well, yes, i have in fact dug deeply into the literature of these studies, looking at statistical effects and the idea of using principal component analysis to measure intelligence. this is the i.q. field, a lot of crud couched in statistical language.
so when i call it crud, it's through a lot of careful thought and research.
also, spend some time reading and learning instead of back-reacting to slashdot stories. i raised the polar bear example as a ridiculous counterexample to a ridiculous and untestable proposal that the harsh environment selected for intelligence. your serious rebuttal to the stupid polar bear example is, in short, weak. you raise these points couched in scientific language, by pointing to 'complex social hiearchies' which means that intelligence must be a target for selection pressure. this would be the sophistry that i'm angry about.
there is no question that genetics manifests as testable effects, that people are different. it would be foolish to imply otherwise. but there's a difference between a serious attempt to study these proposals, and non-serious, non-scientific ones like dr. flynn's, and i'm sad to say, like your arguments, about race and biology. who is the sophist who is so willing to swallow these stories whole without criticism?
what do i mean? for example, your last point regarding black athletes being better than asian ones as 'accepted', is similar crud- why do you think this fact is generally accepted? i don't accept it. where are you getting this? is it because sports is dominated by black athletes, and accountants are all white? therefore black people have genetic athletic ability? do you really believe occupational placement is a direct causal result of racial accounting and athletic ability?
i also raised the issue of what is I.Q.: a "battery of tests" does not prove that i.q. exists. in the same way that testable contractions of moving objects in the aether theory of mechanics doesn't prove that the aether is real. on the contrary, i.q. tests are going to be circular- one defines the i.q. to be consistent with the population, and then uses that to draw conclusions about the tested population.
there was a good post by something regarding the problem of testing something across races- explaining things, when these tests are constructed by normalizing to some single population.
this is sophistry- to use persuasive arguments without careful reasoned criticism.
Before you start reading, I will make my own assessment of his 'research' known. It's really a load of psycho-babble-pseudo-mathematic crud. He believes that we can reduce a comparative analysis of something called "intelligence" to a single metric - i.e. scores on an I.Q. test... he thinks we can compare Saharans and Americans with the same stupid I.Q. metric. He thinks that by measuring these I.Q.s, he can use it to bolster his crappy theories of race and intelligence- basically he makes ALMOST untestable theories of race and intelligence, such as this statement
"The theory I have advanced to explain these race differences in IQ is that when early humans migrated from Africa into Eurasia they encountered the difficulty of survival during cold winters. This problem was especially severe during the ice ages. Plant foods were not available for much of the year and survival required the hunting and dismembering of large animals for food and the ability to make tools, weapons and clothing, to build shelters and make fires. These problems required higher intelligence and exerted selection pressure for enhanced intelligence, particularly on the Orientals."
So harsh climates make races smarter? Why are polar bears stupider than humans? Why are thermophilic bacteria dumber?
some will argue that the reason for exploration is to 'solve' the problems that plague us now. there are no compelling reasons why we should 'solve' all our problems before exploring new worlds. is world hunger a problem? i believe we've been solving that even as we continue to explore new worlds. is industrial pollution a problem? one could go back to take a look at coal-powered england in the 1800s for perspective.
i'm not sure why one would tie up 'solving' our contemporary problems with exploration, i.e. terraforming mars.
unless you think we're going to fantastically botch up the terraforming- which, i will add in defense, that's a technological problem, not a philosophical one which you pose.
for those of you interested, after taleryakhan published a high profile experiment in Science magazine in 2002, another group at oak ridge published a counter-claim that with identical set-ups, they could not produce the correlated sonoluminescence and neutron detection.
one of taleryarkhan's experiments was published in science march 8th 2002, pg 1868. it was high profile, and under a lot of attack by science magazine's own editors.
the article review by becchetti on pg 1850 says that this expt by taleryarkhan showed correlation of bubble flashes and neutron detection.
while the set-up of the expt was a bit bewildering to me, i recall reading why there was a lot of attacks on this article. other people were claiming that the levels of the detected neutrons were below the levels emitted by neutron source they used- as wagdog writes. recall that the expt'al set-up _requires_ one to bombard the acetone with neutrons. maybe they were detecting their own neutrons.
i wholly support giving other shows a chance, star trek constraints are pretty serious. though, i think OSC went off the deep end many years ago. besides ender's game, maybe xenocide, and also treason (now OOP), his books have tended to be numbing to me. that is, not to say that star trek didn't also go off the deep-end many years ago. just too many many rehashed ideas, e.g. like the episode where the crew loses their inhibitions (even the vulcan) because there's too much subspace-pollen floating in the air of planet Xtron.
in more direct terms, i would say that performing these experiments without the appropriate controls means these experiments are almost completely worthless. there are several confounding factors. rather than speculating wildly, perhaps we can address these confounding factors directly by other experiments.
for example, perhaps all hunter-gatherer tribes really have no need to distinguish between 4 or 5 object piles, and as a result, any human raised in the hunter-gatherer environment ends up being unable to perceive this subtlety whether or not their language has words for 3 - infinity.
we could look at other hunter-gather tribes and do the same experiment on them.
or, better yet, since we want to investigate the piraha directly, we can take a piraha and raise him in a hunter-gatherer environment, but teach him english from the outset so he has words for 3 - infinity. and then experiment on him again.
or perhaps, a worse experiment is to take a piraha and raise him in a western society, but restrict him to learning piraha language. if the sapir-whorf hypothesis is correct, then this man, despite having the right environment, would perform worse than a non-piraha speaking person.
or, we could take a piraha, raise him in the hunter-gatherer society, but force him to speak english. and then check to see if he performs better or worse than other piraha.
what i'm trying to say is that there are so many confounding cultural factors that when we remove them all, we may get a much weaker and less affirmative effect than the one seen in the original experiment. your post captures the heart of this objections - since clearly they kanka-bono hunter-gatherer tribe wouldn't have things like wireless routers, opteron blades, print queues and bluetooth mice.
Koch's postulates are the classic rules by which causative agents of diseases can be determined. although the molecular bases of many modern diseases no longer fit the implicit requirements of Koch's postulates (e.g. no microorganisms are implicated in certain cancers), the spirit and basic framework of the postulates can still be applied to dissect the causes of diseases.
That being said, in this prion story, we have an some example of postulates 2-4. The Prusiner team synthesized an artificial agent that's implicated in disease, and used it to infect and create new diseased organisms. This is a scientific step forward. Previously, the prion agent itself correlative with disease, but as to whether it is the causative agent, it was unclear.
The brief criticisms in the NY Times articles may have some merit though. It's still possible that the disease has some other underlying cause, and the artificial prion only hastened onset. This is an important point, because the signs of aggregate prions (the amyloid plaques) are found in BOTH healthy and diseased animals, thereby violating the first Koch postulate in some sense. However, I warn the reader that my knowledge is deficient here. Perhaps the amyloid plaques are composed of misfolded variants of other proteins also.
This is a rough summary of what I know. I hope I haven't offended any experts who know the details. Please feel free to correct what I'm sure are numerous mistakes.
i saw some other oversized government projects mentioned in these posts, like Apollo project, Manhattan project, and the (now defunct) Superconducting Collider. these, and the citation of south korea as a paragon of broadband, sounds like an insinuation that if our government steps in, then the project of wiring the whole U.S. for broadband would be entirely possible. i think there are two points here which are very disputable.
firstly, certainly the U.S. is not too shabbily connected for a country of its size and heterogeneity- it's not as if there's a crisis of any sort. so why would anyone want to push broadband penetration up any higher, except for to be able to announce to the rest of the world that we have the highest broadband penetrance? this sounds like a call for national glory, to show off our technological prowess- any time people ask for things like this, it's a suspicious project because it serves little benefit at an extremely high cost. the space shuttle etc has been attacked for these reasons. ask first, would i make the decision for all of us, that all of our lives would be better with faster internet?
the second point i want to mention is to ask why people think that the best way to achieve broadband penetration is to install a DSL line or a cable line into every home? have new technologies not usurped old ones before? when the modem was invented, was there a call for the government to install a modem in every household? or when cable tv bought educational channels to the masses, did congress ask that every home be installed with a cable line? and if that did happen, do you think we'd be the laughingstock of the world? today's technology is tomorrow's old hat. who knows, maybe someone will develop some sort of medium range wifi that will make it super cheap to connect distant rural areas with high speed access, making broadband obsolete. this is a case where i think one might be pushing too hard for what is probably a non-optimal solution.
well, it may well be true that there are hiring people out there who'll disqualify good candidates for stupid reasons, but that's their problem- to circumvent that, you're asking for a solution that'll satisfy everyone, incl. these people who make crappy decisions. is that even possible? is that necessary?
but then your final suggestion seems like a pretty good one: it's honest, it's true as far as i can tell from talking with the IT guy at the last pharma start-up i consulted with. it's simply a way of putting the orig poster's personal events in context of the industry's recent history.
misinterpretation, misjudgement, who knows what mysterious reasons they'll use to disqualify you.
According to economist
article
the Comcast offer was viewed as clearly low-ball. They would need to raise it by $8 per share to be on par with Disney perceived share value. What Disney may be doing is engaging in shrewd negotiations- the proper thing to do! I quote the salient paragraph from Economist article:
"Mr Eisner, one of the entertainment world's great survivors, will no doubt try to fight to the death. He may offer yet more corporate governance reforms--though the easy ones are mostly done. He will point out that Comcast's opening offer, originally worth $27 a share and falling, is too low--though Comcast has surely known all along that it will have to raise its offer closer to the $35 that Lawrence Haverty of State Street Research says would tempt institutional investors. The fact is, if Disney's board really wants to keep one of the world's iconic companies independent, its best strategy may be to replace Mr Eisner forthwith. Otherwise, Comcast will soon be doing it instead."
i'm one of the accussed and guilty, who've read 'bits' of the book but not in entirety. but i'd like to explain why-
i think part of the reason why the book is so difficult to finish is because it's so incredibly boring. would you like a concrete analogy? it would be easier to use and analogy than to explain in detail how ANKOS was written. i'll supply an analog relating to simple arithmetic that expresses my assessment of how boring his book is.
consider a fifth grade math textbook, in which page 1. contains a paragraph on long division. the page starts off by saying "first you try to do a short division problem with the divisor and the first few digits of the dividend, then you put that number on top, and then multiply it by the divisor and put it below the first digits of the dividend, then subtract. then you bring down the next digit, and then you try dividing the... etc..."
then for the next 4 pages, there is a sample problem of long division. and each problem is accompanied by a short paragraph that goes along the lines of "look, in this problem, my long division procedure produces the correct answer up to as many decimal places as possible. you can check the correct answer by using a calculator. therefore, my long division procedure displays remarkable properties of creating the correct answer."...
so far from saying that wolfram is total gibberish, i say that he has some interesting ideas, but the way he's written the book makes it very difficult to read through completely. therefore, i'm guessing that some of the slashdot people here have made valiant attempts to go through the book, and in good faith, some of them report that they've only read 'bits' of it because reading straight through the whole thing would be so damn boring!
Well, I believe 'real' concert experiences will never go out of style, as long as there's demand for them.
But you can imagine that there are a lot of people who don't really care. Because many consumers go to concerts for not only music, but for the experience of being with a billion other raving, dancing lunatics, and to watch pretty young people prance around on the stage.
It's like what Kasparov said about computers playing chess. Kasparov doens't think supercomputers will doom the inherent prettiness and humanity of chess. He predicts that in the future, we'll have computers vs. computers, people vs. people, and people using computers vs. other people using computers. The new technology should enhance the range of consumer experiences, but it probably won't kill off existing experiences that consumers have come to appreciate and love.
According to CIA World Factbook http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/fact book/geos/ ch.html The electrical power consumption of China is 1 billion MWh, or the amount of energy produced at a the rate of 130,000 Megawatts.
The yahoo article says this thing will produce at most 18,000 Megawatts. That's about 13% of China's usage now. How is this 1/3 of China's energy requirements?
On the other hand, your suggestion that the dam will benefit China's economy by providing network between regions seems like an excellent idea.
The reuters story was a little short on info.
FuelCellWorks has some more info.
I think some people think the idea of refueling is a bit arcane sounding, but the point of fuel cells is the higher energy density and the somewhat increased flexibility we have in creating new technologies to exploit the form of the energy. Batteries haven't improved by much in many many years of research.
According to FuelCellWorks, the DoCoMo phone will have up to 300 hrs functioning time. This is an improvement on my current cell phone, which lasts about a week. Furthermore, the use of little canisters for refueling is pretty much like carrying around a spare battery. It gets around the recharge problem. If I'm in a rush, I don't want to have to stick my phone into the power socket for half an hour.
At some point, I think we won't need to refuel. DoCoMo or someone else can make a device that will use electricity to regenerate from the fuel cell waste products back into fuel. Highly inefficient, but convenient when you run out of your little canisters
The starting of life and the spreading of life seem to be two very different things!
If we look at our own earth, all our life forms seem to possess some _minimal_ complexity. We have a bunch of mammals, reptiles, plants, and then 'simpler' forms (smaller genomes, less gene products) like bacteria and viruses. But these viruses are still pretty complicated things. Certainly viruses are not the first signs of life, are they? The first life forms would be sort of unexciting, who are capable of only a few self-replicating reactions. There seems to be a gap between non-life and life.
Or so we think. Perhaps if we looked hard enough, we would observe biogenesis in nature.
I think a parallel can be drawn with the movie industry. I read and hear about complaints about how movies aren't original any more, and movies are so formulaic, filled mostly with violence and sex. Indeed, most movies are sequels, spinoffs, rehashes of old ideas. Same goes for television shows. I once read an article that mused, "If we learned about human culture from watching television shows, we would think that everyone was either a cop or a doctor." But that, as you say, is simply because of the economics of mass media: low risk + workable formula == profit.
But it doesn't have to be as bleak as the original post made it sound. There are always new, independent films (which span a gamut of quality) which are nothing like mainstream summer blockbuster sludge. So even if the market for independent films is small, there'll be a supply of small independent films to fill that hunger.
I think the game industry is similar in that it is also deluged with big blockbuster type, non-innovative games, but one can find little weirdo innovative games now and then in this sludge. So we are not lost.
I was only in 5th grade when the Challenger exploded. I remember thinking that someone would find out what happened and fix it so that it doesn't happen again. But of course, that's a pretty naive thing to think.
Later, when I was older, I read an account of the Challenger investigation in some compilations of interviews with Richard Feynman, the Nobel Laureate physicist. He was made a member of the investigative panel, even though he was strictly a civilian scientist. And in his words, when he was doing his investigation by going through documents and talking to people, it sounded that he felt like he was fighting a gigantic institutional bureaucracy that was being very slow, passive and reluctant to divulge information. On the committee were members of the military, former astronauts, etc, who likely had ties to NASA in some personal way, at least more so than some physicist from Caltech.
I don't know what sort of hard conclusions came out of the investigative committee in the end. Feynman was flamboyant and made a great show of the O-ring problem in front of TV cameras, an unrehearsed and disruptive performance, according to his accounts. But I think this flamboyance and disruptiveness was a good thing, because here was some guy who didn't give a crap about whether or not NASA was going to get its butt kicked for being negligent whatnot, and that's the sort of investigators that will be needed to bring the facts to light.
We will need people who are independently minded, and who are going to dig at the truth even if it might hurt a lot of people at NASA, assuming that the destruction of Columbia had a man-made origin. And even if NASA does become hurt and demolished in the process, that's for the better in the long run, because we will, hopefully, build anew and better, and send our tendrils even more deeply into space with or without the current incarnation of the thing we call NASA.
I grieve along with all the others affected by this disaster. It wasn't only the death of seven people, it was a little bit of death in all of us, of all of our wonder and awe and our eagerness to propel ourselves beyond our planet.
Yeah, I wouldn't have believed this myself, but according to a recent wired article on Kazaa, they are making money from ad revenue. I quote the article here.
"In the last six months alone, PC users have downloaded more than 90 million copies. Kazaa has 60 million users around the world and 22 million in the US - an irresistible audience to marketers. Last year, Sharman raked in millions from US advertisers like Netflix and DirecTV, without spending a penny on content. The chase could have gone on forever." -Wired
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.02/kazaa.htm l?pg=1&topic=&topic_set=
The article also mentions their side-business model of teaming up with Altnet, by providing access to Altnet products (paid downloads, supposedly). They, I believe, will use the side-business model to argue that the existence of the company depends on a valid, legal method of generating revenue.
Of course, according to the article only 600 files are offered from Altnet. I think this makes Sharman's countersuit quite flimsy- the bulk of their revenue is derived from ads that sit piggy-back on top illegal activity. I don't think they'll be able to show convincingly that they actually have a viable business model with respect to Altnet.
Then again, if Altnet and Sharman can spit out a convincingly story of RIAA MPAA etc etc conspiracy to monopolize and deprive, the judges might listen.
Very insightful. You would be describing the case of Gleevec, among I'm certain other cases. Gleevec is the wonder drug that's been shown to have great effects on leukemia (CML). However, patients will develop resistance to it during the course of treatment. The source of resistance, it turns out, is the mutation of the Gleevec target (a protein) such that it binds Gleevec differently.
One story: http://www.researchmatters.harvard.edu/story.php?a rticle_id=510
There's also the common idea that many cancers are multi-mutational events. That is, many mutations conspire in the cellular network to produce a cancerous cell. What that means is one cancer cell may have one method of producing all the right cell factors to proliferate wildly, while another cell employs a slightly different mechanism of doing so. This would mean that any single-prong approach to treating cancer would not be entirely successful. Hence, the article mentions that "multi-prong" approaches are a possible next step.
This reminds me that about a year ago, three italian scientists came up with a way to find species relatedness by using the zip algorithm. One takes the sequence of bacteria 1, and then attaches a little bit of bacteria X sequence to the end of that. Again, one attaches a bit of bacteria X sequence to the end of bacteria 2. And then zipping is done on this concatenation. The final compression size of just the bacteria X part ended up telling us the homology (or relatedness) of bacteria X to bacteria 1 or 2.
But from reading all these posts, perhaps a Bayesian method would work just as well. There seems to be no inherent advantage to using zip. One still needs a reference piece of work (non-spam email, or bacteria 1) for comparing entropies or probabilities. Of interest also is that the researchers applied their method to generating an accurate language tree of Indoeuropean languages (grouped by relatedness of course.)
The ref & abstract of above paper is here:
Phys. Rev. Lett. 88, 048702 (2002) Dario Benedetto,1 Emanuele Caglioti,1 and Vittorio Loreto2,3
This is somewhat of a misleading remark. And I think this comment misses the spirit of the book and topic presented.
For instance, in the game of chess, we understand _completely_ what each piece does, but that doesn't mean we can play a perfect game, or even a good game. Although it certainly is a prerequisite in this case.
And for instance, in a branch of physics known as critical phenomena, where one tries to explain the behavior of things like water evaporating, or magnets losing magnetization, etc. You can construct extremely simple models where there's like one lower level of abstraction to know, but then you can't answer extremely simple questions about higher levels of abstraction.
Let me draw an example, that is widely known as the Ising model of magnetism in physics. We can make a very very simple model of magnetism by saying that all magnetic spins can be UP or DOWN, and the energy is 1 if an adjacent pair of magnetic spins are the same, and -1 if the spins are different. Then we put all these little spins on a lattice, and we call this collection of little spins a _magnet_. Ok, this is a very very simple model, but now we ask, does this thing behave like a magnet? A tough question in 2 and 3 dimensions! Why? It's not because of errors in our assumptions, it's basically because we have very primitive mathematical tools to tackle this type of problem. We are forced to resort to mathematical tools such as infinite transfer matrices, and jordan-wigner transformations.
Yes, in one sense, I agree with your post, that round-off errors cause chaos to occur over very long simulations or models can be inaccurate and have bad predictions. But the spirit of the book is in examining very simple models that seem to have correct predictions, but are complicated enough that we can't manipulate these models with finesse to extract additional information about the system.
I want to put in a few words also of support for Jack Vance. He writes with a style that immerses you totally in his world, populated by incredible peoples that you can both at once recognize and empathize with, yet find totally alien.
I recommend Emphyrio, and Tales of the Dying Earth. Emphyrio absorbed me as an adventure story when I was a kid. I read it again when I was older, and I saw it in a different light as a much more complicated story. Tales of the Dying Earth is a sampling of short stories he compiled long long ago.
The back cover may pique your interest: "A dim place, ancient beyond knowledge. Once it was a tall world of cloudy mountains and bright rivers, and the sun was a blazing white ball. Ages of wind and rain have beaten and rounded the granite, and the sun is feeble and red. The continents have sunk and risen. A million cities have lifted towers, have fallen to dust. In place of the old peoples a few thousand strange souls live. There is evil on Earth, evil distilled by time... Earth is dying."
He also published only two titles of which I'm aware in the U.S.: Demon Princes and Tales of Dying Earth. People will have trouble finding him. Perhaps www.amazon.uk? You can also find used copies of his books online or in sci-fi used bookstores, such as one pointed out to me on Irving St. in San Francisco.
Slashdot Mirror
well, yes, i have in fact dug deeply into the literature of these studies, looking at statistical effects and the idea of using principal component analysis to measure intelligence. this is the i.q. field, a lot of crud couched in statistical language.
so when i call it crud, it's through a lot of careful thought and research.
also, spend some time reading and learning instead of back-reacting to slashdot stories. i raised the polar bear example as a ridiculous counterexample to a ridiculous and untestable proposal that the harsh environment selected for intelligence. your serious rebuttal to the stupid polar bear example is, in short, weak. you raise these points couched in scientific language, by pointing to 'complex social hiearchies' which means that intelligence must be a target for selection pressure. this would be the sophistry that i'm angry about.
there is no question that genetics manifests as testable effects, that people are different. it would be foolish to imply otherwise. but there's a difference between a serious attempt to study these proposals, and non-serious, non-scientific ones like dr. flynn's, and i'm sad to say, like your arguments, about race and biology. who is the sophist who is so willing to swallow these stories whole without criticism?
what do i mean? for example, your last point regarding black athletes being better than asian ones as 'accepted', is similar crud- why do you think this fact is generally accepted? i don't accept it. where are you getting this? is it because sports is dominated by black athletes, and accountants are all white? therefore black people have genetic athletic ability? do you really believe occupational placement is a direct causal result of racial accounting and athletic ability?
i also raised the issue of what is I.Q.: a "battery of tests" does not prove that i.q. exists. in the same way that testable contractions of moving objects in the aether theory of mechanics doesn't prove that the aether is real. on the contrary, i.q. tests are going to be circular- one defines the i.q. to be consistent with the population, and then uses that to draw conclusions about the tested population.
there was a good post by something regarding the problem of testing something across races- explaining things, when these tests are constructed by normalizing to some single population.
this is sophistry- to use persuasive arguments without careful reasoned criticism.
One of the authors, Richard Flynn, maintains a website. http://www.rlynn.co.uk/
Before you start reading, I will make my own assessment of his 'research' known. It's really a load of psycho-babble-pseudo-mathematic crud. He believes that we can reduce a comparative analysis of something called "intelligence" to a single metric - i.e. scores on an I.Q. test... he thinks we can compare Saharans and Americans with the same stupid I.Q. metric. He thinks that by measuring these I.Q.s, he can use it to bolster his crappy theories of race and intelligence- basically he makes ALMOST untestable theories of race and intelligence, such as this statement
"The theory I have advanced to explain these race differences in IQ is that when early humans migrated from Africa into Eurasia they encountered the difficulty of survival during cold winters. This problem was especially severe during the ice ages. Plant foods were not available for much of the year and survival required the hunting and dismembering of large animals for food and the ability to make tools, weapons and clothing, to build shelters and make fires. These problems required higher intelligence and exerted selection pressure for enhanced intelligence, particularly on the Orientals."
So harsh climates make races smarter? Why are polar bears stupider than humans? Why are thermophilic bacteria dumber?
Ok. I'm off the soap box now.
some will argue that the reason for exploration is to 'solve' the problems that plague us now.
there are no compelling reasons why we should 'solve' all our problems before exploring new worlds. is world hunger a problem? i believe we've been solving that even as we continue to explore new worlds. is industrial pollution a problem? one could go back to take a look at coal-powered england in the 1800s for perspective.
i'm not sure why one would tie up 'solving' our contemporary problems with exploration, i.e. terraforming mars.
unless you think we're going to fantastically botch up the terraforming- which, i will add in defense, that's a technological problem, not a philosophical one which you pose.
for those of you interested, after taleryakhan published a high profile experiment in Science magazine in 2002, another group at oak ridge published a counter-claim that with identical set-ups, they could not produce the correlated sonoluminescence and neutron detection.
URL: http://link.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v89/e104302
as usual, an experiment with negative results are rare, and potentially interesting.
one of taleryarkhan's experiments was published in science march 8th 2002, pg 1868. it was high profile, and under a lot of attack by science magazine's own editors.
the article review by becchetti on pg 1850 says that this expt by taleryarkhan showed correlation of bubble flashes and neutron detection.
while the set-up of the expt was a bit bewildering to me, i recall reading why there was a lot of attacks on this article. other people were claiming that the levels of the detected neutrons were below the levels emitted by neutron source they used- as wagdog writes. recall that the expt'al set-up _requires_ one to bombard the acetone with neutrons. maybe they were detecting their own neutrons.
eh, controversy exciting anyways.
here's google satellite image map of the mall. http://maps.google.com/maps?q=king+of+prussia&ll=4 0.088521,-75.392979&spn=0.004413,0.006961&t=k&hl=e n
i went to KoP for a wedding once, and had the pleasure of strolling through the mall the next day. over and over again, till my feet bled.
i wholly support giving other shows a chance, star trek constraints are pretty serious. though, i think OSC went off the deep end many years ago. besides ender's game, maybe xenocide, and also treason (now OOP), his books have tended to be numbing to me. that is, not to say that star trek didn't also go off the deep-end many years ago. just too many many rehashed ideas, e.g. like the episode where the crew loses their inhibitions (even the vulcan) because there's too much subspace-pollen floating in the air of planet Xtron.
who modded this down? this is a good twist on a good quote.
sir, i like the spirit of your post.
in more direct terms, i would say that performing these experiments without the appropriate controls means these experiments are almost completely worthless. there are several confounding factors. rather than speculating wildly, perhaps we can address these confounding factors directly by other experiments.
for example, perhaps all hunter-gatherer tribes really have no need to distinguish between 4 or 5 object piles, and as a result, any human raised in the hunter-gatherer environment ends up being unable to perceive this subtlety whether or not their language has words for 3 - infinity.
we could look at other hunter-gather tribes and do the same experiment on them.
or, better yet, since we want to investigate the piraha directly, we can take a piraha and raise him in a hunter-gatherer environment, but teach him english from the outset so he has words for 3 - infinity. and then experiment on him again.
or perhaps, a worse experiment is to take a piraha and raise him in a western society, but restrict him to learning piraha language. if the sapir-whorf hypothesis is correct, then this man, despite having the right environment, would perform worse than a non-piraha speaking person.
or, we could take a piraha, raise him in the hunter-gatherer society, but force him to speak english. and then check to see if he performs better or worse than other piraha.
what i'm trying to say is that there are so many confounding cultural factors that when we remove them all, we may get a much weaker and less affirmative effect than the one seen in the original experiment. your post captures the heart of this objections - since clearly they kanka-bono hunter-gatherer tribe wouldn't have things like wireless routers, opteron blades, print queues and bluetooth mice.
That being said, in this prion story, we have an some example of postulates 2-4. The Prusiner team synthesized an artificial agent that's implicated in disease, and used it to infect and create new diseased organisms. This is a scientific step forward. Previously, the prion agent itself correlative with disease, but as to whether it is the causative agent, it was unclear.
The brief criticisms in the NY Times articles may have some merit though. It's still possible that the disease has some other underlying cause, and the artificial prion only hastened onset. This is an important point, because the signs of aggregate prions (the amyloid plaques) are found in BOTH healthy and diseased animals, thereby violating the first Koch postulate in some sense. However, I warn the reader that my knowledge is deficient here. Perhaps the amyloid plaques are composed of misfolded variants of other proteins also.
This is a rough summary of what I know. I hope I haven't offended any experts who know the details. Please feel free to correct what I'm sure are numerous mistakes.
i saw some other oversized government projects mentioned in these posts, like Apollo project, Manhattan project, and the (now defunct) Superconducting Collider. these, and the citation of south korea as a paragon of broadband, sounds like an insinuation that if our government steps in, then the project of wiring the whole U.S. for broadband would be entirely possible. i think there are two points here which are very disputable.
firstly, certainly the U.S. is not too shabbily connected for a country of its size and heterogeneity- it's not as if there's a crisis of any sort. so why would anyone want to push broadband penetration up any higher, except for to be able to announce to the rest of the world that we have the highest broadband penetrance? this sounds like a call for national glory, to show off our technological prowess- any time people ask for things like this, it's a suspicious project because it serves little benefit at an extremely high cost. the space shuttle etc has been attacked for these reasons. ask first, would i make the decision for all of us, that all of our lives would be better with faster internet?
the second point i want to mention is to ask why people think that the best way to achieve broadband penetration is to install a DSL line or a cable line into every home? have new technologies not usurped old ones before? when the modem was invented, was there a call for the government to install a modem in every household? or when cable tv bought educational channels to the masses, did congress ask that every home be installed with a cable line? and if that did happen, do you think we'd be the laughingstock of the world? today's technology is tomorrow's old hat. who knows, maybe someone will develop some sort of medium range wifi that will make it super cheap to connect distant rural areas with high speed access, making broadband obsolete. this is a case where i think one might be pushing too hard for what is probably a non-optimal solution.
well, it may well be true that there are hiring people out there who'll disqualify good candidates for stupid reasons, but that's their problem- to circumvent that, you're asking for a solution that'll satisfy everyone, incl. these people who make crappy decisions. is that even possible? is that necessary?
but then your final suggestion seems like a pretty good one: it's honest, it's true as far as i can tell from talking with the IT guy at the last pharma start-up i consulted with. it's simply a way of putting the orig poster's personal events in context of the industry's recent history.
misinterpretation, misjudgement, who knows what mysterious reasons they'll use to disqualify you.
According to economist article the Comcast offer was viewed as clearly low-ball. They would need to raise it by $8 per share to be on par with Disney perceived share value. What Disney may be doing is engaging in shrewd negotiations- the proper thing to do! I quote the salient paragraph from Economist article:
"Mr Eisner, one of the entertainment world's great survivors, will no doubt try to fight to the death. He may offer yet more corporate governance reforms--though the easy ones are mostly done. He will point out that Comcast's opening offer, originally worth $27 a share and falling, is too low--though Comcast has surely known all along that it will have to raise its offer closer to the $35 that Lawrence Haverty of State Street Research says would tempt institutional investors. The fact is, if Disney's board really wants to keep one of the world's iconic companies independent, its best strategy may be to replace Mr Eisner forthwith. Otherwise, Comcast will soon be doing it instead."
i'm one of the accussed and guilty, who've read
... etc..."
...
'bits' of the book but not in entirety. but i'd like to explain why-
i think part of the reason why the book is so difficult to finish is because it's so incredibly boring. would you like a concrete analogy? it would be easier to use and analogy than to explain in detail how ANKOS was written. i'll supply an analog relating to simple arithmetic that expresses my assessment of how boring his book is.
consider a fifth grade math textbook, in which page 1. contains a paragraph on long division. the page starts off by saying "first you try to do a short division problem with the divisor and the first few digits of the dividend, then you put that number on top, and then multiply it by the divisor and put it below the first digits of the dividend, then subtract. then you bring down the next digit, and then you try dividing the
then for the next 4 pages, there is a sample problem of long division. and each problem is accompanied by a short paragraph that goes along the lines of "look, in this problem, my long division procedure produces the correct answer up to as many decimal places as possible. you can check the correct answer by using a calculator. therefore, my long division procedure displays remarkable properties of creating the correct answer."
so far from saying that wolfram is total gibberish, i say that he has some interesting ideas, but the way he's written the book makes it very difficult to read through completely. therefore, i'm guessing that some of the slashdot people here have made valiant attempts to go through the book, and in good faith, some of them report that they've only read 'bits' of it because reading straight through the whole thing would be so damn boring!
Well, I believe 'real' concert experiences will never go out of style, as long as there's demand for them.
But you can imagine that there are a lot of people who don't really care. Because many consumers go to concerts for not only music, but for the experience of being with a billion other raving, dancing lunatics, and to watch pretty young people prance around on the stage.
It's like what Kasparov said about computers playing chess. Kasparov doens't think supercomputers will doom the inherent prettiness and humanity of chess. He predicts that in the future, we'll have computers vs. computers, people vs. people, and people using computers vs. other people using computers. The new technology should enhance the range of consumer experiences, but it probably won't kill off existing experiences that consumers have come to appreciate and love.
According to CIA World Factbookt book/geos/ ch.html
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/fac
The electrical power consumption of China is 1 billion MWh, or the amount of energy produced at a the rate of 130,000 Megawatts.
The yahoo article says this thing will produce at most 18,000 Megawatts. That's about 13% of China's usage now. How is this 1/3 of China's energy requirements?
On the other hand, your suggestion that the dam will benefit China's economy by providing network between regions seems like an excellent idea.
I think some people think the idea of refueling is a bit arcane sounding, but the point of fuel cells is the higher energy density and the somewhat increased flexibility we have in creating new technologies to exploit the form of the energy. Batteries haven't improved by much in many many years of research.
According to FuelCellWorks, the DoCoMo phone will have up to 300 hrs functioning time. This is an improvement on my current cell phone, which lasts about a week. Furthermore, the use of little canisters for refueling is pretty much like carrying around a spare battery. It gets around the recharge problem. If I'm in a rush, I don't want to have to stick my phone into the power socket for half an hour.
At some point, I think we won't need to refuel. DoCoMo or someone else can make a device that will use electricity to regenerate from the fuel cell waste products back into fuel. Highly inefficient, but convenient when you run out of your little canisters
Very good point.
The starting of life and the spreading of life seem to be two very different things!
If we look at our own earth, all our life forms seem to possess some _minimal_ complexity. We have a bunch of mammals, reptiles, plants, and then 'simpler' forms (smaller genomes, less gene products) like bacteria and viruses. But these viruses are still pretty complicated things. Certainly viruses are not the first signs of life, are they? The first life forms would be sort of unexciting, who are capable of only a few self-replicating reactions. There seems to be a gap between non-life and life.
Or so we think. Perhaps if we looked hard enough, we would observe biogenesis in nature.
I think a parallel can be drawn with the movie industry. I read and hear about complaints about how movies aren't original any more, and movies are so formulaic, filled mostly with violence and sex. Indeed, most movies are sequels, spinoffs, rehashes of old ideas. Same goes for television shows. I once read an article that mused, "If we learned about human culture from watching television shows, we would think that everyone was either a cop or a doctor." But that, as you say, is simply because of the economics of mass media: low risk + workable formula == profit.
But it doesn't have to be as bleak as the original post made it sound. There are always new, independent films (which span a gamut of quality) which are nothing like mainstream summer blockbuster sludge. So even if the market for independent films is small, there'll be a supply of small independent films to fill that hunger.
I think the game industry is similar in that it is also deluged with big blockbuster type, non-innovative games, but one can find little weirdo innovative games now and then in this sludge. So we are not lost.
I was only in 5th grade when the Challenger exploded. I remember thinking that someone would find out what happened and fix it so that it doesn't happen again. But of course, that's a pretty naive thing to think.
Later, when I was older, I read an account of the Challenger investigation in some compilations of interviews with Richard Feynman, the Nobel Laureate physicist. He was made a member of the investigative panel, even though he was strictly a civilian scientist. And in his words, when he was doing his investigation by going through documents and talking to people, it sounded that he felt like he was fighting a gigantic institutional bureaucracy that was being very slow, passive and reluctant to divulge information. On the committee were members of the military, former astronauts, etc, who likely had ties to NASA in some personal way, at least more so than some physicist from Caltech.
I don't know what sort of hard conclusions came out of the investigative committee in the end. Feynman was flamboyant and made a great show of the O-ring problem in front of TV cameras, an unrehearsed and disruptive performance, according to his accounts. But I think this flamboyance and disruptiveness was a good thing, because here was some guy who didn't give a crap about whether or not NASA was going to get its butt kicked for being negligent whatnot, and that's the sort of investigators that will be needed to bring the facts to light.
We will need people who are independently minded, and who are going to dig at the truth even if it might hurt a lot of people at NASA, assuming that the destruction of Columbia had a man-made origin. And even if NASA does become hurt and demolished in the process, that's for the better in the long run, because we will, hopefully, build anew and better, and send our tendrils even more deeply into space with or without the current incarnation of the thing we call NASA.
I grieve along with all the others affected by this disaster. It wasn't only the death of seven people, it was a little bit of death in all of us, of all of our wonder and awe and our eagerness to propel ourselves beyond our planet.
Yeah, I wouldn't have believed this myself, but according to a recent wired article on Kazaa, they are making money from ad revenue. I quote the article here.
m l?pg=1&topic=&topic_set=
"In the last six months alone, PC users have downloaded more than 90 million copies. Kazaa has 60 million users around the world and 22 million in the US - an irresistible audience to marketers. Last year, Sharman raked in millions from US advertisers like Netflix and DirecTV, without spending a penny on content. The chase could have gone on forever."
-Wired
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.02/kazaa.ht
The article also mentions their side-business model of teaming up with Altnet, by providing access to Altnet products (paid downloads, supposedly). They, I believe, will use the side-business model to argue that the existence of the company depends on a valid, legal method of generating revenue.
Of course, according to the article only 600 files are offered from Altnet. I think this makes Sharman's countersuit quite flimsy- the bulk of their revenue is derived from ads that sit piggy-back on top illegal activity. I don't think they'll be able to show convincingly that they actually have a viable business model with respect to Altnet.
Then again, if Altnet and Sharman can spit out a convincingly story of RIAA MPAA etc etc conspiracy to monopolize and deprive, the judges might listen.
Very insightful. You would be describing the case of Gleevec, among I'm certain other cases. Gleevec is the wonder drug that's been shown to have great effects on leukemia (CML). However, patients will develop resistance to it during the course of treatment. The source of resistance, it turns out, is the mutation of the Gleevec target (a protein) such that it binds Gleevec differently.
a rticle_id=510
One story: http://www.researchmatters.harvard.edu/story.php?
There's also the common idea that many cancers are multi-mutational events. That is, many mutations conspire in the cellular network to produce a cancerous cell. What that means is one cancer cell may have one method of producing all the right cell factors to proliferate wildly, while another cell employs a slightly different mechanism of doing so. This would mean that any single-prong approach to treating cancer would not be entirely successful. Hence, the article mentions that "multi-prong" approaches are a possible next step.
This reminds me that about a year ago, three italian scientists came up with a way to find species relatedness by using the zip algorithm. One takes the sequence of bacteria 1, and then attaches a little bit of bacteria X sequence to the end of that. Again, one attaches a bit of bacteria X sequence to the end of bacteria 2. And then zipping is done on this concatenation. The final compression size of just the bacteria X part ended up telling us the homology (or relatedness) of bacteria X to bacteria 1 or 2.
But from reading all these posts, perhaps a Bayesian method would work just as well. There seems to be no inherent advantage to using zip. One still needs a reference piece of work (non-spam email, or bacteria 1) for comparing entropies or probabilities. Of interest also is that the researchers applied their method to generating an accurate language tree of Indoeuropean languages (grouped by relatedness of course.)
The ref & abstract of above paper is here:
Phys. Rev. Lett. 88, 048702 (2002)
Dario Benedetto,1 Emanuele Caglioti,1 and Vittorio Loreto2,3
In this Letter we present a very general method for extracting information from a generic string of characters, e.g., a text, a DNA sequence, or a time series. Based on data-compression techniques, its key point is the computation of a suitable measure of the remoteness of two bodies of knowledge. We present the implementation of the method to linguistic motivated problems, featuring highly accurate results for language recognition, authorship attribution, and language classification. ©2002 The American Physical Society
This is somewhat of a misleading remark. And I think this comment misses the spirit of the book and topic presented.
For instance, in the game of chess, we understand _completely_ what each piece does, but that doesn't mean we can play a perfect game, or even a good game. Although it certainly is a prerequisite in this case.
And for instance, in a branch of physics known as critical phenomena, where one tries to explain the behavior of things like water evaporating, or magnets losing magnetization, etc. You can construct extremely simple models where there's like one lower level of abstraction to know, but then you can't answer extremely simple questions about higher levels of abstraction.
Let me draw an example, that is widely known as the Ising model of magnetism in physics. We can make a very very simple model of magnetism by saying that all magnetic spins can be UP or DOWN, and the energy is 1 if an adjacent pair of magnetic spins are the same, and -1 if the spins are different. Then we put all these little spins on a lattice, and we call this collection of little spins a _magnet_. Ok, this is a very very simple model, but now we ask, does this thing behave like a magnet? A tough question in 2 and 3 dimensions! Why? It's not because of errors in our assumptions, it's basically because we have very primitive mathematical tools to tackle this type of problem. We are forced to resort to mathematical tools such as infinite transfer matrices, and jordan-wigner transformations.
Yes, in one sense, I agree with your post, that round-off errors cause chaos to occur over very long simulations or models can be inaccurate and have bad predictions. But the spirit of the book is in examining very simple models that seem to have correct predictions, but are complicated enough that we can't manipulate these models with finesse to extract additional information about the system.
I want to put in a few words also of support for Jack Vance. He writes with a style that immerses you totally in his world, populated by incredible peoples that you can both at once recognize and empathize with, yet find totally alien.
I recommend Emphyrio, and Tales of the Dying Earth. Emphyrio absorbed me as an adventure story when I was a kid. I read it again when I was older, and I saw it in a different light as a much more complicated story. Tales of the Dying Earth is a sampling of short stories he compiled long long ago.
The back cover may pique your interest:
"A dim place, ancient beyond knowledge. Once it was a tall world of cloudy mountains and bright rivers, and the sun was a blazing white ball. Ages of wind and rain have beaten and rounded the granite, and the sun is feeble and red. The continents have sunk and risen. A million cities have lifted towers, have fallen to dust. In place of the old peoples a few thousand strange souls live. There is evil on Earth, evil distilled by time... Earth is dying."
He also published only two titles of which I'm aware in the U.S.: Demon Princes and Tales of Dying Earth. People will have trouble finding him. Perhaps www.amazon.uk? You can also find used copies of his books online or in sci-fi used bookstores, such as one pointed out to me on Irving St. in San Francisco.