I've seen neuroscience articles (and I will admit I don't know how solid they are) that indicate that via MRI studies, people make decisions before they are conscious of this, and appear to post hoc build a rationale to agree with what their subconscious decided. So, you may actually have an easier time at getting the AI to spit out its parameters than a human.
That is a very questionable interpretation of the experiments. Is there actual data showing that the "post hoc rationale" is not actually retrieving the information used to make the decision "subconsciously"? Or this just a guess that it does not?
137 variables within an algorithm has been running untouched for twenty years now. Had this study not taken place, it would have gone untouched for another twenty years, regardless of AI advancement, because everyone would be sitting back just assuming that it's doing a "good" job.
Even setting aside advances in machine learning, the assumption that the data sample used to train the algorithm would be equally valid 20 years later is stunningly foolish.
Any such tool should regularly be updated and revalidated to establish its performance.
I wonder how well this program was ever vetted and validated. Like the Liebold voting machines sold at about this same time that were proprietary pieces of security-hole ridden garbage, I suspect this product was sold simply through connections and the naive assumption that using a computer for something is automatically "better".
Our knowledge of plague pandemics is largely drawn from observations made since the germ theory of disease gained ascendancy in the 1880s, which coincided with the world-wide Third Plague Pandemic. There are multiple potential routes of plague bacillus transmission, so the processes observed during the recent pandemic (1855 to 1959) were used to interpret the records we had from the Second Plague Pandemic (the Black Death, from the 1340s to the late 1700s).
We have not seen a plague pandemic like the one that affected Late Medieval Europe, the conditions of living are radically different from the time and so this provides a model that matches the historical data we have.
In other recent historical plague news, population genetic analysis of modern day plague survivals, have recently provided confirming evidence that the Plague of Justinian (541–542), which was possibly even more catastrophic than the Black Death, was also due to the plague bacillus Yersinia pestis. The world-wide distribution of genetic variations is best explained by two gigantic events of adaptive radiation -- about 700 years ago and 1500 years ago.
DId you read the article? It discusses this interesting anomaly.
Yet the Dutch were not the first to Asia. That honor belongs to the Portuguese, who are responsible for the island of Taiwan’s colonial European name, Formosa. And the Portuguese traded not through Fujian but Macao, where chá is used. That’s why, on the map above, Portugal is a pink dot in a sea of blue.
There are is a very active field of "voting theory" research about how voting systems can be improved, but little of it has to do with computers per se, though they can make implementation of the post-vote processing more convenient. That is to say, it is not the "computer" that is improving anything. Various forms of preferential voting have a lot to recommend them, along with variations like "instant run-off".
In general it is a good idea to identify actual problems (e.g. widely unpopular candidates winning due multiple candidates splitting the vote; spoilers being run to siphon of votes from specific candidates, etc.) and propose actual fixes that are subjected to formal analyses, large scale simulations and such to validate that they are improvements.
The suggestions of the OP mostly sound like "let's just try something different" rather than carefully considered improvement proposals.
Not for coast-to-coast travel (only about half-way), but my favorite airplane to fly on in recent years is the small Embraers, only three seats across the entire aircraft body. Everyone gets a window, or aisle, or both. Quick to board and deplane.
I guess you don't know about having to sign in to vote, and that the vote registrar has your registration, with signature, on file. This method, using signatures to verify identity has worked reliably for hundreds of years.
I am sure you can point to evidence of this scenario happening at some detectable level somewhere?
Odd how some people are so keen on fixing a problem that can't be show to even exist in reality (as opposed to the fantasy you posted).
The very first computer I ever bought was Macintosh XL -- a Lisa that was loaded with a (lousy) emulation of the Macintosh.
Before buying it I had a long list of questions (more than a dozen) that I took to the Apple store and posited to the top tech guy there - since I had lots of concerns about whether this was functionally equivalent to the Macintosh.
I bought it after getting his answers, every one of which was wrong.
It was a flakey system that crashed constantly doing ordinary tasks. I might have kept it if they had released the Lisa software and I could run it as a Lisa -- at that time they had stopped selling the Lisa so denying the ability to run the OS on the Mac XL did not advantage Apple in any way.
Instead I sold it to a guy who had a start-up turning Mac XL/Lisas into engineering workstations so that I could buy a real Macintosh (512). I still have that and it boots, but is not valuable as a collector's item since I went through a couple of rounds of board and case mods to upgrade it.
Not coming back down "slightly". This is the start of a dramatic population decline, essentially the 20th Century population rise in reverse, bringing their population back down to 1900 levels in 2100. A little after 2100 the population of Japan with be only 1/3 of its peak of 2005: 40 million instead of 120 million.
To change this the fertility rate will need to increase. It is currently 1.46, it needs to climb to 2.1 or so, almost 50% higher, to stabilize the population. Even if they can develop policies to turn this around, these things change slowly (so far it is not changing at all). They are committed to the first 50 years of the decline, at least.
On the bright side, meeting carbon emission reduction goals will be much easier!
If people are being taken to destinations chosen by a sponsor can they keep criminals from arranging to have victims taken to an arranged soon-to-be crime scene? Want to rob, kidnap, rape or murder someone? Arrange a free ride sponsorship that makes a "special stop" somewhere remote.
Sort of like Craig's List, but without the target knowing they will be "meeting someone".
Not exactly getting something for nothing. The energy to turn those blades have to come from somewhere.
It will come from slowing down the air that passes by the blades, while its not a quantum butterfly effect, there will still be some sort of effect caused from pulling energy out of the air.
One turbine won't cause anything measurable, 1000 probably not as well. 1,000,000 you might see something. The effect might be something like a mountain, and cause a down draft convection effect on the downwind side of a turbine farm. Who knows maybe we can use large wind farms for both energy and weather control.
There are a lot of people throwing out FUD about wind power (the poor birds!), seeking to discredit it for whatever reason. You may have noticed the absence of attacks backed by any sort of factual numerical reasoning asserting that wind power is harmful because it pulls too much energy out of atmospheric circulation system. The reason for this is that the contention is an absurd one when you look at the situation at all.
Wind farms slightly increase drag on the flow of air (wind) which occurs with land or water everywhere all the time, but they get useful work out of it. What happens when we pull kinetic energy out of air at the surface layer where the turbines are? It gets replenished from winds at a slightly higher altitude. This limiting vertical transfer rate is known and amounts to about 1.5 W per square meter for extremely large wind farms, or about less than 0.2% the rate of energy delivery by sunlight during the day. Wind farms must be far larger than solar panel farms to produce power, but don't require covering the entire farm with a manufactured material. Towers widely space suffice.
What you say is true, in general. But the anti-cholesterol effect of high dose niacin treatment is independent from its use as a vitamin. It is a vitamin that acts as a (safe, OTC) cholesterol treatment drug in high doses.
Prescription niacin does have a different formulation from over-the-counter niacin and more importantly, you are guaranteed it will have exactly the amount of niacin it says on the label.
Looking up the composition in manufacturers labelling, that is not true in this case. This is a perfectly ordinary 500 mg of niacin in a perfectly conventional tableting composition (croscarmellose sodium, hydrogenated soybean oil, magnesium stearate, microcrystalline cellulose). There is absolutely nothing special about this.
And 500 mg of niacin is not some special calibrated dose, nor is the body sensitive to the exact amount of niacin ingested. The dosing for chlolesterol treatment is basically to take it in large excess (1000-3000 mg/day), the body excretes the excess.
And I googled "vitamin fraud" and found no indication that there were any problems with vitamins from name brand manufacturers (off-brand generics are of course problematic).
So none of your reasons are applicable in this case. Indeed this looks like an invitation to separate corrupt MDs, profiting from kick-backs, from real doctors who care about their patients. All a real doctor need do is recommend a name-brand niacin tablet as a replacement. Even at the pre-jack-up price of $33 a bottle they should have done that. The special name on the bottle is worth little or nothing/
It is as "non-existent" as Earth's atmosphere at 35 km, where some fixed wing aircraft have flown, and 40 km below where meteors typically burn-up.
To deposit comet material on Mars you would probably put the comet in a low circular orbit where drag becomes significant, and start breaking off small chunks to de-orbit and mostly vaporize in this "nonexistent" atmosphere. This should be an easily controllable process. If you blast material off the trailing side you could give the main body small boosts, while immediately de-orbiting the material ejected.
This is a ridiculous idea. There is no way to transfer water to Mars from comets or asteroids that don't involve a massive transfer of kinetic energy at the same time as the comets arrive at the bottom of the Mars gravity well.
Let us do a little arithmetic here.
Say we want to add 1 kg of volatiles per square centimeter of Mars' surface. This is the equivalent of an atmosphere as thick as Earth's, but in this case would be split between gases and water. So, 10,000 kg per square meter. The orbital velocity of Mars is 2.1 km/sec, which means that 10,000 kg mass starts with 2.2 x 10^10 J. Insolation at Earth's orbit is 1367 W/m^2, so this is equivalent to 16.1 million seconds of sunlight hitting Earth's atmosphere at zero obliquity, or about 6 months of sunlight on Earth.
Unless your whole life was the ship, it doesn't make sense.
If (when) we progress to space-based civilization then living in space will be the whole life for many. Of necessity real space settlements far from the Sun must be self-sustaining (distances are too great to order "spare parts"), if they accumulate the fuel needed to boost to say 1% c and then slow down, they will have enough energy to run their society for millions of years also.
These will not be "generation ships" so much as they will be space civilizations in motion.
The exhaust velocity of D+He-3 fusion is about 0.08 c. Using this fuel the extra mass needed to boost and stop a colony will be about 25% of the colony mass. There is a lot of He-3 in the atmospheres of the gas giants.
A colony might vote to go to another star where there is a planet on which we detect life so that it can be studied. There is only so much you can do to understand alien organisms from light years away, regardless of how great your telescope is.
It is estimated that three interstellar objects enter [and leave] the Solar System everyday. There will be plenty of opportunities in the future, as we refine our techniques.
Without a qualification for size and how close it comes to the Sun talking about how often they enter the Solar System is meaningless (i.e. how large and how close determines rate). According to this FAQ from NASA about this:
Yes, scientists expect to find more interstellar objects, especially when next-generation asteroid search programs come online. They estimate that an interstellar object similar to 1I/2017 U1 passes inside the orbit of the Earth several times a year, but up until now they have been too faint and hard to detect. Recent upgrades to survey telescopes such as Pan-STARRS increase the chances of finding these objects, and those odds will increase even more when next-generation survey telescopes begin operations.
So, "several times a year" for something this large and this close or closer to the Sun (close approach is important in making detections)
However there is something that does not quite add up. They also state that scientists expect most of these objects will be comets. Comets approaching this close should be relatively easy to detect, even with older systems/techniques. Not sure what the story is here.
It will be interesting to see someone propose funding such a probe, to be ready for launch if (when) another interstellar object is detected. Can they get traction with anyone with money?
If NASA, the ESO and China won't spring for it, maybe some group of billionaires? Musk, Bezos, Gates, Buffet, are you guys in? Maybe if Stephen Hawking asks?
Before assuming you'll be screwed over by the tax plan, I suggest using the nytimes' calculator to see what your tax changes will be. As it stands, virtually no poor or middle class citizens will see a tax increase. https://www.nytimes.com/intera... (I myself will see a few thousand dollar decrease in taxes)
As has been very widely reported the tax bill is front loaded with expiring sweeteners for the Middle Class that expire after some years, while the tax cuts for corporations and the rich do not ever expire.
This is more than a bit like "introductory interest rates" on loans or credit cards that jump up after a period of time.
Christ has revoked all previous Jewish laws, and left only one: Love one another.
Jewish books have no place in Christianity.
Odd for a man who was an observant Jew, spend his entire life as an observant Jew, and died as one. In fact one of his most famous acts, which likely contributed to his trial and death was making a disruptive commotion about corruption of orthodox Jewish religious practice in the Temple during Passover.
Slashdot Mirror
Because this is Sony, who are the all time champs at pointless bullshit proprietary components to lock you into their shit.
I thought that was Apple as the lock-in champs, but I am willing to be corrected.
I've seen neuroscience articles (and I will admit I don't know how solid they are) that indicate that via MRI studies, people make decisions before they are conscious of this, and appear to post hoc build a rationale to agree with what their subconscious decided. So, you may actually have an easier time at getting the AI to spit out its parameters than a human.
That is a very questionable interpretation of the experiments. Is there actual data showing that the "post hoc rationale" is not actually retrieving the information used to make the decision "subconsciously"? Or this just a guess that it does not?
137 variables within an algorithm has been running untouched for twenty years now. Had this study not taken place, it would have gone untouched for another twenty years, regardless of AI advancement, because everyone would be sitting back just assuming that it's doing a "good" job.
Even setting aside advances in machine learning, the assumption that the data sample used to train the algorithm would be equally valid 20 years later is stunningly foolish.
Any such tool should regularly be updated and revalidated to establish its performance.
I wonder how well this program was ever vetted and validated. Like the Liebold voting machines sold at about this same time that were proprietary pieces of security-hole ridden garbage, I suspect this product was sold simply through connections and the naive assumption that using a computer for something is automatically "better".
Our knowledge of plague pandemics is largely drawn from observations made since the germ theory of disease gained ascendancy in the 1880s, which coincided with the world-wide Third Plague Pandemic. There are multiple potential routes of plague bacillus transmission, so the processes observed during the recent pandemic (1855 to 1959) were used to interpret the records we had from the Second Plague Pandemic (the Black Death, from the 1340s to the late 1700s).
We have not seen a plague pandemic like the one that affected Late Medieval Europe, the conditions of living are radically different from the time and so this provides a model that matches the historical data we have.
In other recent historical plague news, population genetic analysis of modern day plague survivals, have recently provided confirming evidence that the Plague of Justinian (541–542), which was possibly even more catastrophic than the Black Death, was also due to the plague bacillus Yersinia pestis. The world-wide distribution of genetic variations is best explained by two gigantic events of adaptive radiation -- about 700 years ago and 1500 years ago.
DId you read the article? It discusses this interesting anomaly.
Yet the Dutch were not the first to Asia. That honor belongs to the Portuguese, who are responsible for the island of Taiwan’s colonial European name, Formosa. And the Portuguese traded not through Fujian but Macao, where chá is used. That’s why, on the map above, Portugal is a pink dot in a sea of blue.
I thought this was fascinating! My favorite article for this year thus far.
There are is a very active field of "voting theory" research about how voting systems can be improved, but little of it has to do with computers per se, though they can make implementation of the post-vote processing more convenient. That is to say, it is not the "computer" that is improving anything. Various forms of preferential voting have a lot to recommend them, along with variations like "instant run-off".
In general it is a good idea to identify actual problems (e.g. widely unpopular candidates winning due multiple candidates splitting the vote; spoilers being run to siphon of votes from specific candidates, etc.) and propose actual fixes that are subjected to formal analyses, large scale simulations and such to validate that they are improvements.
The suggestions of the OP mostly sound like "let's just try something different" rather than carefully considered improvement proposals.
Non-reparability is a feature not a bug. It is broken by design, at the direction of management at the highest levels.
Not for coast-to-coast travel (only about half-way), but my favorite airplane to fly on in recent years is the small Embraers, only three seats across the entire aircraft body. Everyone gets a window, or aisle, or both. Quick to board and deplane.
I guess you don't know about having to sign in to vote, and that the vote registrar has your registration, with signature, on file. This method, using signatures to verify identity has worked reliably for hundreds of years.
I am sure you can point to evidence of this scenario happening at some detectable level somewhere?
Odd how some people are so keen on fixing a problem that can't be show to even exist in reality (as opposed to the fantasy you posted).
Stay off my lawn!
The very first computer I ever bought was Macintosh XL -- a Lisa that was loaded with a (lousy) emulation of the Macintosh.
Before buying it I had a long list of questions (more than a dozen) that I took to the Apple store and posited to the top tech guy there - since I had lots of concerns about whether this was functionally equivalent to the Macintosh.
I bought it after getting his answers, every one of which was wrong.
It was a flakey system that crashed constantly doing ordinary tasks. I might have kept it if they had released the Lisa software and I could run it as a Lisa -- at that time they had stopped selling the Lisa so denying the ability to run the OS on the Mac XL did not advantage Apple in any way.
Instead I sold it to a guy who had a start-up turning Mac XL/Lisas into engineering workstations so that I could buy a real Macintosh (512). I still have that and it boots, but is not valuable as a collector's item since I went through a couple of rounds of board and case mods to upgrade it.
Not coming back down "slightly". This is the start of a dramatic population decline, essentially the 20th Century population rise in reverse, bringing their population back down to 1900 levels in 2100. A little after 2100 the population of Japan with be only 1/3 of its peak of 2005: 40 million instead of 120 million.
To change this the fertility rate will need to increase. It is currently 1.46, it needs to climb to 2.1 or so, almost 50% higher, to stabilize the population. Even if they can develop policies to turn this around, these things change slowly (so far it is not changing at all). They are committed to the first 50 years of the decline, at least.
On the bright side, meeting carbon emission reduction goals will be much easier!
If people are being taken to destinations chosen by a sponsor can they keep criminals from arranging to have victims taken to an arranged soon-to-be crime scene? Want to rob, kidnap, rape or murder someone? Arrange a free ride sponsorship that makes a "special stop" somewhere remote.
Sort of like Craig's List, but without the target knowing they will be "meeting someone".
Not exactly getting something for nothing. The energy to turn those blades have to come from somewhere. It will come from slowing down the air that passes by the blades, while its not a quantum butterfly effect, there will still be some sort of effect caused from pulling energy out of the air. One turbine won't cause anything measurable, 1000 probably not as well. 1,000,000 you might see something. The effect might be something like a mountain, and cause a down draft convection effect on the downwind side of a turbine farm. Who knows maybe we can use large wind farms for both energy and weather control.
There are a lot of people throwing out FUD about wind power (the poor birds!), seeking to discredit it for whatever reason. You may have noticed the absence of attacks backed by any sort of factual numerical reasoning asserting that wind power is harmful because it pulls too much energy out of atmospheric circulation system. The reason for this is that the contention is an absurd one when you look at the situation at all.
Wind farms slightly increase drag on the flow of air (wind) which occurs with land or water everywhere all the time, but they get useful work out of it. What happens when we pull kinetic energy out of air at the surface layer where the turbines are? It gets replenished from winds at a slightly higher altitude. This limiting vertical transfer rate is known and amounts to about 1.5 W per square meter for extremely large wind farms, or about less than 0.2% the rate of energy delivery by sunlight during the day. Wind farms must be far larger than solar panel farms to produce power, but don't require covering the entire farm with a manufactured material. Towers widely space suffice.
What you say is true, in general. But the anti-cholesterol effect of high dose niacin treatment is independent from its use as a vitamin. It is a vitamin that acts as a (safe, OTC) cholesterol treatment drug in high doses.
Prescription niacin does have a different formulation from over-the-counter niacin and more importantly, you are guaranteed it will have exactly the amount of niacin it says on the label.
Looking up the composition in manufacturers labelling, that is not true in this case. This is a perfectly ordinary 500 mg of niacin in a perfectly conventional tableting composition (croscarmellose sodium, hydrogenated soybean oil, magnesium stearate, microcrystalline cellulose). There is absolutely nothing special about this.
And 500 mg of niacin is not some special calibrated dose, nor is the body sensitive to the exact amount of niacin ingested. The dosing for chlolesterol treatment is basically to take it in large excess (1000-3000 mg/day), the body excretes the excess.
And I googled "vitamin fraud" and found no indication that there were any problems with vitamins from name brand manufacturers (off-brand generics are of course problematic).
So none of your reasons are applicable in this case. Indeed this looks like an invitation to separate corrupt MDs, profiting from kick-backs, from real doctors who care about their patients. All a real doctor need do is recommend a name-brand niacin tablet as a replacement. Even at the pre-jack-up price of $33 a bottle they should have done that. The special name on the bottle is worth little or nothing/
It is as "non-existent" as Earth's atmosphere at 35 km, where some fixed wing aircraft have flown, and 40 km below where meteors typically burn-up.
To deposit comet material on Mars you would probably put the comet in a low circular orbit where drag becomes significant, and start breaking off small chunks to de-orbit and mostly vaporize in this "nonexistent" atmosphere. This should be an easily controllable process. If you blast material off the trailing side you could give the main body small boosts, while immediately de-orbiting the material ejected.
This is a ridiculous idea. There is no way to transfer water to Mars from comets or asteroids that don't involve a massive transfer of kinetic energy at the same time as the comets arrive at the bottom of the Mars gravity well.
Let us do a little arithmetic here.
Say we want to add 1 kg of volatiles per square centimeter of Mars' surface. This is the equivalent of an atmosphere as thick as Earth's, but in this case would be split between gases and water. So, 10,000 kg per square meter. The orbital velocity of Mars is 2.1 km/sec, which means that 10,000 kg mass starts with 2.2 x 10^10 J. Insolation at Earth's orbit is 1367 W/m^2, so this is equivalent to 16.1 million seconds of sunlight hitting Earth's atmosphere at zero obliquity, or about 6 months of sunlight on Earth.
I think Mars can handle it.
I am running Linux Mint 17.2 (i.e. the lastest), anyone know if there are driver problems with these cheap laser printers?
Unless your whole life was the ship, it doesn't make sense.
If (when) we progress to space-based civilization then living in space will be the whole life for many. Of necessity real space settlements far from the Sun must be self-sustaining (distances are too great to order "spare parts"), if they accumulate the fuel needed to boost to say 1% c and then slow down, they will have enough energy to run their society for millions of years also.
These will not be "generation ships" so much as they will be space civilizations in motion.
The exhaust velocity of D+He-3 fusion is about 0.08 c. Using this fuel the extra mass needed to boost and stop a colony will be about 25% of the colony mass. There is a lot of He-3 in the atmospheres of the gas giants.
A colony might vote to go to another star where there is a planet on which we detect life so that it can be studied. There is only so much you can do to understand alien organisms from light years away, regardless of how great your telescope is.
It is estimated that three interstellar objects enter [and leave] the Solar System everyday. There will be plenty of opportunities in the future, as we refine our techniques.
Without a qualification for size and how close it comes to the Sun talking about how often they enter the Solar System is meaningless (i.e. how large and how close determines rate). According to this FAQ from NASA about this:
So, "several times a year" for something this large and this close or closer to the Sun (close approach is important in making detections)
However there is something that does not quite add up. They also state that scientists expect most of these objects will be comets. Comets approaching this close should be relatively easy to detect, even with older systems/techniques. Not sure what the story is here.
It will be interesting to see someone propose funding such a probe, to be ready for launch if (when) another interstellar object is detected. Can they get traction with anyone with money?
If NASA, the ESO and China won't spring for it, maybe some group of billionaires? Musk, Bezos, Gates, Buffet, are you guys in? Maybe if Stephen Hawking asks?
Before assuming you'll be screwed over by the tax plan, I suggest using the nytimes' calculator to see what your tax changes will be. As it stands, virtually no poor or middle class citizens will see a tax increase. https://www.nytimes.com/intera... (I myself will see a few thousand dollar decrease in taxes)
As has been very widely reported the tax bill is front loaded with expiring sweeteners for the Middle Class that expire after some years, while the tax cuts for corporations and the rich do not ever expire.
This is more than a bit like "introductory interest rates" on loans or credit cards that jump up after a period of time.
Christ has revoked all previous Jewish laws, and left only one: Love one another.
Jewish books have no place in Christianity.
Odd for a man who was an observant Jew, spend his entire life as an observant Jew, and died as one. In fact one of his most famous acts, which likely contributed to his trial and death was making a disruptive commotion about corruption of orthodox Jewish religious practice in the Temple during Passover.
When did he revoke "all previous Jewish laws"?