The professors that write these books will simply reject the U.S. funds
What kind of a world do you live in where professors reject money? That just doesn't happen. Being a researcher means being on a constant quest for funding much like being a politician means always seeking campaign contributions. Professors make very little money from publishing a textbook. They do it for the prestige of being the person who literally "wrote the book on the subject." There is no financial reason for a professor to turn down funding because the text will have to be freely available. All academics want their work to be easily available and widely referenced. It is the publishers that want to tie up the content.
A good IT project manager is worth his or her weight in gold.
Because they are about as a rare.
I wonder if that is really true. Gold is going for roughly $990 per troy ounce, which is $1079.10 per ounce. The median weight of a 35 year old white man is about 175 pounds or 2800 ounces. So a IT project manager needs to be worth $3,021,479 to be worth his weight in gold. For a large project, it is not unreasonable to see where the difference between a good and bad manager can exceed that amount. If a company can retain the good manager for, say, 10 years then a manager needs to be saving you $302,147 to be worth his weight in gold. That is not at all unreasonable, so an IT project manager can really be worth his weight in gold if the projects are large enough.
The lesson here is to hire good, fat project managers so that you get your money's worth.
One job (at a large mega-corporation) required everyone to take an online security class once a year. You had to pass a test to get credit for the class. On one test, it gave the following, "True or False: The best way to remember your password is to keep it on a sticky note on your monitor."
The answer they wanted was obviously False, but I so wanted to put True. What possible way could be better? People can try to remember but when you have dozens of accounts, passwords will inevitably be forgotten. I guess I could tattoo it on my hand, but that makes it difficult to change so that is out. I found it hard to make the case that there is a better method than using a sticky pad. Personally, I keep them in an unencrypted text file (over 200 entries right now).
Um, no. Commands like cat and grep have been around since the beginning of Unix. Perl is only about 20 years old.
That is true, but the modern GNU versions of those commands contain a lot of options that the originals never even thought of. Why? Because people were having to hack up solutions in perl (and other languages) to get equivalent functionality. When lots of people have to come up with the same hack all the time, a general purpose solution will eventually emerge as either a new tool or an add-on to an existing tool.
What you say is true, but the recent economic decline has meant that prime beef is showing up in unexpected places (like Costco) at cheap prices (like $9.99 per pound). See this article in the Wall Street Journal. It is still unlikely to have prime beef sold at your local supermarket, but if you keep a good lookout you might find some surprises right now.
I think the real reason we spend so much on servicing the Hubble is that we just don't have a cheaper operational spacecraft. I think the Shuttle is overkill for this type of mission. It's like taking a tractor-trailer to do your weekly grocery shopping. Something closer in design to the Apollo command module could get an expert to the Hubble to do maintenance much cheaper.
I don't believe we can make spaceflight cheaper and more reliable by relying on the shuttle. We need to take the lessons we have learned and build something new with reliability and cost in mind. That is the only way to really advance our ability.
NASA wouldn't need good PR if it had a mission like the Apollo mission to land man on the moon, something a lot of people were able to get behind.
Apollo was not quite as popular as you think. There is no question that it captured people's imagination. For Apollo 11, that is. The rest of the Apollo missions got very little attention. When the last couple of missions were cancelled, there was no public outcry. Within Congress, the amount of money being spent by NASA made it a huge target. Everyone thought there was a better way to spend that money and they were fighting to get that spent in their states/districts. The NASA budgets in the Apollo era were unsustainable and everyone knew it.
Really, spaceflight should be a ho-hum event. That is the goal and that is what was promised but never achieved with the shuttle. At one time, airplanes were amazing and now they are routine. Satellites were amazing and now they are routine (though still expensive). Manned spaceflight will get there one day, but it will be a while. The shuttle is only our 4th generation of manned spacefraft.
I don't use the Netflix streaming much, but when I do I just boot a Windows XP image in VirtualBox and watch it. The performance of VirtualBox is good enough that this works great. There may be a more "native" way to make this work in Linux, but to be honest, it simply isn't worth my time since the virtualization is so easy to setup.
It isn't so much about what your data is worth to the cloud provider as it is a question of how much trust you have in your provider. Will they provide protection to prevent curious employees from snooping on your data? Will they resist a government request for your data? In many cases, a breach of the cloud security would be more damaging to the customer than to the provider.
So even if you completely trust the intentions of the cloud provider, there are still risks. We see examples everyday of businesses doing things to exploit customers for profit (Airlines, credit card companies, cell phone carriers, etc) so it is natural to expect this to extend at some point to a cloud provider, even if the majority of them are honest.
This is all just classic risk management, though. There are benefits and risks to outsourcing infrastructure and individual companies must weigh those. The point of my original post was just to point out that just using encryption does not suddenly mitigate all of the risks that exist.
I'm not sure about that. Cloud computing often means running some operating system image on someone else's hardware. If the application on that image is dealing with sensitive data, it must decrypt it at some point. Once that happens, it is vulnerable to being data mined by the cloud provider.
If you only use the cloud as storage, then encryption does protect you, but most cloud descriptions involve more than just that.
Security issues go beyond just encryption, though. How can you trust that the operating system image that you are running, is what you want to be running? Suppose you generate a CentOS image with your applications on it and give it to a cloud provider. You save a SHA-1 hash of the image to detect tampering. When the image is booted by the cloud, is there anyway for the virtualized operating system to verify that it is running from an image that matches the original hash value? I don't think there is a way to do that now. This means a cloud provider could tamper with your images in ways that are undetectable to you. How much can you trust the calculations of your image now?
After all, who would not want a "private cloud", which is sort of contradictory, no?
A "private cloud" makes no sense at all in a 50-100 person company. But when a company has tens of thousands of employees all over the world in dozens of different markets (e.g. Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Cisco), they make a lot of sense. Departments often need temporary computing services, but have no choice but to buy a server to handle it. The server then goes to waste when the temporary job was done. When a company is large, it is difficult to coordinate the use of computational resources and this leads to inefficiencies.
I worked for a company that would create installers for the software for dozens of different languages. Each one of these installers would need to be tested at release time (about every 6 months). There was a dedicated machine that had all the relevant software to do this testing. This machine would get used for a week or two every six months which is a complete waste. A cloud environment would allow the server to exist as an image and then you would instantiate the image on whatever free machine happened to be in the cloud.
Looking back on my career, there are many times when I would have loved to be able to go to an internal web page, request a machine, upload a preconfigured virtualized image and had a departmental server up and running with no bureaucratic headaches. If I decided I was done with the server, I could just release it and the hardware would no longer be wasted and I would know that I could restore it at any time with a few clicks because the image would still be around.
Exactly... am I the *only* one who thinks all that money would be better spent improving the planet we're already on, rather than giving up on it and moving on to another one?
You certainly aren't the only one, although you are one of very few on Slashdot who feels that way. In the larger population, lots of people feel like you do, especially in Congress.
It was even difficult for Kennedy to justify the huge costs of the Apollo program. (see http://www.whitehousetapes.net/exhibit/jfk-and-space-race) In a conversation with James Webb (the NASA administrator) he said, "we've wrecked our budget on all these other domestic programs, and the only justification for it, in my opinion, to do it in the pell-mell fashion is because we hope to beat them [the Soviets]".
I love space exploration, but I am disappointed with many of the current programs and plans. I want a high science to dollar ratio, but transporting humans wrecks that ratio because of the high cost of protecting life. The Space Shuttle and the ISS are huge money pits while the Mars rovers are a huge value. I want more value out of the program.
It is only colonization if the men and women that are sent can be self-sufficient. People talk like putting men on Mars is the hard part and once we are there we can figure out how to stay there permanently. My claim is that that is backwards. We must figure out a plan to be self-sustaining before we go because that is actually the hardest part of this. Getting there is easy; staying there is far, far harder.
So if we were serious about colonization we would be talking about self-sufficiency instead of our travel arrangements.
Even the launcher that put sputnik into orbit would have been useless as an ICBM due to the long preparation time and the very short life of the fuel.
Indeed, this was a big source of contention between NASA and the Department of Defense. The DoD wanted NASA to use solid fuel rockets because that is what you need for military purposes. It is stable and rockets that use it can be stored without maintenance for large periods of time and be ready when you need them. NASA didn't like them because they are essentially bombs. Once you light them, you cannot easily stop them. The rocket will burn until the fuel is gone. With a liquid fuel rocket, you can turn off the supply of fuel to stop the rocket whenever you want. They are much more flexible, but are more finicky so the military does not like them.
Oh come on. You can do better than that. If you disagree, tell me what you think. Don't put your pretentious labels on me in lieu of a thoughtful argument.
Tell me how sending a few men and women to breathe their last breath on Mars with no hope of return to Earth benefits humanity. Tell me why there really is no better way to spend a few hundred billion dollars. Tell me what the scientific value is for having a few humans there versus hundreds of exploring rovers. If you want to participate in the discussion, then please think of something to say.
For the record, I think being able to colonize Mars is a fantastic goal. But colonizing means turning it into a self-sustaining long-term home. That is a far cry from the suicide missions being proposed. We are so far from being self-sustaining on Mars that there is no point in talking about sending men there. Show me a machine that can generate enough oxygen and water for people to survive (you have to grow your own food, too). Show me how we can generate sufficient electricity, even in the Martian winter. Show me that we can land heavy equipment very near other equipment and people with pinpoint accuracy. When we master those things (and more), then we can start thinking about getting people there.
if you can find other resources that make the enterprise economically viable
This is something I've often wondered. Is there any substance that could exist on Mars which would make a round trip economically viable? If Mars was solid gold, could we transport enough of it so that we could make a profit on the venture? What about diamonds? Litium? Titanium? Anything? I'd love to see some ballpark numbers that show this is economically feasible because I don't believe that it is right now.
That doesn't take away what they would be doing for humanity though.
Which is what? This does nothing for humanity. It isn't like we don't know what is on Mars. We know exactly what Mars is like. For hundreds of billions of dollars we can send an almost limitless series of rovers equipped with a variety of instruments to explore and run tests. Having a couple of humans just trying to survive, is not going to provide a scientific breakthrough.
The only point of sending men to Mars is to prove the point that we can send men to Mars. It's the same reason most people run marathons or attempt to climb Mount Everest. You just want to know that you can do it.
Personally, I don't see the value in that (at least not a few lives and billions of dollars worth). Others may disagree and say that "because its there" is a good enough reason to try, but that still doesn't make it a breakthrough moment for humanity.
Re:Elektronorgtechnica Bias -- Any Video Game Real
on
Tetris Improves Your Brain
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Then you're going to have the hilarious possibility that they were merely observing natural growth of the cortex over time.
I just found the paper online here: http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1756-0500-2-174.pdf . The article did not mention a control group (how I hate stupid science reporting), but there was one. This is almost certainly not normally occurring growth that was observed.
I would find it very surprising if Tetris could improve the brain, but speed chess, sudoku, crossword puzzles, etc could not. They may make improvements on somewhat different areas of the brain, but I would expect they would all provide some benefits. Tetris rewards speedy hand-eye coordination to move the blocks quickly, but does not engage the verbal parts of the brain like a crossword puzzle does.
I think the old adage "use it or lose it" applies just as well to the brain as to our muscles. There is already research that suggests that Alzheimer's patients have a better end of life under some conditions that exercise the mind. I would love to see more studies that show how the mind can be improved by various puzzles and games. This could lead to focused workout regimes to improve many aspects of how we think.
Maybe we could use this research to make sure that in the next presidential elections, one of the debates has a Tetris round for the candidates. I would find that more interesting than the canned blurbs from their stump speeches that they spew now.
Re:Elektronorgtechnica Bias -- Any Video Game Real
on
Tetris Improves Your Brain
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
So you're saying you had control groups of people that played other video games and Tetris showed a difference? Or a control group studying chess? I suspect the title of this article should be "Puzzles Improve Your Brain."
There was no control group in this experiment. They did a before and after with a group of people.
I don't understand why you think the title should be generalized to Puzzles instead of Tetris. The experiment only looked at the impact of Tetris on the brain and not puzzles in general. It is natural to hypothesize that other types of games will have a similar impact, but until that is tested and confirmed across a spectrum of puzzles, you can't safely generalize that.
No one is claiming that playing Tetris makes you smarter than playing other games because no one has tested that, yet.
Having read much of her work, I think it would be fair to say that she is on the left (liberal) side of the political spectrum. This is as opposed to her right leaning (conservative) father. I'm pretty sure she would describe herself as being liberal. If you listen to the audio, she makes her and her father's political views quite clear right at the beginning.
There is a really great episode of This American Life here: http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=734 that is relevant to this story. Act 1 has Sarah Vowell (a liberal anti-gun person) whose father is a gunsmith who built his own cannon. She tells about going out with him to fire it for the first time.
I think many people would make the reasonable assumption that the app will only get the information that is required for it to work. That is what the warning says, after all. But that is not true. The app has full access to everything you can see, whether it needs it or not. Why in the world should a stupid poll need to see my (and my friend's) photos?
This is the crux of the problem. It suggests apps have limited access (based on need) when they really have unfettered access. I assume that the bar to become a Facebook developer is quite low so who knows what kind of low lifes are developing stupid 80's movies quizzes and collecting information on people who never even agreed to take the quiz in the first place.
Auto exposures are notoriously stupid because they have a very simplistic algorithm. They try to make the whole image grey. I.e. not too dark, not too bright, not too red, etc. Things like the moon, snow, sand can easily screw this up. The upside is that the algorithm is so simple that it is easy to guess when it will be way off and correct for it. Most cameras have some manual settings you can use to correct the exposure, but I doubt most people know how to use it.
Slashdot Mirror
The professors that write these books will simply reject the U.S. funds
What kind of a world do you live in where professors reject money? That just doesn't happen. Being a researcher means being on a constant quest for funding much like being a politician means always seeking campaign contributions. Professors make very little money from publishing a textbook. They do it for the prestige of being the person who literally "wrote the book on the subject." There is no financial reason for a professor to turn down funding because the text will have to be freely available. All academics want their work to be easily available and widely referenced. It is the publishers that want to tie up the content.
A good IT project manager is worth his or her weight in gold.
Because they are about as a rare.
I wonder if that is really true. Gold is going for roughly $990 per troy ounce, which is $1079.10 per ounce. The median weight of a 35 year old white man is about 175 pounds or 2800 ounces. So a IT project manager needs to be worth $3,021,479 to be worth his weight in gold. For a large project, it is not unreasonable to see where the difference between a good and bad manager can exceed that amount. If a company can retain the good manager for, say, 10 years then a manager needs to be saving you $302,147 to be worth his weight in gold. That is not at all unreasonable, so an IT project manager can really be worth his weight in gold if the projects are large enough.
The lesson here is to hire good, fat project managers so that you get your money's worth.
One job (at a large mega-corporation) required everyone to take an online security class once a year. You had to pass a test to get credit for the class. On one test, it gave the following, "True or False: The best way to remember your password is to keep it on a sticky note on your monitor."
The answer they wanted was obviously False, but I so wanted to put True. What possible way could be better? People can try to remember but when you have dozens of accounts, passwords will inevitably be forgotten. I guess I could tattoo it on my hand, but that makes it difficult to change so that is out. I found it hard to make the case that there is a better method than using a sticky pad. Personally, I keep them in an unencrypted text file (over 200 entries right now).
Um, no. Commands like cat and grep have been around since the beginning of Unix. Perl is only about 20 years old.
That is true, but the modern GNU versions of those commands contain a lot of options that the originals never even thought of. Why? Because people were having to hack up solutions in perl (and other languages) to get equivalent functionality. When lots of people have to come up with the same hack all the time, a general purpose solution will eventually emerge as either a new tool or an add-on to an existing tool.
What you say is true, but the recent economic decline has meant that prime beef is showing up in unexpected places (like Costco) at cheap prices (like $9.99 per pound). See this article in the Wall Street Journal. It is still unlikely to have prime beef sold at your local supermarket, but if you keep a good lookout you might find some surprises right now.
I think the real reason we spend so much on servicing the Hubble is that we just don't have a cheaper operational spacecraft. I think the Shuttle is overkill for this type of mission. It's like taking a tractor-trailer to do your weekly grocery shopping. Something closer in design to the Apollo command module could get an expert to the Hubble to do maintenance much cheaper.
I don't believe we can make spaceflight cheaper and more reliable by relying on the shuttle. We need to take the lessons we have learned and build something new with reliability and cost in mind. That is the only way to really advance our ability.
NASA wouldn't need good PR if it had a mission like the Apollo mission to land man on the moon, something a lot of people were able to get behind.
Apollo was not quite as popular as you think. There is no question that it captured people's imagination. For Apollo 11, that is. The rest of the Apollo missions got very little attention. When the last couple of missions were cancelled, there was no public outcry. Within Congress, the amount of money being spent by NASA made it a huge target. Everyone thought there was a better way to spend that money and they were fighting to get that spent in their states/districts. The NASA budgets in the Apollo era were unsustainable and everyone knew it.
Really, spaceflight should be a ho-hum event. That is the goal and that is what was promised but never achieved with the shuttle. At one time, airplanes were amazing and now they are routine. Satellites were amazing and now they are routine (though still expensive). Manned spaceflight will get there one day, but it will be a while. The shuttle is only our 4th generation of manned spacefraft.
I don't use the Netflix streaming much, but when I do I just boot a Windows XP image in VirtualBox and watch it. The performance of VirtualBox is good enough that this works great. There may be a more "native" way to make this work in Linux, but to be honest, it simply isn't worth my time since the virtualization is so easy to setup.
It isn't so much about what your data is worth to the cloud provider as it is a question of how much trust you have in your provider. Will they provide protection to prevent curious employees from snooping on your data? Will they resist a government request for your data? In many cases, a breach of the cloud security would be more damaging to the customer than to the provider.
So even if you completely trust the intentions of the cloud provider, there are still risks. We see examples everyday of businesses doing things to exploit customers for profit (Airlines, credit card companies, cell phone carriers, etc) so it is natural to expect this to extend at some point to a cloud provider, even if the majority of them are honest.
This is all just classic risk management, though. There are benefits and risks to outsourcing infrastructure and individual companies must weigh those. The point of my original post was just to point out that just using encryption does not suddenly mitigate all of the risks that exist.
If you encrypt it, data mining isnt a concern.
I'm not sure about that. Cloud computing often means running some operating system image on someone else's hardware. If the application on that image is dealing with sensitive data, it must decrypt it at some point. Once that happens, it is vulnerable to being data mined by the cloud provider.
If you only use the cloud as storage, then encryption does protect you, but most cloud descriptions involve more than just that.
Security issues go beyond just encryption, though. How can you trust that the operating system image that you are running, is what you want to be running? Suppose you generate a CentOS image with your applications on it and give it to a cloud provider. You save a SHA-1 hash of the image to detect tampering. When the image is booted by the cloud, is there anyway for the virtualized operating system to verify that it is running from an image that matches the original hash value? I don't think there is a way to do that now. This means a cloud provider could tamper with your images in ways that are undetectable to you. How much can you trust the calculations of your image now?
After all, who would not want a "private cloud", which is sort of contradictory, no?
A "private cloud" makes no sense at all in a 50-100 person company. But when a company has tens of thousands of employees all over the world in dozens of different markets (e.g. Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Cisco), they make a lot of sense. Departments often need temporary computing services, but have no choice but to buy a server to handle it. The server then goes to waste when the temporary job was done. When a company is large, it is difficult to coordinate the use of computational resources and this leads to inefficiencies.
I worked for a company that would create installers for the software for dozens of different languages. Each one of these installers would need to be tested at release time (about every 6 months). There was a dedicated machine that had all the relevant software to do this testing. This machine would get used for a week or two every six months which is a complete waste. A cloud environment would allow the server to exist as an image and then you would instantiate the image on whatever free machine happened to be in the cloud.
Looking back on my career, there are many times when I would have loved to be able to go to an internal web page, request a machine, upload a preconfigured virtualized image and had a departmental server up and running with no bureaucratic headaches. If I decided I was done with the server, I could just release it and the hardware would no longer be wasted and I would know that I could restore it at any time with a few clicks because the image would still be around.
Exactly... am I the *only* one who thinks all that money would be better spent improving the planet we're already on, rather than giving up on it and moving on to another one?
You certainly aren't the only one, although you are one of very few on Slashdot who feels that way. In the larger population, lots of people feel like you do, especially in Congress.
It was even difficult for Kennedy to justify the huge costs of the Apollo program. (see http://www.whitehousetapes.net/exhibit/jfk-and-space-race) In a conversation with James Webb (the NASA administrator) he said, "we've wrecked our budget on all these other domestic programs, and the only justification for it, in my opinion, to do it in the pell-mell fashion is because we hope to beat them [the Soviets]".
I love space exploration, but I am disappointed with many of the current programs and plans. I want a high science to dollar ratio, but transporting humans wrecks that ratio because of the high cost of protecting life. The Space Shuttle and the ISS are huge money pits while the Mars rovers are a huge value. I want more value out of the program.
It's a step toward colonization.
It is only colonization if the men and women that are sent can be self-sufficient. People talk like putting men on Mars is the hard part and once we are there we can figure out how to stay there permanently. My claim is that that is backwards. We must figure out a plan to be self-sustaining before we go because that is actually the hardest part of this. Getting there is easy; staying there is far, far harder.
So if we were serious about colonization we would be talking about self-sufficiency instead of our travel arrangements.
Even the launcher that put sputnik into orbit would have been useless as an ICBM due to the long preparation time and the very short life of the fuel.
Indeed, this was a big source of contention between NASA and the Department of Defense. The DoD wanted NASA to use solid fuel rockets because that is what you need for military purposes. It is stable and rockets that use it can be stored without maintenance for large periods of time and be ready when you need them. NASA didn't like them because they are essentially bombs. Once you light them, you cannot easily stop them. The rocket will burn until the fuel is gone. With a liquid fuel rocket, you can turn off the supply of fuel to stop the rocket whenever you want. They are much more flexible, but are more finicky so the military does not like them.
It's difficult to overestimate the importance that space travel has on your modern conveniences.
Thank God for Tang!
Go ahead and -1 Troll me. I deserve it, but I couldn't resist.
Oh come on. You can do better than that. If you disagree, tell me what you think. Don't put your pretentious labels on me in lieu of a thoughtful argument.
Tell me how sending a few men and women to breathe their last breath on Mars with no hope of return to Earth benefits humanity. Tell me why there really is no better way to spend a few hundred billion dollars. Tell me what the scientific value is for having a few humans there versus hundreds of exploring rovers. If you want to participate in the discussion, then please think of something to say.
For the record, I think being able to colonize Mars is a fantastic goal. But colonizing means turning it into a self-sustaining long-term home. That is a far cry from the suicide missions being proposed. We are so far from being self-sustaining on Mars that there is no point in talking about sending men there. Show me a machine that can generate enough oxygen and water for people to survive (you have to grow your own food, too). Show me how we can generate sufficient electricity, even in the Martian winter. Show me that we can land heavy equipment very near other equipment and people with pinpoint accuracy. When we master those things (and more), then we can start thinking about getting people there.
if you can find other resources that make the enterprise economically viable
This is something I've often wondered. Is there any substance that could exist on Mars which would make a round trip economically viable? If Mars was solid gold, could we transport enough of it so that we could make a profit on the venture? What about diamonds? Litium? Titanium? Anything? I'd love to see some ballpark numbers that show this is economically feasible because I don't believe that it is right now.
That doesn't take away what they would be doing for humanity though.
Which is what? This does nothing for humanity. It isn't like we don't know what is on Mars. We know exactly what Mars is like. For hundreds of billions of dollars we can send an almost limitless series of rovers equipped with a variety of instruments to explore and run tests. Having a couple of humans just trying to survive, is not going to provide a scientific breakthrough.
The only point of sending men to Mars is to prove the point that we can send men to Mars. It's the same reason most people run marathons or attempt to climb Mount Everest. You just want to know that you can do it.
Personally, I don't see the value in that (at least not a few lives and billions of dollars worth). Others may disagree and say that "because its there" is a good enough reason to try, but that still doesn't make it a breakthrough moment for humanity.
Then you're going to have the hilarious possibility that they were merely observing natural growth of the cortex over time.
I just found the paper online here: http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1756-0500-2-174.pdf . The article did not mention a control group (how I hate stupid science reporting), but there was one. This is almost certainly not normally occurring growth that was observed.
I would find it very surprising if Tetris could improve the brain, but speed chess, sudoku, crossword puzzles, etc could not. They may make improvements on somewhat different areas of the brain, but I would expect they would all provide some benefits. Tetris rewards speedy hand-eye coordination to move the blocks quickly, but does not engage the verbal parts of the brain like a crossword puzzle does.
I think the old adage "use it or lose it" applies just as well to the brain as to our muscles. There is already research that suggests that Alzheimer's patients have a better end of life under some conditions that exercise the mind. I would love to see more studies that show how the mind can be improved by various puzzles and games. This could lead to focused workout regimes to improve many aspects of how we think.
Maybe we could use this research to make sure that in the next presidential elections, one of the debates has a Tetris round for the candidates. I would find that more interesting than the canned blurbs from their stump speeches that they spew now.
So you're saying you had control groups of people that played other video games and Tetris showed a difference? Or a control group studying chess? I suspect the title of this article should be "Puzzles Improve Your Brain."
There was no control group in this experiment. They did a before and after with a group of people.
I don't understand why you think the title should be generalized to Puzzles instead of Tetris. The experiment only looked at the impact of Tetris on the brain and not puzzles in general. It is natural to hypothesize that other types of games will have a similar impact, but until that is tested and confirmed across a spectrum of puzzles, you can't safely generalize that.
No one is claiming that playing Tetris makes you smarter than playing other games because no one has tested that, yet.
Having read much of her work, I think it would be fair to say that she is on the left (liberal) side of the political spectrum. This is as opposed to her right leaning (conservative) father. I'm pretty sure she would describe herself as being liberal. If you listen to the audio, she makes her and her father's political views quite clear right at the beginning.
There is a really great episode of This American Life here: http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=734 that is relevant to this story. Act 1 has Sarah Vowell (a liberal anti-gun person) whose father is a gunsmith who built his own cannon. She tells about going out with him to fire it for the first time.
I think many people would make the reasonable assumption that the app will only get the information that is required for it to work. That is what the warning says, after all. But that is not true. The app has full access to everything you can see, whether it needs it or not. Why in the world should a stupid poll need to see my (and my friend's) photos?
This is the crux of the problem. It suggests apps have limited access (based on need) when they really have unfettered access. I assume that the bar to become a Facebook developer is quite low so who knows what kind of low lifes are developing stupid 80's movies quizzes and collecting information on people who never even agreed to take the quiz in the first place.
Auto exposures are notoriously stupid because they have a very simplistic algorithm. They try to make the whole image grey. I.e. not too dark, not too bright, not too red, etc. Things like the moon, snow, sand can easily screw this up. The upside is that the algorithm is so simple that it is easy to guess when it will be way off and correct for it. Most cameras have some manual settings you can use to correct the exposure, but I doubt most people know how to use it.