Popular science reporting seems the art of taking fairly mundane research and making it sound much more exciting, wonderful, dangerous than it really is. Such as this article for instance.
They are purporting that with MRI scans of people's brains they can "read your unconscious thoughts", like some Orwellian nightmare and then pull these subconscious strings to get you to empty your wallet at the nearest GAP outlet.
Well, being myself a student of the cognitive sciences, I'd like to set a few things clear. The ability to "read thoughts" as purported by this article, while not technically false, is much more primitive than you could imagine.
An MRI of the brain can give you a picutre of what cells are most active at any given point, so you can see relatively what brain centres dominate and try to make inferences from that as to what the person is thinking. Given that our knowledge of brain function is at a very primitive level, the most useful data you can get from this type of scan is "he likes it" or "he doesn't like it". It will not tell you what images, feelings, sounds, associations are passing through the subjects head at any point, only whether they are generally positive or not. Its really no different from putting a bunch of boxes on a chart and asking the person to rate from one to ten how well they like certain things - except you get that rating directly from the brain rather than from asking the person. So in theory this ranking is more "honest" and less clouded by other factors such as social obligations, etc. which might interfere with what a person would say when asked.
The idea that this technology can be used in some Orwellian fashion to understand that secretly you are afraid of rats, or are a pedophile or like the look of women eating juicy mangoes is not going to happen anytime soon. It is unlikely that that level of analysis is ever going to be possible. Ok, end of rant.
Wow, this sounds exactly like the opening 20 minutes of blackness to 2001! Now we finally know what Kubrik was doing - he was torturing a reel-to-reel copy of Beethoven's Ninth, cool!
I'd be shocked if this was really AI. And I'd be a bit shocked if someone called the simple stats a from of AI.
Well prepare to be shocked.
Unfortunately, the term AI is used in so many ways by so many different people for so many different things that it has lost a lot of its meaning as a technical term. Even within the cognitive sciences, the term is used differently by different people, and often a writer will go to lengths to define his particular definition of AI before continuing. AI is sometimes just used to refere to whatever happens to be on the cutting edge of research in computer science. Before the principles of OCR were well established, OCR was considered to be "AI". There was even a point when shortest path finding techniques like Dijkstra's algorithm were within the umbrella of "AI".
When normal people ( cognitive scientists are not normal by any measure ) refer to AI, they usually imagine HAL or R2D2, some machine that interacts in every respect as though it were human. This is often referred to in the literature as "strong" AI - a system which is sentient in every sense of the term. There is, of course, no such thing in the real world, and it is doubtful if there ever will. But this is the subject of much discussion and philosophizing withing cognitive science.
If there is "strong" AI, then there must be "weak" AI. This as it turns out is just everything else, a computer system or program that evaluates some information in a manner which we might describe as an "intelligent" assessment. This of course is a wide definition which covers everything from how to deduce the illness of a patient from his reported symptoms, to how to make monsters crawl through a 3d shooter in an intelligent way, to how to identify enemy tanks from friendly ones in IR images from 30,000 feet. Of course AI researchers don't refer to any of these systems as just AI, there are particular classes and types of systems, and we would refer to them by those names: Neural networks, dynamical systems, expert systems, micro-worlds, fuzzy logic, etc.
The other thing is that some of these systems have been around for a long time and have long since stopped being the type of computing which was pushing the edge of computational power. In fact the techniques that were in the '60s and '70s cutting edge AI which consumed the full attention of supercomputers are now built into numerous software that you can purchase and run on home computers. An expert system, for example, is really just an intelligent way to search through a database, and come up with meaningful relationships. You run this kind of "AI" every time you search on google, or every time MS Word tries to correct your grammar, but you don't think of it as "AI". So having a TiVo or a website run "AI" does not imply that it need to be computationally intensive. So yes, simple statistical matching and simple keyword matching is the type of thing that does fall within the umbrella term of "AI". Although you are free to disagree with me - like I said, everyone seems to have their own definition.
As a student of AI & Cognitive Sciences, it makes me laugh to see this stuff finally coming around. I've thought for years that this kind of tracking was absurd for exactly these reasons. AI in its many forms is still primitive and it is not easy for anyone, even the experts to make it work well. It is almost impossible for it to be made infallible.
While I can't really know what kind of effort was put into these systems, it seems unlikely that Amazon or TiVo hired a team of veteran AI developpers to build these features. That being said, this problem still underlies a trend in all AI systems, no matter how good. That is that they are all really quite dumb when you compare them to anything we would call "reasonable" intelligence. They are incredibly fallible, incredibly silly machines in terms of their output to a large extent. Sure they can be made to do wonderful things, but it always has to be done with a group of human "moderators" to judge and assess the machine's performance and output, and that with a large grain of salt.
The idea that a machine is objective and not biased like people is absurd. They are more biased. They can only follow mindlessly the rules set down for them by their designers, and do not have the breadth or depth of experience that people have to know when the rules don't apply. Even the best dynamic systems and neural nets have these flaws somewhere or other. While it is funny to see them goof like this, it is scary to think that Governments are going to use similar techniques for vital things like law enforcement. This is a serious concern to all of our civil rights.
So far in all that I've seen / read / heard in the literature and water-cooler talk about the advancements and improvements of code design is that the real improvements in design that were supposed to increase our productivity by reducing development time were mostly due to the advances and applications of modularity in programming. The whole object oriented approach was and still is heralded as the solution to all programming woes in some quarters, and hence the development of completely object based languages like Java.
The idea of course being that good modular design, and good use of classes can increase reuseability ad infinitum, so that eventually there will be no task and no problem that cannot be assembled lego-like from blocks of premade reuseable code. The marvelous technology in Douglas Coupland's Microserfs ( called Goop wasn't it ? ) was really the epitome of this concept, a totally reuseable code system that was so generalized, so modularized that anyone with no more experience in programming than a child could assemble working programs for just about any purpose in a drag-and-drop virtual lego-building reality.
Any student of the history of science and science forecasting should begin to smirk at this point. Is it any surprise that these visions have not materialized? The hard truth, IMHO, is that logic is inherently not conducive to such high degrees of abstraction and modularity. For given tasks which are fixed and well defined with completely known and understood parameters and requirements than yes, abstraction and modularization can be a great boon in optimizing design and improving the development cycle. We can see the great advantages that this has yielded in some areas where the requirements are fixed and the applications are mostly derivative of each other. GUI design is a great example, and there are a multitude of GUI building toolkits & development environments that take great advantage of this.
However the whole thing breaks down when you move from the known to the unknown. When you try to extend this principle from fixed tasks to hypothetical ones in which the basic requirements are not envisioned. I would argue that there is a basic lack of understanding among some of the proponents of these techniques that at a fundamental level logic cannot be generalized out across all possible tasks, and all possible configurations. This was similar to the revelations of Godel's theorem in mathematics already in the 1930's - that any axiomatic system could be consistent but never complete. In reality adapting one set of code to a purpose other than that for which it was designed, or with parameters other than those originally envisioned usually is more trouble than it is worth, and often you would be better served by building new objects from scratch. You will always need intelligent educated people to design these things; there is no such thing as logical lego.
Unfortunately it seems to me that many have not gotten this message yet. Sun and Microsoft are still actively humping that dream of infinite modularity and drag-and-drop programming design. In my experience with both Java and.Net, I have found that I always run into blocks where the established object model is too constraining and has too many built-in assumptions about what you're going to be using the classes for, and so I have ended by coding new versions from scratch. Of course it may simply be the nature of the applications I'm working on, and your mileage may vary. Ultimately I think that for derivative applications this kind of abstraction and generalization is definitely an improvement, but when you come to applications that move beyond those fixed tasks it actually becomes an impediment not an advantage.
A virus is not a cell, and does not have the fundamental operations of a cell. The whole point of this experiment is to determine what genes are responsible for what cellular processes, and how the chains of cascading protein-interactions lead from a set of genes to a set of cellular functions. Therefore it would be pointless to use a virus.
You make some good points, but there have been examples of similar things in real history of human short-sightedness leading to major disasters.
Think of the cane toads, rabbits and wild horses in Australia. Or the zebra muscles in the great lakes. Or killer bees. The list goes on and on. We all know that humans have ( mostly inadvertantly ) made a big mess of the world through our ignorance of its complexity.
However, I agree that none of this justifies putting roadblocks up against research but for different reasons. Firstly, and more importantly, the whole point of research is to eliminate the ignorance that leads us to such blunders, and so preventing such research is the opposite strategy to employ to reduce such tragedies. Secondly is that you cannot fundamentally undo knowledge or prevent knowledge and so a ban in one area or country will simply allow other countries to excel in that area, causing possibly dangerous imbalances in technology. If you instituted a global ban, then you would simply force this research underground, pushing science more into the realm of organized crime, which nobody wants to see.
Ultimately education is the best prevention. If we educate biologists and geneticists in the perils & details of bio-ethics, then I think by and large you will have a consciencious and ethical community who will implement self-restraints on what work and applications are ethical. I know this sounds dubious to many, but it has been the general rule in the scientific community up until now, and I think it has been mostly successful.
If you read the article to the end, it says why. This cell has the least number of genes of any organism known, so it is easier to reduce this to a basic minimal set than something more complex. The whole point of the experiment is to get the absolute minimum requirement of genes for basic cellular operations. So a this creature is ideally suited as it is already the most minimal set found in nature.
This is kind of a moot point. Given that any Planet Killing asteroid would kill the whole planet, any program that attempts to protect the northern hemisphere without covering the south as well would be kind of pointless. We've all heard about what happened to the dinosaurs. For some reason I think that the guys at NASA have given this some thought, and would be more than willing to cover the south as well as the north.
The whole reason that these asteroids are something to worry about is not the chance of a dangerous impact, but that the devastation caused by such an impact would affect so many people that it is of significant worry. Even an asteroid that could cause significant local devestation without directly affecting the northern hemisphere is of concern because of the fallout it could wreak on both the global climate and the economy.
I'm not sure about the details of the current case, but there is a very good reason for publishing full technical details about an exploit before patches come out. That is that it may be possible in many circumstances for aware and knowledgeable system administrators to prevent the exploit from affecting machines within their control either at a central point, like a firewall or proxy, or by disabling software features until a patch is available.
For example a web proxy might be able to scan for the presence of the malicious code in question, but if that code is not available to the sysadmins, then how can they make appropriate filters? Also being aware of the ways in which these exploits work could allow sysadmins to make more general security policy decisions in terms of what users / processes are allowed to access what areas, etc. I'm not saying that it could be done in this case, but could in many others.
This could save a company a lot of time and money, and is therefore a good thing. It is not true to say that only the party responsible for producing a patch needs to see the actual code for security reasons.
Being currently embroiled in a statistics course at university, one of the things that has been recently drilled into my head is that a correlation of factors does not mean at all that the one factor causes the other.
Firstly, the term "statistically significant" means that the relationship observed was unlikely to occur by chance. This does not mean that there is definitely a correlation, but that there is a probability of finding a correlation.
Secondly even a very strong correlation when found, does not meant that there is causation, just that there is something interrelating those factors. For example there could be a strong correlation between a person's age and their owning a car. This does not mean that your growing up will cause you to own a car, or that owning a car makes you older. The two variables are interrelated in a system that involves many more complexe factors, but which yields results that keep certain observed factors grouped together. Finding actual causation is much more difficult.
Thirdly, this type of study is called an observational study, where you send out questionaires and look for correlations. These types of studies have very unclear results generally, and really cannot show causation. There is no talk in the article, for example, of what types of people were responding to the study. Often in voluntary response studies you find that there is an unusually high number of people of one particular tendency who respond more readily than another, so that will skew the results. What you would need to do in order to find actual causation is a set of experiments, with control groups, to show an actual causal relationship between VDT use and health. What observational studies are useful for is drawing attention to a subject and saying we need more attention to this issue.
Anyway, here I am rambling on to little point. They say in the article that they need to do more work, and that is my whole point. Its just that often people read articles like this and jump to conclusions like "my computer is going to make me crazy and depressive". So just relax and don't worry... yet!
Don't you think this sort of thing is inevitable? A big lumbering giant like RIAA is such a vulnerable target. Sure they might be able to clobber Napster, but as soon as they do, a dozen new services spring up, and new clever ideas like this spring up.
I think its pretty clear that this is the beginning of the end for the music industry as we know it.
Well hemp would be less effective than corn, because ethanol is made from the fermentation of sugars, so the more sugars in the plant - the more ethanol yielded. Yes, one can make alcohols from grains, but the yield is less. Fruits yield more alcholos per volume than grains - corn yields more than hemp. Something ideal might be sugar cane.
but in all honestly I think that the Chinese end user will still go and pirate Windows at the end of the day. I mean, it looks glitzier, and all the other kiddies are using it.
Umm... hello! This is not the Americans or even the Russians here, this is the Chinese, they can simply say that you have to use this OS or else they lock your head to a wall. This isn't a popularity contest or a free market we're talking about here - this is China. If windows is illegal than only criminals will run windows, or debian, or Mac, or anything other than good old RedFlag.
You can be disqualified for:
"membership or sponsorship in organizations which adversely affect the public's confidence in the space station or its partners."
Does that mean that a millionaire with a passion for space might be banned for... say... being a member of Greenpeace, because they might think badly of McDonell Douglas for its role as an arms manufacturer?
Maybe I'm being overly alarmist, but the implications that this clause can diqualify anyone who is even loosely related to anyone that does not wholeheartedly support large corporate power is a little disconcerting.
In my experience, the biggest snags in all time estimates have to do with the under-determination of what a project is and what it involves. Given any project F which has only F(x) parts to it, you usually have some rough intuitive estimate that there will be G( F(x) ) bugs to work out. Given that you are familiar with the type of project involved the estimations are generally fairly decent.
The big problem is that in real-world applications, x is always changing. I have found that the culprits of this is mostly one of several things:
1) You're not as familiar with the project as you thought you were - or there are some aspects that are familiar, but the unfamiliar ones have ramifications you don't foresee because you're not familiar with them. This adds to both your estimations of F(x) and G(F(x)).
2) Users are dumber than you thought. The difference in mindset between the user and the engineer is real and very significant. There are things that as an engineer ( especially one who is working closely to a piece of code for months on end ) you would never try to do with a particular application, and yet a user who has never seen it before will do out of ignorance or confusion or both. Just when you think you've made something idiot proof - they invent a bigger idiot. This throws off your estimates of G( F(x) ) because you have whole classes of bugs you never thought of as bugs before. Sometimes this requires reworking core components making estimates of F(x) go wrong.
3) The client either doesn't know what (s)he wants, or doesn't know how to explain it, or even that it is necessary to be explained. This is the most frustrating of problems, and can be fatal to entire projects. Often clients don't think of software engineering like real engineering. One cannot ask an architect to redesign a building after its already 3/4 built. But this has happened to me with software projects, and even on occasion prompted me to quit a job in frustration. When this happens, all bets on estimates are off.
Either that or I'm just really lousy at doing time estimates =)
Re:Unfortunately, an end to wars
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Naturally it is all relative to the dispute and the parties in question, and while my point is invalid in many circumstances ( such as some you mention, as well as general revolutions ), it does still apply and constitutes an important shift in recent decades from the nature of political action and discourse in society.
There are whole classes of political action that are today less effective than they might have been in the past because of the advent of such crowd controlling techniques.
And yes, these weapons are still lethal n many cases, but they are less likely to be lethal than many alternatives, so they are properly called "less than lethal" and not "nonlethal". Look at how many Palestinians were killed by rubber bullets to get an example.
Re:Unfortunately, an end to wars
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I was not considering all out revolution, but rather what we find more often in 1st world nations, which is small active organized groups. They may be small in terms of the population at large, and their opinions may not be widely held either, but they have potential to make their opinions become politically significant if they act appropriately.
In the past, a govt. would have to deal more cautiously with such groups, because even if the general population did not agree with them or support their actions, the political fallout from taking violent actions could be devestating for a government. The history of 19th and 20th century democratic nations is filled with such examples.
However with the advent of less than lethal weapons, a government can effectively suppress protest and remove disruptive actions without inflicting sufficient violence to provoke the anger of the general population.
Naturally this does not apply to situations in which the general population is in revolt, or even when the majority opinion is behind the protests.
Re:Unfortunately, an end to wars
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Sorry, I was using the term too loosely. I was assuming that any protesting mass would be significantly smaller than the general population, and the actions of a govt. with regards to that smaller group would affect the opinion of the larger vis a vis the govt. The govt. is less likely to disregard the opinion of the population at large than it is a small mob.
Slashdot Mirror
Popular science reporting seems the art of taking fairly mundane research and making it sound much more exciting, wonderful, dangerous than it really is. Such as this article for instance.
They are purporting that with MRI scans of people's brains they can "read your unconscious thoughts", like some Orwellian nightmare and then pull these subconscious strings to get you to empty your wallet at the nearest GAP outlet.
Well, being myself a student of the cognitive sciences, I'd like to set a few things clear. The ability to "read thoughts" as purported by this article, while not technically false, is much more primitive than you could imagine.
An MRI of the brain can give you a picutre of what cells are most active at any given point, so you can see relatively what brain centres dominate and try to make inferences from that as to what the person is thinking. Given that our knowledge of brain function is at a very primitive level, the most useful data you can get from this type of scan is "he likes it" or "he doesn't like it". It will not tell you what images, feelings, sounds, associations are passing through the subjects head at any point, only whether they are generally positive or not. Its really no different from putting a bunch of boxes on a chart and asking the person to rate from one to ten how well they like certain things - except you get that rating directly from the brain rather than from asking the person. So in theory this ranking is more "honest" and less clouded by other factors such as social obligations, etc. which might interfere with what a person would say when asked.
The idea that this technology can be used in some Orwellian fashion to understand that secretly you are afraid of rats, or are a pedophile or like the look of women eating juicy mangoes is not going to happen anytime soon. It is unlikely that that level of analysis is ever going to be possible. Ok, end of rant.
Wow, this sounds exactly like the opening 20 minutes of blackness to 2001! Now we finally know what Kubrik was doing - he was torturing a reel-to-reel copy of Beethoven's Ninth, cool!
maybe its suddenly april fools day? or November fools day?
What's up with you guys today? That's two double articles in one day. This exact same article was posted just the other day!
When Profiling Goes Wrong
I moderate Hemo -1 for posting a redundant article.
I moderate CmdrTaco down one point for posting redundant articles.
Well prepare to be shocked.
Unfortunately, the term AI is used in so many ways by so many different people for so many different things that it has lost a lot of its meaning as a technical term. Even within the cognitive sciences, the term is used differently by different people, and often a writer will go to lengths to define his particular definition of AI before continuing. AI is sometimes just used to refere to whatever happens to be on the cutting edge of research in computer science. Before the principles of OCR were well established, OCR was considered to be "AI". There was even a point when shortest path finding techniques like Dijkstra's algorithm were within the umbrella of "AI".
When normal people ( cognitive scientists are not normal by any measure ) refer to AI, they usually imagine HAL or R2D2, some machine that interacts in every respect as though it were human. This is often referred to in the literature as "strong" AI - a system which is sentient in every sense of the term. There is, of course, no such thing in the real world, and it is doubtful if there ever will. But this is the subject of much discussion and philosophizing withing cognitive science.
If there is "strong" AI, then there must be "weak" AI. This as it turns out is just everything else, a computer system or program that evaluates some information in a manner which we might describe as an "intelligent" assessment. This of course is a wide definition which covers everything from how to deduce the illness of a patient from his reported symptoms, to how to make monsters crawl through a 3d shooter in an intelligent way, to how to identify enemy tanks from friendly ones in IR images from 30,000 feet. Of course AI researchers don't refer to any of these systems as just AI, there are particular classes and types of systems, and we would refer to them by those names: Neural networks, dynamical systems, expert systems, micro-worlds, fuzzy logic, etc.
The other thing is that some of these systems have been around for a long time and have long since stopped being the type of computing which was pushing the edge of computational power. In fact the techniques that were in the '60s and '70s cutting edge AI which consumed the full attention of supercomputers are now built into numerous software that you can purchase and run on home computers. An expert system, for example, is really just an intelligent way to search through a database, and come up with meaningful relationships. You run this kind of "AI" every time you search on google, or every time MS Word tries to correct your grammar, but you don't think of it as "AI". So having a TiVo or a website run "AI" does not imply that it need to be computationally intensive. So yes, simple statistical matching and simple keyword matching is the type of thing that does fall within the umbrella term of "AI". Although you are free to disagree with me - like I said, everyone seems to have their own definition.
While I can't really know what kind of effort was put into these systems, it seems unlikely that Amazon or TiVo hired a team of veteran AI developpers to build these features. That being said, this problem still underlies a trend in all AI systems, no matter how good. That is that they are all really quite dumb when you compare them to anything we would call "reasonable" intelligence. They are incredibly fallible, incredibly silly machines in terms of their output to a large extent. Sure they can be made to do wonderful things, but it always has to be done with a group of human "moderators" to judge and assess the machine's performance and output, and that with a large grain of salt.
The idea that a machine is objective and not biased like people is absurd. They are more biased. They can only follow mindlessly the rules set down for them by their designers, and do not have the breadth or depth of experience that people have to know when the rules don't apply. Even the best dynamic systems and neural nets have these flaws somewhere or other. While it is funny to see them goof like this, it is scary to think that Governments are going to use similar techniques for vital things like law enforcement. This is a serious concern to all of our civil rights.
The idea of course being that good modular design, and good use of classes can increase reuseability ad infinitum, so that eventually there will be no task and no problem that cannot be assembled lego-like from blocks of premade reuseable code. The marvelous technology in Douglas Coupland's Microserfs ( called Goop wasn't it ? ) was really the epitome of this concept, a totally reuseable code system that was so generalized, so modularized that anyone with no more experience in programming than a child could assemble working programs for just about any purpose in a drag-and-drop virtual lego-building reality.
Any student of the history of science and science forecasting should begin to smirk at this point. Is it any surprise that these visions have not materialized? The hard truth, IMHO, is that logic is inherently not conducive to such high degrees of abstraction and modularity. For given tasks which are fixed and well defined with completely known and understood parameters and requirements than yes, abstraction and modularization can be a great boon in optimizing design and improving the development cycle. We can see the great advantages that this has yielded in some areas where the requirements are fixed and the applications are mostly derivative of each other. GUI design is a great example, and there are a multitude of GUI building toolkits & development environments that take great advantage of this.
However the whole thing breaks down when you move from the known to the unknown. When you try to extend this principle from fixed tasks to hypothetical ones in which the basic requirements are not envisioned. I would argue that there is a basic lack of understanding among some of the proponents of these techniques that at a fundamental level logic cannot be generalized out across all possible tasks, and all possible configurations. This was similar to the revelations of Godel's theorem in mathematics already in the 1930's - that any axiomatic system could be consistent but never complete. In reality adapting one set of code to a purpose other than that for which it was designed, or with parameters other than those originally envisioned usually is more trouble than it is worth, and often you would be better served by building new objects from scratch. You will always need intelligent educated people to design these things; there is no such thing as logical lego.
Unfortunately it seems to me that many have not gotten this message yet. Sun and Microsoft are still actively humping that dream of infinite modularity and drag-and-drop programming design. In my experience with both Java and .Net, I have found that I always run into blocks where the established object model is too constraining and has too many built-in assumptions about what you're going to be using the classes for, and so I have ended by coding new versions from scratch. Of course it may simply be the nature of the applications I'm working on, and your mileage may vary. Ultimately I think that for derivative applications this kind of abstraction and generalization is definitely an improvement, but when you come to applications that move beyond those fixed tasks it actually becomes an impediment not an advantage.
[SARCASM]
...um.... basket weaving!
Prevent the spread of viruses, make computers more secure, enjoy life in the Real World, spend more time with your family & loved ones!
All this and more can be yours! Support Neo-Ludditism - break your computer today!
No computers means no computer problems!
Just imagine a profitable new career in
[/SARCASM]
"Area girl friends with TV director's son, gets part in ad!"
Does this sound like an Onion article?
A virus is not a cell, and does not have the fundamental operations of a cell. The whole point of this experiment is to determine what genes are responsible for what cellular processes, and how the chains of cascading protein-interactions lead from a set of genes to a set of cellular functions. Therefore it would be pointless to use a virus.
You make some good points, but there have been examples of similar things in real history of human short-sightedness leading to major disasters.
Think of the cane toads, rabbits and wild horses in Australia. Or the zebra muscles in the great lakes. Or killer bees. The list goes on and on. We all know that humans have ( mostly inadvertantly ) made a big mess of the world through our ignorance of its complexity.
However, I agree that none of this justifies putting roadblocks up against research but for different reasons. Firstly, and more importantly, the whole point of research is to eliminate the ignorance that leads us to such blunders, and so preventing such research is the opposite strategy to employ to reduce such tragedies. Secondly is that you cannot fundamentally undo knowledge or prevent knowledge and so a ban in one area or country will simply allow other countries to excel in that area, causing possibly dangerous imbalances in technology. If you instituted a global ban, then you would simply force this research underground, pushing science more into the realm of organized crime, which nobody wants to see.
Ultimately education is the best prevention. If we educate biologists and geneticists in the perils & details of bio-ethics, then I think by and large you will have a consciencious and ethical community who will implement self-restraints on what work and applications are ethical. I know this sounds dubious to many, but it has been the general rule in the scientific community up until now, and I think it has been mostly successful.
If you read the article to the end, it says why. This cell has the least number of genes of any organism known, so it is easier to reduce this to a basic minimal set than something more complex. The whole point of the experiment is to get the absolute minimum requirement of genes for basic cellular operations. So a this creature is ideally suited as it is already the most minimal set found in nature.
The whole reason that these asteroids are something to worry about is not the chance of a dangerous impact, but that the devastation caused by such an impact would affect so many people that it is of significant worry. Even an asteroid that could cause significant local devestation without directly affecting the northern hemisphere is of concern because of the fallout it could wreak on both the global climate and the economy.
I'm not sure about the details of the current case, but there is a very good reason for publishing full technical details about an exploit before patches come out. That is that it may be possible in many circumstances for aware and knowledgeable system administrators to prevent the exploit from affecting machines within their control either at a central point, like a firewall or proxy, or by disabling software features until a patch is available.
For example a web proxy might be able to scan for the presence of the malicious code in question, but if that code is not available to the sysadmins, then how can they make appropriate filters? Also being aware of the ways in which these exploits work could allow sysadmins to make more general security policy decisions in terms of what users / processes are allowed to access what areas, etc. I'm not saying that it could be done in this case, but could in many others.
This could save a company a lot of time and money, and is therefore a good thing. It is not true to say that only the party responsible for producing a patch needs to see the actual code for security reasons.
Yeah, that roll from the bay of pigs, where the air support showed up an hour too late - that one would be priceless.
Being currently embroiled in a statistics course at university, one of the things that has been recently drilled into my head is that a correlation of factors does not mean at all that the one factor causes the other.
Firstly, the term "statistically significant" means that the relationship observed was unlikely to occur by chance. This does not mean that there is definitely a correlation, but that there is a probability of finding a correlation.
Secondly even a very strong correlation when found, does not meant that there is causation, just that there is something interrelating those factors. For example there could be a strong correlation between a person's age and their owning a car. This does not mean that your growing up will cause you to own a car, or that owning a car makes you older. The two variables are interrelated in a system that involves many more complexe factors, but which yields results that keep certain observed factors grouped together. Finding actual causation is much more difficult.
Thirdly, this type of study is called an observational study, where you send out questionaires and look for correlations. These types of studies have very unclear results generally, and really cannot show causation. There is no talk in the article, for example, of what types of people were responding to the study. Often in voluntary response studies you find that there is an unusually high number of people of one particular tendency who respond more readily than another, so that will skew the results. What you would need to do in order to find actual causation is a set of experiments, with control groups, to show an actual causal relationship between VDT use and health. What observational studies are useful for is drawing attention to a subject and saying we need more attention to this issue.
Anyway, here I am rambling on to little point. They say in the article that they need to do more work, and that is my whole point. Its just that often people read articles like this and jump to conclusions like "my computer is going to make me crazy and depressive". So just relax and don't worry... yet!
Don't you think this sort of thing is inevitable? A big lumbering giant like RIAA is such a vulnerable target. Sure they might be able to clobber Napster, but as soon as they do, a dozen new services spring up, and new clever ideas like this spring up.
I think its pretty clear that this is the beginning of the end for the music industry as we know it.
What about hemp [...]
Well hemp would be less effective than corn, because ethanol is made from the fermentation of sugars, so the more sugars in the plant - the more ethanol yielded. Yes, one can make alcohols from grains, but the yield is less. Fruits yield more alcholos per volume than grains - corn yields more than hemp. Something ideal might be sugar cane.
Umm... hello!
This is not the Americans or even the Russians here, this is the Chinese, they can simply say that you have to use this OS or else they lock your head to a wall. This isn't a popularity contest or a free market we're talking about here - this is China. If windows is illegal than only criminals will run windows, or debian, or Mac, or anything other than good old RedFlag.
"membership or sponsorship in organizations which adversely affect the public's confidence in the space station or its partners."
Does that mean that a millionaire with a passion for space might be banned for... say... being a member of Greenpeace, because they might think badly of McDonell Douglas for its role as an arms manufacturer?
Maybe I'm being overly alarmist, but the implications that this clause can diqualify anyone who is even loosely related to anyone that does not wholeheartedly support large corporate power is a little disconcerting.
In my experience, the biggest snags in all time estimates have to do with the under-determination of what a project is and what it involves. Given any project F which has only F(x) parts to it, you usually have some rough intuitive estimate that there will be G( F(x) ) bugs to work out. Given that you are familiar with the type of project involved the estimations are generally fairly decent.
The big problem is that in real-world applications, x is always changing. I have found that the culprits of this is mostly one of several things:
1) You're not as familiar with the project as you thought you were - or there are some aspects that are familiar, but the unfamiliar ones have ramifications you don't foresee because you're not familiar with them. This adds to both your estimations of F(x) and G(F(x)).
2) Users are dumber than you thought. The difference in mindset between the user and the engineer is real and very significant. There are things that as an engineer ( especially one who is working closely to a piece of code for months on end ) you would never try to do with a particular application, and yet a user who has never seen it before will do out of ignorance or confusion or both. Just when you think you've made something idiot proof - they invent a bigger idiot. This throws off your estimates of G( F(x) ) because you have whole classes of bugs you never thought of as bugs before. Sometimes this requires reworking core components making estimates of F(x) go wrong.
3) The client either doesn't know what (s)he wants, or doesn't know how to explain it, or even that it is necessary to be explained. This is the most frustrating of problems, and can be fatal to entire projects. Often clients don't think of software engineering like real engineering. One cannot ask an architect to redesign a building after its already 3/4 built. But this has happened to me with software projects, and even on occasion prompted me to quit a job in frustration. When this happens, all bets on estimates are off.
Either that or I'm just really lousy at doing time estimates =)
Naturally it is all relative to the dispute and the parties in question, and while my point is invalid in many circumstances ( such as some you mention, as well as general revolutions ), it does still apply and constitutes an important shift in recent decades from the nature of political action and discourse in society.
There are whole classes of political action that are today less effective than they might have been in the past because of the advent of such crowd controlling techniques.
And yes, these weapons are still lethal n many cases, but they are less likely to be lethal than many alternatives, so they are properly called "less than lethal" and not "nonlethal". Look at how many Palestinians were killed by rubber bullets to get an example.
I was not considering all out revolution, but rather what we find more often in 1st world nations, which is small active organized groups. They may be small in terms of the population at large, and their opinions may not be widely held either, but they have potential to make their opinions become politically significant if they act appropriately.
In the past, a govt. would have to deal more cautiously with such groups, because even if the general population did not agree with them or support their actions, the political fallout from taking violent actions could be devestating for a government. The history of 19th and 20th century democratic nations is filled with such examples.
However with the advent of less than lethal weapons, a government can effectively suppress protest and remove disruptive actions without inflicting sufficient violence to provoke the anger of the general population.
Naturally this does not apply to situations in which the general population is in revolt, or even when the majority opinion is behind the protests.
Sorry, I was using the term too loosely. I was assuming that any protesting mass would be significantly smaller than the general population, and the actions of a govt. with regards to that smaller group would affect the opinion of the larger vis a vis the govt. The govt. is less likely to disregard the opinion of the population at large than it is a small mob.