There is a drama in my place that takes place in a women's prison. One of the inmates is in jail because she left her child alone to do drugs with her friends and the baby died suffocated on its vomit. Another killed a policeman while on drugs. One prison guard (a woman) is a bully who gets off torturing inmates, and another is involved in drug trafficking. The most compassionate characters in the whole series are the prison chaplain, psychologist and probational agent, which are men. The few inmates' boyfriends we see are portrayed as very understanding and faithful.
It's not exactly cowardice, it's the way we humans have an inherent difficulty with patterns and statistics. Human perception of risks is a big problem, especially for people who devise massive, incredibly expensive surveillance systems supposedly to 'protect us against terrorists'.
Think of that whole operation as you would of a screening system for a specific illness. In public health these screening tests have two main properties called sensitivity (how well does the test detects an illness) and specificity (how well does the test differentiate between healthy and ill patients). The test will fail to detect some of the ill people (false negative) and detect some healthy people as sick (false positive). The test in this case is the massive indiscriminate surveillance, the ill patients your big ole nasty terrorists, the healthy the rest of us. Perhaps you have noticed that all existing medical screening tests are not prescribed to everyone indiscriminately, but normally to populations which are more at risk for a certain condition. There are economic reasons for this but there is also a statistical reason : the rarer the ill people among your tested population, the less efficient your test becomes, with very little impact of its sensitivity and specificity, which can never be 100%
When talking about terrorists we're talking about a few individuals among millions. That's rarer than any illness routine screening tests are meant to detect, and for a good reason : it would be an awful waste of resources to do such screening, and it would do more harm than good. False positives would represent many, many times the true positives you would get.
And that's what we observe in that ill-designed, expensive system. Its own proponents are incapable of describing a single precise case where it prevented something. And still the money and resources flow in, because other humans are more scared of a few marginal incidents, which this very expensive, privacy-violating system failed to detect, than of, say, traffic accidents, which cost the lives of many times more people a year.
I think we're quite a bit closer to workable machine-brain interfaces than stem cell regrowth.
We already have cochlear implants and primitive brain-interfaced cameras.
There's one paper I read (http://www.scientific.net/AST.57.204) that discusses how such systems could be implanted in patients to restore lost neuromuscular functions in the near future (it even discusses packaging and wireless communications between such systems). It is unfortunately behind a paywall, but here is the abstract :
"This paper covers circuits and systems techniques for the construction of high reliability biosensing and stimulation medical devices. Such microsystems are dedicated for interconnections through either the central or the peripheral nervous systems. Low-power high-reliability wireless links are used to power up the implanted devices while data are exchanged bidirectionaly between these implants and external controllers. A global view of main devices is given, case studies related to applications such as bladder control, intracortical monitoring and microstimulation are discussed, altogether with modeling, characterization, as well as microsystems assembly and packaging. Also, dedicated electrode arrays and their interfaces to tissues interfaces are summarized."
Keep in mind that this is a 2008 paper, and electronics progresses quite fast. I think the technology actually exists to make this possible, and that it is much more workable, safe (stem cells, if they are not your own, would necessitate anti-rejection drugs, and have been linked to cancers) and promising than stem cell research. However to make an actual marketable product out of it as opposed to the unwieldy prototypes that exist in university labs, you'd have to have a major investment in designing and printing specialized biomedical chips, and investors are only interested in projects that have a big enough market to make them profitable.
So, the question is, is there a sufficiently big market of locked-in syndrome patients to make investment in specialized IC production interesting ?
It's called a brain-machine interface. It essentially a specialized ECG.
An electronics prof in my uni is working with them to control helper robots.
However, you have to train with it to generate the proper signals to get the robot to do what you want it to do. It should be possible to get one to write things for you, but you'd have to find someone to write software for it, and the patient would have to train with it for a while before it could do anything useful for her.
I second the advice to learn UML. You can also add basic design patterns, and the different programming paradigms (object oriented, procedural, ect.)
If you want to progress to bigger, collaborative projects, you need to be able to plan ahead before you start a project, and produce code that is readable (ie, as clean as possible, and commented) for the people you work with.
.
The kind of project you choose depends on your personal interests. For instance, one subject which I find interesting if you're into hard math is computer vision. It has nice algorithms to implement and play with, in addition to providing cool visual results you can show off. You need a basic knowledge of linear algebra / matrix operations to understand what you're doing. There are lots of projects online like manipulating objects on your computer by moving your hands in front of your webcam, HDR photography, face recognition, Kinect hacking, ect. Pretty much all levels of difficulty available. Lots of very nice libraries available. One you might check out is OpenCV, which is available in python and C.
If you want it to progress beyond a hobby, you'll have to tackle a compiled language with memory management and pointers at some point. Most people do this using C/C++. Many guides teach you this online, but it's not a bad idea to invest in a good textbook like Knut's.
Hum, no, you can't transfuse yourself blood from non-human animals. It would coagulate rapidly upon entering your bloodstream as it is attacked as a foreign body and quite possibly kill you by provoking a stroke / heart attack should the resulting clots reach the vessels around your heart or brain.
Even with human-to-human transfusion you have to be very careful with blood groups, and blood has to be treated to remove immune cells (normally irradiated) so as to avoid triggering graft-vs-host disease (GVHD), a very severe illness in which two non-compatible immune systems fight against each other destroying your organs (skin, liver, muscles, lungs, mucosa, ect.).
One harmful side-effect in multiple transfusion recipients is iron overload. Some people are more prone to this than others, depending on how good their genetics is at conserving iron.
Overdose of iron can lead to liver damage in acute intoxication, liver cancer and increased oxidation phenomena in chronic cases.
There are even hypotheses about surplus iron being at the origin of degenerative diseases like alzheimers / parkinsons.
So people doing transfusions of young blood as a way to stay young might be exchanging a temporary increase in performance for steeply increasing risks of cancer and degenerative disorders.
Actually, according to most scientology watchers estimates, the number of scientology members left, world-wide, would be around 50 000, tops. This is based on IAS (International Association of Scientologists) membership, of which all scientologist must be members, and on numbers in attendance at certain events.
There are more people who declared "Jedi Knight" to be their religion on census than there are scientologists.
Scientology however would probably win in the highest real estate net worth per member category, with its current (visible) assets totaling over 6 billion dollars.
It also wins the "costliest, ridiculous and most dangerous cosplay ever" with its fake-navy/paramilitary clergy dedicated to "clear the planet" (to which you can sign away your kids in indentured servitude for a billion years), the Sea Org.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a drama in my place that takes place in a women's prison. One of the inmates is in jail because she left her child alone to do drugs with her friends and the baby died suffocated on its vomit. Another killed a policeman while on drugs. One prison guard (a woman) is a bully who gets off torturing inmates, and another is involved in drug trafficking. The most compassionate characters in the whole series are the prison chaplain, psychologist and probational agent, which are men. The few inmates' boyfriends we see are portrayed as very understanding and faithful.
There has been no complaint about it.
It's not exactly cowardice, it's the way we humans have an inherent difficulty with patterns and statistics. Human perception of risks is a big problem, especially for people who devise massive, incredibly expensive surveillance systems supposedly to 'protect us against terrorists'.
Think of that whole operation as you would of a screening system for a specific illness. In public health these screening tests have two main properties called sensitivity (how well does the test detects an illness) and specificity (how well does the test differentiate between healthy and ill patients). The test will fail to detect some of the ill people (false negative) and detect some healthy people as sick (false positive). The test in this case is the massive indiscriminate surveillance, the ill patients your big ole nasty terrorists, the healthy the rest of us. Perhaps you have noticed that all existing medical screening tests are not prescribed to everyone indiscriminately, but normally to populations which are more at risk for a certain condition. There are economic reasons for this but there is also a statistical reason : the rarer the ill people among your tested population, the less efficient your test becomes, with very little impact of its sensitivity and specificity, which can never be 100%
When talking about terrorists we're talking about a few individuals among millions. That's rarer than any illness routine screening tests are meant to detect, and for a good reason : it would be an awful waste of resources to do such screening, and it would do more harm than good. False positives would represent many, many times the true positives you would get.
And that's what we observe in that ill-designed, expensive system. Its own proponents are incapable of describing a single precise case where it prevented something. And still the money and resources flow in, because other humans are more scared of a few marginal incidents, which this very expensive, privacy-violating system failed to detect, than of, say, traffic accidents, which cost the lives of many times more people a year.
Oh, great.
We're doomed.
I think we're quite a bit closer to workable machine-brain interfaces than stem cell regrowth.
We already have cochlear implants and primitive brain-interfaced cameras.
There's one paper I read (http://www.scientific.net/AST.57.204) that discusses how such systems could be implanted in patients to restore lost neuromuscular functions in the near future (it even discusses packaging and wireless communications between such systems). It is unfortunately behind a paywall, but here is the abstract :
"This paper covers circuits and systems techniques for the construction of high reliability biosensing and stimulation medical devices. Such microsystems are dedicated for interconnections through either the central or the peripheral nervous systems. Low-power high-reliability wireless links are used to power up the implanted devices while data are exchanged bidirectionaly between these implants and external controllers. A global view of main devices is given, case studies related to applications such as bladder control, intracortical monitoring and microstimulation are discussed, altogether with modeling, characterization, as well as microsystems assembly and packaging. Also, dedicated electrode arrays and their interfaces to tissues interfaces are summarized."
Keep in mind that this is a 2008 paper, and electronics progresses quite fast. I think the technology actually exists to make this possible, and that it is much more workable, safe (stem cells, if they are not your own, would necessitate anti-rejection drugs, and have been linked to cancers) and promising than stem cell research. However to make an actual marketable product out of it as opposed to the unwieldy prototypes that exist in university labs, you'd have to have a major investment in designing and printing specialized biomedical chips, and investors are only interested in projects that have a big enough market to make them profitable.
So, the question is, is there a sufficiently big market of locked-in syndrome patients to make investment in specialized IC production interesting ?
derp, I meant EEG.
It's called a brain-machine interface. It essentially a specialized ECG.
An electronics prof in my uni is working with them to control helper robots.
However, you have to train with it to generate the proper signals to get the robot to do what you want it to do. It should be possible to get one to write things for you, but you'd have to find someone to write software for it, and the patient would have to train with it for a while before it could do anything useful for her.
I second the advice to learn UML. You can also add basic design patterns, and the different programming paradigms (object oriented, procedural, ect.)
If you want to progress to bigger, collaborative projects, you need to be able to plan ahead before you start a project, and produce code that is readable (ie, as clean as possible, and commented) for the people you work with.
.
The kind of project you choose depends on your personal interests. For instance, one subject which I find interesting if you're into hard math is computer vision. It has nice algorithms to implement and play with, in addition to providing cool visual results you can show off. You need a basic knowledge of linear algebra / matrix operations to understand what you're doing. There are lots of projects online like manipulating objects on your computer by moving your hands in front of your webcam, HDR photography, face recognition, Kinect hacking, ect. Pretty much all levels of difficulty available. Lots of very nice libraries available. One you might check out is OpenCV, which is available in python and C.
If you want it to progress beyond a hobby, you'll have to tackle a compiled language with memory management and pointers at some point. Most people do this using C/C++. Many guides teach you this online, but it's not a bad idea to invest in a good textbook like Knut's.
Hum, no, you can't transfuse yourself blood from non-human animals. It would coagulate rapidly upon entering your bloodstream as it is attacked as a foreign body and quite possibly kill you by provoking a stroke / heart attack should the resulting clots reach the vessels around your heart or brain.
Even with human-to-human transfusion you have to be very careful with blood groups, and blood has to be treated to remove immune cells (normally irradiated) so as to avoid triggering graft-vs-host disease (GVHD), a very severe illness in which two non-compatible immune systems fight against each other destroying your organs (skin, liver, muscles, lungs, mucosa, ect.).
One harmful side-effect in multiple transfusion recipients is iron overload. Some people are more prone to this than others, depending on how good their genetics is at conserving iron. Overdose of iron can lead to liver damage in acute intoxication, liver cancer and increased oxidation phenomena in chronic cases. There are even hypotheses about surplus iron being at the origin of degenerative diseases like alzheimers / parkinsons. So people doing transfusions of young blood as a way to stay young might be exchanging a temporary increase in performance for steeply increasing risks of cancer and degenerative disorders.
Actually, according to most scientology watchers estimates, the number of scientology members left, world-wide, would be around 50 000, tops. This is based on IAS (International Association of Scientologists) membership, of which all scientologist must be members, and on numbers in attendance at certain events. There are more people who declared "Jedi Knight" to be their religion on census than there are scientologists. Scientology however would probably win in the highest real estate net worth per member category, with its current (visible) assets totaling over 6 billion dollars. It also wins the "costliest, ridiculous and most dangerous cosplay ever" with its fake-navy/paramilitary clergy dedicated to "clear the planet" (to which you can sign away your kids in indentured servitude for a billion years), the Sea Org.