I think corruption usually refers to exchange of personal financial gain for providing services in an official capacity, for example bribes, kickbacks, sending government contracts to a company for which you sit on the board, stuff like that.
Singapore isn't a free country, but I think that is a question of democracy, not corruption. I think we need to separate the concepts. There are certainly corrupt democracies, and corrupt dictatorship, but there are also democracies and dictatorships largely free of personal corruption.
I do get what you're saying, but I think the term "systematically corrupt" is somewhat misleading, because it implies a system in which the playing field is systematically unlevel, such as a fascist system.
The United States is not even close being as corrupt as a 3rd world dictatorship. According to: World Audit, the United States is 16th in the world in terms of being free from corruption. All the countries above it in the rankings are first world democracies (although I admit some people would debate Singapore).
I know it is the fashion to insult the US government at the moment, and there *is* a hell of a lot of room for improvement. However, hyperbole and fighting words (comparing the US government to that of a third world dictatorship) just shuts down debate and, frankly, damages your credibility. Let's keep this civil and factual, OK?
I would say you are right on target, Ms. Brave Electron. All my friends (and we are all over-educated) greatly value intelligence in our dates. I wonder where WaywardGeek lives if he thinks North Carolina has a culture of "dumb chicks"? I live in Raleigh, and with three world class universities nearby, there are a wonderful abundance of successful, intelligent women, and I just love it.
Re: Wayward's advice... Silicon Valley would give you good odds (i.e. man/woman ratio) but my experience there taught me people are WAY too work oriented there. Place is a serious downer.
One issue is how deeply you have to look into space to get a large number of supernovae in your field of vision. Generally, the integration time to image a supernova is extraordinarily large. The radio telescopes famous for SETI experiments are non-directional, therefore they cannot find supernova. You have to look at a specific region of space and look HARD to find them. That is why various space missions are proposed to find supernova in a sky survey, then look at them hard once they're found.
They seem to have departed from standard practice in two ways. First, they use an on-chip DC-DC converter to dynamically scale the voltage down to the minimum required to meet whatever performance metric is specified. Second, they intend to power it using some kind of energy-harvesting technique (namely human body heat). I agree the reduction of power is just first-order physics, but how they do it is quite interesting.
Putting a power amplifier on the same chip as a radio transmitter has not been successful. A lot of money has been wasted going down that road so far...
There will never be any "artificial intelligence" because once a computer achieves something that was considered "artificial intelligence", the phrase is redefined to exclude said achievement. So, by definition, artificial intelligence is impossible. In fact, once something that was considered to require intelligence is achieved, it is then relegated to rote "pattern matching".
Examples: Adaptive filtering Chess Music composition Real-time target acquisition and tracking
You shouldn't be scared about cochlear implants. The cochlea is just a biological transducer (converts pressure changes to electrical pulses). It is complex, but it is not a "decision-making" part of the brain. It serves as an input to the brain. So, a cochlear implant replaces the biological transducer with an electronic one. It works well but of course it will be improved.
You seem to have done very well with the Napster business model. Unfortunately there are not enough people such as yourself to sustain Napster in the long term. Also, since you are stripping the DRM from the WMAs, you are in fact violating the terms of service and Napster would be put out of business if everyone did that (they would lose access to the music).
Enjoy it while it lasts.... as we all did with the original Napster.
There is no nanotube transmitter. The length of the transmitting antenna must be on the order of the wavelength of the transmitted wave AND a large amount of power needs to be sent into the air.
This article, of course, is a cool stunt... but it is still a stunt.
Re:LOGO was perfect for its intended use
on
Forty Years of LOGO
·
· Score: 1
Thank you for sharing those memories. I am also in awe of what is available to kids today. For example, the MIT Open Courseware... Unbelievable. I use it a lot today, but it would have been a life preserver for me when I was a kid (I think I'm about 4 or 5 years younger than you are). Just ten years ago, you had to go to a library and know where to look to get a handle on any kind of advanced technology. Now you can go to google and learn anything you want for example from basic calculus all the way up to adaptive signal processing, FOR FREE. No wonder American technological hegemony is going down the drain fast... we (I'm American) are no longer the gatekeepers of information. It's probably a good thing for the world. Not sure about that though.
If I were a kid today, I would be devouring Linux and Python. Truly astounding tools.
On a personal note, my neighbor was the computer support manager at Reed College, so he had a Mac in 1984. I remember sitting around it with him and his two sons for hours into the night... night after night... programming it and dissecting the Inside Macintosh tomes. Remember Lightspeed C? God, what great memories. The 128k Mac was so advanced, yet the toolbox and UI were small enough to be grasped by my 10 year old mind. And the intellectual honesty and clarity that went into that original Macintosh still guides my designs today. The first time I coded up a desk accessory (that WORKED) I felt like I was Albert Einstein!
One of my favorite memories is when I put a copy of Missle Command I had written in Borland Turbo Pascal into the public domain (added it to one of those Shareware catalogs that were big in the mid/late 80s). Anyway, sometime later I got a letter from Borland inviting me to come in for a job interview! My parents were dumbfounded... my mom still has the letter. I was in Jr. High at the time. It was probably a carpet-bomb type thing, but to me it was huge.
Are you a computer professional these days? I was going down that route until I got seduced by physics as an undergrad.
Re:LOGO was perfect for its intended use
on
Forty Years of LOGO
·
· Score: 1
Agreed. But it probably isn't the best way to be introduced to programming concepts is it? PEEK and POKE was pretty arcane stuff to my 8 year old mind. Now Python... THAT is cool.
LOGO was perfect for its intended use
on
Forty Years of LOGO
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I learned to program using LOGO on a Commodore Vic-20 in 1980 or 81. It was an astounding program because it enabled a very high level of functionality without needed knowledge of a lot of technical details of the machine. My school district (Portland, OR) had a Talented and Gifted program that included a computer course, and LOGO was it. We were able to draw polygons and devise simple games (somewhat more rudimentary than an Atari 2600). Based on this experience, my brother and I got a Commodore 64 a year or so later, and I was disappointed in BASIC. Sure, it was structured more like a "real" computer language, but it wasn't possible to do anything even remotely sophisticated in Commodore Basic graphics-wise without resorting to quasi-assembly PEEKs and POKEs. To get around this, my brother tried to learn 6502 assembly, and burned out on computers (he's now a lawyer.. poor man). I was lucky and discovered Pascal...
I don't think I would have a career in the technology industry if it were not for LOGO (I'm an analog IC designer). A previous comment said Python is better for his child. I would agree. In fact, I would have done pretty much anything for Python and Pygame when I was a small child. However, for the late 70s and early 80s, LOGO was the educational language to beat, and the only way for a child to really feel the machine the way a programmer does, and not as a passive game player.
Thanks for that. Also, be sure not to call them soldiers. If you want anything from DARPA, you must be sure to call them "warfighters". Excuse me while I throw up and thank my lucky stars I'm out of academia.
Maybe we could submit a DARPA/NSF proposal to stick neural probes in Zebra finches to increase the effectiveness of the America Warfighter.
1. Torture Small Animals (preferably in a high-tech way such as with high-impedance neural probes) 2. Collect data 3. ??? 4. Enhance the effectiveness of the American Warfighter
The fact that the researcher is talking to a journalist prior to the research publication is strong evidence he is over-hyping his research. The way a journalist should learn about research is by reading a peer-reviewed article. Not a press release. Note that the article states the research WILL be published in the Journal of Neurophysiology. The only reason the researcher is talking to a journalist now is HYPE. Pure and simple.
Agreed. Academic researchers do hype their stuff prematurely, but it is the nature of the game. Traditional, forward-looking funding has dried up, and NIH and NSF now require "results". That is complete bullshit of course, so these "results" are now of course lame press releases.
For example, it used to be that you could get money to torture small animals just for the hell of it... now you have to write your grant proposal in terms of "helping society".
Old NSF Proposal "Torturing Zebra finches by putting neural probes into their heads then killing them to slice their brains up can lead to increased knowledge of visual pathways in the brain".
New NSF Proposal "Torturing Zebra finches by putting neural probes into their heads then killing them to slice their brains up can lead to increased knowledge of visual pathways in the brain may lead to new modalities of therapy for patients with degenerative eye disease".
Slashdot Mirror
It's Dr. Kristin Gates. At least try to get the basic facts right.
I think corruption usually refers to exchange of personal financial gain for providing services in an official capacity, for example bribes, kickbacks, sending government contracts to a company for which you sit on the board, stuff like that.
Singapore isn't a free country, but I think that is a question of democracy, not corruption. I think we need to separate the concepts. There are certainly corrupt democracies, and corrupt dictatorship, but there are also democracies and dictatorships largely free of personal corruption.
I do get what you're saying, but I think the term "systematically corrupt" is somewhat misleading, because it implies a system in which the playing field is systematically unlevel, such as a fascist system.
The United States is not even close being as corrupt as a 3rd world dictatorship. According to: World Audit, the United States is 16th in the world in terms of being free from corruption. All the countries above it in the rankings are first world democracies (although I admit some people would debate Singapore).
I know it is the fashion to insult the US government at the moment, and there *is* a hell of a lot of room for improvement. However, hyperbole and fighting words (comparing the US government to that of a third world dictatorship) just shuts down debate and, frankly, damages your credibility. Let's keep this civil and factual, OK?
I live in Oakland, and one of the many nicknames we have for it is "Oaksterdam"
Wouldn't you rather fly Dos Equis?
It's NORcal, not NoCal. Damn foreigners always get that wrong.
How did President Obama send those jobs to Mexico? Were jobs sent to India, Mexico and China from 2001 through 2008 sent there by President Bush?
Carl
I would say you are right on target, Ms. Brave Electron. All my friends (and we are all over-educated) greatly value intelligence in our dates. I wonder where WaywardGeek lives if he thinks North Carolina has a culture of "dumb chicks"? I live in Raleigh, and with three world class universities nearby, there are a wonderful abundance of successful, intelligent women, and I just love it.
Re: Wayward's advice... Silicon Valley would give you good odds (i.e. man/woman ratio) but my experience there taught me people are WAY too work oriented there. Place is a serious downer.
---
somedesperateglory.bandcamp.com
One issue is how deeply you have to look into space to get a large number of supernovae in your field of vision. Generally, the integration time to image a supernova is extraordinarily large. The radio telescopes famous for SETI experiments are non-directional, therefore they cannot find supernova. You have to look at a specific region of space and look HARD to find them. That is why various space missions are proposed to find supernova in a sky survey, then look at them hard once they're found.
I imagine you're joking... but a Bluetooth transceiver requires far more power than could be harvested from heat transfer of the head. Sorry.
They seem to have departed from standard practice in two ways. First, they use an on-chip DC-DC converter to dynamically scale the voltage down to the minimum required to meet whatever performance metric is specified. Second, they intend to power it using some kind of energy-harvesting technique (namely human body heat). I agree the reduction of power is just first-order physics, but how they do it is quite interesting.
Putting a power amplifier on the same chip as a radio transmitter has not been successful. A lot of money has been wasted going down that road so far...
My Erdos number [wikipedia.org] is 5, what's yours?
My Erdos number is 4.
There will never be any "artificial intelligence" because once a computer achieves something that was considered "artificial intelligence", the phrase is redefined to exclude said achievement. So, by definition, artificial intelligence is impossible. In fact, once something that was considered to require intelligence is achieved, it is then relegated to rote "pattern matching".
Examples:
Adaptive filtering
Chess
Music composition
Real-time target acquisition and tracking
You shouldn't be scared about cochlear implants. The cochlea is just a biological transducer (converts pressure changes to electrical pulses). It is complex, but it is not a "decision-making" part of the brain. It serves as an input to the brain. So, a cochlear implant replaces the biological transducer with an electronic one. It works well but of course it will be improved.
You seem to have done very well with the Napster business model. Unfortunately there are not enough people such as yourself to sustain Napster in the long term. Also, since you are stripping the DRM from the WMAs, you are in fact violating the terms of service and Napster would be put out of business if everyone did that (they would lose access to the music).
Enjoy it while it lasts.... as we all did with the original Napster.
They demodulated a latent transmission. They didn't transmit anything.
There is no nanotube transmitter. The length of the transmitting antenna must be on the order of the wavelength of the transmitted wave AND a large amount of power needs to be sent into the air.
This article, of course, is a cool stunt... but it is still a stunt.
Thank you for sharing those memories. I am also in awe of what is available to kids today. For example, the MIT Open Courseware... Unbelievable. I use it a lot today, but it would have been a life preserver for me when I was a kid (I think I'm about 4 or 5 years younger than you are). Just ten years ago, you had to go to a library and know where to look to get a handle on any kind of advanced technology. Now you can go to google and learn anything you want for example from basic calculus all the way up to adaptive signal processing, FOR FREE. No wonder American technological hegemony is going down the drain fast... we (I'm American) are no longer the gatekeepers of information. It's probably a good thing for the world. Not sure about that though.
If I were a kid today, I would be devouring Linux and Python. Truly astounding tools.
On a personal note, my neighbor was the computer support manager at Reed College, so he had a Mac in 1984. I remember sitting around it with him and his two sons for hours into the night... night after night... programming it and dissecting the Inside Macintosh tomes. Remember Lightspeed C? God, what great memories. The 128k Mac was so advanced, yet the toolbox and UI were small enough to be grasped by my 10 year old mind. And the intellectual honesty and clarity that went into that original Macintosh still guides my designs today. The first time I coded up a desk accessory (that WORKED) I felt like I was Albert Einstein!
One of my favorite memories is when I put a copy of Missle Command I had written in Borland Turbo Pascal into the public domain (added it to one of those Shareware catalogs that were big in the mid/late 80s). Anyway, sometime later I got a letter from Borland inviting me to come in for a job interview! My parents were dumbfounded... my mom still has the letter. I was in Jr. High at the time. It was probably a carpet-bomb type thing, but to me it was huge.
Are you a computer professional these days? I was going down that route until I got seduced by physics as an undergrad.
Agreed. But it probably isn't the best way to be introduced to programming concepts is it? PEEK and POKE was pretty arcane stuff to my 8 year old mind. Now Python... THAT is cool.
I learned to program using LOGO on a Commodore Vic-20 in 1980 or 81. It was an astounding program because it enabled a very high level of functionality without needed knowledge of a lot of technical details of the machine. My school district (Portland, OR) had a Talented and Gifted program that included a computer course, and LOGO was it. We were able to draw polygons and devise simple games (somewhat more rudimentary than an Atari 2600). Based on this experience, my brother and I got a Commodore 64 a year or so later, and I was disappointed in BASIC. Sure, it was structured more like a "real" computer language, but it wasn't possible to do anything even remotely sophisticated in Commodore Basic graphics-wise without resorting to quasi-assembly PEEKs and POKEs. To get around this, my brother tried to learn 6502 assembly, and burned out on computers (he's now a lawyer.. poor man). I was lucky and discovered Pascal...
I don't think I would have a career in the technology industry if it were not for LOGO (I'm an analog IC designer). A previous comment said Python is better for his child. I would agree. In fact, I would have done pretty much anything for Python and Pygame when I was a small child. However, for the late 70s and early 80s, LOGO was the educational language to beat, and the only way for a child to really feel the machine the way a programmer does, and not as a passive game player.
Analog is just too hard, though there's some room there.
Ahhh... the sweet, sweet smell of job security.
Joe,
Thanks for that. Also, be sure not to call them soldiers. If you want anything from DARPA, you must be sure to call them "warfighters". Excuse me while I throw up and thank my lucky stars I'm out of academia.
Maybe we could submit a DARPA/NSF proposal to stick neural probes in Zebra finches to increase the effectiveness of the America Warfighter.
1. Torture Small Animals (preferably in a high-tech way such as with high-impedance neural probes)
2. Collect data
3. ???
4. Enhance the effectiveness of the American Warfighter
FleaPlus,
The fact that the researcher is talking to a journalist prior to the research publication is strong evidence he is over-hyping his research. The way a journalist should learn about research is by reading a peer-reviewed article. Not a press release. Note that the article states the research WILL be published in the Journal of Neurophysiology. The only reason the researcher is talking to a journalist now is HYPE. Pure and simple.
Carl
Agreed. Academic researchers do hype their stuff prematurely, but it is the nature of the game. Traditional, forward-looking funding has dried up, and NIH and NSF now require "results". That is complete bullshit of course, so these "results" are now of course lame press releases.
For example, it used to be that you could get money to torture small animals just for the hell of it... now you have to write your grant proposal in terms of "helping society".
Old NSF Proposal "Torturing Zebra finches by putting neural probes into their heads then killing them to slice their brains up can lead to increased knowledge of visual pathways in the brain".
New NSF Proposal "Torturing Zebra finches by putting neural probes into their heads then killing them to slice their brains up can lead to increased knowledge of visual pathways in the brain may lead to new modalities of therapy for patients with degenerative eye disease".