Perhaps not creepy but, by itself, not foolproof. I have a tendency toward Bradycardia (slow heart-rate). My normal is in the 50's and at times will slow even down to the mid-40's while fully alert and functional. I don't know whether the system in mind incudes other input in order to determine impairment - the article doesn't really say - but heart-rate alone would be far from reliable.
To be universally useful, I think that a "fatigue detector" needs more than just one parameter.
Either way, what is most interesting, Nielsen says, is that the results show that mating with other groups was an important source of beneficial genes in human evolution. “Modern humans didn’t wait for new mutations to adapt to a new environment,” he says. “They could pick up adaptive traits by interbreeding.”
I have a bit of issue with the notion of the source as "important". Useful perhaps. Maybe even "potentially important". The thing is that we don't know whether the alleged interbreeding produced many other variations that were undesirable - with high mortality rates so that they failed to survive multiple generations. It could even be that most of the offspring were still-born or sterile.
That doesn't take away from it being an interesting conjecture to explain an unusual variation.
True on both. The idea has been around long enough to know the more obvious limitations. You need warm surface waters and access to deep cold water. Back in the 70's the only US sites viewed as suitable for land based OTEC was Hawaii and the territory of Puerto Rico. There were designs for grazing platforms that could float in tropical deep water but the problem was always how to get the energy from the platform to where it is needed. Biofouling is a tremendous problem as well. I think that it is a pretty sound concept but like most others, there is a lot of engineering needed to make it all work.
I don't disagree with that; however, the public education failure compounds the issue. When the employer has a large pool to pick from, he tends to "hedge his bet" by choosing from the pool that are more likely to show up and work. It is also true that employers often take a short term perspective. If the economy does an upturn, their now-experienced employees will tend to look for a better job and the employer will have to start over. I get the feeling that is taken for granted anyway for an large number of jobs.
Unfortunately, it is also a reflection on the ease with which a lot of people make it through high-school without ever having to learn much in the way of responsibility. For example, when you work, your employer actually expects that you will show up on Monday morning and be somewhat functional. The college degree is no guarantee to the prospective employer but it usually has required more self-discipline than high-school.
Wrong direction. Approaching would show a blue shift. Red shift means it is already passed and going away. In practical terms, one might not be able to tell the difference.
Part of the reason is that several of the very earliest attempts at the scam, using standard postage, did originate from Nigeria. In the 1970's, I received a couple of them. (I worked in the petroleum industry at the time.) They were hand written and both were postage stamped from Nigeria. Over time, they have modernized their approach only slightly but still follow the basic outline. Now, it hardly matters where the email originated; they only need a story that can be made to sound credible to a few recepients in order to make it worthwhile.
In general, the sounds are not all that pleasant to live with. The make a lot more noise that most people would think until you actually get close to one or, even more, close to a whole wind farm of them. Most (but not all) people who complain about the noise of nearby trains or airports are at the disatvantage that the tracks or airport was there first. In this case, if you already have a home and someone else wants to put this unpleasant noisemaker near by, it seems that you might have some right to complain.
The reference to 10-cm is (probably unintentionally) misleading. I was thrown off at first until I went to the gismag article. The 10-cm is the length of the projectile. In the picture, the bore appears more on the order of.50 cal. This is why so many replies have referred to it as a dart.
That a commercial entity requests that Twitter not automatically feed all of their news articles to the world hardly seems like an affront to free speech. You or I may not care for that policy but I must admit, the NYT isn't making much money off of me either way. The news reporting business in general is struggling to find a way to stay afloat and the cry that they owe it to us gratis doesn't help.
You make a valid point. Evolution is a term applied to the observation although I find it (validly) applied to more than just the fossil record. However, in common use, it does carry connotations beyond being an observation. And even as an observation, it is still subject to misinterpretation and misunderstandings just like all of our observations of the world (or universe) around us. I will admit that I know of some situations for which I would describe it by saying that it evolved.
The teaching about Darwin could be about careful research and science but I haven't seen it done that way. It tends to be superficial but I suppose on the other hand, that most of our "teaching" even at the undergraduate university level is the same way. One has to work pretty hard to find the questions that were never answered and some of the observations that could never be reconciled.
I will still maintain that the concept of "proof" is popularly misunderstood as if science reaches immutable closed descriptions. The whole wonder, at least in physics, is the surprises that keep showing up in our set of observations.
I only partly qualify. What I resist is the notion that theories (which are explanations or descriptions) are proved. I find the statement that "evolution is proven" to be a statement of religious dogma rather than a conclusion of science.
The world, the universe, behaves in a certain fashion. Mankind, as observers, watches and tries to come up with a description of what happens. In physics (my background), that description often uses mathematics as its language. The theory is not reality, it is only a description of reality. That means that our descriptions are just conjectures as to the behavior. The description is useful where it works, and as long as it works. When it doesn't work, we have missed something whether in our observation or in our (mathematical) description. We may find a way to make it better - or we may find a different description that does a better job, at least in the places that the first one doesn't work well.
Evolution as a description has holes in it; places where there are contradictions or massive gaps. Those are weaknesses in the "theory". There are attempts to re-describe some of the problem areas and ongoing questions on some of the observations that seem contradictory. All of that is well and good. But I do not find the conjecture that "perhaps not everything that we see evolved - perhaps there is something (an intelligent being) outside of the range of our observable space that put things in a certain way in the space that we can see" to be every bit as valid as a conjecture as evolution.
There really is a lot more to the challenge of making use of such a thing. The satellites that are stationary with respect to an observer on earth are in a very sought for orbit over the equator. If the used satellite is not already in a geostationary orbit, the new owner is unlikely to be allowed to get it there. So I see that there may be lots of hurdles including the hardware expense to distribute the satellite signal to the intended audience. However, I applaud the notion and wish them success.
A non geostationary orbit satellite is much more likely to be affordable but establishing continuous contact is then much more difficult.
Simulation allows our learning errors to not be at the expense of real lives. Don't underestimate the breadth of what these simulators can do.
I first saw simulated bodies for trauma-training at I/ITSEC in 1999. At the time they were expensive (probably still are), somewhat limited compared to those described in the article, and tied to additional hardware. Nevertheless they could be programmed with a wide variety of responses. The eyes could dilate as needed, the pulse could be detected in the normal ways and be programmed to respond, injected drugs were detected by the system and the physiological response programmed, body panels could be substituted to simulate cuts and burns, etc. The programing could include an adverse reaction to a drug, for which the trauma team had to detect the response, provide response to counter the reaction, and provide an alternate to treat the original problem.
There were two companies providing these simulators for demonstration and one point the program included a panel discussion. I remember a lady from the audience, dressed in military officer clothing, stand and ask whether the programming range included the sometimes quite-different physiological response of the female body. In response, one of the panel members explained "I don't know about the other one, but ours has been pregnant twice already."
These modern ones appear much more portable and powerful. I have no doubt that trauma teams that have the opportunity to be trained using them are much more prepared for the real experiences that they encounter.
I wonder how this book's information compares or differs to Alton Brown's books, or "How to Read a French Fry", or "What Einstein Told his Cook", all of which deal with Kitchen science. Are you (the reviewer, jsuda) familiar with them?
Exactly as it should be. Physicists are first, observers. They see something (and like it best when there is some sort of measure that they can put to it). Then next, they are curious; what could this mean?, how could this happen?, what could cause this? Sometimes simultaneous with that, sometimes after, comes; is this real?, are there other causes for this observation or set of observations?
Meanwhile, the reporting takes an avenue of speculation; sometimes one possible explanation of several gets the most attention because it is the easiest to express verbally, and most of us reading the reports take it as if true, or at least likely, if there is any credibility to it in our minds.
But the community overall keeps looking to see if another (better?) explanation comes to mind or if there is some test that can be examined to strengthen or weaken any such conclusion. Over time, the explanation with the most credibility to the scientific community becomes the one generally accepted.
The copyright lobby would be more likely want an additional fee added to the purchase of every pen based on the amount of text you could potentially copy before the ink ran out. This fee would be provided to book publishers to offset the losses they might encounter should you decide to copy portions of the book instead of purchasing an additional copy of the book.
I find that we are also thinking within a limited concept of what is meant by SSD. Perhaps within the present technologies, he is correct, but we keep hearing of other methods of storing data being explored by some university or laboratory and who knows when one of those might pan out and become the basis of non-rotating storage in the future.
Several of the storage accomplishments of today were outside of what we could conceive as few as five years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps not creepy but, by itself, not foolproof. I have a tendency toward Bradycardia (slow heart-rate). My normal is in the 50's and at times will slow even down to the mid-40's while fully alert and functional. I don't know whether the system in mind incudes other input in order to determine impairment - the article doesn't really say - but heart-rate alone would be far from reliable. To be universally useful, I think that a "fatigue detector" needs more than just one parameter.
Either way, what is most interesting, Nielsen says, is that the results show that mating with other groups was an important source of beneficial genes in human evolution. “Modern humans didn’t wait for new mutations to adapt to a new environment,” he says. “They could pick up adaptive traits by interbreeding.”
I have a bit of issue with the notion of the source as "important". Useful perhaps. Maybe even "potentially important". The thing is that we don't know whether the alleged interbreeding produced many other variations that were undesirable - with high mortality rates so that they failed to survive multiple generations. It could even be that most of the offspring were still-born or sterile. That doesn't take away from it being an interesting conjecture to explain an unusual variation.
I agree. My wood is mostly a mixture of blackjack and post oak and will split straight only about a third of the time.
True on both. The idea has been around long enough to know the more obvious limitations. You need warm surface waters and access to deep cold water. Back in the 70's the only US sites viewed as suitable for land based OTEC was Hawaii and the territory of Puerto Rico. There were designs for grazing platforms that could float in tropical deep water but the problem was always how to get the energy from the platform to where it is needed. Biofouling is a tremendous problem as well. I think that it is a pretty sound concept but like most others, there is a lot of engineering needed to make it all work.
I don't disagree with that; however, the public education failure compounds the issue. When the employer has a large pool to pick from, he tends to "hedge his bet" by choosing from the pool that are more likely to show up and work. It is also true that employers often take a short term perspective. If the economy does an upturn, their now-experienced employees will tend to look for a better job and the employer will have to start over. I get the feeling that is taken for granted anyway for an large number of jobs.
Unfortunately, it is also a reflection on the ease with which a lot of people make it through high-school without ever having to learn much in the way of responsibility. For example, when you work, your employer actually expects that you will show up on Monday morning and be somewhat functional. The college degree is no guarantee to the prospective employer but it usually has required more self-discipline than high-school.
Wrong direction. Approaching would show a blue shift. Red shift means it is already passed and going away. In practical terms, one might not be able to tell the difference.
Part of the reason is that several of the very earliest attempts at the scam, using standard postage, did originate from Nigeria. In the 1970's, I received a couple of them. (I worked in the petroleum industry at the time.) They were hand written and both were postage stamped from Nigeria. Over time, they have modernized their approach only slightly but still follow the basic outline. Now, it hardly matters where the email originated; they only need a story that can be made to sound credible to a few recepients in order to make it worthwhile.
In general, the sounds are not all that pleasant to live with. The make a lot more noise that most people would think until you actually get close to one or, even more, close to a whole wind farm of them. Most (but not all) people who complain about the noise of nearby trains or airports are at the disatvantage that the tracks or airport was there first. In this case, if you already have a home and someone else wants to put this unpleasant noisemaker near by, it seems that you might have some right to complain.
The reference to 10-cm is (probably unintentionally) misleading. I was thrown off at first until I went to the gismag article. The 10-cm is the length of the projectile. In the picture, the bore appears more on the order of .50 cal. This is why so many replies have referred to it as a dart.
http://www.xkcd.com/912/
That a commercial entity requests that Twitter not automatically feed all of their news articles to the world hardly seems like an affront to free speech. You or I may not care for that policy but I must admit, the NYT isn't making much money off of me either way. The news reporting business in general is struggling to find a way to stay afloat and the cry that they owe it to us gratis doesn't help.
You make a valid point. Evolution is a term applied to the observation although I find it (validly) applied to more than just the fossil record. However, in common use, it does carry connotations beyond being an observation. And even as an observation, it is still subject to misinterpretation and misunderstandings just like all of our observations of the world (or universe) around us. I will admit that I know of some situations for which I would describe it by saying that it evolved. The teaching about Darwin could be about careful research and science but I haven't seen it done that way. It tends to be superficial but I suppose on the other hand, that most of our "teaching" even at the undergraduate university level is the same way. One has to work pretty hard to find the questions that were never answered and some of the observations that could never be reconciled. I will still maintain that the concept of "proof" is popularly misunderstood as if science reaches immutable closed descriptions. The whole wonder, at least in physics, is the surprises that keep showing up in our set of observations.
I only partly qualify. What I resist is the notion that theories (which are explanations or descriptions) are proved. I find the statement that "evolution is proven" to be a statement of religious dogma rather than a conclusion of science. The world, the universe, behaves in a certain fashion. Mankind, as observers, watches and tries to come up with a description of what happens. In physics (my background), that description often uses mathematics as its language. The theory is not reality, it is only a description of reality. That means that our descriptions are just conjectures as to the behavior. The description is useful where it works, and as long as it works. When it doesn't work, we have missed something whether in our observation or in our (mathematical) description. We may find a way to make it better - or we may find a different description that does a better job, at least in the places that the first one doesn't work well. Evolution as a description has holes in it; places where there are contradictions or massive gaps. Those are weaknesses in the "theory". There are attempts to re-describe some of the problem areas and ongoing questions on some of the observations that seem contradictory. All of that is well and good. But I do not find the conjecture that "perhaps not everything that we see evolved - perhaps there is something (an intelligent being) outside of the range of our observable space that put things in a certain way in the space that we can see" to be every bit as valid as a conjecture as evolution.
There really is a lot more to the challenge of making use of such a thing. The satellites that are stationary with respect to an observer on earth are in a very sought for orbit over the equator. If the used satellite is not already in a geostationary orbit, the new owner is unlikely to be allowed to get it there. So I see that there may be lots of hurdles including the hardware expense to distribute the satellite signal to the intended audience. However, I applaud the notion and wish them success. A non geostationary orbit satellite is much more likely to be affordable but establishing continuous contact is then much more difficult.
Simulation allows our learning errors to not be at the expense of real lives. Don't underestimate the breadth of what these simulators can do. I first saw simulated bodies for trauma-training at I/ITSEC in 1999. At the time they were expensive (probably still are), somewhat limited compared to those described in the article, and tied to additional hardware. Nevertheless they could be programmed with a wide variety of responses. The eyes could dilate as needed, the pulse could be detected in the normal ways and be programmed to respond, injected drugs were detected by the system and the physiological response programmed, body panels could be substituted to simulate cuts and burns, etc. The programing could include an adverse reaction to a drug, for which the trauma team had to detect the response, provide response to counter the reaction, and provide an alternate to treat the original problem. There were two companies providing these simulators for demonstration and one point the program included a panel discussion. I remember a lady from the audience, dressed in military officer clothing, stand and ask whether the programming range included the sometimes quite-different physiological response of the female body. In response, one of the panel members explained "I don't know about the other one, but ours has been pregnant twice already." These modern ones appear much more portable and powerful. I have no doubt that trauma teams that have the opportunity to be trained using them are much more prepared for the real experiences that they encounter.
I wonder how this book's information compares or differs to Alton Brown's books, or "How to Read a French Fry", or "What Einstein Told his Cook", all of which deal with Kitchen science. Are you (the reviewer, jsuda) familiar with them?
Exactly as it should be. Physicists are first, observers. They see something (and like it best when there is some sort of measure that they can put to it). Then next, they are curious; what could this mean?, how could this happen?, what could cause this? Sometimes simultaneous with that, sometimes after, comes; is this real?, are there other causes for this observation or set of observations? Meanwhile, the reporting takes an avenue of speculation; sometimes one possible explanation of several gets the most attention because it is the easiest to express verbally, and most of us reading the reports take it as if true, or at least likely, if there is any credibility to it in our minds. But the community overall keeps looking to see if another (better?) explanation comes to mind or if there is some test that can be examined to strengthen or weaken any such conclusion. Over time, the explanation with the most credibility to the scientific community becomes the one generally accepted.
The copyright lobby would be more likely want an additional fee added to the purchase of every pen based on the amount of text you could potentially copy before the ink ran out. This fee would be provided to book publishers to offset the losses they might encounter should you decide to copy portions of the book instead of purchasing an additional copy of the book.
I find that we are also thinking within a limited concept of what is meant by SSD. Perhaps within the present technologies, he is correct, but we keep hearing of other methods of storing data being explored by some university or laboratory and who knows when one of those might pan out and become the basis of non-rotating storage in the future. Several of the storage accomplishments of today were outside of what we could conceive as few as five years ago.