music purchases? It's just stupid.
Oh, and Microsoft..... Just a suggestion: Very few end users want their products to "squirt" anything at them. That is just bad marketing.
Thanks FleaPlus,
This is correct as the first link in the post is not directly concerned with the paper. I actually know Paul Bressloff pretty well and his work is pretty exciting. Of course the next step is biological validation of the data and we've talked a bit about how to go there. The trick will be to find funding in this current political climate for this work.....
Well, I guess if you're going to take away my PDE inhibitors, I might as well sleep anyway.
:-)
Oh my, that *is* funny. Mod parent funny!
But other studies have indicated increased performance in those subjects allowed REM sleep versus those subjects who have been selectively deprived of REM sleep. Other studies still have shown a reduction (higher efficiency) in brain metabolism in those subjects performing tasks who have been allowed REM sleep versus those other subjects who have been selectively sleep deprived. I am on a very narrow connection here and out of time for posting for now or I would find those references for you. But a simple Medline search should bring them up.
Actually, you *are* a eukaryote and most of us posting here on Slashdot are with the exception of those that have foed me I suspect. :-)
Seriously though, worms, jellyfish and other "lower" invertebrates do exhibit periods of inactivity as do even prokaryotes such as bacteria. This period of "inactivity" is often crucial for normal physiological processes to occur. The important thing to note here is that through evolution, "higher" organisms appear to have accumulated a number of circadian clocks related to a variety of physiological functions and the "higher" up an organism is, the more clocks for various functions are accumulated.
Some people only need 4-5 hours of sleep a night.
Why is that?
There can be some play in actual sleep requirements. Whereas most people need 8-9 hours of sleep per night, in long term situations, you can "economize" your sleep by appearing to make it more efficient in that latencies to certain periods of sleep may be reduced over time. But like any other economizing you see in life/financials etc...etc...etc... there are tradeoffs. For instance, I typically get about 4-5 hours of sleep per night during the week, but it does catch up with me and I have to once or twice a week get a full nights sleep to recover or there is a price to pay and I suspect that those who claim they only *need* 4-5 hours of sleep per night are doing much the same thing as I am. There are very few people in the world who have been truly documented to maintain lifestyles where they get much less sleep than on average and to remain effective long term, you need your sleep.
You might be surprised at how art imitates *real life* with respect to sleep projects that have acquired a black status within certain government agencies in the not too distant past. I'm not kidding...
Speaking as a scientist who used to study sleep and sleep disorders, I have to say this is troubling. Sleep has evolved for a purpose and a number of studies have shown that sleep is necessary or crucial to consolidate long term memories, stabilize mood and more. If you are a simple automaton in your job, then *perhaps* you might be able to get away with something like modafinil for short periods of time, but if your job requires thought and the use of memory and higher cognitive function, then you are doing yourself a disservice by taking these drugs. I worry that the long term effects will not become apparent until years later, like I suspect might happen with PDE inhibitors like Viagra, Cialis and Levitra.
Humans have evolved an organized architecture of sleep where we progress through a number of stages of sleep. In other words, sleep is an active state that is not homogenous in that there are five generally accepted states of sleep separate from consciousness. Stages 1 and 2 are light sleep whereas 3 and 4 are deeper, more restful states of sleep with lower brain metabolic rates and more cortical synchronization. Stage 5 or REM sleep is actually a very active stage of sleep with very high metabolic requirements rivaling that or exceeding wakefulness and its thought that REM sleep may be necessary for memory consolidation. The trick is that the architecture of sleep is broken up into various stages and you do not really approach the most intense REM periods until after you have progressed back and forth through some of the other stages including a more brief period of REM sleep earlier in the night. So, the most intense REM period is late into sleep and often early in the morning. If you short change yourself of the other sleep periods, you reduce the quantity and quality of your REM sleep period.
I wonder how the airlines are going to keep inappropriate video (i.e. porn or even just movies like "Snakes on a Plane" or "Alive") from appearing on the seat-back displays."
That's funny as I was wondering the same thing when Apple's press announcement appeared in my inbox. Of course the issue of other movies like those you mentioned should not even be an issue as it is content that the user has loaded on their own iPods (and you should not be looking at your neighbors content anyhow). As to porn and other questionable content, this really comes down to etiquette and if there are those on the flight that will display such content where others may see it (like kids), they are likely pissing people off for other reasons. All told, this is a great idea and I'd rather have to deal with other people's movies than having to listen to them talk on their cell phones (Please! FAA, Nnnoooooooo!) or worse. Flying anywhere is becoming more and more onerous these days and at the very least, having airlines support ways to charge laptops or iPods during long flights would be a huge benefit as Empower outlets are pretty hard to find on many flights in coach and sometimes even in first or business class.
I've had to deal with enough problems flying anyhow again and again and again and anything that will keep people quiet and minding their own business is a good thing.
It's illegal to plan crimes.
Say that to yourself again, really slow this time. What about writing novels, movie scripts, or what about those individuals in police agencies and federal agencies that think about planning crimes to prevent them. What you are saying is that it is illegal to think about carrying a crime out. There should be nothing illegal about that. However, if you go about carrying those plans out, then it becomes a crime. Or at least that is how it should be.
Say for just the fun of it have some blueprints for making bombs then on the same table have a postcard with the parliment buildings on it.
If you really believe this, then you are part of the problem.
The cops don't just go searching random computers hoping they'll stumble on some terrorist then they can arrest them.
But these are just the sorts of things the US and UK governments have been moving towards. Datamining through any available database available to them to search for incriminating evidence and calculate likelihood indices for incrimination.
I am hoping that there were other lines of evidence against this woman as this is what we need to be very careful about here in the US. The concept of a thought crime is not new and any society that starts prosecuting individuals for books they may possess or for studying things is becoming a a darkness right out of an Orwellian nightmare.
Hell, as kids we had copies of the Anarchists cookbook and manuals that the US government printed for crafting insurgencies and survival that had all sorts of directions for creating improvised munitions and such. It makes me wonder if we would have been suspects back then. Of course the early 80's were a different time when a couple of 14-15 year olds could carry a rifle out in the Texas countryside to shoot cans without even a second glance. Now, we have bastardized Republicans (Neocons) who are out to create National IDs, document any passage in and out of the country, search our personal information including credit files and library files, and some even propose to index all of the information on personal computers in an effort to screen out "enemy combatants" not to mention revoking Constitutional rights such as Habeus Corpus. It's a strange time.
A couple of points humeister,
1) The ganglion cells are the projection cells of the retina. If you assume that the visual cortex is already mapped, and the ganglion cells survive, the mapping remains intact.
2) Which brings up problem #2 What everybody needs to realize is that if you wait until the photoreceptors degenerate, it is too late in that downstream changes are taking place in the bipolar cells, amacrine cells, horiztonal cells, Muller cells and ganglion cells. The retina remodels and alters the existing circuitry to corrupt any subsequent inputs and any intervention biological or bionic is going to have to take this into account. We showed this back in 2001 and 2002 at the ARVO vision conferences and published it formally starting in 2003. I am not criticizing the work of this particular study however, in that it is a tour de force. All I am saying is that there is much more to the biology than simply finding new inputs to replace the degenerate ones.
As to the mice, human eyes are hard to get, particularly the diseased eyes. Also we can engineer mouse eyes to have the same biochemical/genetic/proteomic defect as in the human instances and get much more science done with mice.
If you were shooting film on a SLR before, didn't you already have the tripod, backpack, filters (maybe the wrong size, maybe not), and books, and maybe the flash as well?
I had to sell off all my 35mm gear for tuition money when I was an undergraduate. And even though I had one of the first digital cameras made for consumers, the Apple Quicktake 100, its not been until the last couple of years though that I've been getting back into photography seriously.
Those film SLR lenses will also serve well (after factoring in the +60% or so magnification factor) on the DSLR, though you are going to need specialized DSLR wide-angle lenses.
There are a number of other technological advances such as Image Stabilization that make the new lenses worthwhile. Also ultrasonic auto-focus really helps with the fast motion stuff.
Personally I would like to get a digital back for my old manual-focus Canon A-1
I loved the A-1. Mine went with me to a lot of places including the cargoholds of aircraft, the desert, mountain peaks etc...etc...etc... It was an awesome camera and I was sorry to have to sell it.
You can shoot RAW you know...... That way you get the image without all of the processing that goes on in the camera leaving you free to experiment.
I can't agree with this article more. Since moving from film to digital SLRs my photography has really grown because shooting digital blows away all of the risk and gives you much more creative freedom when it comes to experimental exposures such as low light photography, action photography and more. I find myself taking far more pictures and experimenting more with digital and then simply throwing away the bad experiments than I did with film because of the costs associated with film. The other thing about Digital SLRs is that in addition to the higher quality optics, the actual imaging sensors on the CCD are physically larger leading to much higher quality images than are possible with point and shoots that may possess higher megapixel counts, but have smaller physical sensor sizes.
If you are going to make the move to a digital SLR, I also highly recommend the Canon 20d/30d cameras as a good system to begin exploring a variety of different photographic styles from outdoors to action to macro and still life. You really cannot go wrong with some of the other manufacturers like Nikon with their D70/D80 and Sony, but Canon, like Apple tends to build the entire widget from the glass to the camera to the imaging chips. Additionally, I tend to like the color representation from the Canon Digic imaging chips. If you are planning on shooting less outdoor work or in less rigorous environments, I'd suggest introducing yourself to digital SLRs with the lower end Rebel (or Nikon D50) series which is still pretty nice hardware, just not as ruggedly built. (I've also heard rumors that Nikon is going to introduce a new lower cost D40).
For a sample of some of the images possible with the Canon 20d/30d, almost all of the images on my blog that were taken by me have been captured with the Canon 20d and associated hardware. I also have a Canon hardware list at the top of my FAQ here that may be helpful for those that are interested in some of the lens options.
The negatives that the author of the linked article writes about are also true. Hauling around all of your camera gear to various spots on the globe does get a bit harder with more (and heavier) gear. I just got back from a trip to Argentina at the foot of the Andes (pics to be posted tomorrow morning) and it does take a bit more effort to pack everything you need to take with you. The gear addiction and associated costs do not stop at the camera body and lenses either. You will find yourself buying tripods, monopods, backpacks, filters, flashes, books, more books etc...etc...etc....
What is wrong with paper ballots?!!!??!? Canada seems to be able to handle paper balloting followed up with results within 24 hours, so what is the deal with all of the money and risk associated with trusting our politics to hackable solutions?
I was out this morning at 7:00am voting and predictably, two of the ten voting machines (20% folks!) at our location would not take their programs...... Take their programs! And how many times do we have to be shown how easy it is to hack the system? When I left after voting, we were still looking at machines that were not working.
Again, paper ballots folks. It's a simple, cost effective solution that is easier to secure than electronic voting. I have yet to see a valid statistical study that demonstrates that electronic voting is inherently more reliable/statistically valid than paper ballot voting. How much is this move towards electronic voting costing the US taxpayer? Was this a favor for political contributors? I think that the evidence is pretty strong for it which might give even more credibility to the FBI in their new focus on corruption in Washington DC politics.
Does the visual cortex also 'remodel' when being deprived of input?
:-)
It is an interesting question that nobody has yet (unbelievably) addressed adequately. My guess is that we are going to see cortical and subcortical remodeling in any system that has been deafferented much like we see from the learning and memory literature or the epilepsy literature. Wanna job doing some of the research?
If so, would it 'remodel' back after a period of time once input has been restored?
Again, surprisingly, given all of the money that has flowed into bionic retinal implants, this is work that needs to be performed.
Perhaps an alternative, although understandably more complex alternative would be to interfere with the optic nerve directly.
There are some approaches that people are working on to couple bionic implants directly into the optic nerve, but they are going to run into problems with selective stimulation of appropriate channels given that we only consciously "see" with a subset of our ganglion cells that contribute axons to the optic nerve.
Because of this I doubt very much that an adult with regular vision can have their vision "enhanced" at all.
Ah, but if we introduce all of the "enhancements", such as additional spectral filters or channels into the existing channels as biological additions (or bionic implants), then we can piggyback enhancements on existing circuitry.
It turns out that for things such as hitting a fastball etc..., the visual system actually performs predictive processing and helps you to kinesthetically program a response based upon a prediction of where an object, such as a baseball will be at the appropriate time. You don't actually "see" the ball along its entire path.
Well, we (the community of vision scientists) are working on vision rescue strategies and one of the goals at the Moran Eye Center is to assemble the best possible team we can to begin coherently working on solutions that will help resolve vision loss through development, disease and trauma. The problem with vision rescue approaches in the past little while is that they have not truly examined at a fundamental level some of the basic science involved in the neural processing of the retina. But now that we are aware of some of the complexities, we are now able to refine many of the approaches (biological and bionic) to construct better interventions.
Actually, we only consciously "see" with about 20% of our ganglion cells. The other 80% project to other areas of cortex and subcortical regions that mediate percepts of movement and circadian timing among other things. The other thing that you should remember is that it is not compression of information per se, so much as it is filtering and pre-processing of information in a parallel fashion prior to transmission to other CNS regions.
While this is very cool research (and we are looking at hiring one of the graduate students involved in this project as a post-doc when he graduates), they are still not addressing many of the fundamental issues related to retinal degeneration such as retinal remodeling that we have addressed for the past couple of years. The problem is that the retina (like any other neural system) will remodel its connections when the inputs have been lost. In retinal degenerations, when the photoreceptors degenerate, you lose your inputs and any new input you put in, either bionic implant or biological transplant will have to deal with corrupted circuits.