Until someone argues that there could be a great, big promise when we let them develop a little bit more. Just to see where the specialization sets in, how it is different from normal human embryo's. Perhaps we can cure some fashionable disease with it then!
Repeat 17 times and congratulations, you're the proud father of the first Chimera(TM) and my God, will you feel sorry for it.
So stop it, before it's too late. We can always start the investigation again if we stop now, but if we continue, we can't undo it.
Me too, but face it: if you can live forever, so can 6 billion other people. And their offspring. Not to be too Malthusian, but we're already stretching the limits of what this planet can bear. Curiousness kills the cat, but it shouldn't kill a planet.
By the way, if there is no extraterrestial life, you're going to have to wait pretty long for an answer.
No, by unethical I mean amoral. The research starts without knowing what good it is going to do, takes risks, manipulates things people don't want manipulated and will put us up with its outcomes. Furthermore, I don't expect any great insights from research where the basic target is mixing up genes just for the heck of it and see what comes out. Hey, perhaps we can patent it.
The promise of this kind of research is always something medical (treat some disease, basically), never fundamental knowledge.
Consequently, I'm wondering why anyone would want to fund such research.
I think the greatest promise comes not in extending lifespan indefinitely, but extending the vigorous and productive period within our current approximate lifespans And what good would come of that? More production? More unemployment? More energy consumption? Less time to enjoy?
I would say funds for possibly unethical, dangerous and nonsensical medical research could be applied to better causes.
About the quality of life: I can't imagine giving everyone a stem cell DNA-replacement treatment (or whatever might be the hypothetical outcome of this research) for free. And, on the off-chance that this will happen anyway, it *will* extend life, whether you like it or not, and open up a whole new bunch of disabilities for elderly people.
a) Increasing scientific knowledge can be done in a different manner and scientific knowledge is not the highest goal. Complying with Godwin's law: remember the experiments in WWII. They got us a lot of scientific knowledge, e.g. about safe diving depths, but you'll agree that the price wasn't worth it.
b) Faust is not someone to fuck with unless you're Mephistopheles.
It's not just cells. The article says that
human embryos modified with animal DNA... will also be allowed under licence. Galileo didn't have this problem. He wasn't asking the pope for funding, much less in a competition for it. If he would have been in a funding competition paid for by the Holy See, I'm sure his request would have been ignored and the money would have gone to another project, and "thus ensure that the winning piece of research is valuable".
The problems with this kind of research are ethical. So let us consider possible advantages. What is this research for?
a) Rare diseases. Many people die in poor countries because there is no proper health care. Why fund research with possibly far reaching ethical dilemmas that might one day cure some rare disease when there are millions to be saved?
b) Common causes of death. We now reach an average age of around 80. That's enough. There is no point in following Faust's example with the risk of getting us in troubled waters.
My conclusion: The disadvantages outway possible advantages. These outraged scientists (BTW, I am one, just in another field) just cry for more money. This line of research is not going to give us more insight into nature, nor is it morally acceptable at this point.
By the way, there is a much more mundane explanation of the similarity in brain activity: subjects got bored in both tasks. Pressing buttons is not really the most challenging task. Therefore, they might simply be sleeping with their eyes open the same way they do in the condition where they're not supposed to think of anything. I'd like to see an experimental design that can rule that out...
Resting state activity is vaguely interesting. I did not try to pass it off as a minor point, but the implication is that it was not thought to be related to stimulus-response actions. Well, that might be a wrong assumption (not that a lot of fMRI studies are based in noise modelling and subtractions, which excludes these possibly systematic variations).
I would not go as far as to call this rest activity thinking. Subjects in the scanner do not think about lunch or a short skirt. Perhaps briefly, but that is acceptable. Most subjects in those tasks understand the implication of the command "don't think about anything". Researchers therefore concluded that the measured activity is some kind of book-keeping or is related to ongoing background processing or whatever.
This study does not challenge either view. It just says BOLD response variations may be more systematic than thought before. It's a technical point on the interpretation of fMRI data. The rest is bollocks.
Well, the summary of the article says nothing of the kind (as usual, I'm tempted to say).
In some fMRI studies (I'm a post-doc in the field), the brain resting state is studied. Now, if you know what fMRI actually measures, you'll know that that means the blood flow through the brain while there is a minimum of external stimuli (plus the task to try to think of nothing, which is quite hard). So all this study claims is that some of the variability you see in normal fMRI studies (those that have stimuli and acting subjects) in a particular area are strongly related to the variations you see in resting state activity.
So, half of the blood flow fluctations (0.74 ^ 2) in a brain with a minimum of activity seems to return when the brain has a very simple task. Not really a big deal.
Caveat: I haven't read the full paper (I'm at home right now).
Even if that story about that small tribe is true (nobody seems to be able to find the link), then still Einstein thought of it, and he was not speaking that language. Other people seem to understand it as well.
Learning any other language will bring you in contact with the culture, that's obvious. But that doesn't mean the thinking or the culture is in some way intrinsically linked to the language. There are (quite a few) multi-lingual cultures. There are languages that spread over different cultures (Arab, Spanish, English). All this undermines the idea that though, culture and language share a "deep", meaningful relation. Culture shapes language (there are Japanese that add -chan to their name in *English*), but the culture stays even when the language disappears.
I think the point here is that the culture itself is heavily influenced by ever more pressure from the environment (think media, globalisation, etc.). The people who form that culture are changed, thus the language is lost. You can see it as a sad thing (and really I do, it's like losing a work of art), but it's not inherently bad, and there's nothing you can do against it, except changing the dominant culture...
"a lot of those languages are dying out because the speakers of the more monolithic languages have forced them into extinction.": Sad, but unrelated to the issue at hand. This is consequence of oppression. There are several organizations that address that: Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch,...
"Languages quite honestly give you a completely different way of thinking": Now there's a statement that requires a lot of backup. Language does not encapsulate ways of thinking; it's a means of conveying thoughts. Do you think that the Chinese cannot understand Plato? Their languages are about as far apart as possible.
"New languages effectively don't happen": well, there's a plainly wrong statement. New languages do arise. Not very frequently, but they do. Usually Creole, but there are more interesting cases. Check e.g. the sign language developed by deaf Nicaraguan children.
"the world's piranha of a language English": that's funny, but not really true either. Chinese is really gobbling up large portions of Asia and Spanish also seems to be spreading still.
I honestly think there is no way to stop the process of language extinction. It has always happened: my native tongue (Dutch) is quite different from what it used to be and that holds for many languages. They develop. Small groups tend to disappear. That also has always been the case. You can find remains of settlements everywhere with signs of a lost culture, and probably a lost language.
There is nothing inherently bad about that. It's not a question of ethics. Join Amnesty, support the Kurds and the Tibetans, but don't do it to save their language. Human life and thought is worth more than the precise way that they use to communicate.
Hey, I've got a working TI-58 and some of the original programming sheets. Great machine, though the battery doesn't work anymore and the leds are flickering, but well, I can still enter my tic-tac-toe program and be beaten by a calculator (time per move: several minutes).
I can assure you that in psychology (including hard-core cognitive neuro-stuff) and in linguistics the same criticism holds and many published effects are not reproducible or generalizable. Personally, I distrust over half the articles. Of course, the impact of a wrong conclusion in a study on interference of color names on memory effects (or something similar) are much less than errors in medical studies, but still it is annoying...
BTW, that even holds for high impact journals such as Science. I know of at least one study in my field whose conclusions were disputable from the start and that was shown to be wrong just a year later, but got published in Science anyway. The later article didn't get nearly as much exposure. Guess which study is quoted more often...
Holy Christ! Homeopathy does NOT work with herbal cures at all. The idea is entirely different. And the passage "Modern medicine acknowledges that aspirin came from willow bark" is highly suggestive (implicatures: traditionally they did not recognize it and they still don't want you to know it). However, it is modern science that isolated the effective component and made it a reliable consumable, instead of folklore. Can you imagine your doctor telling you to go to a forest, find a willow, and extract some bark with a silver knife at new moon, and that oak perhaps will also work, but not for everyone?
A scientist will not claim that all alternative medicine doesn't work, he will claim that many don't, that you cannot trust them and that some treatments are detrimental.
I don't think that has anything to do with the article. That is about storage on disk, not about manipulating pointers in memory to such an extent that a programming language that should never have been invented in the first place becomes even more ununderstandable.
The.05 is a bit arbitrary, but.07 is definitely high, especially given the fact that they didn't analyze correlation, but split the data in two groups at an arbitrary point of the CPI scale, probably the one where the test gave the highest result (which probably leaves them zero df). Furthermore, it gives a rather high 0.07 chance that the null-hypothesis is true (I do not disapprove of the one-side tail, since that ties in with the hypothesis), but without a power analysis, this isn't worth reporting...
Probably you won't be able to run the new iTunes at all. If iTunes has been bound to the frameworks in Tiger, it just won't run on 10\.[0-3] (that is 10.0 through 10.3 for the regexp impaired). And if you can't run iTunes (7.3?), the iPod becomes a cool looking paper weight.
First: I doubt the alternatives have equal probabilities. In a real world setting, there are hundreds if not thousands of different options at any moment, most of which are highly unlikely. Second, you're not playing against a single person, but against a whole bunch of them, which changes behaviour significantly. Third, you have to take the possible actions of your allies (also a large number of individual agents) into account. That makes computing the probabilities of the joint actions and the joint distribution of the utility quite hard.
This model is (if it works well) an approximation of the utility function (aka objective)...
Slashdot Mirror
Until someone argues that there could be a great, big promise when we let them develop a little bit more. Just to see where the specialization sets in, how it is different from normal human embryo's. Perhaps we can cure some fashionable disease with it then!
Repeat 17 times and congratulations, you're the proud father of the first Chimera(TM) and my God, will you feel sorry for it.
So stop it, before it's too late. We can always start the investigation again if we stop now, but if we continue, we can't undo it.
Me too, but face it: if you can live forever, so can 6 billion other people. And their offspring. Not to be too Malthusian, but we're already stretching the limits of what this planet can bear. Curiousness kills the cat, but it shouldn't kill a planet.
By the way, if there is no extraterrestial life, you're going to have to wait pretty long for an answer.
The promise of this kind of research is always something medical (treat some disease, basically), never fundamental knowledge.
Consequently, I'm wondering why anyone would want to fund such research. I think the greatest promise comes not in extending lifespan indefinitely, but extending the vigorous and productive period within our current approximate lifespans And what good would come of that? More production? More unemployment? More energy consumption? Less time to enjoy?
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon (Susan Ertz)
I would say funds for possibly unethical, dangerous and nonsensical medical research could be applied to better causes.
About the quality of life: I can't imagine giving everyone a stem cell DNA-replacement treatment (or whatever might be the hypothetical outcome of this research) for free. And, on the off-chance that this will happen anyway, it *will* extend life, whether you like it or not, and open up a whole new bunch of disabilities for elderly people.
a) Increasing scientific knowledge can be done in a different manner and scientific knowledge is not the highest goal. Complying with Godwin's law: remember the experiments in WWII. They got us a lot of scientific knowledge, e.g. about safe diving depths, but you'll agree that the price wasn't worth it.
b) Faust is not someone to fuck with unless you're Mephistopheles.
The problems with this kind of research are ethical. So let us consider possible advantages. What is this research for?
a) Rare diseases. Many people die in poor countries because there is no proper health care. Why fund research with possibly far reaching ethical dilemmas that might one day cure some rare disease when there are millions to be saved?
b) Common causes of death. We now reach an average age of around 80. That's enough. There is no point in following Faust's example with the risk of getting us in troubled waters.
My conclusion: The disadvantages outway possible advantages. These outraged scientists (BTW, I am one, just in another field) just cry for more money. This line of research is not going to give us more insight into nature, nor is it morally acceptable at this point.
Amen to that!
By the way, there is a much more mundane explanation of the similarity in brain activity: subjects got bored in both tasks. Pressing buttons is not really the most challenging task. Therefore, they might simply be sleeping with their eyes open the same way they do in the condition where they're not supposed to think of anything. I'd like to see an experimental design that can rule that out...
Resting state activity is vaguely interesting. I did not try to pass it off as a minor point, but the implication is that it was not thought to be related to stimulus-response actions. Well, that might be a wrong assumption (not that a lot of fMRI studies are based in noise modelling and subtractions, which excludes these possibly systematic variations).
I would not go as far as to call this rest activity thinking. Subjects in the scanner do not think about lunch or a short skirt. Perhaps briefly, but that is acceptable. Most subjects in those tasks understand the implication of the command "don't think about anything". Researchers therefore concluded that the measured activity is some kind of book-keeping or is related to ongoing background processing or whatever.
This study does not challenge either view. It just says BOLD response variations may be more systematic than thought before. It's a technical point on the interpretation of fMRI data. The rest is bollocks.
Well, the summary of the article says nothing of the kind (as usual, I'm tempted to say).
In some fMRI studies (I'm a post-doc in the field), the brain resting state is studied. Now, if you know what fMRI actually measures, you'll know that that means the blood flow through the brain while there is a minimum of external stimuli (plus the task to try to think of nothing, which is quite hard). So all this study claims is that some of the variability you see in normal fMRI studies (those that have stimuli and acting subjects) in a particular area are strongly related to the variations you see in resting state activity.
So, half of the blood flow fluctations (0.74 ^ 2) in a brain with a minimum of activity seems to return when the brain has a very simple task. Not really a big deal.
Caveat: I haven't read the full paper (I'm at home right now).
You're going all Sapir-Whorf here.
Even if that story about that small tribe is true (nobody seems to be able to find the link), then still Einstein thought of it, and he was not speaking that language. Other people seem to understand it as well.
Learning any other language will bring you in contact with the culture, that's obvious. But that doesn't mean the thinking or the culture is in some way intrinsically linked to the language. There are (quite a few) multi-lingual cultures. There are languages that spread over different cultures (Arab, Spanish, English). All this undermines the idea that though, culture and language share a "deep", meaningful relation. Culture shapes language (there are Japanese that add -chan to their name in *English*), but the culture stays even when the language disappears.
I think the point here is that the culture itself is heavily influenced by ever more pressure from the environment (think media, globalisation, etc.). The people who form that culture are changed, thus the language is lost. You can see it as a sad thing (and really I do, it's like losing a work of art), but it's not inherently bad, and there's nothing you can do against it, except changing the dominant culture...
"a lot of those languages are dying out because the speakers of the more monolithic languages have forced them into extinction.": Sad, but unrelated to the issue at hand. This is consequence of oppression. There are several organizations that address that: Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, ...
"Languages quite honestly give you a completely different way of thinking": Now there's a statement that requires a lot of backup. Language does not encapsulate ways of thinking; it's a means of conveying thoughts. Do you think that the Chinese cannot understand Plato? Their languages are about as far apart as possible.
"New languages effectively don't happen": well, there's a plainly wrong statement. New languages do arise. Not very frequently, but they do. Usually Creole, but there are more interesting cases. Check e.g. the sign language developed by deaf Nicaraguan children.
"the world's piranha of a language English": that's funny, but not really true either. Chinese is really gobbling up large portions of Asia and Spanish also seems to be spreading still.
I honestly think there is no way to stop the process of language extinction. It has always happened: my native tongue (Dutch) is quite different from what it used to be and that holds for many languages. They develop. Small groups tend to disappear. That also has always been the case. You can find remains of settlements everywhere with signs of a lost culture, and probably a lost language.
There is nothing inherently bad about that. It's not a question of ethics. Join Amnesty, support the Kurds and the Tibetans, but don't do it to save their language. Human life and thought is worth more than the precise way that they use to communicate.
Hey, I've got a working TI-58 and some of the original programming sheets. Great machine, though the battery doesn't work anymore and the leds are flickering, but well, I can still enter my tic-tac-toe program and be beaten by a calculator (time per move: several minutes).
Ah, they don't make them like that anymore.
I can assure you that in psychology (including hard-core cognitive neuro-stuff) and in linguistics the same criticism holds and many published effects are not reproducible or generalizable. Personally, I distrust over half the articles. Of course, the impact of a wrong conclusion in a study on interference of color names on memory effects (or something similar) are much less than errors in medical studies, but still it is annoying...
BTW, that even holds for high impact journals such as Science. I know of at least one study in my field whose conclusions were disputable from the start and that was shown to be wrong just a year later, but got published in Science anyway. The later article didn't get nearly as much exposure. Guess which study is quoted more often...
Holy Christ! Homeopathy does NOT work with herbal cures at all. The idea is entirely different. And the passage "Modern medicine acknowledges that aspirin came from willow bark" is highly suggestive (implicatures: traditionally they did not recognize it and they still don't want you to know it). However, it is modern science that isolated the effective component and made it a reliable consumable, instead of folklore. Can you imagine your doctor telling you to go to a forest, find a willow, and extract some bark with a silver knife at new moon, and that oak perhaps will also work, but not for everyone?
A scientist will not claim that all alternative medicine doesn't work, he will claim that many don't, that you cannot trust them and that some treatments are detrimental.
Strange, the GP, making a joke, only got 4 points and the post that explains it, thus making it more accessible to the illiterate polloi gets 5.
- Can I have the envelope, Madonna? ...
- Here you are, Brad.
- Well, , the winner in the category Obnoxious Redrawing is
OPEN OFFICE!
I don't think that has anything to do with the article. That is about storage on disk, not about manipulating pointers in memory to such an extent that a programming language that should never have been invented in the first place becomes even more ununderstandable.
This was done 9 years ago: http://web.mit.edu/macdev/asciiMac/, and won the Best Hack (and Victor A-Trap) award at MacHack '98.
The .05 is a bit arbitrary, but .07 is definitely high, especially given the fact that they didn't analyze correlation, but split the data in two groups at an arbitrary point of the CPI scale, probably the one where the test gave the highest result (which probably leaves them zero df). Furthermore, it gives a rather high 0.07 chance that the null-hypothesis is true (I do not disapprove of the one-side tail, since that ties in with the hypothesis), but without a power analysis, this isn't worth reporting...
Probably you won't be able to run the new iTunes at all. If iTunes has been bound to the frameworks in Tiger, it just won't run on 10\.[0-3] (that is 10.0 through 10.3 for the regexp impaired). And if you can't run iTunes (7.3?), the iPod becomes a cool looking paper weight.
First: I doubt the alternatives have equal probabilities. In a real world setting, there are hundreds if not thousands of different options at any moment, most of which are highly unlikely. Second, you're not playing against a single person, but against a whole bunch of them, which changes behaviour significantly. Third, you have to take the possible actions of your allies (also a large number of individual agents) into account. That makes computing the probabilities of the joint actions and the joint distribution of the utility quite hard.
This model is (if it works well) an approximation of the utility function (aka objective)...