Indeed. I have actually moved away from the Palm to using my iPod, with the address book, iCal and notes. It is not everything I would like ideally, but the issues of moving files back and forth from work has been greatly simplified as there are gigabytes available in addition to being able to use it as a hard drive for everything (including a boot partition if needed). I had really wished that Palm would integrate more support for standards such as text files and such that would be easily transferable from system to system, but they never really got around to improving the handheld devices much beyond color screens and faster CPUs. What I really want in a palm/small tablet device (don't care who makes it, but Apple would probably do it best) that would sync all files and settings with my desktop or notebook computers, easily transfer files that are cross platform compatible and standards based for collaborative purposes, allow easy note taking via an external keyboard (there are some nice ones available for Palm devices now), be able to present Keynote or Powerpoint presentations with the embedded movies and animations I require for our science, have good handwriting recognition and integration with graphics (like the Newton 120s, 130s, and 2100s).
Essentially what would be ideal is an updated Apple Newton (which still by the way amazes me with how far ahead they were). I used a Newton 120 up until OS X came out and it is still by far the most capable palm/tablet device I have ever used. Modern implementation is lacking however and while it is capable of being used wirelessly over 802.11, can sync to desktops and do many of the things I would like, the efforts required to support these functionalities are becoming more and more kludgy and harder to keep up the workflow. The iPaqs are interesting, but still not quite there for all of my needs, so I ask you, how hard is it to re-engineer functionality that Apple invented over a decade ago? Granted, the software would need a complete redo (perhaps as a light OS X), but the general concepts are all worked out for a lightweight ultraportable computer.
Even science has a problem of touting the best data and "leaving the devil in the details." Research is driven by money just as much as industry. If you're not producing good results, you won't get funding.
And if you are caught falsifying data then you will never get funding again. At least from traditional sources this is true and you will have major problems finding a position in academia. There have been a few cases where folks even spent time in jail for scientific fraud. On the whole, most scientists are reputable.
I've also witnessed our product go into test labs (usually for the purposes of running a series of tests for a 'bake off' in a trade publication). Not uncommon is the attempt to 'tune' the configuration of the device under test to perform in the best light (not unlike tuning your car to pass emissions tests). I have seen it go as far as exploiting weaknesses in the test that, if the test operator discovered, would be considered bad faith.
Oh, you work for Intel then.:-) Seriously though, this has been the whole problem with "benchmarks" like SPEC and others that ultimately results in pissing matches between manufacturers saying "my product is faster than yours" which for 99% of the users out there means nothing. In fact, even for that 1% of us where it does make a difference, specific optimizations to ones code or algorithms typically will get you more performance. So, what it really comes down to is how productive is the product + environment + task that you are assigning to the platform.
To answer your question of false advertising, I would say keep to the standard that most of us scientists do: Specifically, peer review and ensure that your results can be duplicated by said peers. If results cannot be duplicated, then it is false advertising.
Play with the numbers all you want. Then, go print a document at 100 dpi vs 600 or 1200 dpi, and tell me they look the same.
Did you actually read what I wrote? Read it again and think about it and you might find that what you are currently thinking is supported by my statement.
If they do, go make an appointment with your eye doctor.
This is very much like a conversation I just had in another discussion group. The issue is that you have certain optical properties of your eye. Namely starting with the density of photoreceptors which are about 10^5 per square mm. You then have to deal with an imaging surface (the retina) at 2.5 cm from the lens revealing an object of 1mm at 25 cm which gets projected to a size of about 0.1mm onto the back of the retina. If one assumes approximately 320 photoreceptors/mm (averaged over the eye), given a perfect lens the ideal resolution would be about 30 pixels/mm at 25cm away from your eye! which gives you an approximate optimal resolution distinguishability of 10 microns (important for tying flies). Given that most folks do not have perfect lenses, we are really looking at about a 4 micron resolution that can be distinguished monochromatically. So, if one backs away from the object in question resolution becomes much less important for overall perception and the huge Apple Cinema display three feet in front of me right now does a pretty good job at rendering a close approximation of reality at 100dpi. In fact, an 8MP image from my Canon camera on the Cinema Display is almost indistinguishable from a picture of the valley below taken from my office window.
[George W. Bush]: "All them scientists don't know nuthin. Ain't that right Andy boy?" [Andrew Card]: "Yessir, that is absolutely correct sir. Don't know nuthin." [George W. Bush]: "Ain't that right Scott towell?" [Scott McClellan]: "Right in every way sir!" [George W. Bush]: "Ain't that right Colonoscopy?" [Colin Powell]: "I gotta get out of here."
Yup, and what does that say about priorities? If your priorities are football and the taxbase, then you are right on. If your priorities are academics, then you are somewhat off.
Yes, and look how much goes into the football programs. Even university coaches are making obscene amounts of money. Coach Myer going to the Florida Gators just got a $14 Million seven year contract.
Shoot, when I was a film major in my first year of college, I was stunned to find out that seniors were spending 12-15 thousand dollars on their final film projects. Recently, I had the privilege to see some of the recent films of some current film students and I was really quite pleased to see what was possible with even iMovie, a DV camera and an iMac. Beyond that, for about 66% of what we would have spent on our senior projects just a few years ago, you can practically have an entire G5 editing studio.
Robots this cool and bizarre could only come from Japan. Normally, I am a fan of form following function, but am reminded in these robots of everything cool about design from a Japanese ethic. Their principal application of providing the handicapped with greater mobility is one that we are familiar with in our lab. One of our fellows is in a wheelchair (polio) and sometimes accessibility is still a problem for him, particularly obtaining things that are above his reach. Certainly the Segway folks have worked in this area before, but their form absolutely followed function and had very little of the design sensibility of Toyotas products. I also can find almost nothing on their site about products for the handicapped anymore. What happened? Has Segway abandoned all their accessibility products in favor of the HT?
Also, I imagine that since the US Army has an overriding interest in enhancing personal mobility, that they too will be paying Toyota a visit.
Our experience with operating system maintenance costs has been that Windows systems typically are the most expensive in terms of total required hours. Linux boxes initially are difficult to set up, but are more difficult for novice users necessitating frequent support, Windows boxes are easy for novices to use and recently have become much more stable, but have malware issues. Solaris and IRIX boxes are somewhere inbetween in terms of ease of use but require "privileged" knowledge in how to deal with certain issues, leaving us with OS X.......
OS X/Macintosh has proven to be the absolute most productive environment for us to date, least susceptible to malware/hacking has the lowest support costs and is why we have been in the process of replacing most machines with OS X boxes.
This has actually been the historical precedent. The CIA was originally intended to be tuned to outside intelligence with specific laws and guidelines established to enforce this, while the FBI was intended for domestic investigations. However, recent law (including PATRIOT and PATRIOT II) has eroded those protections that US citizens enjoyed.
That said, given that the Internet is truly global (and plans to expand beyond global), in defense of this work (not that I support it) nobody can effectively monitor the Internet without monitoring domestic IPs.
Oh I don't know about that. It really depends upon which area you are going into. When I went to grad school (Ph.D. in neurophysiology), I had a tuition waver and I was making about $30k/year. (I think the NIH average is now around $22k) Some students in computer science make even more. On the whole however, grad students are typically underpaid, and you do work hard, but my experience has been that after I graduated, things got busier even still, because in addition to writing and doing benchwork, you have to add in travel for invited talks (provided anybody thinks your work is worth a damn), managing students, teaching, trying to find a full tenure paid position etc... because as a research fellow, while technically faculty, you still don't rank.....:-(
All of that said, it is still one of the coolest jobs in the world to get paid to learn and discover new things. That I would not trade for any MBA position sitting at a desk managing other folks who are actually getting something tangible accomplished.
What you need to realize is that there has been a movement in the last few years to roll back the scientific method in favor of a new dark age much like what happened to the United States back during prohibition. Then, like now, there was a large religiously based movement toward a definition of "morality" in opposition to science and progress. Back then, a significant portion of the American people were told what and how to believe and they lined up like sheep to follow a few who promulgated their beliefs onto those who wished to be led by the nose. All you have to do is look at what is being proposed as science in this Senate Committee, in the hearings that led up to the current Iraqi conflict, and many other areas of law like the proposals to roll back evolution education in favor of "intelligent design" (which sounds an awful like the marketing geniuses that came up with "compassionate conservative").
There is a most distressing lack of scientific knowledge amongst our law makers and it is showing in everything from decisions on technology issues to the often fraudulent supplement industry, to censorship and others.
I am not supporting pornography as it is most decidedly not victimless, however, these folks on Capitol Hill are clueless about science, how science is performed and how one acts on scientific hypothesis and testimony like this only serves to weaken positions and make a mockery of the political process.
Erotoxins.......oh jeez. You have got to be kidding me. This is right up there with covering up the breasts on statues of Lady Liberty. Only perverts are this obsessed with issues like this and are more disturbing to me than people obsessed with pornography, perhaps simply because they are obsessed with what others are doing.
These folks need to read some of the basic science behind addiction and understand that anything can be addictive. Yes, some things are more addictive because of their pharmacology or biological implications, but to say pornography is more addictive that crack cocaine is a farce.
Some of the conclusions seem a bit wacky, however, there is no evidence in this documentation that the recommendations are accepted or that this guy's conclusions are accepted.
But this is an advocation for 8 Million dollars of taxpayer funded money. A lot of good science can be done with 8 Million dollars.
don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with paying somebody to do some background research on potentially "out there" research areas, and figure out what application they might have to the military.
Is it worth 8 Million dollars? Do you know how much education could be done for 8 Million dollars? Do you know how much science could be done for 8 Million dollars? Hell, do you know how much 8 million dollars would be if compounded with interest over 20 years? That would certainly help pay down our deficit and make US science more competitive.
I don't know the specifics of the Chinese studies he mentions, but I know that most of the psychokinetic stuff from the 70s has been thoroughly discredited when repeated under controlled conditions.
If it is not testable, then by definition it is not science. This is why real science is peer reviewed and documented. If your peers cannot duplicate your results or have access to your data, then there very well may be some suspect work going on.
It is a bit disturbing is that this same fellow is making recommendations on military funding of mainstream scientific propositions, like quantum cryptography and computation, entanglement research, and thereotical string theory stuff.
What is disturbing is that this person is confabulating real science with bogus ideas. I call shenanigans! Seriously though, this is how lots of crackpots justify their products and ideas by making them sound plausible through the lens of real science. To the untrained, this could appear plausible. But like shark cartilage and crystal healing (placebo effects aside) much of this stuff is complete bunk.
Was the study a waste of $25,000 (what the Yahoo News article says the company was paid for this work)?
I'll field that question.........The answer is yes.
My criticism has more to do with the style of writing which borrows commonly used "catch words" that seem to be popular with marketing folks these days. Specifically I was referring to his use of "paradigm shifts" twice within two serial sentences. I am surprised we did not see the invocation of "world class" among other gems of marketspeak which I am loathe to include in this post.
Initially I thought this may have some relevance to encryption as there is a phenomenon of quantum teleportation that appears to have some scientific validity and would have significance in military and strategic planning and communication. However, when I actually started reading the article, at first I could not stop laughing until I reached this part:
From the linked.pdf:An experimental program similar in fashion to the Remote Viewing program should be funded at $900,000 - 1,000,000 per year in parallel with a theoretical program funded at $500,000 per year for an initial five-year duration.
What!!!!!???? I am thunderstruck that this recommendation could be made. 1.5 Million dollars for essentially a program that the CIA back in the 1970's decided was full of crap and decided to abandon. By the way, the CIA's program was ill conceived and full of it back then too amounting to a huge waste of taxpayer dollars.
Other conclusions in the document are: "We will need a physics theory of consciousness and psychotronics, along with more experimental data, in order to test the hypothesis in Section 5.1.1 and discover the physical mechanisms that lay behind the psychotronic manipulation of matter." What can I say? The status of basic science education among those who make funding decisions within certain areas of government are pitiful.
Even worse is this statement: "This phenomenon could generate a dramatic revolution in technology, which would result from a dramatic paradigm shift in science. Anomalies are the key to all paradigm shifts! " which has got to be the work of someone with a marketing background and absolutely no self respect in the scientific community. A document like this would be laughed out of the NIH or any other respectable scientific funding agency, but the scary thing is funding like this has always been able to go forward under the guise of military funding in crisis situations where fear abounds. Combine that with no understanding of science and this is what you get. If any of my students came up with something like this, I think I would cry.
Hey, if the Air Force wants out of the box thinkers, I can come up with all sorts of biomemetic and bioencryption stuff for 1.5 Million that would be based in scientific fact with reliable peer review science behind it.
Microscopy and electron microscopy are also used to image the surface of the hard drive platters. Patterns of data can be reconstructed this way to determine the nature of deleted data believe it or not.
So, one of the important things I hope this book demonstrates (not read the book, yet) is that for proper scientific or forensic analysis, you find the right/relevant talent or subject matter expert to examine your data. For instance, some years ago I was stunned to find out that the FBI had been shipping hard drives from Apple Macintosh systems to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for investigation. Apparently, the RCMP had established themselves as the subject matter experts and were the right folks to send data to from Apple systems. Of course this brings up all sorts of International issues, but that is only one example.
My point is simply that forensic agencies should not always attempt to do it all themselves. Rather it would be appropriate to build a network of subject matter experts and then approach the problem by having the best "eyes" examine the problem rather than always presuming your local agency/facility has all of the tools.
Not necessarily. I would argue that it is well developed for its needs and environment and may have some advantage in terms of design, but the metabolic load in a mammalian eye is much higher than that of an octopus. For instance, in addition to the vascular choroid at the back of the eye, we also have a vascular network at the front of the retina on the ganglion cell side.
As to why we have a blind spot, we developed a need for high acuity vision that the octopus (despite their well developed visual system) does not have in combination with very high metabolic needs. In order to obtain this acuity combined with high metabolic turnover, we have developed the inverted system which necessitates a place to run all of the "wiring" out of the retina which gives us the blind spot.
wouldn't it be more accurate to say that humans have four channels of vision
You are somewhat correct. Given the general audience here on Slashdot, I "tuned" my comments a bit to make them more clear discussion. Photopic and mesopic are words commonly used in vision science, but are not words the general populace is familiar with. As for your point about humans seeing with four channels, this is somewhat complicated by the fact that cones "piggy back" on the existing rod based system so one does not have true segregation of signals. Mammals evolved cones later than rods and integrated them into the existing rod based pathways.
Also, isn't it somewhat misleading to describe the cone channels as red, green, and blue channels when in fact the peaks of their sensitivity curves are closer to what we would call yellow-green, green-yellow, and blue, IIRC? Or is referring to them as red-green-blue channels standard usage in the field in spite of that?
Most folks in the vision community, even the psychophysics folks use red, green and blue for their nomenclature, but everybody does know about the spectral properties of the pigments. As an interesting aside, the pigment in rods is actually blue-green.
I've heard rumors that a small number of human females may be tetrachromats -- i.e., actually possess 4 distinct cone variants -- but I'm not aware of any peer-reviewed studies of this supposed phenomenon. Do any exist to your knowledge?
I have seen a few posters at ARVO, and I believe there might have been a paper in Nature some time ago talking about it, but I am not really familiar with that literature.
Finally, regarding retinal regeneration, the current issue of New Scientist discusses some successful early experiments in which implantation of retinal material from aborted fetuses helped restore vision in adult humans.
Much of the vision restoration literature has been lacking in definitive proof of vision restoration. It turns out that the problem of evaluation of vision is harder than it seems. That said, I believe there are some good potential biological approaches to rescuing vision, possibly involving stem cells, but I have my own ideas about that and am not talking just yet.....:-)
All mammalian retinas are "inverted" as well as many other organisms. This seems backwards from a developmental perspective, but when you realize the anatomy and physiology of the retina is designed around a high metabolic load system, it makes more sense. The retina has one of the highest metabolic requirements/mass in the body and all that metabolic machinery requires some mechanism to supply nutrients and remove wastes. This is the function of the RPE and vascular choroid. So, you make the retina essentially transparent and flip the bits with the highest metabolic requirements over to face the tissues that would be very difficult to make transparent and you have a reasonable solution.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. I have actually moved away from the Palm to using my iPod, with the address book, iCal and notes. It is not everything I would like ideally, but the issues of moving files back and forth from work has been greatly simplified as there are gigabytes available in addition to being able to use it as a hard drive for everything (including a boot partition if needed). I had really wished that Palm would integrate more support for standards such as text files and such that would be easily transferable from system to system, but they never really got around to improving the handheld devices much beyond color screens and faster CPUs. What I really want in a palm/small tablet device (don't care who makes it, but Apple would probably do it best) that would sync all files and settings with my desktop or notebook computers, easily transfer files that are cross platform compatible and standards based for collaborative purposes, allow easy note taking via an external keyboard (there are some nice ones available for Palm devices now), be able to present Keynote or Powerpoint presentations with the embedded movies and animations I require for our science, have good handwriting recognition and integration with graphics (like the Newton 120s, 130s, and 2100s).
Essentially what would be ideal is an updated Apple Newton (which still by the way amazes me with how far ahead they were). I used a Newton 120 up until OS X came out and it is still by far the most capable palm/tablet device I have ever used. Modern implementation is lacking however and while it is capable of being used wirelessly over 802.11, can sync to desktops and do many of the things I would like, the efforts required to support these functionalities are becoming more and more kludgy and harder to keep up the workflow. The iPaqs are interesting, but still not quite there for all of my needs, so I ask you, how hard is it to re-engineer functionality that Apple invented over a decade ago? Granted, the software would need a complete redo (perhaps as a light OS X), but the general concepts are all worked out for a lightweight ultraportable computer.
Even science has a problem of touting the best data and "leaving the devil in the details." Research is driven by money just as much as industry. If you're not producing good results, you won't get funding.
And if you are caught falsifying data then you will never get funding again. At least from traditional sources this is true and you will have major problems finding a position in academia. There have been a few cases where folks even spent time in jail for scientific fraud. On the whole, most scientists are reputable.
I've also witnessed our product go into test labs (usually for the purposes of running a series of tests for a 'bake off' in a trade publication). Not uncommon is the attempt to 'tune' the configuration of the device under test to perform in the best light (not unlike tuning your car to pass emissions tests). I have seen it go as far as exploiting weaknesses in the test that, if the test operator discovered, would be considered bad faith.
:-) Seriously though, this has been the whole problem with "benchmarks" like SPEC and others that ultimately results in pissing matches between manufacturers saying "my product is faster than yours" which for 99% of the users out there means nothing. In fact, even for that 1% of us where it does make a difference, specific optimizations to ones code or algorithms typically will get you more performance. So, what it really comes down to is how productive is the product + environment + task that you are assigning to the platform.
Oh, you work for Intel then.
To answer your question of false advertising, I would say keep to the standard that most of us scientists do: Specifically, peer review and ensure that your results can be duplicated by said peers. If results cannot be duplicated, then it is false advertising.
Play with the numbers all you want. Then, go print a document at 100 dpi vs 600 or 1200 dpi, and tell me they look the same.
:-)
Did you actually read what I wrote? Read it again and think about it and you might find that what you are currently thinking is supported by my statement.
If they do, go make an appointment with your eye doctor.
Ummmmm. That would be me.
This is very much like a conversation I just had in another discussion group. The issue is that you have certain optical properties of your eye. Namely starting with the density of photoreceptors which are about 10^5 per square mm. You then have to deal with an imaging surface (the retina) at 2.5 cm from the lens revealing an object of 1mm at 25 cm which gets projected to a size of about 0.1mm onto the back of the retina. If one assumes approximately 320 photoreceptors/mm (averaged over the eye), given a perfect lens the ideal resolution would be about 30 pixels/mm at 25cm away from your eye! which gives you an approximate optimal resolution distinguishability of 10 microns (important for tying flies). Given that most folks do not have perfect lenses, we are really looking at about a 4 micron resolution that can be distinguished monochromatically. So, if one backs away from the object in question resolution becomes much less important for overall perception and the huge Apple Cinema display three feet in front of me right now does a pretty good job at rendering a close approximation of reality at 100dpi. In fact, an 8MP image from my Canon camera on the Cinema Display is almost indistinguishable from a picture of the valley below taken from my office window.
[George W. Bush]: "All them scientists don't know nuthin. Ain't that right Andy boy?"
[Andrew Card]: "Yessir, that is absolutely correct sir. Don't know nuthin."
[George W. Bush]: "Ain't that right Scott towell?"
[Scott McClellan]: "Right in every way sir!"
[George W. Bush]: "Ain't that right Colonoscopy?"
[Colin Powell]: "I gotta get out of here."
I have never seen any numbers to support/refute this claim. Do you know of any sources?
Yup, and what does that say about priorities? If your priorities are football and the taxbase, then you are right on. If your priorities are academics, then you are somewhat off.
Yes, and look how much goes into the football programs. Even university coaches are making obscene amounts of money. Coach Myer going to the Florida Gators just got a $14 Million seven year contract.
Shoot, when I was a film major in my first year of college, I was stunned to find out that seniors were spending 12-15 thousand dollars on their final film projects. Recently, I had the privilege to see some of the recent films of some current film students and I was really quite pleased to see what was possible with even iMovie, a DV camera and an iMac. Beyond that, for about 66% of what we would have spent on our senior projects just a few years ago, you can practically have an entire G5 editing studio.
Robots this cool and bizarre could only come from Japan. Normally, I am a fan of form following function, but am reminded in these robots of everything cool about design from a Japanese ethic. Their principal application of providing the handicapped with greater mobility is one that we are familiar with in our lab. One of our fellows is in a wheelchair (polio) and sometimes accessibility is still a problem for him, particularly obtaining things that are above his reach. Certainly the Segway folks have worked in this area before, but their form absolutely followed function and had very little of the design sensibility of Toyotas products. I also can find almost nothing on their site about products for the handicapped anymore. What happened? Has Segway abandoned all their accessibility products in favor of the HT?
Also, I imagine that since the US Army has an overriding interest in enhancing personal mobility, that they too will be paying Toyota a visit.
Our experience with operating system maintenance costs has been that Windows systems typically are the most expensive in terms of total required hours. Linux boxes initially are difficult to set up, but are more difficult for novice users necessitating frequent support, Windows boxes are easy for novices to use and recently have become much more stable, but have malware issues. Solaris and IRIX boxes are somewhere inbetween in terms of ease of use but require "privileged" knowledge in how to deal with certain issues, leaving us with OS X.......
OS X/Macintosh has proven to be the absolute most productive environment for us to date, least susceptible to malware/hacking has the lowest support costs and is why we have been in the process of replacing most machines with OS X boxes.
This has actually been the historical precedent. The CIA was originally intended to be tuned to outside intelligence with specific laws and guidelines established to enforce this, while the FBI was intended for domestic investigations. However, recent law (including PATRIOT and PATRIOT II) has eroded those protections that US citizens enjoyed.
That said, given that the Internet is truly global (and plans to expand beyond global), in defense of this work (not that I support it) nobody can effectively monitor the Internet without monitoring domestic IPs.
Oh I don't know about that. It really depends upon which area you are going into. When I went to grad school (Ph.D. in neurophysiology), I had a tuition waver and I was making about $30k/year. (I think the NIH average is now around $22k) Some students in computer science make even more. On the whole however, grad students are typically underpaid, and you do work hard, but my experience has been that after I graduated, things got busier even still, because in addition to writing and doing benchwork, you have to add in travel for invited talks (provided anybody thinks your work is worth a damn), managing students, teaching, trying to find a full tenure paid position etc... because as a research fellow, while technically faculty, you still don't rank..... :-(
All of that said, it is still one of the coolest jobs in the world to get paid to learn and discover new things. That I would not trade for any MBA position sitting at a desk managing other folks who are actually getting something tangible accomplished.
What you need to realize is that there has been a movement in the last few years to roll back the scientific method in favor of a new dark age much like what happened to the United States back during prohibition. Then, like now, there was a large religiously based movement toward a definition of "morality" in opposition to science and progress. Back then, a significant portion of the American people were told what and how to believe and they lined up like sheep to follow a few who promulgated their beliefs onto those who wished to be led by the nose. All you have to do is look at what is being proposed as science in this Senate Committee, in the hearings that led up to the current Iraqi conflict, and many other areas of law like the proposals to roll back evolution education in favor of "intelligent design" (which sounds an awful like the marketing geniuses that came up with "compassionate conservative").
There is a most distressing lack of scientific knowledge amongst our law makers and it is showing in everything from decisions on technology issues to the often fraudulent supplement industry, to censorship and others.
I am not supporting pornography as it is most decidedly not victimless, however, these folks on Capitol Hill are clueless about science, how science is performed and how one acts on scientific hypothesis and testimony like this only serves to weaken positions and make a mockery of the political process.
Erotoxins.......oh jeez. You have got to be kidding me. This is right up there with covering up the breasts on statues of Lady Liberty. Only perverts are this obsessed with issues like this and are more disturbing to me than people obsessed with pornography, perhaps simply because they are obsessed with what others are doing.
These folks need to read some of the basic science behind addiction and understand that anything can be addictive. Yes, some things are more addictive because of their pharmacology or biological implications, but to say pornography is more addictive that crack cocaine is a farce.
Some of the conclusions seem a bit wacky, however, there is no evidence in this documentation that the recommendations are accepted or that this guy's conclusions are accepted.
.
But this is an advocation for 8 Million dollars of taxpayer funded money. A lot of good science can be done with 8 Million dollars.
don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with paying somebody to do some background research on potentially "out there" research areas, and figure out what application they might have to the military.
Is it worth 8 Million dollars? Do you know how much education could be done for 8 Million dollars? Do you know how much science could be done for 8 Million dollars? Hell, do you know how much 8 million dollars would be if compounded with interest over 20 years? That would certainly help pay down our deficit and make US science more competitive.
I don't know the specifics of the Chinese studies he mentions, but I know that most of the psychokinetic stuff from the 70s has been thoroughly discredited when repeated under controlled conditions.
If it is not testable, then by definition it is not science. This is why real science is peer reviewed and documented. If your peers cannot duplicate your results or have access to your data, then there very well may be some suspect work going on.
It is a bit disturbing is that this same fellow is making recommendations on military funding of mainstream scientific propositions, like quantum cryptography and computation, entanglement research, and thereotical string theory stuff.
What is disturbing is that this person is confabulating real science with bogus ideas. I call shenanigans! Seriously though, this is how lots of crackpots justify their products and ideas by making them sound plausible through the lens of real science. To the untrained, this could appear plausible. But like shark cartilage and crystal healing (placebo effects aside) much of this stuff is complete bunk.
Was the study a waste of $25,000 (what the Yahoo News article says the company was paid for this work)?
I'll field that question.........The answer is yes
My criticism has more to do with the style of writing which borrows commonly used "catch words" that seem to be popular with marketing folks these days. Specifically I was referring to his use of "paradigm shifts" twice within two serial sentences. I am surprised we did not see the invocation of "world class" among other gems of marketspeak which I am loathe to include in this post.
Maj. Ed Dames' astral body may come kick you in the nuts.
:-)
Then he would have to worry about my corporal body kicking back.
Initially I thought this may have some relevance to encryption as there is a phenomenon of quantum teleportation that appears to have some scientific validity and would have significance in military and strategic planning and communication. However, when I actually started reading the article, at first I could not stop laughing until I reached this part:
.pdf :An experimental program similar in fashion to the Remote Viewing program should be funded at $900,000 - 1,000,000 per year in parallel with a theoretical program funded at $500,000 per year for an initial five-year duration.
From the linked
What!!!!!???? I am thunderstruck that this recommendation could be made. 1.5 Million dollars for essentially a program that the CIA back in the 1970's decided was full of crap and decided to abandon. By the way, the CIA's program was ill conceived and full of it back then too amounting to a huge waste of taxpayer dollars.
Other conclusions in the document are: "We will need a physics theory of consciousness and psychotronics, along with more experimental data, in order to test the hypothesis in Section 5.1.1 and discover the physical mechanisms that lay behind the psychotronic manipulation of matter." What can I say? The status of basic science education among those who make funding decisions within certain areas of government are pitiful.
Even worse is this statement: "This phenomenon could generate a dramatic revolution in technology, which would result from a dramatic paradigm shift in science. Anomalies are the key to all paradigm shifts! " which has got to be the work of someone with a marketing background and absolutely no self respect in the scientific community. A document like this would be laughed out of the NIH or any other respectable scientific funding agency, but the scary thing is funding like this has always been able to go forward under the guise of military funding in crisis situations where fear abounds. Combine that with no understanding of science and this is what you get. If any of my students came up with something like this, I think I would cry.
Hey, if the Air Force wants out of the box thinkers, I can come up with all sorts of biomemetic and bioencryption stuff for 1.5 Million that would be based in scientific fact with reliable peer review science behind it.
These tools are not for cathing people but for convicting them once they are caught.
:-)
I do not think you mean what you say........
Microscopy and electron microscopy are also used to image the surface of the hard drive platters. Patterns of data can be reconstructed this way to determine the nature of deleted data believe it or not.
So, one of the important things I hope this book demonstrates (not read the book, yet) is that for proper scientific or forensic analysis, you find the right/relevant talent or subject matter expert to examine your data. For instance, some years ago I was stunned to find out that the FBI had been shipping hard drives from Apple Macintosh systems to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for investigation. Apparently, the RCMP had established themselves as the subject matter experts and were the right folks to send data to from Apple systems. Of course this brings up all sorts of International issues, but that is only one example.
My point is simply that forensic agencies should not always attempt to do it all themselves. Rather it would be appropriate to build a network of subject matter experts and then approach the problem by having the best "eyes" examine the problem rather than always presuming your local agency/facility has all of the tools.
One exmaple of better design is the octopus eye
Not necessarily. I would argue that it is well developed for its needs and environment and may have some advantage in terms of design, but the metabolic load in a mammalian eye is much higher than that of an octopus. For instance, in addition to the vascular choroid at the back of the eye, we also have a vascular network at the front of the retina on the ganglion cell side.
As to why we have a blind spot, we developed a need for high acuity vision that the octopus (despite their well developed visual system) does not have in combination with very high metabolic needs. In order to obtain this acuity combined with high metabolic turnover, we have developed the inverted system which necessitates a place to run all of the "wiring" out of the retina which gives us the blind spot.
wouldn't it be more accurate to say that humans have four channels of vision
:-)
You are somewhat correct. Given the general audience here on Slashdot, I "tuned" my comments a bit to make them more clear discussion. Photopic and mesopic are words commonly used in vision science, but are not words the general populace is familiar with. As for your point about humans seeing with four channels, this is somewhat complicated by the fact that cones "piggy back" on the existing rod based system so one does not have true segregation of signals. Mammals evolved cones later than rods and integrated them into the existing rod based pathways.
Also, isn't it somewhat misleading to describe the cone channels as red, green, and blue channels when in fact the peaks of their sensitivity curves are closer to what we would call yellow-green, green-yellow, and blue, IIRC? Or is referring to them as red-green-blue channels standard usage in the field in spite of that?
Most folks in the vision community, even the psychophysics folks use red, green and blue for their nomenclature, but everybody does know about the spectral properties of the pigments. As an interesting aside, the pigment in rods is actually blue-green.
I've heard rumors that a small number of human females may be tetrachromats -- i.e., actually possess 4 distinct cone variants -- but I'm not aware of any peer-reviewed studies of this supposed phenomenon. Do any exist to your knowledge?
I have seen a few posters at ARVO, and I believe there might have been a paper in Nature some time ago talking about it, but I am not really familiar with that literature.
Finally, regarding retinal regeneration, the current issue of New Scientist discusses some successful early experiments in which implantation of retinal material from aborted fetuses helped restore vision in adult humans.
Much of the vision restoration literature has been lacking in definitive proof of vision restoration. It turns out that the problem of evaluation of vision is harder than it seems. That said, I believe there are some good potential biological approaches to rescuing vision, possibly involving stem cells, but I have my own ideas about that and am not talking just yet.....
All mammalian retinas are "inverted" as well as many other organisms. This seems backwards from a developmental perspective, but when you realize the anatomy and physiology of the retina is designed around a high metabolic load system, it makes more sense. The retina has one of the highest metabolic requirements/mass in the body and all that metabolic machinery requires some mechanism to supply nutrients and remove wastes. This is the function of the RPE and vascular choroid. So, you make the retina essentially transparent and flip the bits with the highest metabolic requirements over to face the tissues that would be very difficult to make transparent and you have a reasonable solution.