In both of these cases, calling the 1-800-xxx-yyyy number created an account entry with the phone numbe you were calling from on it. This account entry was provided to the owner of the 1-800-number, who used it to call you back.
While a 1-{800 | 888 | 877 | 866} number is free to the calling party, except for some nefarious call redirection scams, it is NOT free to the receiving party. They pay for the call. They can receive ANI information detailing which phone number is calling them.
Unlike Caller-ID information which is transmitted in-band (on the same line) between the first and second telephone ring and can be blocked by the dialing party, the ANI service is transmitted off-band and CANNOT be blocked when you call an 800 number. It's always there.
But do you think anyone anywhere could come up with a 64MBytes replacement for a 512MByte memory? Not a lossless one. Lossy memory substitution might work, and that's pretty darn close to what we currently have in our wetware now, isn't it? And my position is that the electronic replacement isn't a ratio of 1:8 to the brain as in my example of 64:512 above, but more likely to be a ratio of 1:1000 or smaller (1:10^5).
One big problem with this device is that it is gargantuan in scale compared to the neural regions which it will bypass or replace. The brain has neuron bodies at a density of 10^8 cells per cubic centimeter (based on the brain containing 10^11 cells and having a volume of approximately 10^3 ccs). The neurons may be just part of the computational structure; it is believed that the axons and dendrites and the synaptic junctions themselves (and their spatial distribution) may also play a part in the computation and associative learning that is embodied in the brain. So there may be 10^11 - 10^14 connections per cubic centimeter to deal with.
While silicon tracks (or GaAs or whatever) may be laid down at a similar density, interfacing these silicon wafers does not happen at this high a density. Jerome Pine at CalTech has worked with making "neural wells" , chips with wells that neurons can grow into. Their density is not very high. I don't know what the density of this "artificial hippocampus" is or the number of connections it will make, so I can't literally say that I doubt it's density is high enough.
This is more a proof of concept, and a stepping stone, not anywhere near being able to "replace a hippocampus."
Compare it to replacing your retinal optics and neural circuitry with the Fisher-Price black-and-white video camera which recorded its low resoultion video onto audio cassettes. Imagine hooking up the output of the Fisher-Price camera to the optic nerve and daring to call it a replacement for the eye. Audacious, definitely. An amazing first step, perhaps. Once it works. But a replacement? I think not.
What is testable are his conclusions that evolution could not have led to developments such as a retina/lens pair or to a interlocking cycle of systems or biochemical pathways. Even cellular automata with very simple sets of rules can "evolve" highly complex behaviour which appears to be "goal seeking" in nature. When I said "testable" above, I was not implying that being "testable" gave Behe's claims any validity. I was in fact stating that the few testable statements which he makes are, in my estimation, testably false.
I agree with you that Behe is arguing incorrectly. He is fairly knowledgeable in biochemistry, being a professor in that field. Rather than an ad hominem attack stating that Behe argues from ignorance, I prefer to say that his logic is unsound and that he reaches an inappropriate and incorrect solution. I disagree with Behe. I disagree with Intelligent Design. I own these books so that I can study the arguments to see its weaknesses. I must not have been clear enough in my prior posting that I favor the idea of evolution and the idea of scientific argument.
Exactly. ID proponents, a Mr. Johnson (a lawyer), and Michael Behe (a biochemist, author of Darwin's Black Box) try to use scientific precepts to bolster creationist ideas and to denigrate Darwin's theory of evolution.
The basic concept behind irreducible complexity is an attack on Richard Dawkins' ideas in The Blind Watchmaker. Dawkins compares evolution to a blind watchmaker who puts together or creates a watch from a jumble of parts without knowing what they are. Behe presents certain systems (the visual system and the hemocoagulation cascade) and shows how there are interlocking and interdependent components within them. The eye needs both the lens and cornea and the retina. A retina without a lens and cornea does not get a focused image. A lens and cornea without a retina will focus an image, but there will be nothing there to receive it. Behe thus postulates that this is a chicken and egg problem: neither could have come first and neither has any reason to evolve without the simultaneous co-evolution of the other, thus he states that the only possible solution is that there must be a designer, an intelligent designer who created this interlocking system. Behe also presents the interlocking biochemical cascade of clotting factors in a similar argument. He is wrong.
The examination of multiple species shows multiple conserved elements of the visual system: certain cratures have different types of lenses, others have no lenses at all and only have eyecups with physical depressions that concentrate reflected light. Starfish and molluscs have different types of photoreceptors, and plants and single celled organisms have simple photoreceptors that are very similar to the G-protein opsins that we humans have and which serve a similar function: to transduce light into a biochemical signal.
Behe's arguments are testable and are becoming less relevent as more people become aware of them and of the arguments against them.
I wish I had the reference for this, I googled but can't find it, but my brain-box reminds me that this actually happened. Time Magazine sent out subscription offers at an amazingly low price. When people responded to it, they received a reply stating that "sorry, we were just testing to see how many people would subscribe at that price X. [I'm paraphrasing] We won't really let you have the magazine at that price. How about price Y instead?" I believe Consumer Reports did an article about the consumer complaints that came out of this.
I agree with saddino. Apple also received permission from Apple Records, the Beatles' record company, to use the word "Apple" in its trademark as long as Apple Computers did not venture into the music business.
When Apple finally used a fancy noisemaker sound device rather than a simple beep, it called the sound "sosumi", a homonym for "So sue me!" That was also the beginning of being able to use the Mac-plus and the Mac SE-30 for sound processing, simple hacks like reversing a sound etc. The point is that Apple also realized that by allowing for "electronic music" it was treading upon the trademark rights of Apple Records.
Actually, when Microsoft first came out with its spreadsheet software, it (MS) was sued by a banking/accounting software firm which had a product that was already trademarked as Excel. Microsoft was required to refer to the MS software in all instances as Microsoft Excel. If you look at old versions of MS software on the Macintosh, you'll see that the finder menu calls MS-Word just "Word", but that Excel is referred to in its entirety as "Microsoft Excel" even in tight spots such as the finder menu.
Just one case where Microsoft lost a round. I'll find the reference and insert it later. (I believe I read this in Byte or in Creative Computing, way back when...)
So the statement by Kigar is limited to ~100 brains measured post-mortem from 100 women who died of cancer but supposedly had "normal brains". I can think of a few confounding variables.
Was there any correction for the BMI (body mass index) of these women? Larger people have larger cranial vaults and thus have room for larger brains.
What is the correlation between pre-mortem CNS volume and post-mortem CNS volume?
What was the age at death of these women? (I know the article states that, unlike men, womens' brains do NOT shrink with age, but the distribution of ages could have played a role.)
What was the self-selection index in these women? How were they chosen to be in the group of women whose brains were donated to science? Were they organ donors (a very small pool) or were they cancer victims (a much larger pool) who were approached to enter this study?
As to some of the other comments so far, even though I don't believe I.Q. is an accurate measure of intelligence, it is at least a fixed quantitative measure of performance on an I.Q. test. Kinda like the SATs: they just measure how well you perform on the SATs.
hmmm... the math works out to the five JDS executives getting an average bonus of $147,180,000 each. That's HUGE even in Canadian dollars!
So even though your ratio of 14 is correct for the ratio of compensation of 5 JDS executives vs. 120 non JDS executives, the more appropriate ratio is the one executive to one executive ratio.
And that works out to the "average" JDS executive getting 342 times as much as the "average" non-JDS executive.
I'm replying to spitzak's comment I don't think right-mouse pastes in ANY program, and not the parent comment or about Linux APIs.
Right-mouse works as paste in the virtual consoles (ALT-F1 through ALT-F6, if those are the virtual ttys you've configured). Middle-mouse does NOT paste in the virtual consoles, but DOES paste in X-windows, if you've set up your X windows in that manner which is the default.
you can say "you get 10% of the profits from the sale of this album," which is relatively straightforward to measure
The point where they screw you is the word "profits". Profit is not straightforward. This is why movies like Forrest Gump rake in hundreds of millions of dollars and authors (Winston Groom, in this case) don't make a lot because they were promised a percentage of net profits, not gross profits. If you think Arthur Andersen was doing creative accouting, you haven't heard what Los Angeles production companies publish as the ultimate in fiction: their accounting books. All sorts of movies that make a lot of money are on the books as losing money and if your calculations are on the net profit and some of the producers promise themselves X megabucks regardless of income, then the movie might never see a net profit. Those in the know make sure that they're signed on for a percentage of the gross profits instead.
It's the new and naive who fall for the net profits.
And in fact, this is also how songwriters and musicians get screwed. A few kilobucks as an advance may sound great to a start-up band and they sign on without looking at the details of the contract. They have then entered indentured servitude where the record producers get to dictate whether they will accept the quality of the product submitted to them AND they get to charge for studio time, production time, art work, pressing the discs, promotion, all of which take a big chunk of the money before anything even makes it to the artist.
It's actually quite difficult to assign the value of a single element to a whole. How about the digit 'zero'? Prior to the Hindu-Arabic numeral system, the standard for written numerals in the west was the Roman Numeral system: not conducive to multiplication or division easily, and not too easy to write fractions with (as the sumerians and babylonians could with their systems). Now admittedly, the zero is only 10 percent of the numerals usually written, but as a place holder to indicate orders of magnitude or a missing value at an order of magnitude, it's priceless.
How would real time streaming of ads (or surreptitiously changing the channel we watch for the duration of a commercial) be different from what Gator and some other hijackware programs try to do?
If this were really only done for the blocks of ad space that are already being held for "local station identification" and local broadcast ads, I can't see that the advertisers would have a problem with this. However, if it acts like a Gator and talks like a Gator, and substitutes its own targeted ad over the original advertisement, it is stepping on the toes of the original purchaser of the advertising time. That seems as wrong as Gator inserting its own banners or inserting hyperlinks in words to ads of its own.
I don't know how accurately you can correlate simple congestion estimates with ping times alone. Obviously, the small size of ping packets vs. the larger mltipacket nature of other messages creates a difference. And the ping times alone show large variablity even on a closed network with just two machines.
Do you remember the article about estimating the speed of light by measuring the ping return times over varying lengths of CAT-5 cable on a simple loopback line? I replicated that sort of thing on my own two machine disconnected-from-the-net network and also saw the same sorts of 1/f distribution of ping times when I ran ping with a time delay of 0.1 seconds. If you run ping with a 0.0 second delay, flooding the system, you see a sort of weibull distribution (a skewed gaussian). If you run ping with a default of 1 sec and 10k iterations, you see an almost gaussian distribution (more accurately, a very slightly skewed weibull).
But if you look a the power spectra of these distributions, the delay factors in the ethernet switch or card or PCI bus or software or the kernel delays from the interrupts continuously occuring in the background all get together to create delays that could be mischaracterized as congestion, if only I didn't already know that this network consisted of two machines and that the only traffic on this network was composed of pings and responses.
btw, I was getting averages of 1.4 - 1.7 msec, with stds of 0.026 msec using cables of 5 m, 10 m, and 300 m (meters) length.
I highly suspect that it is a troll too, but misguided trolls exist who just don't believe or understand or don't want to understand.
The third component that you passed on is also known as the interlocking component conundrum, or the chicken-and-egg problem ('which came first...'), or the idea that when you have a complex system composed of multiple interdependent parts (e.g. the coagulation cascade of clotting factors in the blood, the DNA -> RNA -> protein -> multiple protein activities and A,T,C,G creating enzymes -> nuclear bases -> DNA system, etc.) then there must have been NO reason for the individual elements to have evolved on their own because they serve no purpose without their interdependent parts.
This anti evolution argument has been expounded most strongly by Michael Behe, a chemist or biochemist, in his book Darwin's Black Box. The strongest counterargument is that proteins and other molecules do not simply play a single role. A protein that is known as Coagulation Factor X does not simply play a role in coagulating. It may also have other activites. And these other activities may have been selected for after they had arisen out of random mutation. Philip Johnson, a lawyer, is another anti-evolution creationist who has also published a few books on this topic. Rather than list any specific book that argues against Behe or Johnson, I recommend looking at general biology and biochemistry books.
Evolution may be called a theory, but it is a well accepted theory that is buttressed by a strong scientific and evidentiary basis. Creationism is not.
It was Ruggles in Harvard Square. They had cheddar cheese on top of a whole wheat crust and some other bizarre toppings too.
I personally preferred Mr. & Mrs. ___ for burgers, , Wei Ta for chinese, and Iruna for Spanish, esp. their garlic soup and their white sangria. And Toscanini's for ice cream... mmm... ginger snap molasses ice cream... mmm...
And the Orson Welles theater. And the Harvard Square cinema before it became a Star cinema, etc.
My firewall regularly notes random attempts onto port 80 on an average of 10 times a day, onto port 21 twice a day, 23 twice a day, and of course the standard Microsoft SQL worms on 1433 once to twice a day. My standard nslookup and dig -x _ _ soa note that I get these incursions from around the world.
Back when I was connecting with a Mac Powerbook G3 and using telnet (I know, I know, the sysadmin did not have ssh installed on my uni account back then) I'd always have my ftp log window open. I'd regularly see attempts to connect into the telnet programs FTP port once to twice a day, and that was with me being logged on about one hour per day. And that was with a system that dynamically assigned IP numbers. So there are many many random script kiddies out there attempting to probe whatever IP address they randomly choose.
Yes, but this is only true because you are not getting noticed. The big league players with their big league salaries can be a significant chunk of revenues for cities and states, and the ensuing lawsuits can create big waves of publicity. This is why some of these taxes get enforced for the NBA players and the NFL and baseball (I refuse to call them Major League, and I refuse to insult true Little League by calling them LitLeague, but these soon to be striking bozos are by no means no way no how any sort of major league class) players. When they're getting millions a year and a single game may be worth a few hundred thou per player, then taxing that team's single game is a revenue source.
Taxing your $100-$200/hour over two weeks is not worth the effort of paperwork or revenue collection. Taxing their effective $30k - $40k per hour per player is worth the effort.
entymology is an almost homonym, almost spoonerism of what you meant to say: etymology.
Etymology: An account of the formation of or development of a word and its meaning.
Entomology: The branch of zoology relating to insects, I believe. Ants are very social and intelligent (in a hive/nest sort of way), but I'm pretty sure that ants do not have the word "wherefore" in their vocabulary. Check with E.O. Wilson just to make sure.
It's not a question of forcing anyone to buy only open source or only closed source software. That thrust of questioning obfucates the underlying issue. The actions of governing bodies ought to be accessible to the governed and there should not be any imposition of closed or proprietary standards required to interact with our government.
Documents should be available in non-proprietary formats, and documents required to be submitted to governmental agencies should not be forced to have to be in proprietary formats. This should be a basic requirement for our governing bodies at the federal, state/commonwealth, county/parish, and city levels.
If proprietary software should have to compete to meet these obligations. The smart way to insert open source software components is not to claim that open source is inherently better (even though it obviously is), but to show how open source meets the standards of an open governing system.
Closed systems are too often present at all levels. I can understand that scholarly journals may have requirements that manuscripts be submitted in the word processing format of their choice and on the preferred media of their choice. Those are just the rules of the game you have to play if you choose to publish in peer reviewed journals. At least the mathematical journals accept LaTex. And some printing services prefer Quark files for their layout services. That's their prerogative. However, all citizens have to interact with their governments at time. And the gov't ought not to impose the requirement that anyone wishing to submit proposals under requests for proposals or wishing to submit legal documentation be required to use proprietary data interchange formats. Proprietary formats require the use of proprietary software which may cost some citizens too much. It is not just for a government to keep some of their citizens out of the game.
And this lack of justice is the key reason that open formats should be used. And the fact that open source software can best meet the usage of open formats is the best reason that open source software ought to be used.
I'm glad that you have a scalp mounted microphone. At least you can take advantage of headshadowing for sound localization.
While audiobooks may be good for correlating words as written with the percepts transferred through the electronic cochlea, I think that you need to realize that even infants spend more than a year training themselves to work with audio. It will take time.
As for localization, immerse yourself in auditory rich environments. DVDs and movies with subtitles may only help you a little with correlating lip motion and facial changes with speech sounds. But DVDs and movies and televisions will make you misassociate localization cues. This is especially true of movies in theaters. This is because even though the apparent location of the sound sources will change, the actual sound source remains stationary: the speakers in the movie theater or in your television or in your speaker setup.
Even though you may have a limited sense of directional cues available, you should avail yourself of the opportunity to learn as many as you can. I recommend playground areas and dog walking areas: kids and adults will be running around and making noises. Moving sound sources will be associable with the visual stimuli locating these sources in space around you.
Go to a shopping mall and listen to the environment as you walk around. In a two-story mall, this will give you the opportunity to hear sound sources coming from above when you're downstairs, and below when you're upstairs. Unfortunately, you'll also get a lower signal to noise ratio (and a higher Muzak to voice ratio), but it is the real world environment you have to inhabit.
Good luck. I'm sorry about the cost of speech therapy. Too bad the insurers don't realize that cognitive rehab is as important as physical rehabilitation.
Resolution really matters, but we (humans) are capable of resolving "sub-pixel" features by interpolation. The retinal cones are spaced at least 1-minute-of-arc apart, however we are able to accurately place a vernier line to within 1/10 of a minute of arc. This is probably done in a way that is the converse of anti-aliasing in image processing: you can create non-jagged edges by using intermediate gray scales to imply curves.
So even with 32 x 32 pixel images, if we are allowed to scan slowly across an image, we can see sub-pixel elements as they average across pixel areas and we see finer grain changes in intensity which our brain can infer is due to sub pixel features.
I heartily agree with the use of audio books. I've listened to hundreds of them on long drives and may I recommend that you try to find children's books on audio as they may have clearer enunciation and slower speech rates. I'd suggest Ramona and the Pest series, text author is Beverly Cleary, read aloud by Stockard Channing I believe. She articulates distinctly and carefully.
I had been involved with some of the earliest cochlear implants on children below the age of three. I haven't reviewed the literature recently, but I do know that the directional aspects of hearing depend on the higher frequency components being redirected and filter by the pinna of the ears. May I ask you a few questions?
What brand of implant do you have?
How many channels does it have? (The audio stream is broken down into multple frequency bands by FFT and then sent to the receiver. The best I remember from 1991 were 8 channel devices. Are they much better now?)
Where is the microphone? Are you certain that the microphone is on the scalp transmitter? Is it on your belt mounted processor? (A lot the directional cues depend on the fact that the qualia of the sounds change as you move your head around. If the microphone is on your hip, moving your head will not help you localize the direction of a sound source.)
Have you had just one operation for one ear, or have you had a second operation for the other ear as well? A lot of the directional cues depend on the HRTF (head related transfer function) applied to the sound by sound shadowed by and diffracted around your head. Head shadowing will affect some frequencies. Higher frequencies are needed to be able to differentiate high elevation sources from low elevation sources. However, the key cue in directionality is the comparison of amplitude and interaural time delays between the ears. If you only have one implant, your cochlear nerves and brainstem will not receive the stereo signals which it will need to decode the azimuth and elevation of the sound sources.
Best of luck to you, and may I also ask if you are working with a speech therapist? They do wonderful work. Are you involved with any clinical studies (or since the market for implants has been large for a while, is this just a production job, fairly "routine" surgery [though no surgical intervention is routine for those undergoing it], with no intensive clinical followup?)
Well, Larry Ellison proposed a national ID system, of course based on Oracle database software. That proposal came out right after the attacks, but it was fought against and seems to have faded away. But considering the amount of hyperbole that's out there, and the willingness of the american population to put up with it (or more accurately, their apathy), it's possible that such a system may be required very soon. Let's hope that the protests happen here if that were to come about.
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While a 1-{800 | 888 | 877 | 866} number is free to the calling party, except for some nefarious call redirection scams, it is NOT free to the receiving party. They pay for the call. They can receive ANI information detailing which phone number is calling them.
Unlike Caller-ID information which is transmitted in-band (on the same line) between the first and second telephone ring and can be blocked by the dialing party, the ANI service is transmitted off-band and CANNOT be blocked when you call an 800 number. It's always there.
But do you think anyone anywhere could come up with a 64MBytes replacement for a 512MByte memory? Not a lossless one. Lossy memory substitution might work, and that's pretty darn close to what we currently have in our wetware now, isn't it? And my position is that the electronic replacement isn't a ratio of 1:8 to the brain as in my example of 64:512 above, but more likely to be a ratio of 1:1000 or smaller (1:10^5).
While silicon tracks (or GaAs or whatever) may be laid down at a similar density, interfacing these silicon wafers does not happen at this high a density. Jerome Pine at CalTech has worked with making "neural wells" , chips with wells that neurons can grow into. Their density is not very high. I don't know what the density of this "artificial hippocampus" is or the number of connections it will make, so I can't literally say that I doubt it's density is high enough.
This is more a proof of concept, and a stepping stone, not anywhere near being able to "replace a hippocampus."
Compare it to replacing your retinal optics and neural circuitry with the Fisher-Price black-and-white video camera which recorded its low resoultion video onto audio cassettes. Imagine hooking up the output of the Fisher-Price camera to the optic nerve and daring to call it a replacement for the eye. Audacious, definitely. An amazing first step, perhaps. Once it works. But a replacement? I think not.
What is testable are his conclusions that evolution could not have led to developments such as a retina/lens pair or to a interlocking cycle of systems or biochemical pathways. Even cellular automata with very simple sets of rules can "evolve" highly complex behaviour which appears to be "goal seeking" in nature. When I said "testable" above, I was not implying that being "testable" gave Behe's claims any validity. I was in fact stating that the few testable statements which he makes are, in my estimation, testably false.
I agree with you that Behe is arguing incorrectly. He is fairly knowledgeable in biochemistry, being a professor in that field. Rather than an ad hominem attack stating that Behe argues from ignorance, I prefer to say that his logic is unsound and that he reaches an inappropriate and incorrect solution. I disagree with Behe. I disagree with Intelligent Design. I own these books so that I can study the arguments to see its weaknesses. I must not have been clear enough in my prior posting that I favor the idea of evolution and the idea of scientific argument.
The basic concept behind irreducible complexity is an attack on Richard Dawkins' ideas in The Blind Watchmaker. Dawkins compares evolution to a blind watchmaker who puts together or creates a watch from a jumble of parts without knowing what they are. Behe presents certain systems (the visual system and the hemocoagulation cascade) and shows how there are interlocking and interdependent components within them. The eye needs both the lens and cornea and the retina. A retina without a lens and cornea does not get a focused image. A lens and cornea without a retina will focus an image, but there will be nothing there to receive it. Behe thus postulates that this is a chicken and egg problem: neither could have come first and neither has any reason to evolve without the simultaneous co-evolution of the other, thus he states that the only possible solution is that there must be a designer, an intelligent designer who created this interlocking system. Behe also presents the interlocking biochemical cascade of clotting factors in a similar argument. He is wrong.
The examination of multiple species shows multiple conserved elements of the visual system: certain cratures have different types of lenses, others have no lenses at all and only have eyecups with physical depressions that concentrate reflected light. Starfish and molluscs have different types of photoreceptors, and plants and single celled organisms have simple photoreceptors that are very similar to the G-protein opsins that we humans have and which serve a similar function: to transduce light into a biochemical signal.
Behe's arguments are testable and are becoming less relevent as more people become aware of them and of the arguments against them.
I wish I had the reference for this, I googled but can't find it, but my brain-box reminds me that this actually happened. Time Magazine sent out subscription offers at an amazingly low price. When people responded to it, they received a reply stating that "sorry, we were just testing to see how many people would subscribe at that price X. [I'm paraphrasing] We won't really let you have the magazine at that price. How about price Y instead?" I believe Consumer Reports did an article about the consumer complaints that came out of this.
When Apple finally used a fancy noisemaker sound device rather than a simple beep, it called the sound "sosumi", a homonym for "So sue me!" That was also the beginning of being able to use the Mac-plus and the Mac SE-30 for sound processing, simple hacks like reversing a sound etc. The point is that Apple also realized that by allowing for "electronic music" it was treading upon the trademark rights of Apple Records.
</PI-encoded-message-begin>
<start-digit > 09754198093241062140396080639620967866
<messag e length > 852
<subencoding> EBCDIC
</PI-encoded-message-end>
(spacin g brought to you by the slashdot linebreaker alogorithm and the number e.)
Actually, when Microsoft first came out with its spreadsheet software, it (MS) was sued by a banking/accounting software firm which had a product that was already trademarked as Excel. Microsoft was required to refer to the MS software in all instances as Microsoft Excel. If you look at old versions of MS software on the Macintosh, you'll see that the finder menu calls MS-Word just "Word", but that Excel is referred to in its entirety as "Microsoft Excel" even in tight spots such as the finder menu.
Just one case where Microsoft lost a round. I'll find the reference and insert it later. (I believe I read this in Byte or in Creative Computing, way back when...)
Was there any correction for the BMI (body mass index) of these women? Larger people have larger cranial vaults and thus have room for larger brains.
What is the correlation between pre-mortem CNS volume and post-mortem CNS volume?
What was the age at death of these women? (I know the article states that, unlike men, womens' brains do NOT shrink with age, but the distribution of ages could have played a role.)
What was the self-selection index in these women? How were they chosen to be in the group of women whose brains were donated to science? Were they organ donors (a very small pool) or were they cancer victims (a much larger pool) who were approached to enter this study?
As to some of the other comments so far, even though I don't believe I.Q. is an accurate measure of intelligence, it is at least a fixed quantitative measure of performance on an I.Q. test. Kinda like the SATs: they just measure how well you perform on the SATs.
hmmm... the math works out to the five JDS executives getting an average bonus of $147,180,000 each. That's HUGE even in Canadian dollars!
So even though your ratio of 14 is correct for the ratio of compensation of 5 JDS executives vs. 120 non JDS executives, the more appropriate ratio is the one executive to one executive ratio.
And that works out to the "average" JDS executive getting 342 times as much as the "average" non-JDS executive.
Right-mouse works as paste in the virtual consoles (ALT-F1 through ALT-F6, if those are the virtual ttys you've configured). Middle-mouse does NOT paste in the virtual consoles, but DOES paste in X-windows, if you've set up your X windows in that manner which is the default.
you can say "you get 10% of the profits from the sale of this album," which is relatively straightforward to measure
The point where they screw you is the word "profits". Profit is not straightforward. This is why movies like Forrest Gump rake in hundreds of millions of dollars and authors (Winston Groom, in this case) don't make a lot because they were promised a percentage of net profits, not gross profits. If you think Arthur Andersen was doing creative accouting, you haven't heard what Los Angeles production companies publish as the ultimate in fiction: their accounting books. All sorts of movies that make a lot of money are on the books as losing money and if your calculations are on the net profit and some of the producers promise themselves X megabucks regardless of income, then the movie might never see a net profit. Those in the know make sure that they're signed on for a percentage of the gross profits instead.
It's the new and naive who fall for the net profits.
And in fact, this is also how songwriters and musicians get screwed. A few kilobucks as an advance may sound great to a start-up band and they sign on without looking at the details of the contract. They have then entered indentured servitude where the record producers get to dictate whether they will accept the quality of the product submitted to them AND they get to charge for studio time, production time, art work, pressing the discs, promotion, all of which take a big chunk of the money before anything even makes it to the artist.
It's actually quite difficult to assign the value of a single element to a whole. How about the digit 'zero'? Prior to the Hindu-Arabic numeral system, the standard for written numerals in the west was the Roman Numeral system: not conducive to multiplication or division easily, and not too easy to write fractions with (as the sumerians and babylonians could with their systems). Now admittedly, the zero is only 10 percent of the numerals usually written, but as a place holder to indicate orders of magnitude or a missing value at an order of magnitude, it's priceless.
How would real time streaming of ads (or surreptitiously changing the channel we watch for the duration of a commercial) be different from what Gator and some other hijackware programs try to do?
If this were really only done for the blocks of ad space that are already being held for "local station identification" and local broadcast ads, I can't see that the advertisers would have a problem with this. However, if it acts like a Gator and talks like a Gator, and substitutes its own targeted ad over the original advertisement, it is stepping on the toes of the original purchaser of the advertising time. That seems as wrong as Gator inserting its own banners or inserting hyperlinks in words to ads of its own.
I don't know how accurately you can correlate simple congestion estimates with ping times alone. Obviously, the small size of ping packets vs. the larger mltipacket nature of other messages creates a difference. And the ping times alone show large variablity even on a closed network with just two machines.
Do you remember the article about estimating the speed of light by measuring the ping return times over varying lengths of CAT-5 cable on a simple loopback line? I replicated that sort of thing on my own two machine disconnected-from-the-net network and also saw the same sorts of 1/f distribution of ping times when I ran ping with a time delay of 0.1 seconds. If you run ping with a 0.0 second delay, flooding the system, you see a sort of weibull distribution (a skewed gaussian). If you run ping with a default of 1 sec and 10k iterations, you see an almost gaussian distribution (more accurately, a very slightly skewed weibull).
But if you look a the power spectra of these distributions, the delay factors in the ethernet switch or card or PCI bus or software or the kernel delays from the interrupts continuously occuring in the background all get together to create delays that could be mischaracterized as congestion, if only I didn't already know that this network consisted of two machines and that the only traffic on this network was composed of pings and responses.
btw, I was getting averages of 1.4 - 1.7 msec, with stds of 0.026 msec using cables of 5 m, 10 m, and 300 m (meters) length.
I highly suspect that it is a troll too, but misguided trolls exist who just don't believe or understand or don't want to understand.
The third component that you passed on is also known as the interlocking component conundrum, or the chicken-and-egg problem ('which came first...'), or the idea that when you have a complex system composed of multiple interdependent parts (e.g. the coagulation cascade of clotting factors in the blood, the DNA -> RNA -> protein -> multiple protein activities and A,T,C,G creating enzymes -> nuclear bases -> DNA system, etc.) then there must have been NO reason for the individual elements to have evolved on their own because they serve no purpose without their interdependent parts.
This anti evolution argument has been expounded most strongly by Michael Behe, a chemist or biochemist, in his book Darwin's Black Box. The strongest counterargument is that proteins and other molecules do not simply play a single role. A protein that is known as Coagulation Factor X does not simply play a role in coagulating. It may also have other activites. And these other activities may have been selected for after they had arisen out of random mutation. Philip Johnson, a lawyer, is another anti-evolution creationist who has also published a few books on this topic. Rather than list any specific book that argues against Behe or Johnson, I recommend looking at general biology and biochemistry books.
Evolution may be called a theory, but it is a well accepted theory that is buttressed by a strong scientific and evidentiary basis. Creationism is not.
I remember this place:
It was Ruggles in Harvard Square.
They had cheddar cheese on top of a whole wheat crust and some other bizarre toppings too.
I personally preferred Mr. & Mrs. ___ for burgers,
, Wei Ta for chinese, and Iruna for Spanish, esp. their garlic soup and their white sangria. And Toscanini's for ice cream... mmm... ginger snap molasses ice cream... mmm...
And the Orson Welles theater. And the Harvard Square cinema before it became a Star cinema, etc.
My firewall regularly notes random attempts onto port 80 on an average of 10 times a day, onto port 21 twice a day, 23 twice a day, and of course the standard Microsoft SQL worms on 1433 once to twice a day. My standard nslookup and dig -x _ _ soa note that I get these incursions from around the world.
Back when I was connecting with a Mac Powerbook G3 and using telnet (I know, I know, the sysadmin did not have ssh installed on my uni account back then) I'd always have my ftp log window open. I'd regularly see attempts to connect into the telnet programs FTP port once to twice a day, and that was with me being logged on about one hour per day. And that was with a system that dynamically assigned IP numbers. So there are many many random script kiddies out there attempting to probe whatever IP address they randomly choose.
Yes, but this is only true because you are not getting noticed. The big league players with their big league salaries can be a significant chunk of revenues for cities and states, and the ensuing lawsuits can create big waves of publicity. This is why some of these taxes get enforced for the NBA players and the NFL and baseball (I refuse to call them Major League, and I refuse to insult true Little League by calling them LitLeague, but these soon to be striking bozos are by no means no way no how any sort of major league class) players. When they're getting millions a year and a single game may be worth a few hundred thou per player, then taxing that team's single game is a revenue source.
Taxing your $100-$200/hour over two weeks is not worth the effort of paperwork or revenue collection. Taxing their effective $30k - $40k per hour per player is worth the effort.
I'm not sure about the entymology . . .
entymology is an almost homonym, almost spoonerism of what you meant to say: etymology.
Etymology: An account of the formation of or development of a word and its meaning.
Entomology: The branch of zoology relating to insects, I believe. Ants are very social and intelligent (in a hive/nest sort of way), but I'm pretty sure that ants do not have the word "wherefore" in their vocabulary. Check with E.O. Wilson just to make sure.
It's not a question of forcing anyone to buy only open source or only closed source software. That thrust of questioning obfucates the underlying issue. The actions of governing bodies ought to be accessible to the governed and there should not be any imposition of closed or proprietary standards required to interact with our government.
Documents should be available in non-proprietary formats, and documents required to be submitted to governmental agencies should not be forced to have to be in proprietary formats. This should be a basic requirement for our governing bodies at the federal, state/commonwealth, county/parish, and city levels.
If proprietary software should have to compete to meet these obligations. The smart way to insert open source software components is not to claim that open source is inherently better (even though it obviously is), but to show how open source meets the standards of an open governing system.
Closed systems are too often present at all levels. I can understand that scholarly journals may have requirements that manuscripts be submitted in the word processing format of their choice and on the preferred media of their choice. Those are just the rules of the game you have to play if you choose to publish in peer reviewed journals. At least the mathematical journals accept LaTex. And some printing services prefer Quark files for their layout services. That's their prerogative. However, all citizens have to interact with their governments at time. And the gov't ought not to impose the requirement that anyone wishing to submit proposals under requests for proposals or wishing to submit legal documentation be required to use proprietary data interchange formats. Proprietary formats require the use of proprietary software which may cost some citizens too much. It is not just for a government to keep some of their citizens out of the game.
And this lack of justice is the key reason that open formats should be used. And the fact that open source software can best meet the usage of open formats is the best reason that open source software ought to be used.
I'm glad that you have a scalp mounted microphone. At least you can take advantage of headshadowing for sound localization.
While audiobooks may be good for correlating words as written with the percepts transferred through the electronic cochlea, I think that you need to realize that even infants spend more than a year training themselves to work with audio. It will take time.
As for localization, immerse yourself in auditory rich environments. DVDs and movies with subtitles may only help you a little with correlating lip motion and facial changes with speech sounds. But DVDs and movies and televisions will make you misassociate localization cues. This is especially true of movies in theaters. This is because even though the apparent location of the sound sources will change, the actual sound source remains stationary: the speakers in the movie theater or in your television or in your speaker setup.
Even though you may have a limited sense of directional cues available, you should avail yourself of the opportunity to learn as many as you can. I recommend playground areas and dog walking areas: kids and adults will be running around and making noises. Moving sound sources will be associable with the visual stimuli locating these sources in space around you.
Go to a shopping mall and listen to the environment as you walk around. In a two-story mall, this will give you the opportunity to hear sound sources coming from above when you're downstairs, and below when you're upstairs. Unfortunately, you'll also get a lower signal to noise ratio (and a higher Muzak to voice ratio), but it is the real world environment you have to inhabit.
Good luck. I'm sorry about the cost of speech therapy. Too bad the insurers don't realize that cognitive rehab is as important as physical rehabilitation.
Resolution really matters, but we (humans) are capable of resolving "sub-pixel" features by interpolation. The retinal cones are spaced at least 1-minute-of-arc apart, however we are able to accurately place a vernier line to within 1/10 of a minute of arc. This is probably done in a way that is the converse of anti-aliasing in image processing: you can create non-jagged edges by using intermediate gray scales to imply curves.
So even with 32 x 32 pixel images, if we are allowed to scan slowly across an image, we can see sub-pixel elements as they average across pixel areas and we see finer grain changes in intensity which our brain can infer is due to sub pixel features.
A few answers and some more questions for you:
I heartily agree with the use of audio books. I've listened to hundreds of them on long drives and may I recommend that you try to find children's books on audio as they may have clearer enunciation and slower speech rates. I'd suggest Ramona and the Pest series, text author is Beverly Cleary, read aloud by Stockard Channing I believe. She articulates distinctly and carefully.
I had been involved with some of the earliest cochlear implants on children below the age of three. I haven't reviewed the literature recently, but I do know that the directional aspects of hearing depend on the higher frequency components being redirected and filter by the pinna of the ears. May I ask you a few questions?
What brand of implant do you have?
How many channels does it have? (The audio stream is broken down into multple frequency bands by FFT and then sent to the receiver. The best I remember from 1991 were 8 channel devices. Are they much better now?)
Where is the microphone? Are you certain that the microphone is on the scalp transmitter? Is it on your belt mounted processor? (A lot the directional cues depend on the fact that the qualia of the sounds change as you move your head around. If the microphone is on your hip, moving your head will not help you localize the direction of a sound source.)
Have you had just one operation for one ear, or have you had a second operation for the other ear as well? A lot of the directional cues depend on the HRTF (head related transfer function) applied to the sound by sound shadowed by and diffracted around your head. Head shadowing will affect some frequencies. Higher frequencies are needed to be able to differentiate high elevation sources from low elevation sources. However, the key cue in directionality is the comparison of amplitude and interaural time delays between the ears. If you only have one implant, your cochlear nerves and brainstem will not receive the stereo signals which it will need to decode the azimuth and elevation of the sound sources.
Best of luck to you, and may I also ask if you are working with a speech therapist? They do wonderful work. Are you involved with any clinical studies (or since the market for implants has been large for a while, is this just a production job, fairly "routine" surgery [though no surgical intervention is routine for those undergoing it], with no intensive clinical followup?)
Well, Larry Ellison proposed a national ID system, of course based on Oracle database software. That proposal came out right after the attacks, but it was fought against and seems to have faded away. But considering the amount of hyperbole that's out there, and the willingness of the american population to put up with it (or more accurately, their apathy), it's possible that such a system may be required very soon. Let's hope that the protests happen here if that were to come about.