Physical pain is biology's way of telling us something is wrong, yet it's one thing doctors have no objective way of measuring.
The amount of pain a person is *really* experiencing, and its location and nature, are in many cases the only information a doctor has to go on for both diagnosing and treating injuries and illnesses. If they could measure that pain the way they can measure temperature and blood pressure - their ability to treat us effectively would be increased as dramatically as it has by the existence of thermometers and blood pressure cuffs.
Heck, even if you could only determine vaguely how much general physical pain a person was experiencing - that would still be a staggering improvement over what we have now. If we can determine something as relatively vague as fatigue from brain waves, the ability to determine pain levels is certainly within reach.
Just use Safari's "Reader" function. It extracts the actual article from behind the paywall overlay and makes it easily readable. I don't know how long they'll leave that vulnerability there though, so enjoy it while it lasts.
In theory it makes sense, accept the impact the decision to eat meat makes, don't suppress the natural instinct to hunt and kill into a video game habit or bad personality... but in practice I'm having trouble of thinking of any hunters who I'd want people to be *more* like. People who hunt, or say they hunt to bond with people who actually do, more often than not strike me as the opposite direction I'd like to see us go as a species.
somehow be set up so that I could program on them for three days straight. Back when I was on my trusty Texas Instruments TI 99/4A, why I could sit in front of my 13" inch TV screen for hours on end, stopping only to nap on the carpet for the 2 to the 3 hours it took to successfully save my work to cassette.
But with this new fangled Macbook Pro... man, after just five or six hours my *back* starts to hurt. And even these new 24" LCD screens that are supposed to be such a big improvement? Well I don't know what it is, but they sure don't seem as sharp and focused as my old VDT did. I can barely make out the text unless I wear these special "reading" glasses. How is that progress?
They said all I had to provide was my PSN login ID, full name, address, phone number, credit card number, credit expiration date, credit card security code, mother's maiden name, social security number, router WEP2 password, bank account number, recent photo graph, times when I would not be home, locations of my valuables, and high res photograph of my house key.
Well, "smart" can be a vague term, but I think I agree with you that anyone can develop a functional knowledge of any subject given: 1. An explanation of the subject that is put in terms they can understand (it has to build on what they know) 2. Sufficient interest in the subject to follow that explanation. 3. Sufficient memory to hold all the necessary pieces in their head at the same time.
The extent a person has a functional knowledge on enough different subjects would probably translate roughly to how "smart" they are judged by others. The only internal limit I see on a person's ability to learn something is the memory capacity. Though memory can be improved, I imagine that people do have limits on that in the same way they have physical limits.
And I'm not sure how this whole formula would apply to someone with learning disability, where there were certain concepts that were very unnatural for them, or a need for so much explanation that time would be a limiting factor; either in terms of sustaining enthusiasm for the subject or simply having enough free hours to devote to it.
Maybe that's why I love computer programming so much. We know memory won't be a limiting factor for computers, and the concept of motivation doesn't even apply. All they await is a sufficient explanation from us, or the barest capacity to provide one for themselves.
You're assuming that IQ tests are accurate, that they correlate to intelligence, that my mum didn't lie to boost my ego, and that respect your opinion on this.
Also, while I am very good at my job, if I'm one "the most intelligent people in the world"... we're all in very serious trouble my friend. Why? Because I smoke cigarettes - which is just about the dumbest thing a person can do (long term). And I decided to start smoking well after everyone knew smoking was dumb, and well before I began to start chipping away at whatever my IQ might have been with booze and drugs.
So, as long as you don't literally pay for the privilege of being poisoned several times a day - congrats, you're far more intelligent than I am. Do you feel better now?
IQ was *kind* of a presence in my early life, as I got the impression it was a big deal to the adults. After having me take the test again a few weeks after the first, they wanted to put me in a special school; something that hadn't happened to my five older siblings. My mum turned it down saying she thought it was better I live a normal life - but I still was constantly hounded about the not living up to my potential... though no one ever bothered to explain how my potential was apparently restricted to school work.
Eventually I got the idea that your IQ was just how fast you learned compared to others your age. Our mum wouldn't tell us our exact IQ scores of course, the closest she came was telling me mine had been over 200. Which to teachers meant I should learn twice as much, but to me seemed better suited to learning the same amount in half the time - as I had no use for anything being taught beyond its ability to placate adults. Later I tried variations on that, like paying half as much attention, or being twice as high.
Intelligence is still just a convenience, like upper body strength or good eyesight. Anyone who's read the news for longer than a week (let alone a history book) can see that people are embarrassingly slow learners. Being a pretty smart human is like being a pretty fast tractor. I mean, human intelligence is great for solving the types of technical puzzles that lend themselves to that skill - but don't expect it to spare you from making most of the really dumb mistakes in the course of your life that you would have anyway.
The American school system seems to have the unique ability to make anything it teaches horribly uninteresting. None of us worry that they're the mathematics they're teaching are false, or basic geography or history; yet Americans who've been through those lessons generally demonstrate a lesser degree of knowledge of those subjects than people educated in other industrialized nations.
In theory, it's wrong to teach children bad science; but in practice - at least in America - it's probably the fastest way to sour them on religion for the rest of their natural lives. Personally, I think things would be much improved if in the future, Americans spent as much time on religion as they currently do on calculus or classical literature.
A major appeal of Apple's products is their track record with customers. Most people have used PC's at work, which did help PC's be a first choice for home usage when that became appealing; but in all that time those people have been burned by PC's at one time or another. Most people's first introduction to Apple products on the other hand was either comparatively simple products like the iPod, or iMacs for casual home use when the price of entry level Apple computers was not large enough to be a major drawback. It's pretty hard to crash an iPod, and it's pretty hard to crash iMac doing little more with it than email and internet usage.
So I don't think the "cult" like follow Apple gets is based so much on the love for their products, but on the absence of really bad experiences on them. Which isn't terribly surprising considering that people are far more motivated by fear than by love.
But it's Apple's game to lose now. With more customers, more products, and more ambition - the odds getting associated with poor experiences in the public's mind grows ever greater. The most important thing Apple has done for its brand wasn't the creation of the iPad - but the way it handled the poor reception on its iPhone by successfully pining the blame for that on AT&T.
The most profitable model I've ever heard of for music was the jukebox. 25 cents to listen to a song, whether or not you owned it, regardless of how many times you've played it - and all without the guarantee that it would even play before you left the establishment. And I don't remember anyone complaining about the cost.
So what if there was a service which functioned as a jukebox, but with a monthly service fee instead of a per song fee. Now, there's nothing revolutionary about that of course, plenty of attempts have been made at doing just that. The problem with those models is that they didn't have enough content to automatically entice users to discover (and hence pay to listen to) enough new music to make it profitable.
But if you had a large enough library that you could create various types of iTunes-type genius playlists based on things like: 2nd favourite songs of people who listed the same favourite song as you Songs/albums manually suggested by the actual artist of the song you're listening to
It would take both a tremendous amount of content to generate truly successful recommendations, as well as way of uploading records of your preferences/familiarity from various music programs such as iTunes xml.
In addition to that, there would be ample upselling opportunities - a section displaying available live concerts from the artist playing, a section for merchandise from the artist, maybe even sections for music learning products such as video lessons which included the song being played, or learning materials created by the artist. With enough users, and the ubiquitous face book links, sections could be created where people could join others wishing to carpool a local concert (and or chaperons for minors wishing to attend).
Again, I'm aware that all the capabilities exist in spades across all the various balkanized music services; but none of them have every gotten enough cooperation from music publishers to achieve the critical mass necessary to add sufficient value to make people comfortable paying a monthly fee to possibly do little more than listen to what might be in their own library with greater ease of use.
As for the licensing fees for the music, the monthly fee's net profit could easily be proportioned to actually publishers of the music that was heard.
Full disclosure: a big part of the motivation for wanting to see a service like this succeed, is to finally drive music profits to the artists creating the music people listen to. Right now, the artists making money are the ones that are popular among people who don't know how to get music for free; not the artists that are popular among people who are actually listening to music. This would also have the effect of driving home the value of albums or songs that people keep listening to years after their release, hopefully nudging the music industry into investing more in artists that have more going for them than nice tits and a copy of Antares auto-tune.
1. Provide preventative care to address a health problem before it becomes worse. 2. Provide preventative safeguards to address a customer's financial liability to their insurers before they become unprofitable customers.
See if you can guess which approach a health insurance company will take with such an algorithm. (Hint: Health Insurance companies provide insurance, not health care.)
Then scientists and creationists would at least *sound* like they agreed.
Of course, it would make life tough for Muslim cartoonists... not being able to draw rocks anymore. But hey, even if they did and we're sentenced to stoning - as soon as someone picked up a rock to throw they could just point and yell "Forbidden Idol!!!", and nonchalantly amble away in the ensuing confusion.
If we stop acting terrorized just because it made sense not to, then the terrorists would have to start doing things that *were* statistically dangerous, like driving drunk, cooking with trans-fats, or starting health insurance companies.
If males and females were sexually monogomous, they would run the risk that their mate was infertile, or shared the same recessive gene with them; and they would eventually be replaced by whichever members of the species were inclined to sort of hedge their genetic bets.
That's also why males and females react differently to perceived evidence of sexual infidelity. When a male cheats, the risk to the female is primarily that he'll find his "fling" to be preferable and pair bond with her - thus abandoning the original female. When a female cheats though, the risk to the male is that he's spending a great deal of time and effort to ensure some *other* male's genes make it to the next generation. So when cheating happens, it would be effective if females were more likely to forgive it as long as the male was otherwise attentive, and males to be far less likely to be forgiving.
Most of us are here because we're the descendents of couples which behaved in the most effective ways for them to pass alone their genes; probably long before there was any such animal as humans. And certainly long before there was any such thing as "The Jerry Springer Show", which is why it's so easy to picture monkeys throwing chairs at each other once they'd run out of poop.
Hey, I just went through the trial of one those myself. So far, I haven't opted for the permanent version you have because: 1. The area which needs the parathesia is on the way to my arms, so using it makes it impossible to use them for programming (my job) or music (my dream). 2. The only one who think it's a good idea is my insurance company. Every doctor who's treated me says, and has proven, that my injury can be corrected with simple PT - though for quite a bit longer than my current insurance policy allows.
If by the time I get a new insurance plan which this time, no foolin', really does cover PT as medically necessary (as opposed to "Medically Necessary" which is apparently totally different), I'll find out of PT alone can actually get me to a point where I can live without the Keith-Richards-Calibre pain medication they have me on now. If not, I'll have to wait another year to get a SCS.
I could hedge my bets and have them install the thing now while it'd be free to me, but I don't know how much maintence those things require over the first year. If I switch plans, the maintenance wouldn't be covered.
May I ask how many times you had to go back for repositioning, repairs, and reprogramming the first year you had it?
1. Be a nice guy and die tragically: making your last act on earth to make people sad. 2. Be a jerk and die any way at all: making your last act on earth to make people relieved. 3. Be a nice guy, and die in ironic or comical way: making your last act funny enough to take the sting out of your death.
If you've always tried to be a nice guy, when your time goes - try to go out on something that won't make your funeral any more morbid that it has to be. I can't really afford a segway, so I'm always on the lookout for a good sale on Rocket Skates or giant slingshots.
For iPods and iPhones (as well as many network capable ebook readers like Nooks) putting them in airplane mode results in an "airplane" symbol being displayed at the top of the screen just like the signal strength. Next to jamming the signal (which is almost needless if they're on AT&T iPhones), requiring them to use devices which indicate they aren't transmitting or receiving visually would be the next best way to ensure they weren't sharing answers.
It seems to me that a lot of activities which are described as "bullying" when done to high school kids, would be legally defined as "assault" if it were done to an adult. I understand the idea of granting minors some leniency in punishment, but I don't understand the downgrading the action simply because of the age of the victim. If those kids threw a full soda can at some 93 year old women, or pushed her down, or knocked her purse out of her hands - wouldn't that be assault, complete with arrest and pressing charges and all that?
Slashdot Mirror
Physical pain is biology's way of telling us something is wrong, yet it's one thing doctors have no objective way of measuring.
The amount of pain a person is *really* experiencing, and its location and nature, are in many cases the only information a doctor has to go on for both diagnosing and treating injuries and illnesses. If they could measure that pain the way they can measure temperature and blood pressure - their ability to treat us effectively would be increased as dramatically as it has by the existence of thermometers and blood pressure cuffs.
Heck, even if you could only determine vaguely how much general physical pain a person was experiencing - that would still be a staggering improvement over what we have now. If we can determine something as relatively vague as fatigue from brain waves, the ability to determine pain levels is certainly within reach.
Just use Safari's "Reader" function. It extracts the actual article from behind the paywall overlay and makes it easily readable. I don't know how long they'll leave that vulnerability there though, so enjoy it while it lasts.
I thought they'd figured out a way to turn mice into Scientologists. As if mice weren't annoying enough as it is.
In theory it makes sense, accept the impact the decision to eat meat makes, don't suppress the natural instinct to hunt and kill into a video game habit or bad personality ... but in practice I'm having trouble of thinking of any hunters who I'd want people to be *more* like. People who hunt, or say they hunt to bond with people who actually do, more often than not strike me as the opposite direction I'd like to see us go as a species.
somehow be set up so that I could program on them for three days straight. Back when I was on my trusty Texas Instruments TI 99/4A, why I could sit in front of my 13" inch TV screen for hours on end, stopping only to nap on the carpet for the 2 to the 3 hours it took to successfully save my work to cassette.
But with this new fangled Macbook Pro... man, after just five or six hours my *back* starts to hurt. And even these new 24" LCD screens that are supposed to be such a big improvement? Well I don't know what it is, but they sure don't seem as sharp and focused as my old VDT did. I can barely make out the text unless I wear these special "reading" glasses. How is that progress?
They said all I had to provide was my PSN login ID, full name, address, phone number, credit card number, credit expiration date, credit card security code, mother's maiden name, social security number, router WEP2 password, bank account number, recent photo graph, times when I would not be home, locations of my valuables, and high res photograph of my house key.
Well, "smart" can be a vague term, but I think I agree with you that anyone can develop a functional knowledge of any subject given:
1. An explanation of the subject that is put in terms they can understand (it has to build on what they know)
2. Sufficient interest in the subject to follow that explanation.
3. Sufficient memory to hold all the necessary pieces in their head at the same time.
The extent a person has a functional knowledge on enough different subjects would probably translate roughly to how "smart" they are judged by others. The only internal limit I see on a person's ability to learn something is the memory capacity. Though memory can be improved, I imagine that people do have limits on that in the same way they have physical limits.
And I'm not sure how this whole formula would apply to someone with learning disability, where there were certain concepts that were very unnatural for them, or a need for so much explanation that time would be a limiting factor; either in terms of sustaining enthusiasm for the subject or simply having enough free hours to devote to it.
Maybe that's why I love computer programming so much. We know memory won't be a limiting factor for computers, and the concept of motivation doesn't even apply. All they await is a sufficient explanation from us, or the barest capacity to provide one for themselves.
You're assuming that IQ tests are accurate, that they correlate to intelligence, that my mum didn't lie to boost my ego, and that respect your opinion on this.
Also, while I am very good at my job, if I'm one "the most intelligent people in the world"... we're all in very serious trouble my friend. Why? Because I smoke cigarettes - which is just about the dumbest thing a person can do (long term). And I decided to start smoking well after everyone knew smoking was dumb, and well before I began to start chipping away at whatever my IQ might have been with booze and drugs.
So, as long as you don't literally pay for the privilege of being poisoned several times a day - congrats, you're far more intelligent than I am. Do you feel better now?
IQ was *kind* of a presence in my early life, as I got the impression it was a big deal to the adults. After having me take the test again a few weeks after the first, they wanted to put me in a special school; something that hadn't happened to my five older siblings. My mum turned it down saying she thought it was better I live a normal life - but I still was constantly hounded about the not living up to my potential... though no one ever bothered to explain how my potential was apparently restricted to school work.
Eventually I got the idea that your IQ was just how fast you learned compared to others your age. Our mum wouldn't tell us our exact IQ scores of course, the closest she came was telling me mine had been over 200. Which to teachers meant I should learn twice as much, but to me seemed better suited to learning the same amount in half the time - as I had no use for anything being taught beyond its ability to placate adults. Later I tried variations on that, like paying half as much attention, or being twice as high.
Intelligence is still just a convenience, like upper body strength or good eyesight. Anyone who's read the news for longer than a week (let alone a history book) can see that people are embarrassingly slow learners. Being a pretty smart human is like being a pretty fast tractor. I mean, human intelligence is great for solving the types of technical puzzles that lend themselves to that skill - but don't expect it to spare you from making most of the really dumb mistakes in the course of your life that you would have anyway.
The American school system seems to have the unique ability to make anything it teaches horribly uninteresting. None of us worry that they're the mathematics they're teaching are false, or basic geography or history; yet Americans who've been through those lessons generally demonstrate a lesser degree of knowledge of those subjects than people educated in other industrialized nations.
In theory, it's wrong to teach children bad science; but in practice - at least in America - it's probably the fastest way to sour them on religion for the rest of their natural lives. Personally, I think things would be much improved if in the future, Americans spent as much time on religion as they currently do on calculus or classical literature.
A major appeal of Apple's products is their track record with customers. Most people have used PC's at work, which did help PC's be a first choice for home usage when that became appealing; but in all that time those people have been burned by PC's at one time or another. Most people's first introduction to Apple products on the other hand was either comparatively simple products like the iPod, or iMacs for casual home use when the price of entry level Apple computers was not large enough to be a major drawback. It's pretty hard to crash an iPod, and it's pretty hard to crash iMac doing little more with it than email and internet usage.
So I don't think the "cult" like follow Apple gets is based so much on the love for their products, but on the absence of really bad experiences on them. Which isn't terribly surprising considering that people are far more motivated by fear than by love.
But it's Apple's game to lose now. With more customers, more products, and more ambition - the odds getting associated with poor experiences in the public's mind grows ever greater. The most important thing Apple has done for its brand wasn't the creation of the iPad - but the way it handled the poor reception on its iPhone by successfully pining the blame for that on AT&T.
The most profitable model I've ever heard of for music was the jukebox. 25 cents to listen to a song, whether or not you owned it, regardless of how many times you've played it - and all without the guarantee that it would even play before you left the establishment. And I don't remember anyone complaining about the cost.
So what if there was a service which functioned as a jukebox, but with a monthly service fee instead of a per song fee. Now, there's nothing revolutionary about that of course, plenty of attempts have been made at doing just that. The problem with those models is that they didn't have enough content to automatically entice users to discover (and hence pay to listen to) enough new music to make it profitable.
But if you had a large enough library that you could create various types of iTunes-type genius playlists based on things like:
2nd favourite songs of people who listed the same favourite song as you
Songs/albums manually suggested by the actual artist of the song you're listening to
It would take both a tremendous amount of content to generate truly successful recommendations, as well as way of uploading records of your preferences/familiarity from various music programs such as iTunes xml.
In addition to that, there would be ample upselling opportunities - a section displaying available live concerts from the artist playing, a section for merchandise from the artist, maybe even sections for music learning products such as video lessons which included the song being played, or learning materials created by the artist. With enough users, and the ubiquitous face book links, sections could be created where people could join others wishing to carpool a local concert (and or chaperons for minors wishing to attend).
Again, I'm aware that all the capabilities exist in spades across all the various balkanized music services; but none of them have every gotten enough cooperation from music publishers to achieve the critical mass necessary to add sufficient value to make people comfortable paying a monthly fee to possibly do little more than listen to what might be in their own library with greater ease of use.
As for the licensing fees for the music, the monthly fee's net profit could easily be proportioned to actually publishers of the music that was heard.
Full disclosure: a big part of the motivation for wanting to see a service like this succeed, is to finally drive music profits to the artists creating the music people listen to. Right now, the artists making money are the ones that are popular among people who don't know how to get music for free; not the artists that are popular among people who are actually listening to music. This would also have the effect of driving home the value of albums or songs that people keep listening to years after their release, hopefully nudging the music industry into investing more in artists that have more going for them than nice tits and a copy of Antares auto-tune.
1. Provide preventative care to address a health problem before it becomes worse.
2. Provide preventative safeguards to address a customer's financial liability to their insurers before they become unprofitable customers.
See if you can guess which approach a health insurance company will take with such an algorithm.
(Hint: Health Insurance companies provide insurance, not health care.)
Anyone know how to say "like," in Arabic?
Then scientists and creationists would at least *sound* like they agreed.
Of course, it would make life tough for Muslim cartoonists... not being able to draw rocks anymore. But hey, even if they did and we're sentenced to stoning - as soon as someone picked up a rock to throw they could just point and yell "Forbidden Idol!!!", and nonchalantly amble away in the ensuing confusion.
they all end with the lyrics, "All rights reserved".
Though it is adorable to see them start each school play with a 3 minute copyright infringment warning sketch in 15 different languages.
If we stop acting terrorized just because it made sense not to, then the terrorists would have to start doing things that *were* statistically dangerous, like driving drunk, cooking with trans-fats, or starting health insurance companies.
If males and females were sexually monogomous, they would run the risk that their mate was infertile, or shared the same recessive gene with them; and they would eventually be replaced by whichever members of the species were inclined to sort of hedge their genetic bets.
That's also why males and females react differently to perceived evidence of sexual infidelity. When a male cheats, the risk to the female is primarily that he'll find his "fling" to be preferable and pair bond with her - thus abandoning the original female. When a female cheats though, the risk to the male is that he's spending a great deal of time and effort to ensure some *other* male's genes make it to the next generation. So when cheating happens, it would be effective if females were more likely to forgive it as long as the male was otherwise attentive, and males to be far less likely to be forgiving.
Most of us are here because we're the descendents of couples which behaved in the most effective ways for them to pass alone their genes; probably long before there was any such animal as humans. And certainly long before there was any such thing as "The Jerry Springer Show", which is why it's so easy to picture monkeys throwing chairs at each other once they'd run out of poop.
Hey, I just went through the trial of one those myself. So far, I haven't opted for the permanent version you have because:
1. The area which needs the parathesia is on the way to my arms, so using it makes it impossible to use them for programming (my job) or music (my dream).
2. The only one who think it's a good idea is my insurance company. Every doctor who's treated me says, and has proven, that my injury can be corrected with simple PT - though for quite a bit longer than my current insurance policy allows.
If by the time I get a new insurance plan which this time, no foolin', really does cover PT as medically necessary (as opposed to "Medically Necessary" which is apparently totally different), I'll find out of PT alone can actually get me to a point where I can live without the Keith-Richards-Calibre pain medication they have me on now. If not, I'll have to wait another year to get a SCS.
I could hedge my bets and have them install the thing now while it'd be free to me, but I don't know how much maintence those things require over the first year. If I switch plans, the maintenance wouldn't be covered.
May I ask how many times you had to go back for repositioning, repairs, and reprogramming the first year you had it?
1. Be a nice guy and die tragically: making your last act on earth to make people sad.
2. Be a jerk and die any way at all: making your last act on earth to make people relieved.
3. Be a nice guy, and die in ironic or comical way: making your last act funny enough to take the sting out of your death.
If you've always tried to be a nice guy, when your time goes - try to go out on something that won't make your funeral any more morbid that it has to be. I can't really afford a segway, so I'm always on the lookout for a good sale on Rocket Skates or giant slingshots.
Unless it's just a page that says "Quick, look away!!!"
But you can only use it for rhetorical questions like:
"Soda and Pop Tarts - you call that breakfast?" or "This is thanks I get?"
For iPods and iPhones (as well as many network capable ebook readers like Nooks) putting them in airplane mode results in an "airplane" symbol being displayed at the top of the screen just like the signal strength. Next to jamming the signal (which is almost needless if they're on AT&T iPhones), requiring them to use devices which indicate they aren't transmitting or receiving visually would be the next best way to ensure they weren't sharing answers.
Unfortunately, every time they've tried to demo it, a fight breaks out.
It seems to me that a lot of activities which are described as "bullying" when done to high school kids, would be legally defined as "assault" if it were done to an adult. I understand the idea of granting minors some leniency in punishment, but I don't understand the downgrading the action simply because of the age of the victim. If those kids threw a full soda can at some 93 year old women, or pushed her down, or knocked her purse out of her hands - wouldn't that be assault, complete with arrest and pressing charges and all that?