and finally a few comments on negative side effects...
But cosmetic neurology, as some call it, has risks. Ritalin, Adderall and other ADHD drugs can cause headaches, insomnia and loss of appetite. etc.
And this is just the short-term stuff. What happens when your brain gets used to all those beta-blockers/whatever in your veins and starts to re-adjust its own chemical output (aka, drug tolerance)? If you're using doping to work at a level beyond your normal ability, that's a pretty powerful incentive to keep upping the dose---an ugly potential feedback loop to get into, especially since it can take months to years for brain chemistry (and thus job performance) to return to baseline after periods of heavy use.
Let me ask you something, who do you think *does* research an *why*?
College professors and because they love it.
We also love to pay our bills. Getting the shaft doesn't put food on the table.
Without pharmaceutical patents, there's no reason whatsoever to develop a given drug,
Really? Bettering the health of the general population isn't any incentive at all?
Not if it means getting screwed over by any corporation who feels like it, no, it isn't. And if you really believed it is, why don't you go to medical school and go work for free in the urban hospital of your choice?
U.S. industry (in particular, the big corporations that do pharmaceutical research) benefits from lower trans-national barriers to information.
Big pharma hasn't done any basic research in decades . They just buy out spin-off corporations based on said NIH-funded research.
Pharma research budgets (which are spent getting FDA approval not developing new drugs from scratch) are a fraction of the typical pharma marketing budget---tells you their real priorities.
If you work for the public for less than you'd work for substantially less than you'd work for a corporation, then either you're very generous or you're a fool. But it's not the NIH's fault if you underbid yourself.
I work for a university for substantially less than industry because there is non-cash compensation associated with universities: I set my own research priorities and, according to my standard contract with the NIH, I own my research results (with the understanding that they'll be reported in appropriate journals and not kept secret so that others will benefit).
That's the social contract and if NIH doesn't keep its end of the bargain, there's zero motivation to keep mine.
Whoever pays for the research ought to own the results. If that's the NIH, than the taxpayers, the public, own the results.
Then no one will do research. I publish my work, there's nothing I've done that you can't look up in journals and read all about.
The issue is putting it in the public domain. Once it's in the public domain, no one owns it anymore. Not me, not you, not the government.
Yes I want my cake, and so do most of the people on slashdot. You all say "software should be free" but then release it under a GNU license instead of putting it in the public domain. Why? We all know why: so the Microsofts of the world won't make a fast buck on your work. Yes, you worked on your own time, but the motivation is the same. We both have something that required significant personal investment and no one wants to see some schmuck steal your hard work and give you squat in return.
You say "if you want to own it, go to venture capitalists." You nave no clue how research works. VC's won't touch you unless you have a working system. They're out to make the fast buck (emphasis on fast). Doing research for 10 years without any reasonable expectation of financial return isn't how they work. NO ONE funds long-term or basic research any more except the government.
Yes, I take government money---there's no one else to go to.
Where do you think the read-head on the drive in your iPod came from? Seagate didn't fund the work that led to GMR, corporate America can't see beyond its next quarterly earnings report.
The government did because they at least understand that research is an investment in the country that pays long-term dividends (global competitivenes, new technology, future tax returns, etc) well beyond their initial investment.
You might as well argue that the government should stop building the interstates because they're not getting paid for them.
I'm a university researcher and I have a problem.
About 70% percent of the papers I go looking for are under lock and key, with the key being upwards $30 per paper.
Dude, that's what libraries are for. You know, the big building where you can look at the paper copies for free and decide afterwards whether to download/photocopy the paper?
I agree with him, that research paid for by the public ought to belong to the public; you shouldn't be able to get the government to pay for your research and then use it to get a patent that lets you deprive others of the fruits of that research for a few decades.
So, you want me to invest ten years of my life at a sub-standard wages (aka university pay scales) developing the latest thing, using government money because industry sure as hell doesn't pay for basic research any more, and then turn it all over into the public domain so that the big pharma/electronics/whatever firms can bring it to market without paying me a dime in royalties? And I'm supposed to to this "for the sake of knowledge"?
Frankly, that gets the big F(#& Y)*!
Nobody is saying that a company can't pay for research itself and reap the benefits of it.
Why should they, when they can just steal my work after you force it into the public domain? You seem to be under the delusion that private industry actually does basic research. They don't---it's cheaper for them to acquire spin-offs (started by university researchers) who have already taken the business risks for them. Private research died with deregulation.
I don't care who to fund my lab; I took the risks, I did the work, and the results of my work belong to me. If the NIH wants to own my work, fine, they can hire me at industry-standard wages and I'll sign it over to them same as I would for any other employer. If you want to treat me as disposable contract labor working at 50% industry salary, I expect some alternate form of compensation, same as anyone else would (i.e., ownership of my research results).
In other words, there's about a 1:14000 chance that any 10 consecutive numbers will be all black. Given the number of roulette wheels in Vegas and the number of times each one is spun, it's not so shocking that this happens on a fairly regular basis.
Q: Why did the Catholic church accept the divinity of Mary in the middle of the 20th century?
A: Catholicism wasn't taking hold in Latin America, where people were unwilling to give up their earth mother goddess.
The Catholic church, does not, has not, and never will accept the divinity of Mary. According to the Catholic Church, Mary is a human being. Period. Full stop.
The most (only?) significant statement about Mary the Church made in the middle of the 20th century was the declaration by Pope Pius XII
that, at the end of her life, Mary was bodily
assumed into heaven by the grace of God. This, BTW, was the second of only
two ex cathedra statements ever made by a pope and reflected a Christian tradition going back more than 1500 years. It also has absolutely nothing to do with a supposed divinity of Mary.
Maybe it's "biz speak". To employers, "shortage" really means "we weren't inundated with hundreds of resumes for 1 position".
"Shortage" also can be translated "everyone we interviewed expects to be paid at the at least 80% of industry standard"...
Part of the point of all these "occupational needs" surveys is to attract people into fields now, before demand starts pushing wages up. The government's been putting out these studies for traditional engineers since the Sputnik era, and the projected numbers have usually proven, over time, to be high by a good order of magnitude.
As with almost any profession, if you are very good at what you do then you won't have any problem finding work. If you are merely "good" (or worse) then you'll have trouble if the field isn't "hot" at the time.
I've seen lots of posters spew this out today, but as someone who's been on both ends of the interview I say its bullshit.
It doesn't matter whether you're good or not - what matters is whether other people think you're good or not. I've seen jerk-offs with good reputations get hired (and regretted). I've also seen very good people go begging for jobs because they'd worked in an obscure corner for a while and no one on the outside knew what they were capable of.
In the end, being well known trumps being good at your job every time.
I work on sonar/seismic/radar inversion problems. Essentially the problem of mapping terrain or subterrain by measuring scattered sound or radio signals, e.g. with synthetic aperture radar. One thing I seriously lack at the moment is a good wave simulation that I can simply play around with to get a feel for both wave mechanics itself and for the equations and techniques of the field.
Why not work with a TE or TM source wave (effectively, translational invariance in the "z" direction) and reduce the whole thing to a 2D (or pseudo-2D) problem? Much easier to find existing code and it will run faster and in much less memory.
If you want to get a feel for the equations and techniques, though, there's no better way than writing your own. FDTD remains a good place to start.
Overall, a fairly clever technique. I wonder how this compares to adaptive optics, which is another solution to this problem.
The two techniques are unrelated; either one or both at the same time can be used to improve the images. Actually, the sample images from the original article were taken through a telescope (Palomar) using basic adaptive optics to improve the image before the "lucky" software even saw the data.
As you suggest, this also works with sub-sections of the image. I saw this same technique described at a conference about five years ago for imaging through terrestrial turbulence (I think it was funded by the US Army) and they were using image sub-sections at the time, having seen the videos they had then subsectioning is clearly both possible and effective.
If Feynmann can simplify things so MIT physics students can get started, Wikipedia can simplify things for their audience of random idiots on the web.
To be fair, that was one of the most impressive aspects of Feynman's genius, and one which he worked very hard at.
To be fair, Feynmann's lecture's had a reputation for something the undergraduates dropped by the end of the term, leaving just graduate students who would sit in on the lectures. Feynmann's Red Book is an excellent resource after you understand the material, but its a miserable textbook for teaching freshmen.
I'd also be interested in the false positive / false negative rates,...
Of course, the engineers who made the device and the scientists who test it almost certainly know all this, so I'm not being particularly insightful.
I used to work in the field of diffuse optical tomography (DOT) and I'd like to know the false positive rate is too. It's a chronic problem in DOT, distinguishing between real blood pooling and generic signal clutter. 3cm is also very deep in the brain for DOT; we used to figure we could scan no more than the top 1cm of brain matter (remember, you have to get the light through the skull twice, once going in and once coming out, and brain tissue is highly absorbing in the near-IR as well).
The scientists on whose work this is based all know and understand these problems (I know some of the guys personally), but reading the marketing fluff, I'm not sure the company or the MD's do. As others have noted, it's easy to get a 98% success rate if you're willing to put up with 9 out of 10 "detections" being false positives.
I've never met or heard of a christian who knows ancient hebrew well enough to study the bible like a jewish scholar. And I've also never met a christian who quotes such scholars to validate their understanding of the bible. Therefore I don't see how they can know the original meaning of your "Old Testament".
There are lots of excellent Christian scripture scholars, most with an excellent knowledge of scriptural Greek and Hebrew, and often a working knowledge of a few other first-century languegs like Aramaic, Coptic, or Syriac. A quick check through any scholarly biblical journal will confirm this. They may not be your average bible-thumpers, but they do exist.
Competant biblical scholars do, however, tend to work in Theology departments which would seem to be terra incognita for most Slashdot posters.
The problem is that programs written in your normal languages (C, C++, Java, C#, basically anything you've ever heard of) are totally synchronous; you can not proceed on to the next statement until the previous one completes.
*cough* Fortran *cough*
Fortran has had support for this type of thing since F90 came out 15+ years ago. The language standard defines what are (and are not) asynchronous operations. For example, the WHERE()...OTHERWISE...END construct is designed to be implemented asynchronous. Dual-core is new enough that the free compilers don't implement parallel operations yet, but the support is already there with some of the commercial compilers.
Shouldn't explaining Wikipedia's role and saying, "There are very few situations where it is acceptable to use Wikipedia, so if you want to be safe, just don't cite it as a source," be good enough to stop this so-called "problem"?
I've taught at the university level, and I can assure you it isn't sufficient. Rational arguments won't do it, as far as the students are concerned, everything that isn't forbidden is permitted. If Wikipedia isn't explicitly banned, students will ignore your "just do the right thing" and will continue to insist that Wikipedia is a perfectly valid and reliable source.
Students are lazy and going to the library is work. Many have never used anything besides Google and Wikipedia for research; they don't know how to efficiently track down sources and references. As other posters have pointed out, in my day it was [paper] encyclopedias, this is just a variation on the theme. They were forbidden (with good reason) when I was a student, and they should be forbidden now for the same reasons.
The military mostly looks at NQR as a confirmation technology for other detectors and not as the first line of explosive threat detection.
It's also being looked at for landmine detection (I did some work on a competing technology for a time once). NQR has better sensitivity than the WWII-vintage metal-detectors at a comparable rate of forward advance. Also, most mines have very little metal any more, mostly because using plastic is cheaper. That plastic also makes it harder for a metal detector to find them is just a side-benefit.
Currently, all these multi-processor mapping activities happens manually, and it really sucks. It would be wonderful if programming languages supported this activity automatically.
That's the whole point of High Performance Fortran (HPF). You tell it what to do, and it figures out how to do the threading and data segregation for you: vector operations, different data models, block vs cyclic storage, load balancing, everything. The compilers are commercial, but they do exist for high-end systems.
See, I always saw the Klingons as metaphors for the Russian/Communist threat, the Romulans as a metaphor for espionage, and the Borg as a metaphor for socialism.
The original series was an allegory and you're mostly correct: the Federation was the US/Western Europe and the Klingons were the Russions/Soviet Block. The Romulans, though, were the Chinese (of the 1960's, very different from today's China). Go see "The Undiscovered Country" again and remember it's being filmed just after the Cold War ended. Makes much more sense, really---it's no accident that the the Klingon moon in the opening sequence was called praxis.
Slashdot Mirror
And this is just the short-term stuff. What happens when your brain gets used to all those beta-blockers/whatever in your veins and starts to re-adjust its own chemical output (aka, drug tolerance)? If you're using doping to work at a level beyond your normal ability, that's a pretty powerful incentive to keep upping the dose---an ugly potential feedback loop to get into, especially since it can take months to years for brain chemistry (and thus job performance) to return to baseline after periods of heavy use.
-JS
We also love to pay our bills. Getting the shaft doesn't put food on the table.
Not if it means getting screwed over by any corporation who feels like it, no, it isn't. And if you really believed it is, why don't you go to medical school and go work for free in the urban hospital of your choice?
-JS
Big pharma hasn't done any basic research in decades . They just buy out spin-off corporations based on said NIH-funded research. Pharma research budgets (which are spent getting FDA approval not developing new drugs from scratch) are a fraction of the typical pharma marketing budget---tells you their real priorities.
-JS
I work for a university for substantially less than industry because there is non-cash compensation associated with universities: I set my own research priorities and, according to my standard contract with the NIH, I own my research results (with the understanding that they'll be reported in appropriate journals and not kept secret so that others will benefit). That's the social contract and if NIH doesn't keep its end of the bargain, there's zero motivation to keep mine.
-JS
Then no one will do research. I publish my work, there's nothing I've done that you can't look up in journals and read all about. The issue is putting it in the public domain. Once it's in the public domain, no one owns it anymore. Not me, not you, not the government.
Yes I want my cake, and so do most of the people on slashdot. You all say "software should be free" but then release it under a GNU license instead of putting it in the public domain. Why? We all know why: so the Microsofts of the world won't make a fast buck on your work. Yes, you worked on your own time, but the motivation is the same. We both have something that required significant personal investment and no one wants to see some schmuck steal your hard work and give you squat in return.
You say "if you want to own it, go to venture capitalists." You nave no clue how research works. VC's won't touch you unless you have a working system. They're out to make the fast buck (emphasis on fast). Doing research for 10 years without any reasonable expectation of financial return isn't how they work. NO ONE funds long-term or basic research any more except the government.
Yes, I take government money---there's no one else to go to. Where do you think the read-head on the drive in your iPod came from? Seagate didn't fund the work that led to GMR, corporate America can't see beyond its next quarterly earnings report. The government did because they at least understand that research is an investment in the country that pays long-term dividends (global competitivenes, new technology, future tax returns, etc) well beyond their initial investment.
You might as well argue that the government should stop building the interstates because they're not getting paid for them.
-JS
So, you want me to invest ten years of my life at a sub-standard wages (aka university pay scales) developing the latest thing, using government money because industry sure as hell doesn't pay for basic research any more, and then turn it all over into the public domain so that the big pharma/electronics/whatever firms can bring it to market without paying me a dime in royalties? And I'm supposed to to this "for the sake of knowledge"? Frankly, that gets the big F(#& Y)*!
Why should they, when they can just steal my work after you force it into the public domain? You seem to be under the delusion that private industry actually does basic research. They don't---it's cheaper for them to acquire spin-offs (started by university researchers) who have already taken the business risks for them. Private research died with deregulation.
I don't care who to fund my lab; I took the risks, I did the work, and the results of my work belong to me. If the NIH wants to own my work, fine, they can hire me at industry-standard wages and I'll sign it over to them same as I would for any other employer. If you want to treat me as disposable contract labor working at 50% industry salary, I expect some alternate form of compensation, same as anyone else would (i.e., ownership of my research results).
-JS
In other words, there's about a 1:14000 chance that any 10 consecutive numbers will be all black. Given the number of roulette wheels in Vegas and the number of times each one is spun, it's not so shocking that this happens on a fairly regular basis.
-JS
The Catholic church, does not, has not, and never will accept the divinity of Mary. According to the Catholic Church, Mary is a human being. Period. Full stop.
The most (only?) significant statement about Mary the Church made in the middle of the 20th century was the declaration by Pope Pius XII that, at the end of her life, Mary was bodily assumed into heaven by the grace of God. This, BTW, was the second of only two ex cathedra statements ever made by a pope and reflected a Christian tradition going back more than 1500 years. It also has absolutely nothing to do with a supposed divinity of Mary.
-JS
"Shortage" also can be translated "everyone we interviewed expects to be paid at the at least 80% of industry standard"...
Part of the point of all these "occupational needs" surveys is to attract people into fields now, before demand starts pushing wages up. The government's been putting out these studies for traditional engineers since the Sputnik era, and the projected numbers have usually proven, over time, to be high by a good order of magnitude.
JS
I've seen lots of posters spew this out today, but as someone who's been on both ends of the interview I say its bullshit. It doesn't matter whether you're good or not - what matters is whether other people think you're good or not. I've seen jerk-offs with good reputations get hired (and regretted). I've also seen very good people go begging for jobs because they'd worked in an obscure corner for a while and no one on the outside knew what they were capable of.
In the end, being well known trumps being good at your job every time.
-JS
Why not work with a TE or TM source wave (effectively, translational invariance in the "z" direction) and reduce the whole thing to a 2D (or pseudo-2D) problem? Much easier to find existing code and it will run faster and in much less memory.
If you want to get a feel for the equations and techniques, though, there's no better way than writing your own. FDTD remains a good place to start.
-JS (as I work on my own 2D FDTD solver)
The two techniques are unrelated; either one or both at the same time can be used to improve the images. Actually, the sample images from the original article were taken through a telescope (Palomar) using basic adaptive optics to improve the image before the "lucky" software even saw the data.
As you suggest, this also works with sub-sections of the image. I saw this same technique described at a conference about five years ago for imaging through terrestrial turbulence (I think it was funded by the US Army) and they were using image sub-sections at the time, having seen the videos they had then subsectioning is clearly both possible and effective.
-Jonathan
Bah. Try involuntarily eating at the poverty line...
-JS
To be fair, Feynmann's lecture's had a reputation for something the undergraduates dropped by the end of the term, leaving just graduate students who would sit in on the lectures. Feynmann's Red Book is an excellent resource after you understand the material, but its a miserable textbook for teaching freshmen.
-JS (YIAAP)
I used to work in the field of diffuse optical tomography (DOT) and I'd like to know the false positive rate is too. It's a chronic problem in DOT, distinguishing between real blood pooling and generic signal clutter. 3cm is also very deep in the brain for DOT; we used to figure we could scan no more than the top 1cm of brain matter (remember, you have to get the light through the skull twice, once going in and once coming out, and brain tissue is highly absorbing in the near-IR as well).
The scientists on whose work this is based all know and understand these problems (I know some of the guys personally), but reading the marketing fluff, I'm not sure the company or the MD's do. As others have noted, it's easy to get a 98% success rate if you're willing to put up with 9 out of 10 "detections" being false positives.
-JS
There are lots of excellent Christian scripture scholars, most with an excellent knowledge of scriptural Greek and Hebrew, and often a working knowledge of a few other first-century languegs like Aramaic, Coptic, or Syriac. A quick check through any scholarly biblical journal will confirm this. They may not be your average bible-thumpers, but they do exist.
Competant biblical scholars do, however, tend to work in Theology departments which would seem to be terra incognita for most Slashdot posters.
-JS
*cough* Fortran *cough*
Fortran has had support for this type of thing since F90 came out 15+ years ago. The language standard defines what are (and are not) asynchronous operations. For example, the WHERE()...OTHERWISE...END construct is designed to be implemented asynchronous. Dual-core is new enough that the free compilers don't implement parallel operations yet, but the support is already there with some of the commercial compilers.
F90, it's not your Grandfather's FORTRAN...
-JS
I've taught at the university level, and I can assure you it isn't sufficient. Rational arguments won't do it, as far as the students are concerned, everything that isn't forbidden is permitted. If Wikipedia isn't explicitly banned, students will ignore your "just do the right thing" and will continue to insist that Wikipedia is a perfectly valid and reliable source.
Students are lazy and going to the library is work. Many have never used anything besides Google and Wikipedia for research; they don't know how to efficiently track down sources and references. As other posters have pointed out, in my day it was [paper] encyclopedias, this is just a variation on the theme. They were forbidden (with good reason) when I was a student, and they should be forbidden now for the same reasons.
-JS
Bad idea. I've seen a steel penny, and if you look quick, it looks just like a dime. It would be the SBA debacle all over again.
-JS
It's also being looked at for landmine detection (I did some work on a competing technology for a time once). NQR has better sensitivity than the WWII-vintage metal-detectors at a comparable rate of forward advance. Also, most mines have very little metal any more, mostly because using plastic is cheaper. That plastic also makes it harder for a metal detector to find them is just a side-benefit.
-JS
That's the whole point of High Performance Fortran (HPF). You tell it what to do, and it figures out how to do the threading and data segregation for you: vector operations, different data models, block vs cyclic storage, load balancing, everything. The compilers are commercial, but they do exist for high-end systems.
-JS
The original series was an allegory and you're mostly correct: the Federation was the US/Western Europe and the Klingons were the Russions/Soviet Block. The Romulans, though, were the Chinese (of the 1960's, very different from today's China). Go see "The Undiscovered Country" again and remember it's being filmed just after the Cold War ended. Makes much more sense, really---it's no accident that the the Klingon moon in the opening sequence was called praxis.
-JS
I'm have flashbacks of sci.physics and Petr Beckman...
-JS
It's the same sound that Pacman makes when you eat the power pill. Doesn't taking money out of the machine make you feel energized?
-JS