Indeed. Ironically, a large part of why colleges (or universities in canada) are now so ineffective at actually imparting knowledge is because they have been transformed from academic institutions into business ventures – marketed and operated with the primary goal of selling credentials. It would be nice if, like in some european countries, both academic and technical / pragmatic streams were offered with equivalent social merit. We would end up with happier, more capable people, and the academic institutions could go back to being concerned with higher learning instead of business-prep. It would also help to stop hiring CEOs as deans...
I don't mean to suggest that they couldn't in principle contribute something – perhaps even something amazing that otherwise would take decades to arrive on the scene. But I do maintain that we don't need them, and that the net contribution of people with regressive ideas about sharing and cooperation is negative. So no, it's not a rationalization, it's a rational judgement. Society can function just fine without antisocial innovators – and it suffers more for accommodating them than it would for showing them the door.
Paid shills generally lurk in the comments sections of mainstream news sites. I doubt the demographic on./ is of enough interest to government or lobby to waste the investment...
[rant] Maybe we can't blame them for shunning some of the left – but we sure as hell can (and I do, without reservation) blame the assholes who actively did vote for Harper. Particularly after he was thrown out for the first case in history of contempt of parliament (in our system). Harper may be the proximate cause of Canada's decline as a positive global player, but the asshats who voted for him shoulder most of the blame. [/rant]
Can you articulate why you think that it is all that important for it to be given emphasis in a typical public school curriculum?
I suppose a lot of this depends on what you think public education should accomplish. If the aim is simply to provide everyone with a passable grasp of various facts describing the world around them, then probably most things don't need to be taught. Unfortunately, at least in north america, it seems that this view is becoming the norm. Least common denominator is the benchmark, so that, for instance, math is really just a means to understand your taxes, keep track of the contents of your fridge, and make prudent investments.
However, if instead you want education to be about crafting each new generation in such a way that they make the best use of current knowledge to produce discerning, rational judgments and insights about the world around them, then it becomes extremely important to teach big picture, and deep concept. Understanding evolution isn't really about just learning why we still have an appendix. It's a distinctly different lens on the world and on the kinds of causal processes at play – very different from physical 'laws,' while still entirely consistent with them – and an important foundation for thinking about complex systems of various kinds. It also, when actually understood, does away handily with anthropocentrism and other useless biases in thinking.
The world today suffers tremendously from a lack of people qualified to make coherent, reasoned decisions about global policy. Making sure kids get a comprehensive knowledge base – one that can be used for reasoning not just "knowing" – is critical.
I was actually about to upmod because in general I agree (and for the record, I have a PhD in cog neuro), and based on the summary and the nature write-up, I was underwhelmed. But skimming the Science paper, these guys have legitimately done something that really hasn't been done before. The model gets a picture that tells it what task it's supposed to do, preserves that context while getting the task-relevant input, gets the answer to the problem (and the problems are, computationally, pretty wide-ranging), and writes the answer (i.e., it's not being read out from the state of a surface layer and transcoded to a human-readable result). All of this is being done with reasonably-realistic spiking neurons (with Eliasmith, these are probably single-compartment LIF), configured in a gross-scale topology commensurate with what we know about neuroanatomy and connectivity.
Is this going to unleash a new revolution in AI and cybernetics? Nope. But it's definitely both impressive and progressive for the field. Both Eliasmith and Izhikevich are the real deal. And while we certainly don't understand the brain well enough to make truly general-intelligence models, this kind of work is precisely the sort of step we need to be taking – scaling down the numbers but trying to reproduce the known connectivity is a lot more useful than building 10^10 randomly connected McCulloch-Pitts neurons...
Those who would self-censor their innovations can keep them. Most meaningful innovations in history have had parallel 'discoveries' and the rest, it is not unreasonable to assume, only lack additional discoverers because the original gained widespread exposure sooner than the particular rediscovery time-horizon for that invention.
Copyright is only a useful mechanism in a capitalist system. This is ironic, because it's actually a very severe restriction on free market pressures (as with so much of the critical infrastructure of the capitalist system of government, they won't really let the invisible hand do all the work).
I fail to comprehend why people are so convinced that the betterment of society will result from incentivizing people to withhold information in order to extort privilege from others. A widely ignored fact about most people, is that we actually like to be useful and to contribute to society. It's an unfounded myth that progress would stall outside of a wage-system. People are productive when they're comfortable, and extra productive when they cooperate.
So you're right. Copyright isn't worth dick-all. But you could have stopped there...
I'm afraid I still can't get my head around why a CEO, or anyone for that matter, should ever get a bonus of any kind. Tips are one thing – and most people in a line of work getting tips aren't exactly pulling down large salaries (in fact, those serving alcohol can legally be paid below minimum wage because of the assumption that tips will make up for it). So ignoring tip jobs, why the hell should anyone get a bonus? Just do your fucking job or someone else will. Especially if you're already pulling down some outrageously unjustifiable salary. There's really no sensible explanation for why it's possible for one employed individual to earn 5-6 orders of magnitude more than another employed individual. Do we really believe it's possible to do 6 orders of magnitude more work than someone else? I just don't get it. I really don't.
I think when scientists discuss a "new" X, it's generally understood to mean "newly observed" or "new to us". In this particular instance though, we don't even have to make those presumptions - because the claim is for a new type, which refers to our own arbitrary classification schemes. In this sense, it is indeed new, by necessity, because it is a classification we did not have before...
Many large telescopes already use multiple dishes. But the base you need to actually get stereoscopic views on astronomical distances is outrageous. Of course, that is precisely what WFIRST and its ilk are for...
Considering we already have autonomous lab robots that iteratively form hypotheses, test, and interpret and integrate results, this not an unreasonable suggestion. Arguably though, such a scenario is actually in the biotech category (whether 'bio' or 'nano' is semantics as far as the science of the small is concerned) – just with AI put on top. Admittedly, the robot might help to short-circuit human oversight for boundary conditions...
In that light, I'd suggest these folk should look closely at interactions. AI*bio, as discussed above, has dangerous potential. Likewise, I'd suggest, bio*climate could be risky if we start to use engineered organisms for geo-engineering projects. AI*nuclear would be risky in theory, but is sufficiently unlikely not to worry about. AI*climate is a maybe. If we start using deep-learning type algorithms for climate modelling, we might end up making decisions on the basis of reasoning we don't fully understand. I can't see any sensible interpretations for bio*nuclear or climate*nuclear scenarios – so probably we can ignore those. The only viable 3-way is maybe AI*climate*bio, which pretty much couples the pitfalls of indecipherable modelling with autonomous bio-engineering, plus a motivational hack on the humans (climate will make us more and more desperate over time – and consequently sloppier) and an industrial scale insertion vector (geoengineering).
Absolutely. This is a non-existent problem, or if anything a problem that is being compounded through this kind of bullshit. Conversely, changing nothing allows sane teachers to maintain a respectful relationship with their students, and to treat skipping on a case by case basis. The teachers at my school would talk to me first when I'd skipped, get a sense of my reasons, and consider the situation in the light of my performance, my level of respect while in class, and the degree to which I was a positive influence on the school and the student body. They didn't go whining to my parents every fucking time (they knew I skipped anyway and considered it entirely my own discretion – with consequences entirely my own responsibility). Of course, I went to an arts school (first on the funding chopping block, of course) where maximum freedom was a given, and the student culture was vibrant, positive, and intensely productive. While serving as student technical director for the theatre I had bloody keys to parts of the building. This idea that minors are property and completely bereft of responsibility and accountability is just nonsense. And – crazy idea, I know – maybe, just maybe, kids would be more responsible if they were actually allowed and expected to have responsibility.
[...] it is exceptionally unlikely that we could eliminate insects or even mamals (e.g. rats, mice, etc). I very much doubt we could even eliminate humans. But yes, just because us and life would go on, doesn't say anything about how comfortable we'd find it.
Fixed that for you.
At least I presume that's what you meant. Otherwise I think you are grossly underestimating the contribution of insects to the stability of earth's biosphere. If they go – we go. No question at all.
What they're also failing to take into account is that if everyone in the world except you suddenly gets fucked – then sitting on your pile of resources, water, land, and booming agriculture is going to make you a pretty big target. If these projections pan out, one of two things will happen: A) war on Canadian soil (who all participates is probably a more difficult question), or B) global consolidation of existing powers into a few NWO-style oligarchies (we're en route already; resource scarcity certainly isn't going to slow the process), who will make savage, cut-throat resource distribution decisions. The notion that some countries will benefit from warming is a typical economist perspective – turning a blind eye to what has always been the dominant political and market force: cheating / theft / coercion, whatever you want to call it. That ugly hidden variable that always maximizes so much more effectively than playing by 'the rules'. So no. Neither Canada nor Russia will benefit from our newfound stature. We'll be murdered for it.
On the plus side, with the arctic waters open, maybe we can team up – back-to-back style? What do you say, Russia?
The only reason they aren't already autonomous is the military leadership's prudent stance on CYA (cover your ass) pragmatics. They sure as fuck don't care how many innocent people they kill overseas – they only care that they can claim due diligence. If they turned the robots loose, they'd be in a tight spot even if they were more conservative killers because the public at large can't stomach the idea. But don't entertain the illusion that it's a technological limitation. They'd be loose today if the PR flak could be mitigated (which isn't to say they'd be particularly good at their jobs – but that's irrelevant; as long as they don't get blown up or captured, anything else they accomplish would be gravy, and you don't have to pay any grunts).
In the same article, they claim two opposing features are both representative of his genius. Absence of a furrow in parietal suggests greater connectivity (tracts tend to be somewhat reduced going 'around' bends vs. 'across' them). Conversely, increased convolutions in frontal suggest greater surface area (ignoring the prior mention that his brain was smaller than average). Give me a break. Until we get a decent library of brains (which some folks are working on, thankfully), this is all as bad as evolutionary psychology (you know - girls like pink because they used to pick berries, and similar bs). We don't even know much about normative topologies, and certainly not about precise form-function relations...
Depending on the part of the body, you'll often break bones before ripping tendons. In fact, unaugmented human muscles are capable of breaking bones if the golgi tendon organ (responsible for regulating contractile force) is inactivated. Unscrupulous / stupid weight lifters sometimes suffer this fate... If you used a muscle like the ones described (if we assume the tendon-muscle join is good, and ignoring the fact that you'd just incinerate the tendons running the thing), you might well shatter the bones with sufficient force to generate shrapnel.... Suffice it to say – if you're going the aug route, you'd better just replace the whole limb!
Cybersecurity Agency with powers to monitor everything and permaban people from the internet based on anonymous accusations like the no-flight lists? What's the worst that could happen?
That reading isn't necessarily implied. The parent is merely pointing out that, in this instance, the republicans probably blocked because their supporters weren't on the handouts list. Presumably the dem supporters were. If that situation were reversed, then it would be the dems trying to block. The party is interchangeable in this setup. Parent merely highlighted republicans in this instance because that's how the cards fall in this instance... No need to get all partisan. It's politics after all.
The Bennett study was deliberately using poor statistical methods to demonstrate a point, and to encourage the field to adopt better minimum standards. While it's undeniable that there are problems in fMRI – anyone halfway competent is aware of these problems (especially the dead salmon problem – which essentially says that without correcting for multiple comparisons, if you do thousands of tests you will get false positives).
It's important to be mindful of the possibility of trouble in the statistical methods, but unless you can provide even the barest hint that such problems are actually at play in a given case, your lack of confidence is the most useless form of skepticism possible. Indeed, it can be applied to any situation or claim whatsoever simply by stating "I don't believe this result, because at various times in the past some people have made mistakes."
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. Ironically, a large part of why colleges (or universities in canada) are now so ineffective at actually imparting knowledge is because they have been transformed from academic institutions into business ventures – marketed and operated with the primary goal of selling credentials. It would be nice if, like in some european countries, both academic and technical / pragmatic streams were offered with equivalent social merit. We would end up with happier, more capable people, and the academic institutions could go back to being concerned with higher learning instead of business-prep. It would also help to stop hiring CEOs as deans...
I don't mean to suggest that they couldn't in principle contribute something – perhaps even something amazing that otherwise would take decades to arrive on the scene. But I do maintain that we don't need them, and that the net contribution of people with regressive ideas about sharing and cooperation is negative. So no, it's not a rationalization, it's a rational judgement. Society can function just fine without antisocial innovators – and it suffers more for accommodating them than it would for showing them the door.
Paid shills generally lurk in the comments sections of mainstream news sites. I doubt the demographic on ./ is of enough interest to government or lobby to waste the investment...
[rant] Maybe we can't blame them for shunning some of the left – but we sure as hell can (and I do, without reservation) blame the assholes who actively did vote for Harper. Particularly after he was thrown out for the first case in history of contempt of parliament (in our system). Harper may be the proximate cause of Canada's decline as a positive global player, but the asshats who voted for him shoulder most of the blame. [/rant]
Can you articulate why you think that it is all that important for it to be given emphasis in a typical public school curriculum?
I suppose a lot of this depends on what you think public education should accomplish. If the aim is simply to provide everyone with a passable grasp of various facts describing the world around them, then probably most things don't need to be taught. Unfortunately, at least in north america, it seems that this view is becoming the norm. Least common denominator is the benchmark, so that, for instance, math is really just a means to understand your taxes, keep track of the contents of your fridge, and make prudent investments.
However, if instead you want education to be about crafting each new generation in such a way that they make the best use of current knowledge to produce discerning, rational judgments and insights about the world around them, then it becomes extremely important to teach big picture, and deep concept. Understanding evolution isn't really about just learning why we still have an appendix. It's a distinctly different lens on the world and on the kinds of causal processes at play – very different from physical 'laws,' while still entirely consistent with them – and an important foundation for thinking about complex systems of various kinds. It also, when actually understood, does away handily with anthropocentrism and other useless biases in thinking.
The world today suffers tremendously from a lack of people qualified to make coherent, reasoned decisions about global policy. Making sure kids get a comprehensive knowledge base – one that can be used for reasoning not just "knowing" – is critical.
I was actually about to upmod because in general I agree (and for the record, I have a PhD in cog neuro), and based on the summary and the nature write-up, I was underwhelmed. But skimming the Science paper, these guys have legitimately done something that really hasn't been done before. The model gets a picture that tells it what task it's supposed to do, preserves that context while getting the task-relevant input, gets the answer to the problem (and the problems are, computationally, pretty wide-ranging), and writes the answer (i.e., it's not being read out from the state of a surface layer and transcoded to a human-readable result). All of this is being done with reasonably-realistic spiking neurons (with Eliasmith, these are probably single-compartment LIF), configured in a gross-scale topology commensurate with what we know about neuroanatomy and connectivity.
Is this going to unleash a new revolution in AI and cybernetics? Nope. But it's definitely both impressive and progressive for the field. Both Eliasmith and Izhikevich are the real deal. And while we certainly don't understand the brain well enough to make truly general-intelligence models, this kind of work is precisely the sort of step we need to be taking – scaling down the numbers but trying to reproduce the known connectivity is a lot more useful than building 10^10 randomly connected McCulloch-Pitts neurons...
Those who would self-censor their innovations can keep them. Most meaningful innovations in history have had parallel 'discoveries' and the rest, it is not unreasonable to assume, only lack additional discoverers because the original gained widespread exposure sooner than the particular rediscovery time-horizon for that invention.
Copyright is only a useful mechanism in a capitalist system. This is ironic, because it's actually a very severe restriction on free market pressures (as with so much of the critical infrastructure of the capitalist system of government, they won't really let the invisible hand do all the work).
I fail to comprehend why people are so convinced that the betterment of society will result from incentivizing people to withhold information in order to extort privilege from others. A widely ignored fact about most people, is that we actually like to be useful and to contribute to society. It's an unfounded myth that progress would stall outside of a wage-system. People are productive when they're comfortable, and extra productive when they cooperate.
So you're right. Copyright isn't worth dick-all. But you could have stopped there...
Indeed. Heinlein, anyone? You scarcely need fuel at all, except for attitude adjustments...
And this is easily my favourite vortex.
I'm afraid I still can't get my head around why a CEO, or anyone for that matter, should ever get a bonus of any kind. Tips are one thing – and most people in a line of work getting tips aren't exactly pulling down large salaries (in fact, those serving alcohol can legally be paid below minimum wage because of the assumption that tips will make up for it). So ignoring tip jobs, why the hell should anyone get a bonus? Just do your fucking job or someone else will. Especially if you're already pulling down some outrageously unjustifiable salary. There's really no sensible explanation for why it's possible for one employed individual to earn 5-6 orders of magnitude more than another employed individual. Do we really believe it's possible to do 6 orders of magnitude more work than someone else? I just don't get it. I really don't.
I think when scientists discuss a "new" X, it's generally understood to mean "newly observed" or "new to us". In this particular instance though, we don't even have to make those presumptions - because the claim is for a new type, which refers to our own arbitrary classification schemes. In this sense, it is indeed new, by necessity, because it is a classification we did not have before...
"Yes, we have a soul. But it's made of lots of tiny robots." - Giulio Giorello
Many large telescopes already use multiple dishes. But the base you need to actually get stereoscopic views on astronomical distances is outrageous. Of course, that is precisely what WFIRST and its ilk are for...
Or 8.113962545 x 10^19 e ...
Considering we already have autonomous lab robots that iteratively form hypotheses, test, and interpret and integrate results, this not an unreasonable suggestion. Arguably though, such a scenario is actually in the biotech category (whether 'bio' or 'nano' is semantics as far as the science of the small is concerned) – just with AI put on top. Admittedly, the robot might help to short-circuit human oversight for boundary conditions...
In that light, I'd suggest these folk should look closely at interactions. AI*bio, as discussed above, has dangerous potential. Likewise, I'd suggest, bio*climate could be risky if we start to use engineered organisms for geo-engineering projects. AI*nuclear would be risky in theory, but is sufficiently unlikely not to worry about. AI*climate is a maybe. If we start using deep-learning type algorithms for climate modelling, we might end up making decisions on the basis of reasoning we don't fully understand. I can't see any sensible interpretations for bio*nuclear or climate*nuclear scenarios – so probably we can ignore those. The only viable 3-way is maybe AI*climate*bio, which pretty much couples the pitfalls of indecipherable modelling with autonomous bio-engineering, plus a motivational hack on the humans (climate will make us more and more desperate over time – and consequently sloppier) and an industrial scale insertion vector (geoengineering).
I'd do it.
Absolutely. This is a non-existent problem, or if anything a problem that is being compounded through this kind of bullshit. Conversely, changing nothing allows sane teachers to maintain a respectful relationship with their students, and to treat skipping on a case by case basis. The teachers at my school would talk to me first when I'd skipped, get a sense of my reasons, and consider the situation in the light of my performance, my level of respect while in class, and the degree to which I was a positive influence on the school and the student body. They didn't go whining to my parents every fucking time (they knew I skipped anyway and considered it entirely my own discretion – with consequences entirely my own responsibility). Of course, I went to an arts school (first on the funding chopping block, of course) where maximum freedom was a given, and the student culture was vibrant, positive, and intensely productive. While serving as student technical director for the theatre I had bloody keys to parts of the building. This idea that minors are property and completely bereft of responsibility and accountability is just nonsense. And – crazy idea, I know – maybe, just maybe, kids would be more responsible if they were actually allowed and expected to have responsibility.
[...] it is exceptionally unlikely that we could eliminate insects or even mamals (e.g. rats, mice, etc). I very much doubt we could even eliminate humans. But yes, just because us and life would go on, doesn't say anything about how comfortable we'd find it.
Fixed that for you.
At least I presume that's what you meant. Otherwise I think you are grossly underestimating the contribution of insects to the stability of earth's biosphere. If they go – we go. No question at all.
What they're also failing to take into account is that if everyone in the world except you suddenly gets fucked – then sitting on your pile of resources, water, land, and booming agriculture is going to make you a pretty big target. If these projections pan out, one of two things will happen: A) war on Canadian soil (who all participates is probably a more difficult question), or B) global consolidation of existing powers into a few NWO-style oligarchies (we're en route already; resource scarcity certainly isn't going to slow the process), who will make savage, cut-throat resource distribution decisions. The notion that some countries will benefit from warming is a typical economist perspective – turning a blind eye to what has always been the dominant political and market force: cheating / theft / coercion, whatever you want to call it. That ugly hidden variable that always maximizes so much more effectively than playing by 'the rules'. So no. Neither Canada nor Russia will benefit from our newfound stature. We'll be murdered for it.
On the plus side, with the arctic waters open, maybe we can team up – back-to-back style? What do you say, Russia?
The only reason they aren't already autonomous is the military leadership's prudent stance on CYA (cover your ass) pragmatics. They sure as fuck don't care how many innocent people they kill overseas – they only care that they can claim due diligence. If they turned the robots loose, they'd be in a tight spot even if they were more conservative killers because the public at large can't stomach the idea. But don't entertain the illusion that it's a technological limitation. They'd be loose today if the PR flak could be mitigated (which isn't to say they'd be particularly good at their jobs – but that's irrelevant; as long as they don't get blown up or captured, anything else they accomplish would be gravy, and you don't have to pay any grunts).
In the same article, they claim two opposing features are both representative of his genius. Absence of a furrow in parietal suggests greater connectivity (tracts tend to be somewhat reduced going 'around' bends vs. 'across' them). Conversely, increased convolutions in frontal suggest greater surface area (ignoring the prior mention that his brain was smaller than average). Give me a break. Until we get a decent library of brains (which some folks are working on, thankfully), this is all as bad as evolutionary psychology (you know - girls like pink because they used to pick berries, and similar bs). We don't even know much about normative topologies, and certainly not about precise form-function relations...
Depending on the part of the body, you'll often break bones before ripping tendons. In fact, unaugmented human muscles are capable of breaking bones if the golgi tendon organ (responsible for regulating contractile force) is inactivated. Unscrupulous / stupid weight lifters sometimes suffer this fate... If you used a muscle like the ones described (if we assume the tendon-muscle join is good, and ignoring the fact that you'd just incinerate the tendons running the thing), you might well shatter the bones with sufficient force to generate shrapnel.... Suffice it to say – if you're going the aug route, you'd better just replace the whole limb!
Cybersecurity Agency with powers to monitor everything and permaban people from the internet based on anonymous accusations like the no-flight lists? What's the worst that could happen?
People might start going outside again...
That reading isn't necessarily implied. The parent is merely pointing out that, in this instance, the republicans probably blocked because their supporters weren't on the handouts list. Presumably the dem supporters were. If that situation were reversed, then it would be the dems trying to block. The party is interchangeable in this setup. Parent merely highlighted republicans in this instance because that's how the cards fall in this instance... No need to get all partisan. It's politics after all.
The Bennett study was deliberately using poor statistical methods to demonstrate a point, and to encourage the field to adopt better minimum standards. While it's undeniable that there are problems in fMRI – anyone halfway competent is aware of these problems (especially the dead salmon problem – which essentially says that without correcting for multiple comparisons, if you do thousands of tests you will get false positives). It's important to be mindful of the possibility of trouble in the statistical methods, but unless you can provide even the barest hint that such problems are actually at play in a given case, your lack of confidence is the most useless form of skepticism possible. Indeed, it can be applied to any situation or claim whatsoever simply by stating "I don't believe this result, because at various times in the past some people have made mistakes."