What they supposedly found was WHERE the brain encodes semantic functioning. No mention of how.
Furthermore, semantic functioning is not conceptual encoding.
Non-humans have concepts: abstract categories whose members they treat indifferently. When a dog that has been house-trained is in a house different from the house it was trained in, it has no difficulty understanding that it isn't supposed to crap on the floor. It has a concept of "house" whose members can be identified by their particulars, but which are all treated in a common way.
Indeed, if other species didn't have some conceptual ability, it is very unlikely we would have any. Evolution works primarily by elaboration, so without some elaborative material to operate on it is very unlikely a species with our conceptual powers would arise. It would be like a planet of snakes suddenly evolving a species of sprinters.
Human reasoning ability comes from a combination of pre-existing capabilities: the aforementioned conceptual capacity we share with many other species, and the equally wide-spread capacity to use symbols such as sounds to refer to other things, like a predator approaching. In humans evolution has enhanced the ability to use symbols so that any symbol can refer to anything, including concepts.
If this actually goes through (if it hasn't already), then all of the prior art in the world doesn't matter because the ruling goes to whoever files the patent first.
There are two different issues here. Prior art is public, whereas invention is at least potentialy private.
Prior art can be used to invalidate a patent under first-to-file. That is, if I file a patent on left-handed widgets, and you can show you have been making and selling them for years, my patent will be invalidated (after a few million dollars has gone to feed the lawyers.) But to make the claim of prior art you must have actually published or produced something that conflicts with one or more of my patent's claims.
So it is incorrect to say that "all the prior art in the world doesn't matter" if a country has a first-to-file system, which virtually every country in the world except the U.S. does.
Prior invention, on the other hand, may be something that someone thought up and wrote down (and had notarized) but did not ever publish or produce. Prior invention is the ultimate submarine legal weapon. It creates a situation where you may have invented something, patented it, built a business on it, and then had your patent stripped away because someone else can prove that they invented it first even though you had absolutely no way of knowing about it because they didn't publish it or produce it.
In practical terms, patents are rarely overturned on this basis--the most famous case is that of the laser, and it is the only one I know of.
However, first-to-file reduces this uncertainty, and encourages early filing and reduced reliance on trade secrets, so it promotes the publication (by patenting) of new ideas, which is supposed to be the point of this monopoly priviledge that the government grants on them.
That means that those countries will be reducing their emissions to 55% of their 1990 levels.
A) The 55% figure is not correct--I believe it is more like 20%
2) Canada signed the treaty, but the Liberals did next to nothing with regard to meeting our targets, and the Conservatives have owned up and said we will not meet them. Since the time the treaty has been in place, the big, bad, ugly United States has done far more to control greenhouse gas emissions than how-green-is-my-Canada. The U.S. actions have been mostly due to initiatives at the level of individual states, who are far ahead of the U.S. federal government in this regard.
iii) Ergo, simply signing the treaty means nothing, and in the case of the U.S. at least, not signing the treaty does not mean nothing. I think I just sprained my square of opposition.
it is absolutlely imposiible for a person (of 75%+ standard IQ) to not have some sort of religion since "religion" is just a word for CONTEXT
No, "context" is a word for context.
"Religion" is a word for a set of beliefs that are not falsifiable, and which are held as truths rather than contingent postulates or used as disciplines.
Ordinary people have no trouble at all understanding that religion is not like rationally justified or contingent forms of belief. The only people who do not understand this are those appologists for religion who do not have the courage to show their colours for what they are. They know in their hearts the epistemological untenability of their position, and yet persist in trying to tar everyone with their own filthy brush.
If, on the other hand, climate change causes changes in CO2 levels, then you need only explain climate change, something which has been adequately explained by solar cycles.
So I guess you could claim that on longer timescales something completely different happens, and the shorter growing season over a smaller area of land during ice ages somehow results in less C02 in the atmosphere, and the longer growing season over a larger area of land during interglacials somehow results in more CO2 in the atmosphere.
You could even claim that non-linear climate response means that even though doubling the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere radically alters the heat balance of the planet, it does not necessarily follow from this that the temperature of the atmosphere or even the heat content of the atmosphere (which is quite independent of temperature) will increase.
What you cannot claim is that the non-linear response that you might want to arbitrarily invoke in the paragraph above will have no major effect on the human societies and economies.
So unfortunately it appears that the "climate change causes CO2 variations" argument gets off to a very poor start. It may have some legs in the long run, but it is not at all obvious what those legs are, as all of the science points to the oppositive climate-CO2 trend that you would need for the argument to get anywhere.
I am unwilling to shut down half a dozen industries, reduce lifestyles back to the 17th century and potentially kill millions through half a dozen causes that can be avoided by maintaining an oil based economy (think no fertilizers, no shipping, no refrigeration), based on, "Well this *might* be really bad."
Excellent play of the Hysteria card! Brilliant--let's focus on entirely hypothetical (and entirely negative) consequences of imaginary actions. It's so much easier than debating the actual science.
What I wouldn't give to see you and a die-hard Greenpeacer locked in a room together. You deserve each other. Neither group cares about the environment or the science. Only political orthodoxies.
The mainstream consciousness of climate change as a major problem will be terrribly damaging to the old-guard environmentalists, because they don't care in the least about the science, any more than do morons making up nonsense like the claim that a carbon-neutral energy economy can only be achieved by world-wide poverty. Both groups lack all imagination--remember the Club of Rome and their loopy report from the '70's that the odds were good we would be having widespread famine just about now? They carefully left out all technological progress from their calculations, just like the kind of idiot who focusses on economic change but sees no new economic opportunities whatsoever in a major retooling of the economy.
Huh? I just played the game for five minutes and my 'partner' and I repeatedly labelled images the same way. Telephone, tree, meeting, magazine... Lots of common tags.
Yeah, I tried it after I posted. What I found was consistent with your experience: innanely uninformative tags that tell you virtually nothing about the content of the images are easy to get in common. Anything that is actually descriptive of the content is impossible.
Image of a ship with a drilling rig on deck: "ship". The same as what you'd get for a child's picture of a ship, a Viking longboat, a caravel or galleon, a container ship, an oil tanker, a car ferry...
Image of two old guys playing a board game in central park: "chess". Could have been chequers.
Image of a group of people in an airport departure lounge: "people". That really tells you a lot about the image, doesn't it?
Which kinda proves my point: people classify stuff in different ways, and the odds of a common classfication (beyond the innanely simple ones that convey virtually no useful information about the images) are nil.
Even without deliberate abuse, which will be rampant, the odds of two people labeling the same image in the same way are virtually nil.
Human beings are just barely able to communicate with each other when we are face-to-face. Language functions primarily as a carrier wave for innonation and expression in most (non-geek) social interactions, so the precise meaning of words hardly matters. Because of this we rarely notice that meaning is extremely elastic.
Meaning is a verb--it is something people do, not a property of the objects we do it to. Expecting two people to mean the same thing with regard to the same image is equivalent to expecting them to dance the same steps in time with each other, even though they are in separate cities and just hearing the same music over the Web.
As far as title/mortgage fraud goes I really wonder what kind of screwed up system Canada has. A quick search for "real estate" "title fraud" is completely filled with links about canadian real estate and almost no other country.
It may be simply that title fraud has become an industry here due to the fact that lawyers sell title insurance. I've bought two homes in Ontario in the past five years, and been strongly advised by my lawyer to buy title insurance both times (which I did--it is cheap and effective). That would protect me as a buyer from this kind of nonsense, though it does not protect the legitimate home-owner who is fraudulently deprived of their property.
Insofar as there is a problem, it is probably because our land registry offices are provincial, and unlike the Canadian federal government, which is a world-leader in electronic records and services (the recent Lockheed-Martin-derived census fiasco, and the earlier long gun registry disaster, notwithstanding) the provinces have mostly proven incapable of computerizing their land registry records in a usable way. The POLARIS system in Ontario was supposed to cost $28 million. It cost over a billion dollars and was 11 years late, and is so painfully stupid in design it is hard to believe. For example, the software retains a strict division between individual land registry offices (does anyone else smell politics?) so to search multiple offices you have to run multiple searches. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
So if there really is a problem with title fraud in Canada it is primarily a result of the chronic inability of individual people within our provincial governments to implement effective technological solutions to completely straightforward problems.
I am glad that I live in America, where we at least retain some of the more important aspects of English common law...
Except for habeas corpus. And there is that eminent domain thingy, too...
Who came up with the idea that they should let someone else sell your home as long as they can successfully trick the buyer?
In a free market, like we have in Canada, no one needs permission from anyone to sell something that is legally theirs. So "they" don't "let" anyone sell anything. We have a legal right to sell what is ours. The whole purpose of this fraud is to create the appearance that the property legally belongs to someone who does not in fact own it.
The limits of humans' ability to perceive sensor information is fixed and while the DVD isn't perfect, the lackluster response of the HD-DVD & Blu-Ray in the marketplace is an indication that diminishing returns for entertainment-based technology are here.
Not only are we limited, our houses are limited. What's the point of having a 100" screen if you can only be eight or ten feet away from it in a room that has all kinds of stray light from windows etc?
Regular DVDs are already of sufficient quality that your viewing experience is generally limited by the venue rather than the technology, so the market for higher-end products is relatively limited. But the high-end videophile is also exactly the sort of person who is going to be most concerned/pissed-off by the big stinking heap of DRM piled on these disks, so the market is really restricted to people who care enough to want hi-def but don't care enough to not want DRM.
'm gonna guess that the main difference here that in 1998, internet relationships weren't counted as "real" relationships.
Or it could possibly be that both the previous negative and current positive effects are small, and have been overly-hyped by the press. Looking at the article, I notice something to the effect of "barely statistically significant".
Remember, a 2 sigma effect is suprious about 3% of the time, and so if a hundred studies are done by psychologists on the effect of the internets, 3 are certain to result in irreproducible results that get reported as gospel truth. Which is pretty much what they are, come to think of it.
Things are looking better than ever for Intel. And this job cut is only going to help.
Why do you think that, given the well-known fact that companies that undergo significant layoffs underperform the market for the next few years?
10% may be below the critical threshold where cuts do more harm than good, but not by much.
"This job cut may help" would be a rational statement. "This cut is going to help" indicates an unjustified level of confidence in anyone's ability to predict the consequences of a complex action within an evolving market.
I program computers for a living. I didn't get a computer until I was in 8th grade. What does that tell you?
I program computers for a living and I didn't even see a computer until I was in my senior year of highschool, where I learned that aways-useful language: APL.
That was followed by a first-year engineering course on FORTRAN, complete with punch cards, which I worked in as an academic of one kind or another for most of the next decade, with a little BASIC thrown in for controlling hardware on Apple ]['s (some of which had 8 k memory, whoo hoo!)
I didn't learn C until the late 80's or C++, which is the language I work exclusively in now, until the mid-90's, by which time I was well into my 30's.
Pretty much 100% of the "computing" skills I learned before 1995 other than debugging techniques are now obsolete. Flow charts? Waterfall design? Quote-quad? Many of the things I've learned since have been marginally useful (most of UML beyond class diagrams and sequence diagrams, all of Java, all of CORBA--these things may be useful in their place, but I have no place for them) I'm currently changing from Perl to Python as my primary scripting language, a transition I expect will take a few years, creating another obsolete skill.
There is one skill that I learned in grade 9 that has been valuable throughout my computing career: typing.
This is the nature of computing technology. Trying to teach kids in lower forms stuff that is state of the art today is just wasting their time, because the vast majority of it will be obsolete tomorrow. A laptop is just an impediment, and awkward and unnecesary tool that will get in the way of much substantive learning.
In some ways I think his current actions with the libraries and Iraq are good examples of Bush's presidency. Using Executive action and Executive order to create sweeping changes in the way things are done
The leitmotif of the Bush presidency has been cowardice.
1) Don't use the veto, which is public and open to congressional challenge. Use signing statements, which are extra-legal and can't be challenged. What does the couragous President choose? Open disagreement and possible over-ride, or hiding his disagreements where they can't be challenged?
2) Attack before your enemies actually have any capacity to defend themselves. Isn't it interesting that Bush chose to attack Iraq, which he knew or reasonably ought to have known did not have WMDs, and has not chosen to attack North Korea, which he knows does have them? It's almost as if he was only willing to take on the fictional threat while letting the real one get away, literally, with murder on a scale that makes Saddam look like a piker.
3) Gerymander electoral districts rather than face fair elections.
4) Appoint friends rather than competent administrators to key posts in your government. After all, loyalty to you and to the party is far, far more important than loyalty to the country, and if they are loyal to you they can't be any kind of a threat to you. And to a coward, keeping threats at bay is the most important thing.
5) Abandon due process, open government, "speed and public trail" and generally all of the IVth, Vth and VIth ammendments to the Constitution, because they are fundamentally about exposing the workings of government to the light of day, and Bush is terrified of scrutiny.
Fill in a few of your own--there are no shortage of examples.
Closing libraries under false auspices is in keeping with all of this. It would take actual courage to openly make the EPA's job as much harder as this will do. So Bush et al have opted for stealth and dishonesty rather than an open, courageous statement of policy.
Congress has all the power in the world to spank the crap out of the president even without impeachment. But they won't.
Because congress-people are now almost universally loyal to their party rather than their country.
The stakes in U.S. partisan politics are now insanely high. Leadership of the world's sole self-proclaimed superpower is up for grabs. That has had an enormously corrosive effect on the previously-effective system of checks and balances that is supposed to keep things stable.
If the Democrats take control of congress this fall it will change the balance of power between the two parties and put Bush on a more dangerous footing, but what it won't do is change the fundamental problem. Neither party has the interests of the county as their primary concern, and the Democrats will use congress as a platform to attack Bush on any grounds whatsoever (just as the Republicans did to Clinton.)
I think the Republicans have done a better job of ignoring everything but party loyalty than the Democrats have, but that is simply because what passes for the Left in the U.S. is broader and less cohesive than the Right. The Right is more monolithic and therefore more able to rally around the party and stay focussed, while the Left spends time debating issues rather than simply pursuing power at all costs.
There is still hope that the relative pluralism of the Left may save the day, especially after the economy tanks next year, but until they get badly beaten at the polls the Right is going to continue playing the game with the same ruthless lack of patriotism they are now, running roughshod over the constitution and every genuinely conservative value of the republic in the name of gaining and keeping raw political power.
individuals may be irrational, but as a group they are rational.
This is not correct on two accounts.
The first is theoretical, where individual rational choices result in global irrational behaviour, as observed in the Prisoner's Dilemma and similar situations (the group optimum requires different behaviour than the individual optimum, and the group optimum is what everyone would value the most if they could be assured of achieving it.)
The second is practical: there is a well-known class of historical situations where people in large groups strongly support and even willingly participate in actions that are extremely high risk and economically a dead loss. These are called "wars", and the "war puzzle" is a topic of ongoing discussion in economics because wars so grossly violate the economist's placid assumption of equilibrium rationality.
Economic rationality will get you a long way in understanding the world. But never forget that we are all monkeys under the skin, and be periodically overcome with "the maddness of crowds".
When TFA says the light is "white," this makes me think that there is at least one problem remaining to be solved -- though perhaps it would be as simple as using lightly tinted glass for the bulb.
It has been solved. I was singing the praises of CF bulbs to my g/f a few months ago and she complained about the harshness of the light. It was the perfect straight line, because we were sitting in a room lit by a lamp with a CF bulb in it, and I was able to say, "You mean like this?"
I actually had to get the lamp and show her it really was a CF bulb before she would believe me.
This isn't just marketing hype anymore. CFL's are really good to go, and you really can't tell the difference between the light they cast and an incandescent.
I'm using them everywhere I can, and you should too. As someone else said here, there is a moral imperative to do so, and you'll save money when you act on it. Kantians in the audience will note that this is therefore not a true moral imperative, but who cares what they think?
The only problem I've had with CFL's is that they only last a year or so in the bathroom due to moisture-sensitivity, which is a known issue.
The very fact that there are 17 of them tells you that at least 15 of them are not competing with Office any more than a kid on a bicycle is competing with Lance Armstrong.
Office is a mature turnkey desktop office suite for enterprise accounts (that sucks). These things are one step away from vapourware serving no one in particular.
Hype hype hype hype. AJAX hype AJAX.
Re:Blog First, Then Scientific Journals.
on
Dark Matter Exists
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· Score: 4, Informative
The key quote from the paper is:
Any non-standard gravitational force that scales with baryonic mass will fail to reproduce these observations.
This is a very nice piece of work. One observation doth not a proof make (the myth of the "crucial experiment" is, well, a myth) but if confirmed by comparable observations on similar structures it could really start to constrain inter-galactic dark matter models in ways that are much more precise than hitherto has been possible.
The fundamental importance of this paper is less in the single observation than in the development of a new technique for probing the inter-galactic dark matter distribution directly and in detail.
Of course, it says nothing at all about galactic dark matter.
So then, you are for labeling every hybrid? That's genetic modification.
If you're going to pretend not to know what "GM" means, why stop at hybridization? Unless an animal or plant has been produced by cloning, all offspring are genetically modified relative to their progenitors. So why are you asking specifically about hybridization rather than simply about reproduction?
In any case, your question illustrates the force of my argument nicely, although it's disappointing you weren't able to apply it.
THE ONLY ISSUE IS THE CONSUMER'S FREEDOM TO MAKE AN INFORMED CHOICE AS TO WHAT THEY ARE EATING.
So, would labelling hybrids enhance that freedom? By your own admission, virtually everything we eat is a hybrid. Ergo, the additional information provided by labelling everything we eat as a hybrid is nil. You, I, and everyone else who cares about the issue already knows everything there is to know.
So labelling everything as a hybrid would not address the only issue.
I hope that clears this up for you.
I am still waiting for someone to produce an argument as to why I should not have the freedom to know what I am eating.
Except no one has provided any evidence whatsoever that genetically modified foods are less healthy
This is not the issue.
The issue is: KNOWING WHAT WE ARE BUYING SO WE CAN MAKE INFORMED CHOICES.
That is all. That is the only issue. It is an issue of the freedom to choose, and the knowledge required to make that choice.
I want to know what agricultural practices I am supporting when I buy food. I have my reasons, and in a free country I should be allowed to act on those reasons. I neither know nor care what you, the FDA or Monsanto think of the issue.
Freedom means the freedom to do things that other people think are irrational and ill-advised, so long as doing so does not take away other's freedom.
If you can come up with a single argument as to why I should not be free to know what I am eating I'd like to see it.
Where are you from that tremendous work ethic is not something to be admired?
I'm from a country where, like most of the developed world, productivity gains in the past half century mean that the average person should be able to have the same quality of life as people did in the 1950's while working 10 hours a week, and where productivity gains in the past fifteen years mean we should be able to enjoy the same quality of life as we did in the early '90's working 30 hours a week.
But due to the unreflective stupidity of people who believe that working long hours is inherently virtuous, many people--mostly men--continue to work themselves into early graves. And all of this is done for no more happiness.
So do I admire someone who has the ability to work hard for long hours? Yes--I'm one of those myself. But do I admire someone who thinks it is inherently virtuous to work long hours, which is what I take "work ethic" to mean? Of course not.
Work is a means to an end, and when it no longer serves that end it is time to focus less on work and more on enjoying life.
People have been comparing brains to computers almost as long as they have been comparing computers to brains.
And people have been using inappropriate analogies between the brain and the dominant technology of the day for even longer than that.
Freud compared the brain to a steam engine, the visible motion of consciousness driven by the hidden fires of the unconscious. Later comparisons were made to telephone exchanges and electrical supply networks. I don't know if anyone ever compared the brain to the power loom, but it would be in keeping with the long history of imposing on the brain the metaphor-of-the-moment.
The brain is almost nothing like a computer. My favoured analogy for the brain is a stagnant pond. Much of what goes on in our heads is about neuro-chemistry, not electrical activity. So think of the brain as the dynamically stable eco-system of a stagnant pond, a seething chemical soup that is capable of the most remarkable non-linear reactions to its environement.
Does such a thing have an operating system? A kernel? Does it boot?
If it was 170 million of somebody's own money I think that it would have been done a lot better
It's nice that you think that. It's too bad it isn't true.
Human stupidity is not limited to any one type of human organization, and the money spent by poor-quality managers in large corporations is no more the manager's own money than money spent by poor-quality managers in governments is.
Fiscal control is the least important aspect of failures of this kind, and any serious student of large software project failures should read Stephen Flowers' Software Failure: Management Failure for a better understanding of how such projects go wrong. The book is an empirical study of ten failed software projects (most but not all of them public sector). He comes up with a list of risk factors that includes things like, "attempting to fix a management problem with a technological solution" and "lack of end-user buy-in", as well as more mundane issues like the adoption of multiple new technologies within the scope of a single project. Highly recommended.
Slashdot Mirror
What they supposedly found was WHERE the brain encodes semantic functioning. No mention of how.
Furthermore, semantic functioning is not conceptual encoding.
Non-humans have concepts: abstract categories whose members they treat indifferently. When a dog that has been house-trained is in a house different from the house it was trained in, it has no difficulty understanding that it isn't supposed to crap on the floor. It has a concept of "house" whose members can be identified by their particulars, but which are all treated in a common way.
Indeed, if other species didn't have some conceptual ability, it is very unlikely we would have any. Evolution works primarily by elaboration, so without some elaborative material to operate on it is very unlikely a species with our conceptual powers would arise. It would be like a planet of snakes suddenly evolving a species of sprinters.
Human reasoning ability comes from a combination of pre-existing capabilities: the aforementioned conceptual capacity we share with many other species, and the equally wide-spread capacity to use symbols such as sounds to refer to other things, like a predator approaching. In humans evolution has enhanced the ability to use symbols so that any symbol can refer to anything, including concepts.
If this actually goes through (if it hasn't already), then all of the prior art in the world doesn't matter because the ruling goes to whoever files the patent first.
There are two different issues here. Prior art is public, whereas invention is at least potentialy private.
Prior art can be used to invalidate a patent under first-to-file. That is, if I file a patent on left-handed widgets, and you can show you have been making and selling them for years, my patent will be invalidated (after a few million dollars has gone to feed the lawyers.) But to make the claim of prior art you must have actually published or produced something that conflicts with one or more of my patent's claims.
So it is incorrect to say that "all the prior art in the world doesn't matter" if a country has a first-to-file system, which virtually every country in the world except the U.S. does.
Prior invention, on the other hand, may be something that someone thought up and wrote down (and had notarized) but did not ever publish or produce. Prior invention is the ultimate submarine legal weapon. It creates a situation where you may have invented something, patented it, built a business on it, and then had your patent stripped away because someone else can prove that they invented it first even though you had absolutely no way of knowing about it because they didn't publish it or produce it.
In practical terms, patents are rarely overturned on this basis--the most famous case is that of the laser, and it is the only one I know of.
However, first-to-file reduces this uncertainty, and encourages early filing and reduced reliance on trade secrets, so it promotes the publication (by patenting) of new ideas, which is supposed to be the point of this monopoly priviledge that the government grants on them.
That means that those countries will be reducing their emissions to 55% of their 1990 levels.
A) The 55% figure is not correct--I believe it is more like 20%
2) Canada signed the treaty, but the Liberals did next to nothing with regard to meeting our targets, and the Conservatives have owned up and said we will not meet them. Since the time the treaty has been in place, the big, bad, ugly United States has done far more to control greenhouse gas emissions than how-green-is-my-Canada. The U.S. actions have been mostly due to initiatives at the level of individual states, who are far ahead of the U.S. federal government in this regard.
iii) Ergo, simply signing the treaty means nothing, and in the case of the U.S. at least, not signing the treaty does not mean nothing. I think I just sprained my square of opposition.
it is absolutlely imposiible for a person (of 75%+ standard IQ) to not have some sort of religion since "religion" is just a word for CONTEXT
No, "context" is a word for context.
"Religion" is a word for a set of beliefs that are not falsifiable, and which are held as truths rather than contingent postulates or used as disciplines.
Ordinary people have no trouble at all understanding that religion is not like rationally justified or contingent forms of belief. The only people who do not understand this are those appologists for religion who do not have the courage to show their colours for what they are. They know in their hearts the epistemological untenability of their position, and yet persist in trying to tar everyone with their own filthy brush.
If, on the other hand, climate change causes changes in CO2 levels, then you need only explain climate change, something which has been adequately explained by solar cycles.
Climate change has not been adequately explained by solar cycles. The dominant climate variation is on a 100,000 year scale, which is predicted to have the weakest variation due to insolation changes.
Explaining C02 changes via climate change is difficult. Currently, for example, there is a seasonal variation in C02 levels that is clearly tied to growing season: "Because of the greater land area, and therefore greater plant life, in the northern hemisphere as compared to the southern hemisphere, there is an annual fluctuation of about 5 L/L, peaking in May and reaching a minimum in October at the end of the northern hemisphere growing season, when the quantity of biomass on the planet is greatest."
So I guess you could claim that on longer timescales something completely different happens, and the shorter growing season over a smaller area of land during ice ages somehow results in less C02 in the atmosphere, and the longer growing season over a larger area of land during interglacials somehow results in more CO2 in the atmosphere.
You could even claim that non-linear climate response means that even though doubling the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere radically alters the heat balance of the planet, it does not necessarily follow from this that the temperature of the atmosphere or even the heat content of the atmosphere (which is quite independent of temperature) will increase.
What you cannot claim is that the non-linear response that you might want to arbitrarily invoke in the paragraph above will have no major effect on the human societies and economies.
So unfortunately it appears that the "climate change causes CO2 variations" argument gets off to a very poor start. It may have some legs in the long run, but it is not at all obvious what those legs are, as all of the science points to the oppositive climate-CO2 trend that you would need for the argument to get anywhere.
I am unwilling to shut down half a dozen industries, reduce lifestyles back to the 17th century and potentially kill millions through half a dozen causes that can be avoided by maintaining an oil based economy (think no fertilizers, no shipping, no refrigeration), based on, "Well this *might* be really bad."
Excellent play of the Hysteria card! Brilliant--let's focus on entirely hypothetical (and entirely negative) consequences of imaginary actions. It's so much easier than debating the actual science.
What I wouldn't give to see you and a die-hard Greenpeacer locked in a room together. You deserve each other. Neither group cares about the environment or the science. Only political orthodoxies.
The mainstream consciousness of climate change as a major problem will be terrribly damaging to the old-guard environmentalists, because they don't care in the least about the science, any more than do morons making up nonsense like the claim that a carbon-neutral energy economy can only be achieved by world-wide poverty. Both groups lack all imagination--remember the Club of Rome and their loopy report from the '70's that the odds were good we would be having widespread famine just about now? They carefully left out all technological progress from their calculations, just like the kind of idiot who focusses on economic change but sees no new economic opportunities whatsoever in a major retooling of the economy.
Huh? I just played the game for five minutes and my 'partner' and I repeatedly labelled images the same way. Telephone, tree, meeting, magazine... Lots of common tags.
Yeah, I tried it after I posted. What I found was consistent with your experience: innanely uninformative tags that tell you virtually nothing about the content of the images are easy to get in common. Anything that is actually descriptive of the content is impossible.
Image of a ship with a drilling rig on deck: "ship". The same as what you'd get for a child's picture of a ship, a Viking longboat, a caravel or galleon, a container ship, an oil tanker, a car ferry...
Image of two old guys playing a board game in central park: "chess". Could have been chequers.
Image of a group of people in an airport departure lounge: "people". That really tells you a lot about the image, doesn't it?
Which kinda proves my point: people classify stuff in different ways, and the odds of a common classfication (beyond the innanely simple ones that convey virtually no useful information about the images) are nil.
I didn't get one tag in common with my partner!
Even without deliberate abuse, which will be rampant, the odds of two people labeling the same image in the same way are virtually nil.
Human beings are just barely able to communicate with each other when we are face-to-face. Language functions primarily as a carrier wave for innonation and expression in most (non-geek) social interactions, so the precise meaning of words hardly matters. Because of this we rarely notice that meaning is extremely elastic.
Meaning is a verb--it is something people do, not a property of the objects we do it to. Expecting two people to mean the same thing with regard to the same image is equivalent to expecting them to dance the same steps in time with each other, even though they are in separate cities and just hearing the same music over the Web.
As far as title/mortgage fraud goes I really wonder what kind of screwed up system Canada has. A quick search for "real estate" "title fraud" is completely filled with links about canadian real estate and almost no other country.
It may be simply that title fraud has become an industry here due to the fact that lawyers sell title insurance. I've bought two homes in Ontario in the past five years, and been strongly advised by my lawyer to buy title insurance both times (which I did--it is cheap and effective). That would protect me as a buyer from this kind of nonsense, though it does not protect the legitimate home-owner who is fraudulently deprived of their property.
According to this article the incidence of title fraud in Ontario is rare: 10 cases last year. That hardly sounds epidemic in a market with 1.5 million real estate transactions per year.
Insofar as there is a problem, it is probably because our land registry offices are provincial, and unlike the Canadian federal government, which is a world-leader in electronic records and services (the recent Lockheed-Martin-derived census fiasco, and the earlier long gun registry disaster, notwithstanding) the provinces have mostly proven incapable of computerizing their land registry records in a usable way. The POLARIS system in Ontario was supposed to cost $28 million. It cost over a billion dollars and was 11 years late, and is so painfully stupid in design it is hard to believe. For example, the software retains a strict division between individual land registry offices (does anyone else smell politics?) so to search multiple offices you have to run multiple searches. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
So if there really is a problem with title fraud in Canada it is primarily a result of the chronic inability of individual people within our provincial governments to implement effective technological solutions to completely straightforward problems.
I am glad that I live in America, where we at least retain some of the more important aspects of English common law...
Except for habeas corpus. And there is that eminent domain thingy, too...
Who came up with the idea that they should let someone else sell your home as long as they can successfully trick the buyer?
In a free market, like we have in Canada, no one needs permission from anyone to sell something that is legally theirs. So "they" don't "let" anyone sell anything. We have a legal right to sell what is ours. The whole purpose of this fraud is to create the appearance that the property legally belongs to someone who does not in fact own it.
Whoever it was, they should be shot.
God bless America.
The limits of humans' ability to perceive sensor information is fixed and while the DVD isn't perfect, the lackluster response of the HD-DVD & Blu-Ray in the marketplace is an indication that diminishing returns for entertainment-based technology are here.
Not only are we limited, our houses are limited. What's the point of having a 100" screen if you can only be eight or ten feet away from it in a room that has all kinds of stray light from windows etc?
Regular DVDs are already of sufficient quality that your viewing experience is generally limited by the venue rather than the technology, so the market for higher-end products is relatively limited. But the high-end videophile is also exactly the sort of person who is going to be most concerned/pissed-off by the big stinking heap of DRM piled on these disks, so the market is really restricted to people who care enough to want hi-def but don't care enough to not want DRM.
That's a pretty narrow band.
'm gonna guess that the main difference here that in 1998, internet relationships weren't counted as "real" relationships.
Or it could possibly be that both the previous negative and current positive effects are small, and have been overly-hyped by the press. Looking at the article, I notice something to the effect of "barely statistically significant".
Remember, a 2 sigma effect is suprious about 3% of the time, and so if a hundred studies are done by psychologists on the effect of the internets, 3 are certain to result in irreproducible results that get reported as gospel truth. Which is pretty much what they are, come to think of it.
Things are looking better than ever for Intel. And this job cut is only going to help.
Why do you think that, given the well-known fact that companies that undergo significant layoffs underperform the market for the next few years?
10% may be below the critical threshold where cuts do more harm than good, but not by much.
"This job cut may help" would be a rational statement. "This cut is going to help" indicates an unjustified level of confidence in anyone's ability to predict the consequences of a complex action within an evolving market.
I program computers for a living. I didn't get a computer until I was in 8th grade. What does that tell you?
I program computers for a living and I didn't even see a computer until I was in my senior year of highschool, where I learned that aways-useful language: APL.
That was followed by a first-year engineering course on FORTRAN, complete with punch cards, which I worked in as an academic of one kind or another for most of the next decade, with a little BASIC thrown in for controlling hardware on Apple ]['s (some of which had 8 k memory, whoo hoo!)
I didn't learn C until the late 80's or C++, which is the language I work exclusively in now, until the mid-90's, by which time I was well into my 30's.
Pretty much 100% of the "computing" skills I learned before 1995 other than debugging techniques are now obsolete. Flow charts? Waterfall design? Quote-quad? Many of the things I've learned since have been marginally useful (most of UML beyond class diagrams and sequence diagrams, all of Java, all of CORBA--these things may be useful in their place, but I have no place for them) I'm currently changing from Perl to Python as my primary scripting language, a transition I expect will take a few years, creating another obsolete skill.
There is one skill that I learned in grade 9 that has been valuable throughout my computing career: typing.
This is the nature of computing technology. Trying to teach kids in lower forms stuff that is state of the art today is just wasting their time, because the vast majority of it will be obsolete tomorrow. A laptop is just an impediment, and awkward and unnecesary tool that will get in the way of much substantive learning.
In some ways I think his current actions with the libraries and Iraq are good examples of Bush's presidency. Using Executive action and Executive order to create sweeping changes in the way things are done
The leitmotif of the Bush presidency has been cowardice.
1) Don't use the veto, which is public and open to congressional challenge. Use signing statements, which are extra-legal and can't be challenged. What does the couragous President choose? Open disagreement and possible over-ride, or hiding his disagreements where they can't be challenged?
2) Attack before your enemies actually have any capacity to defend themselves. Isn't it interesting that Bush chose to attack Iraq, which he knew or reasonably ought to have known did not have WMDs, and has not chosen to attack North Korea, which he knows does have them? It's almost as if he was only willing to take on the fictional threat while letting the real one get away, literally, with murder on a scale that makes Saddam look like a piker.
3) Gerymander electoral districts rather than face fair elections.
4) Appoint friends rather than competent administrators to key posts in your government. After all, loyalty to you and to the party is far, far more important than loyalty to the country, and if they are loyal to you they can't be any kind of a threat to you. And to a coward, keeping threats at bay is the most important thing.
5) Abandon due process, open government, "speed and public trail" and generally all of the IVth, Vth and VIth ammendments to the Constitution, because they are fundamentally about exposing the workings of government to the light of day, and Bush is terrified of scrutiny.
Fill in a few of your own--there are no shortage of examples.
Closing libraries under false auspices is in keeping with all of this. It would take actual courage to openly make the EPA's job as much harder as this will do. So Bush et al have opted for stealth and dishonesty rather than an open, courageous statement of policy.
Congress has all the power in the world to spank the crap out of the president even without impeachment. But they won't.
Because congress-people are now almost universally loyal to their party rather than their country.
The stakes in U.S. partisan politics are now insanely high. Leadership of the world's sole self-proclaimed superpower is up for grabs. That has had an enormously corrosive effect on the previously-effective system of checks and balances that is supposed to keep things stable.
If the Democrats take control of congress this fall it will change the balance of power between the two parties and put Bush on a more dangerous footing, but what it won't do is change the fundamental problem. Neither party has the interests of the county as their primary concern, and the Democrats will use congress as a platform to attack Bush on any grounds whatsoever (just as the Republicans did to Clinton.)
I think the Republicans have done a better job of ignoring everything but party loyalty than the Democrats have, but that is simply because what passes for the Left in the U.S. is broader and less cohesive than the Right. The Right is more monolithic and therefore more able to rally around the party and stay focussed, while the Left spends time debating issues rather than simply pursuing power at all costs.
There is still hope that the relative pluralism of the Left may save the day, especially after the economy tanks next year, but until they get badly beaten at the polls the Right is going to continue playing the game with the same ruthless lack of patriotism they are now, running roughshod over the constitution and every genuinely conservative value of the republic in the name of gaining and keeping raw political power.
individuals may be irrational, but as a group they are rational.
This is not correct on two accounts.
The first is theoretical, where individual rational choices result in global irrational behaviour, as observed in the Prisoner's Dilemma and similar situations (the group optimum requires different behaviour than the individual optimum, and the group optimum is what everyone would value the most if they could be assured of achieving it.)
The second is practical: there is a well-known class of historical situations where people in large groups strongly support and even willingly participate in actions that are extremely high risk and economically a dead loss. These are called "wars", and the "war puzzle" is a topic of ongoing discussion in economics because wars so grossly violate the economist's placid assumption of equilibrium rationality.
Economic rationality will get you a long way in understanding the world. But never forget that we are all monkeys under the skin, and be periodically overcome with "the maddness of crowds".
When TFA says the light is "white," this makes me think that there is at least one problem remaining to be solved -- though perhaps it would be as simple as using lightly tinted glass for the bulb.
It has been solved. I was singing the praises of CF bulbs to my g/f a few months ago and she complained about the harshness of the light. It was the perfect straight line, because we were sitting in a room lit by a lamp with a CF bulb in it, and I was able to say, "You mean like this?"
I actually had to get the lamp and show her it really was a CF bulb before she would believe me.
This isn't just marketing hype anymore. CFL's are really good to go, and you really can't tell the difference between the light they cast and an incandescent.
I'm using them everywhere I can, and you should too. As someone else said here, there is a moral imperative to do so, and you'll save money when you act on it. Kantians in the audience will note that this is therefore not a true moral imperative, but who cares what they think?
The only problem I've had with CFL's is that they only last a year or so in the bathroom due to moisture-sensitivity, which is a known issue.
The very fact that there are 17 of them tells you that at least 15 of them are not competing with Office any more than a kid on a bicycle is competing with Lance Armstrong.
Office is a mature turnkey desktop office suite for enterprise accounts (that sucks). These things are one step away from vapourware serving no one in particular.
Hype hype hype hype. AJAX hype AJAX.
The key quote from the paper is:
Any non-standard gravitational force that scales with baryonic mass will fail to reproduce these observations.
This is a very nice piece of work. One observation doth not a proof make (the myth of the "crucial experiment" is, well, a myth) but if confirmed by comparable observations on similar structures it could really start to constrain inter-galactic dark matter models in ways that are much more precise than hitherto has been possible.
The fundamental importance of this paper is less in the single observation than in the development of a new technique for probing the inter-galactic dark matter distribution directly and in detail.
Of course, it says nothing at all about galactic dark matter.
So then, you are for labeling every hybrid? That's genetic modification.
If you're going to pretend not to know what "GM" means, why stop at hybridization? Unless an animal or plant has been produced by cloning, all offspring are genetically modified relative to their progenitors. So why are you asking specifically about hybridization rather than simply about reproduction?
In any case, your question illustrates the force of my argument nicely, although it's disappointing you weren't able to apply it.
THE ONLY ISSUE IS THE CONSUMER'S FREEDOM TO MAKE AN INFORMED CHOICE AS TO WHAT THEY ARE EATING.
So, would labelling hybrids enhance that freedom? By your own admission, virtually everything we eat is a hybrid. Ergo, the additional information provided by labelling everything we eat as a hybrid is nil. You, I, and everyone else who cares about the issue already knows everything there is to know.
So labelling everything as a hybrid would not address the only issue.
I hope that clears this up for you.
I am still waiting for someone to produce an argument as to why I should not have the freedom to know what I am eating.
Except no one has provided any evidence whatsoever that genetically modified foods are less healthy
This is not the issue.
The issue is: KNOWING WHAT WE ARE BUYING SO WE CAN MAKE INFORMED CHOICES.
That is all. That is the only issue. It is an issue of the freedom to choose, and the knowledge required to make that choice.
I want to know what agricultural practices I am supporting when I buy food. I have my reasons, and in a free country I should be allowed to act on those reasons. I neither know nor care what you, the FDA or Monsanto think of the issue.
Freedom means the freedom to do things that other people think are irrational and ill-advised, so long as doing so does not take away other's freedom.
If you can come up with a single argument as to why I should not be free to know what I am eating I'd like to see it.
Where are you from that tremendous work ethic is not something to be admired?
I'm from a country where, like most of the developed world, productivity gains in the past half century mean that the average person should be able to have the same quality of life as people did in the 1950's while working 10 hours a week, and where productivity gains in the past fifteen years mean we should be able to enjoy the same quality of life as we did in the early '90's working 30 hours a week.
But due to the unreflective stupidity of people who believe that working long hours is inherently virtuous, many people--mostly men--continue to work themselves into early graves. And all of this is done for no more happiness.
So do I admire someone who has the ability to work hard for long hours? Yes--I'm one of those myself. But do I admire someone who thinks it is inherently virtuous to work long hours, which is what I take "work ethic" to mean? Of course not.
Work is a means to an end, and when it no longer serves that end it is time to focus less on work and more on enjoying life.
People have been comparing brains to computers almost as long as they have been comparing computers to brains.
And people have been using inappropriate analogies between the brain and the dominant technology of the day for even longer than that.
Freud compared the brain to a steam engine, the visible motion of consciousness driven by the hidden fires of the unconscious. Later comparisons were made to telephone exchanges and electrical supply networks. I don't know if anyone ever compared the brain to the power loom, but it would be in keeping with the long history of imposing on the brain the metaphor-of-the-moment.
The brain is almost nothing like a computer. My favoured analogy for the brain is a stagnant pond. Much of what goes on in our heads is about neuro-chemistry, not electrical activity. So think of the brain as the dynamically stable eco-system of a stagnant pond, a seething chemical soup that is capable of the most remarkable non-linear reactions to its environement.
Does such a thing have an operating system? A kernel? Does it boot?
If it was 170 million of somebody's own money I think that it would have been done a lot better
It's nice that you think that. It's too bad it isn't true.
Human stupidity is not limited to any one type of human organization, and the money spent by poor-quality managers in large corporations is no more the manager's own money than money spent by poor-quality managers in governments is.
Fiscal control is the least important aspect of failures of this kind, and any serious student of large software project failures should read Stephen Flowers' Software Failure: Management Failure for a better understanding of how such projects go wrong. The book is an empirical study of ten failed software projects (most but not all of them public sector). He comes up with a list of risk factors that includes things like, "attempting to fix a management problem with a technological solution" and "lack of end-user buy-in", as well as more mundane issues like the adoption of multiple new technologies within the scope of a single project. Highly recommended.