Some questions for the AC who developed these landmines and is convinced they will reduce civilian casualties. One, how can you be so certain that the U.S. or somebody else won't extend this technology for anti-personnel landmines? In the configuration you describe, an enemy who was somehow able to bypass the (conventional) anti-personnel mines (e.g., via old-fashioned mine-clearing techniques) could get to the (adaptive) anti-tank mines, clear a few, then just hang out and keep grabbing the anti-tank mines as they hop in to replace the cleared ones -- in fact, seems like that would be *easier* than clearing an old-fashioned minefield, because the anti-tank mines are going to identify themselves by hopping around. Sooner or later, somebody in the military is going to argue that you can create an even more secure minefield by making both kinds of mines adaptive, don't you think? If the anti-personnel landmines are necessary to protect the anti-tank mines, then it seems, from a purely strategic standpoint, that you could create an even more secure minefield by applying this technology to both the core anti-tank mines and the surrounding anti-personnel mines.
Question two, how human-safe are anti-tank mines really in the long run? If an anti-tank mine is forgotten and left in place for years or even decades, what are the chances that someday it will either (a) decompose enough to become unstable and therefore dangerous, or (b) end up in an area where large metal objects (tractors, cars, construction equipment, etc.) are likely to appear?
Agreed. Stevens is the longest-serving Republican in the Senate, holds tremendous sway over senators and representatives in both parties, and is largely responsible for Alaska receiving the highest per-capita federal spending of any state. Overall he has a pretty impressive record getting done what he wants done.
When people make fun of him or call him "subliterate" for failing to understand the technology, they miss an important point. He doesn't care about the technology. He cares about having and using power. And he's damn good at it.
Interesting... Just for the heck of it, I ran Alan Sokal's paper Transgressing the Boundaries through the detector. It came back with a 93.8% chance of being authentic.
For those of you who don't remember the story, Sokal, a physicist, wrote a paper full of postmodern-sounding gobbledygook, asserting among other things that gravity is a social construction (the paper was subtitled, "Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity"). The paper was accepted at a peer-reviewed humanities journal. Sokal later revealed it to be a hoax.
Of course, by the detector's standards the article was indeed "authentic" in the sense that a human being did write it.
Fortunately, there is more evidence than Bhutan. Like this nice review of hundreds of controlled experiments and long-term outcome studies.
As a sidenote (not direct response to parent poster), I find it kind of amusing that people (a) gripe about there not being any controlled experiments, when in fact there are plenty, and then (b) ask for the ultimate uncontrolled nonexperimental test by saying "well why don't we see hundreds of GTA killers in the streets?" when they're presented with the controlled studies that they insisted, in the first place, were the only acceptible evidence.
Oh, and just because research supports a causal relationship between consuming violent media and behaving aggressively, that does not mean that ergo we must limit access to violent media, especially with adults. After all, we don't limit most forms of speech (short of direct incitement). It's just that you need to frame your defense in terms of the First Amendment, not by ignoring available evidence.
Actually, if you RTFriendlyA that you linked, you'll see that the fMRI procedure detects changes in brain activity associated with anxiety and impulse control. So conceptually it's not necessarily any closer to being a "lie detector" than the polygraph (though possibly better at detecting anxiety, or possibly not).
On the other hand, fMRI would be very effective at stopping terrorists who try to sneak some metal somewhere on their body. Messy, but effective.
On a behavioral level, this finding is nothing new. Hermann Ebbinghaus introduced the idea of savings in relearning in the 19th century. This finding has been replicated countless different ways, including being replicated in neural network simulations.
Nor is it news that this involves neurons. Hint to cnet: all of mental life involves neurons.
What's scientifically interesting is which neurons are involved. The researchers are trying to map out the circuits involved in order to better understand the underlying process. That is at least potentially interesting.
My followup question is, is it possible to break these patterns, ever? Or are we destined for eternity to be creatures of our own habits? Should we stop buying self-help books?
One way to break an association is to develop a competing association. If Stimulus A triggers Response B, then you develop a new association between Stimulus A with Response C. That makes it harder to fall victim to the savings-in-relearning effect when you're faced with Stimulus A in the future, because you won't just be left hanging to try to suppress your impulse to respond with B.
I think there is a real, though limited, technological side to this.
The technological goal would be to turn the reporter (and maybe the editor) into a "choke point" for information. That way, responsibility is concentrated in the hands of the journalists, who can decide whether to go to jail to protect a source. Prosecutors cannot do an end-run by seizing equipment or by subpoenaing IT staff, who may be less willing than reporters to go to jail on principle.
Isn't it possible that kids no longer need real-world environments to get those thrills, now that the games simulate them so vividly?
This is a very outdated idea from psychoanalysis that has leaked into the popular consciousness, but actual scientific evidence suggests otherwise. Freud observed that biological drives like hunger and thirst are temporarily diminished when they are satisfied, and he incorrectly assumed that all motivated behavior (including sex and aggression) worked the same way.
Think of it this way: If this were true, armies would be complete pussycats (because they would've gotten it all out of their systems in training), and pacifists would regularly go on murderous rampages.
Psychosis is not a disorder in the sense of a separate Axis I category. Rather, it is a loss of contact with reality that can be part of many disorders, including severe depression.
Whats needed now is a way to determine if someone is clinincally depressed even if they are denying it.
Most likely the device will only be used on people with extraordinarily serious depression (psychosis, history of suicide attempts, etc.) for whom other techniques like psychotherapy and drugs have failed. Currently that is the case with electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) -- in spite of the popular perception, it's pretty much a last-resort kind of thing, and I'd imagine any treatment involving surgery would be similar. So although there are certainly lots of people with undiagnosed depression, I don't think that will be relevant here.
Section 16600 of the California Business and Professions Code provides that "every contract by which anyone is restrained from engaging in a lawful profession, trade, or business of any kind is to that extent void."
Google is based in California, but the contract was signed in Washington, so I'm not sure if that helps.
Bob Jones, vice president of engineering for Time Warner's San Diego division, said the key to high-quality video is keeping the data on the company's private network. While the video travels along the same pipeline as e-mail and Web sites, it never leaves Time Warner's lines.
Sounds like you can't use this from just anyplace on the Internet -- you have to be a Road Runner subscriber using it from home. Still, pretty nifty.
What are the odds that the Republicans are going to use this report to try to smear scientists even more than they have?
Although if you look at the original Nature article...
The modern scientist faces intense competition, and is further burdened by difficult, sometimes unreasonable, regulatory, social, and managerial demands. This mix of pressures creates many possibilities for the compromise of scientific integrity.
There have been several studies that show that IQ is mostly genetics
That's a superficial and flawed reading of the evidence. First of all, behavior genetic studies typically show that the heritability of intelligence is about.50, which means that about 50% of the population variance is attributable to genetic differences. The rest -- the other half -- is environment, mostly nonshared environment (i.e., unique individual experience).
However, what most people do not realize is that heritability quotients depend on the population in which they're derived. Most heritability studies have been on middle- to upper-middle class subjects. It turns out that when you look at poorer populations(see original study here), heritability goes way down, and the importance of environment (including shared environment) increases dramatically.
The upshot is that for a poor kid, the expected return on an investment in the environment is huge. For a well-off kid, it's smaller but still real.
The book Freakonomicshas a great example of something like this. A day care center was having trouble with people showing up late to get their kids, which requires day care workers to stay overtime. So they started charging a fine when parents came late. The only problem was, parents started coming late even more than they used to. Previously they had felt some guilt about making the workers stay late. Now the parents treated it as an economic transaction rather than a social obligation, and they figured it was worth paying the fine in order to have some extra flexibility.
Admittedly, libraries do charge fines sometimes, but in most ways they are set up to be perceived as a social/community institution rather than economic ones. The anonymous cash card system would have to be implemented very carefully to avoid tipping the balance.
Re:Number of participants
on
Trust in a Bottle
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The experimenters reported p=.029 (one-tailed) with their results. If you accept the one-tailed test, it is "statistically significant" by conventional standards.
And N=58 (29 people per group) is pretty typical for single studies in the behavioral sciences. Ultimately, the grandparent is right -- this needs to be replicated. But that's true of single studies in any scientific field, no matter the sample size or p-value. This is an exciting enough discovery that you can bet lots of scientists are going to try to replicate it.
If you call the cops and say "somebody has stolen my social security number," do you really think you'll get the same reaction as if you say somebody has stolen your car?
In a weird way, this problem seems like a bass-ackwards parallel to copyright infringement. In both cases, it is unlike a traditional theft because information is copied with no loss to the original holder. So the infringers do not value the information as much as the infringed-upon. (But in this case, the little guy is the one getting infringed upon, and the big institutions are the infringers.)
In other words, universities and corporations do not intrinsically "lose" anything when somebody breaches their system and "steals" people's SSNs. They only lose if they get caught and if there is some sort of penalty (like a really expensive lawsuit). Until the legal system starts whacking them in a way that hurts, this problem is going to keep coming up.
If Cerf is giving the award personally, than he agrees Gore should get the award, unless this is some kinda of wierd political scratch his back and he'll scratch his doo-hicky.
Given that Gore is an also-ran candidate from the out-of-power party, it's pretty hard to believe this could be politically motivated.
Every university has an institutional review board that must approve any research that uses human beings as subjects. The IRB is an independent body that includes nonscientists and people with no affiliation with the university, and it evaluates whether the potential benefits of research outweigh any harm. IRBs are usually very conservative about allowing deception -- you simply cannot do it unless you can demonstrate that you are gaining valuable knowledge that could not be obtained any other way.
According to TFA, the researchers got approval from their IRB. Seems to me there's a potential benefit not just to society at large (better understanding of how phishing schemes work), but also to the actual students involved in the study (learning how to protect themselves better). Indiana University better have the researchers' backs on this one.
Slashdot Mirror
Some questions for the AC who developed these landmines and is convinced they will reduce civilian casualties. One, how can you be so certain that the U.S. or somebody else won't extend this technology for anti-personnel landmines? In the configuration you describe, an enemy who was somehow able to bypass the (conventional) anti-personnel mines (e.g., via old-fashioned mine-clearing techniques) could get to the (adaptive) anti-tank mines, clear a few, then just hang out and keep grabbing the anti-tank mines as they hop in to replace the cleared ones -- in fact, seems like that would be *easier* than clearing an old-fashioned minefield, because the anti-tank mines are going to identify themselves by hopping around. Sooner or later, somebody in the military is going to argue that you can create an even more secure minefield by making both kinds of mines adaptive, don't you think? If the anti-personnel landmines are necessary to protect the anti-tank mines, then it seems, from a purely strategic standpoint, that you could create an even more secure minefield by applying this technology to both the core anti-tank mines and the surrounding anti-personnel mines.
Question two, how human-safe are anti-tank mines really in the long run? If an anti-tank mine is forgotten and left in place for years or even decades, what are the chances that someday it will either (a) decompose enough to become unstable and therefore dangerous, or (b) end up in an area where large metal objects (tractors, cars, construction equipment, etc.) are likely to appear?
Agreed. Stevens is the longest-serving Republican in the Senate, holds tremendous sway over senators and representatives in both parties, and is largely responsible for Alaska receiving the highest per-capita federal spending of any state. Overall he has a pretty impressive record getting done what he wants done.
When people make fun of him or call him "subliterate" for failing to understand the technology, they miss an important point. He doesn't care about the technology. He cares about having and using power. And he's damn good at it.
Pirates coming to America... Does this mean that global warming is starting to reverse itself?
Correction: The humanities journal in question was not peer reviewed; see the editors' account of why they published the hoax paper.
Interesting... Just for the heck of it, I ran Alan Sokal's paper Transgressing the Boundaries through the detector. It came back with a 93.8% chance of being authentic.
For those of you who don't remember the story, Sokal, a physicist, wrote a paper full of postmodern-sounding gobbledygook, asserting among other things that gravity is a social construction (the paper was subtitled, "Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity"). The paper was accepted at a peer-reviewed humanities journal. Sokal later revealed it to be a hoax.
Of course, by the detector's standards the article was indeed "authentic" in the sense that a human being did write it.
Can't they just compress it?
Fortunately, there is more evidence than Bhutan. Like this nice review of hundreds of controlled experiments and long-term outcome studies.
As a sidenote (not direct response to parent poster), I find it kind of amusing that people (a) gripe about there not being any controlled experiments, when in fact there are plenty, and then (b) ask for the ultimate uncontrolled nonexperimental test by saying "well why don't we see hundreds of GTA killers in the streets?" when they're presented with the controlled studies that they insisted, in the first place, were the only acceptible evidence.
Oh, and just because research supports a causal relationship between consuming violent media and behaving aggressively, that does not mean that ergo we must limit access to violent media, especially with adults. After all, we don't limit most forms of speech (short of direct incitement). It's just that you need to frame your defense in terms of the First Amendment, not by ignoring available evidence.
Actually, if you RTFriendlyA that you linked, you'll see that the fMRI procedure detects changes in brain activity associated with anxiety and impulse control. So conceptually it's not necessarily any closer to being a "lie detector" than the polygraph (though possibly better at detecting anxiety, or possibly not).
On the other hand, fMRI would be very effective at stopping terrorists who try to sneak some metal somewhere on their body. Messy, but effective.
Nor is it news that this involves neurons. Hint to cnet: all of mental life involves neurons.
What's scientifically interesting is which neurons are involved. The researchers are trying to map out the circuits involved in order to better understand the underlying process. That is at least potentially interesting.
One way to break an association is to develop a competing association. If Stimulus A triggers Response B, then you develop a new association between Stimulus A with Response C. That makes it harder to fall victim to the savings-in-relearning effect when you're faced with Stimulus A in the future, because you won't just be left hanging to try to suppress your impulse to respond with B.
And yes, you should stop buying self-help books.
I think there is a real, though limited, technological side to this.
The technological goal would be to turn the reporter (and maybe the editor) into a "choke point" for information. That way, responsibility is concentrated in the hands of the journalists, who can decide whether to go to jail to protect a source. Prosecutors cannot do an end-run by seizing equipment or by subpoenaing IT staff, who may be less willing than reporters to go to jail on principle.
This is a very outdated idea from psychoanalysis that has leaked into the popular consciousness, but actual scientific evidence suggests otherwise. Freud observed that biological drives like hunger and thirst are temporarily diminished when they are satisfied, and he incorrectly assumed that all motivated behavior (including sex and aggression) worked the same way.
Think of it this way: If this were true, armies would be complete pussycats (because they would've gotten it all out of their systems in training), and pacifists would regularly go on murderous rampages.
Nitpick returned:
Psychosis is not a disorder in the sense of a separate Axis I category. Rather, it is a loss of contact with reality that can be part of many disorders, including severe depression.
Most likely the device will only be used on people with extraordinarily serious depression (psychosis, history of suicide attempts, etc.) for whom other techniques like psychotherapy and drugs have failed. Currently that is the case with electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) -- in spite of the popular perception, it's pretty much a last-resort kind of thing, and I'd imagine any treatment involving surgery would be similar. So although there are certainly lots of people with undiagnosed depression, I don't think that will be relevant here.
You are right - California forbids non-competition clauses:
Google is based in California, but the contract was signed in Washington, so I'm not sure if that helps.
From the article:
Sounds like you can't use this from just anyplace on the Internet -- you have to be a Road Runner subscriber using it from home. Still, pretty nifty.
Anybody know whether JHymn-decrypted files still work?
He's a computer scientist, I'm sure he can just look up the answer in Godel Escher Back, right?
What are the odds that the Republicans are going to use this report to try to smear scientists even more than they have?
Although if you look at the original Nature article...
...it actually sounds an awful lot like the Bush White House.
Slightly OT but important.....
That's a superficial and flawed reading of the evidence. First of all, behavior genetic studies typically show that the heritability of intelligence is about .50, which means that about 50% of the population variance is attributable to genetic differences. The rest -- the other half -- is environment, mostly nonshared environment (i.e., unique individual experience).
However, what most people do not realize is that heritability quotients depend on the population in which they're derived. Most heritability studies have been on middle- to upper-middle class subjects. It turns out that when you look at poorer populations (see original study here), heritability goes way down, and the importance of environment (including shared environment) increases dramatically.
The upshot is that for a poor kid, the expected return on an investment in the environment is huge. For a well-off kid, it's smaller but still real.
Admittedly, libraries do charge fines sometimes, but in most ways they are set up to be perceived as a social/community institution rather than economic ones. The anonymous cash card system would have to be implemented very carefully to avoid tipping the balance.
And N=58 (29 people per group) is pretty typical for single studies in the behavioral sciences. Ultimately, the grandparent is right -- this needs to be replicated. But that's true of single studies in any scientific field, no matter the sample size or p-value. This is an exciting enough discovery that you can bet lots of scientists are going to try to replicate it.
If you call the cops and say "somebody has stolen my social security number," do you really think you'll get the same reaction as if you say somebody has stolen your car?
In a weird way, this problem seems like a bass-ackwards parallel to copyright infringement. In both cases, it is unlike a traditional theft because information is copied with no loss to the original holder. So the infringers do not value the information as much as the infringed-upon. (But in this case, the little guy is the one getting infringed upon, and the big institutions are the infringers.)
In other words, universities and corporations do not intrinsically "lose" anything when somebody breaches their system and "steals" people's SSNs. They only lose if they get caught and if there is some sort of penalty (like a really expensive lawsuit). Until the legal system starts whacking them in a way that hurts, this problem is going to keep coming up.
If Cerf is giving the award personally, than he agrees Gore should get the award, unless this is some kinda of wierd political scratch his back and he'll scratch his doo-hicky.
Given that Gore is an also-ran candidate from the out-of-power party, it's pretty hard to believe this could be politically motivated.
According to TFA, the researchers got approval from their IRB. Seems to me there's a potential benefit not just to society at large (better understanding of how phishing schemes work), but also to the actual students involved in the study (learning how to protect themselves better). Indiana University better have the researchers' backs on this one.