I agree that crime is more a systemic problem than one than a matter of better enforcement. However shotspotter is remarkably accurate. In a '98 study they had a proven accuracy of 40 feet with sensors a mile apart, and its probably much better now. It can also replay the recorded sound before a human decides to respond, as well as route the data directly to a computer in the car of an officer on duty in that zone.
One of the major applications it seems for the police is to catch people firing guns in the air for fun (like on new years), but it does help with response time to incidents as well and its vastly superior to having people call in to the station when they hear gunfire.
A flat surface behaves as an acoustic mirror where the original source is "replicated" at a second virtual position. Wheras a cave wall is usually bumpy so it tends to diffuse sound in all directions. A convex curved surface that is smooth may also act like a lens wherby it focuses reflected sound and this can compound the problem for certain locations, but flat surfaces a quite a bit more common architecturally.
However if you know the impulse response of an acoustic system (for example you can measure it by firing a gun at a known location and recording the resulting echos) then its a simple matter of some signal processing to deconvolve the reflections and extract the original source. Unfortunately the impulse response is different at every point in space so you have to repeat the measurement at many different locations. Sometimes there is also an additional complication when the source is directional, because now you have to sample not only spatially but also directionally. I don't know how much this applies to guns but I'm sure they do have some directional component. In theory you could discriminate between guns fired in the air versus parallel or into to the ground.
The methods of compressive sampling are very useful in this type of acoustics application, as it reduces greatly both the number of microphones you need as well as the number of neighborhood-disturbing impulse measurements required to calibrate the system.
TMS is just the modern equivalent to what they used to do with lesions (i.e., intentional brain damage with a scapel or a hot iron). The summary is just very badly written... its not morality that is disrupted by magnetism, its the brain.
No I am perfectly aware of the difference between monochromatic pure color and a synthetic color (wheel or whatever). I think my point was perhaps misunderstood...
Consider for a moment the ear. It also has a dimensionality reduction in the translation from sound to perception. Meaning, multiple audio spectra map to the same perceived sound. MP3 famously uses this effect to hide compression artifacts. Colorimetry is the applied science of doing basically the same thing but for color mixing with different reflectance/emmission spectra.
Now some people have better hearing than others, they can hear the MP3 artifacts when someone else can't. Shall we argue that they have an "extra" dimension of sound perception? I'd rather just say they have a more refined threshold of difference between spectra. Similarly some people have better color perception than others, and this manifests as finer discrimination thresholds.
Most of colorimetry and its various models are really made for applications, they have no interest to a vision scientist. The mantis shrimp has something like 18 different cone classes, shall we give names to every one of those and run around an 18-dimensional hypersphere? What if I put in a bionic eyeball with a spectrophotometer that senses a thousand different frequencies... at some point you need to throw out all the color models and switch over to something that scales easily, namely, sampling theory.
Furthermore if you look into the details (which I have) you realize that these linearly separable cartesian models are an idealization rather far from reality; first of all they fail linearity tests (such as associativity rules) except under highly constrained viewing conditions and furthermore they don't describe at all the fact that some dimensions are not as strong as others (various attempts to fix this have been made with mixed results).
The answer is they have extra depth, actually extra spectral resolution.
Color perception is a byproduct of the retina being stimulated with a particular spectral distribution of light. Its a spectral sampling, much like how the ear samples the spectral distribution of sound, but a totally different method and with much much lower resolution.
We all see the same spectra, some people get more or less information than others. Mainly this manifests in differences in discrimination ability between colors as well as disagreement about what constitutes a "color match" between observers that are getting different information.
Debating about what this maps to in the head is mostly an exercise in mental masturbation, the brain simply integrates available information in a statistically optimal fashion.
The correct time to teach a concept to a child is precisely when they need that concept to function in the environment.
Current research on learning shows that unless the stimulus has meaning in the environment of an organism, the brain actually learns to ignore that stimulus. If that stimulus later changes to have some meaning, individuals with prior exposure are actually slower to learn than a control group since they have to undo the previously conditioned behavior.
This is a classic example of folk-psychology being not just dead wrong, but dangerously counterproductive. For example the idea that you can "learn by osmosis" such as by playing language tapes in the background while you work--this will actually slow down the rate that you learn the desired skill because you are actually learning to treat the language as background noise.
Obviously being creatures of advanced reasoning capacity there is a point in our development where we are sufficiently mature to realize that we should invest in skills with no obvious immediate necessity. This is the time when we are ready to learn more abstract tasks and prepare for things we might need later.
The question is, when is that level of maturity reached, how can we assess the ability accurately, and moreover, how can we get our children to that point sooner? I suspect there are certain types of lessons that would target the development of this capacity explicitly. Instead, what we tend to do is just move on and assume they will just "get it" at some point. Since they don't, they end up learning something other than what is intended, like "how to ignore adults", or "how to be a conformist and not get yelled at".
I was particularly gifted in math, during my K-12 years I was advanced 2 years ahead of my peers. The interesting thing to me is that I think this was due to my disposition, not my understanding of the utility of the skill. I was extremely good at following instructions and usually simply content to do things for their own intrinsic interest without wondering why I should bother. It was not foresight or future-skill anticipation that led me to be good at math. Then much later I learned that 99% of the math skill I had worked so hard on was redundant and performed faster and more accurately by a computer, so obviously if I *really* understood the future I would have not bothered with all those pointless calculations.
Term limits have been widely criticized by political scholars since they require us to regularly fire our most qualified employees for no reason other than X years have passed. No private company would ever adopt such an absurd policy, its a a sure way to create incompetence and mayhem. Much more tragically, this high rate of turnover increases the cost of campaigning greatly and in turn, this magnifies the influence of money in politics.
Its true that sham-democracies don't have term limits for obvious reasons, but to think that the converse is true is a basic logical fallacy. The sham is in the elections, not the term limits.
Air actually has a very high thermal resistance so one needs to use forced circulation to actually transport moderate amounts of heat. Running all those fans uses more energy. In fact in any closed room, running a fan may cause objects immediately in front of the fan to be cooled, but overall the room is heating up from the power use.
Oil has a very low thermal resistance naturally so one can use ordinary convection instead (up to some point).
A less messy solution would be for servers to be made with integrated metal heat-pipes that conduct the waste energy to the case. Then a special type of rack would carry the heat away through the mounting rails.
Its not the cost of regulation that is high, its the cost of doing things right and safely. China effectively uses human life and environmental destruction to offset production costs. So far there is no developed nation that is able to match the prices that the chinese are giving us, so it would seem that we are not willing to give up the protections that we now take for granted in a civilized society.
Its economical to keep buying from them, but its not morally correct because we are simply enabling the the ruling class of chinese society to continue to exploit the land and people in ways that would be considered gross negligence if we saw it first hand.
Higher resolution electrode-arrays have been tried, but so far they don't produce any improvement in the sound quality. The 20 or so band versions have been the max in use for many years. Apparently the bio-electrical properties of the cochlea in-situ are rather complex, due to some weird stuff perhaps current leakage pathways, you can't just throw more electrodes in and expect it to work.
When I was a kid my parents would not buy me any game or toy that featured an element of violence. No GI Joe, no shoot-em-up video games, etc.
What I got was stuff like Legos, and the freedom to build all kinds of stuff in garage using my Dad's tools and scraps of wood, and we learned to program in BASIC on the computer. Its not surprising that I made all kinds of guns, missile-toting spaceships, and shooting games, etc etc, but at least I had to get creative to do it. Somewhere along the way I learned to enjoy the process more than the outcome.
Once I had my own earning power I was free to buy whatever I wanted (and it was at 16 when I already had a job making 3x any of my peers doing computer work at a local company).
He is a self described "lifetime libertarian republican". He was a personal associate to Ayn Rand and wrote articles criticizing regulation as creating a socialist welfare state. If you don't believe me then go fact check it, there is primary source material for all of this.
His role at the Fed only seems paradoxical until you realize he used his power to promote deregulation of the market. He was particularly instrumental in preventing the opaque derivatives market from being regulated by the CFTC in 1998, resulting in the current crises due to the fraudulent accounting that it enabled.
Years of deregulation and resource starvation have strangulated our regulatory agencies to the point where they are unable to act.
Much of this based on Greenspan-style Libertarian philosophies that market forces can correct any problem including fraud and crime, a position which he himself has now renounced and we as a people have yet to heed.
Since the late 80s we have been riding on a giant ponzi scheme and its all coming crashing down right now. And yet, nothing. I expect things to get much worse.
Its a complicated situation because in recent history the deaf community has beed badly persecuted, for example by forbidding the use of sign language in schools.
Anyways children who get cochlear implants at an early age have significantly improved reading comprehension. English spelling has a pretty low information rate (only 1.5 bits/character) and its much harder to learn how to read fast if you don't know where the natural dipthongs are in the word. The bottom line is that if you want your kid to be successful in society then implanting is good.
Missile defense systems have a history of fraudulent claims and glaringly obvious problems such as the inability to take out warheads once they separate from the missile booster (which typically happens well outside the range of such systems) and the fact that for very low investment by the enemy they are easily defeated by decoys.
At least new planes, while useless in the sense that there is no real need for them, do actually meet their functional specifications.
Diplomacy, education and improvement of living standards worldwide are the only proven means for the reduction of violence, and are future-proof with respect to any new technology.
The case currently in the US is that state and federal governments are rapidly divesting in basic academic research and the academic system as a whole. Many of the more successful departments in science and engineering are now heavily funded by contributions from individuals and corporations, and the IP flows back to the funders through technology transfer licensing and the hiring of fresh grad students into industry. Meanwhile many faculty positions in universities are paid for by private donations. At the most extreme end are the private universities that have enormous endowments and basically do everything with private funds.
Its nice to say the taxpayers should get what they paid for but the truth is, they are not really paying for it, and until we elect a government that is actually willing to fund education and science in a serious way then that is not going to change in a significant way.
My experience with CC going up hills is that it usually overshoots the requested speed by up to about 5mph after a downshift occurs. Also, drivers without CC tend to slow down on uphills (as they tend to drive with constant RPM not constant velocity). The combined effect is that going uphill with CC causes your relative speed to other drivers to change quite dramatically, say 10-15mph. If one were to simultaneously also request a speed increase, you'd almost certainly perceive the car to be moving much too quickly for safe handling.
As we know, it is the difference in relative speed that tends to cause accidents, so I will always disable CC on inclines unless the traffic conditions are very light.
Given that our school system is coming up woefully under-par in math and science, we seem to be having enough problems just preparing the next generation of rocket engineers.
Space, technology and all that CAN save us, but we also can't just pretend that its a matter of setting funding priorities for NASA, we have to revitalize an entire culture and economy towards innovation.
This method could be modified to avoid the prompting problem. Essentially the entire test can be buried in noise (i.e., random faces) so that the subject is never aware of the convergence process. It should also be possible to modify it to detect when the subject has insufficient information to identify the target. These sorts of techniques are quite common in experimental psychology when you need to suppress adaptation effects or do testing for medical purposes where the subject can't be trusted to be truthful.
Opinions can be formed on the basis of false or incomplete information, or on conception of ideal reality (e.g. strict father vs nurturing family). The latter explains most of the idealogical differences between the two parties, but misinformation is the means most often exploited to push the border-line cases (moderates or independents if you will) one way or the other.
Its the false information that is disturbing, and this is where news organizations are falling terribly short. It really doesn't matter what sources they use--analysts, senators, tweets... its all noise. They have multiple sources on simultaneously making wildly different purely factual claims about the same thing. But they'd rather cut to the next 30-second segment on puppy dogs rather than actually give some work to the research team.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that crime is more a systemic problem than one than a matter of better enforcement. However shotspotter is remarkably accurate. In a '98 study they had a proven accuracy of 40 feet with sensors a mile apart, and its probably much better now. It can also replay the recorded sound before a human decides to respond, as well as route the data directly to a computer in the car of an officer on duty in that zone.
One of the major applications it seems for the police is to catch people firing guns in the air for fun (like on new years), but it does help with response time to incidents as well and its vastly superior to having people call in to the station when they hear gunfire.
A flat surface behaves as an acoustic mirror where the original source is "replicated" at a second virtual position. Wheras a cave wall is usually bumpy so it tends to diffuse sound in all directions. A convex curved surface that is smooth may also act like a lens wherby it focuses reflected sound and this can compound the problem for certain locations, but flat surfaces a quite a bit more common architecturally.
However if you know the impulse response of an acoustic system (for example you can measure it by firing a gun at a known location and recording the resulting echos) then its a simple matter of some signal processing to deconvolve the reflections and extract the original source. Unfortunately the impulse response is different at every point in space so you have to repeat the measurement at many different locations. Sometimes there is also an additional complication when the source is directional, because now you have to sample not only spatially but also directionally. I don't know how much this applies to guns but I'm sure they do have some directional component. In theory you could discriminate between guns fired in the air versus parallel or into to the ground.
The methods of compressive sampling are very useful in this type of acoustics application, as it reduces greatly both the number of microphones you need as well as the number of neighborhood-disturbing impulse measurements required to calibrate the system.
TMS is just the modern equivalent to what they used to do with lesions (i.e., intentional brain damage with a scapel or a hot iron). The summary is just very badly written... its not morality that is disrupted by magnetism, its the brain.
No I am perfectly aware of the difference between monochromatic pure color and a synthetic color (wheel or whatever). I think my point was perhaps misunderstood...
Consider for a moment the ear. It also has a dimensionality reduction in the translation from sound to perception. Meaning, multiple audio spectra map to the same perceived sound. MP3 famously uses this effect to hide compression artifacts. Colorimetry is the applied science of doing basically the same thing but for color mixing with different reflectance/emmission spectra.
Now some people have better hearing than others, they can hear the MP3 artifacts when someone else can't. Shall we argue that they have an "extra" dimension of sound perception? I'd rather just say they have a more refined threshold of difference between spectra. Similarly some people have better color perception than others, and this manifests as finer discrimination thresholds.
Most of colorimetry and its various models are really made for applications, they have no interest to a vision scientist. The mantis shrimp has something like 18 different cone classes, shall we give names to every one of those and run around an 18-dimensional hypersphere? What if I put in a bionic eyeball with a spectrophotometer that senses a thousand different frequencies... at some point you need to throw out all the color models and switch over to something that scales easily, namely, sampling theory.
Furthermore if you look into the details (which I have) you realize that these linearly separable cartesian models are an idealization rather far from reality; first of all they fail linearity tests (such as associativity rules) except under highly constrained viewing conditions and furthermore they don't describe at all the fact that some dimensions are not as strong as others (various attempts to fix this have been made with mixed results).
The answer is they have extra depth, actually extra spectral resolution.
Color perception is a byproduct of the retina being stimulated with a particular spectral distribution of light. Its a spectral sampling, much like how the ear samples the spectral distribution of sound, but a totally different method and with much much lower resolution.
We all see the same spectra, some people get more or less information than others. Mainly this manifests in differences in discrimination ability between colors as well as disagreement about what constitutes a "color match" between observers that are getting different information.
Debating about what this maps to in the head is mostly an exercise in mental masturbation, the brain simply integrates available information in a statistically optimal fashion.
A handful of hate groups can throw enough bricks to get on the news, that does not make them "many Americans".
The correct time to teach a concept to a child is precisely when they need that concept to function in the environment.
Current research on learning shows that unless the stimulus has meaning in the environment of an organism, the brain actually learns to ignore that stimulus. If that stimulus later changes to have some meaning, individuals with prior exposure are actually slower to learn than a control group since they have to undo the previously conditioned behavior.
This is a classic example of folk-psychology being not just dead wrong, but dangerously counterproductive. For example the idea that you can "learn by osmosis" such as by playing language tapes in the background while you work--this will actually slow down the rate that you learn the desired skill because you are actually learning to treat the language as background noise.
Obviously being creatures of advanced reasoning capacity there is a point in our development where we are sufficiently mature to realize that we should invest in skills with no obvious immediate necessity. This is the time when we are ready to learn more abstract tasks and prepare for things we might need later.
The question is, when is that level of maturity reached, how can we assess the ability accurately, and moreover, how can we get our children to that point sooner? I suspect there are certain types of lessons that would target the development of this capacity explicitly. Instead, what we tend to do is just move on and assume they will just "get it" at some point. Since they don't, they end up learning something other than what is intended, like "how to ignore adults", or "how to be a conformist and not get yelled at".
I was particularly gifted in math, during my K-12 years I was advanced 2 years ahead of my peers. The interesting thing to me is that I think this was due to my disposition, not my understanding of the utility of the skill. I was extremely good at following instructions and usually simply content to do things for their own intrinsic interest without wondering why I should bother. It was not foresight or future-skill anticipation that led me to be good at math. Then much later I learned that 99% of the math skill I had worked so hard on was redundant and performed faster and more accurately by a computer, so obviously if I *really* understood the future I would have not bothered with all those pointless calculations.
Term limits have been widely criticized by political scholars since they require us to regularly fire our most qualified employees for no reason other than X years have passed. No private company would ever adopt such an absurd policy, its a a sure way to create incompetence and mayhem. Much more tragically, this high rate of turnover increases the cost of campaigning greatly and in turn, this magnifies the influence of money in politics.
Its true that sham-democracies don't have term limits for obvious reasons, but to think that the converse is true is a basic logical fallacy. The sham is in the elections, not the term limits.
Air actually has a very high thermal resistance so one needs to use forced circulation to actually transport moderate amounts of heat. Running all those fans uses more energy. In fact in any closed room, running a fan may cause objects immediately in front of the fan to be cooled, but overall the room is heating up from the power use.
Oil has a very low thermal resistance naturally so one can use ordinary convection instead (up to some point).
A less messy solution would be for servers to be made with integrated metal heat-pipes that conduct the waste energy to the case. Then a special type of rack would carry the heat away through the mounting rails.
Its not the cost of regulation that is high, its the cost of doing things right and safely. China effectively uses human life and environmental destruction to offset production costs. So far there is no developed nation that is able to match the prices that the chinese are giving us, so it would seem that we are not willing to give up the protections that we now take for granted in a civilized society.
Its economical to keep buying from them, but its not morally correct because we are simply enabling the the ruling class of chinese society to continue to exploit the land and people in ways that would be considered gross negligence if we saw it first hand.
You are talking about the over-the-ear type hearing aids, which are less expensive but also less popular since they are not so sleek.
Higher resolution electrode-arrays have been tried, but so far they don't produce any improvement in the sound quality. The 20 or so band versions have been the max in use for many years. Apparently the bio-electrical properties of the cochlea in-situ are rather complex, due to some weird stuff perhaps current leakage pathways, you can't just throw more electrodes in and expect it to work.
When I was a kid my parents would not buy me any game or toy that featured an element of violence. No GI Joe, no shoot-em-up video games, etc.
What I got was stuff like Legos, and the freedom to build all kinds of stuff in garage using my Dad's tools and scraps of wood, and we learned to program in BASIC on the computer. Its not surprising that I made all kinds of guns, missile-toting spaceships, and shooting games, etc etc, but at least I had to get creative to do it. Somewhere along the way I learned to enjoy the process more than the outcome.
Once I had my own earning power I was free to buy whatever I wanted (and it was at 16 when I already had a job making 3x any of my peers doing computer work at a local company).
He is a self described "lifetime libertarian republican". He was a personal associate to Ayn Rand and wrote articles criticizing regulation as creating a socialist welfare state. If you don't believe me then go fact check it, there is primary source material for all of this.
His role at the Fed only seems paradoxical until you realize he used his power to promote deregulation of the market. He was particularly instrumental in preventing the opaque derivatives market from being regulated by the CFTC in 1998, resulting in the current crises due to the fraudulent accounting that it enabled.
Years of deregulation and resource starvation have strangulated our regulatory agencies to the point where they are unable to act.
Much of this based on Greenspan-style Libertarian philosophies that market forces can correct any problem including fraud and crime, a position which he himself has now renounced and we as a people have yet to heed.
Since the late 80s we have been riding on a giant ponzi scheme and its all coming crashing down right now. And yet, nothing. I expect things to get much worse.
Its a complicated situation because in recent history the deaf community has beed badly persecuted, for example by forbidding the use of sign language in schools.
Anyways children who get cochlear implants at an early age have significantly improved reading comprehension. English spelling has a pretty low information rate (only 1.5 bits/character) and its much harder to learn how to read fast if you don't know where the natural dipthongs are in the word. The bottom line is that if you want your kid to be successful in society then implanting is good.
Just tweak the collimation optics so the beam has some divergence...
Missile defense systems have a history of fraudulent claims and glaringly obvious problems such as the inability to take out warheads once they separate from the missile booster (which typically happens well outside the range of such systems) and the fact that for very low investment by the enemy they are easily defeated by decoys.
At least new planes, while useless in the sense that there is no real need for them, do actually meet their functional specifications.
Diplomacy, education and improvement of living standards worldwide are the only proven means for the reduction of violence, and are future-proof with respect to any new technology.
The case currently in the US is that state and federal governments are rapidly divesting in basic academic research and the academic system as a whole. Many of the more successful departments in science and engineering are now heavily funded by contributions from individuals and corporations, and the IP flows back to the funders through technology transfer licensing and the hiring of fresh grad students into industry. Meanwhile many faculty positions in universities are paid for by private donations. At the most extreme end are the private universities that have enormous endowments and basically do everything with private funds.
Its nice to say the taxpayers should get what they paid for but the truth is, they are not really paying for it, and until we elect a government that is actually willing to fund education and science in a serious way then that is not going to change in a significant way.
My experience with CC going up hills is that it usually overshoots the requested speed by up to about 5mph after a downshift occurs. Also, drivers without CC tend to slow down on uphills (as they tend to drive with constant RPM not constant velocity). The combined effect is that going uphill with CC causes your relative speed to other drivers to change quite dramatically, say 10-15mph. If one were to simultaneously also request a speed increase, you'd almost certainly perceive the car to be moving much too quickly for safe handling.
As we know, it is the difference in relative speed that tends to cause accidents, so I will always disable CC on inclines unless the traffic conditions are very light.
Google has just announced today they are phasing out support for IE6 in the Apps suite (Docs, Sites, etc) by March 1 2010.
http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/01/modern-browsers-for-modern-applications.html
Given that our school system is coming up woefully under-par in math and science, we seem to be having enough problems just preparing the next generation of rocket engineers.
Space, technology and all that CAN save us, but we also can't just pretend that its a matter of setting funding priorities for NASA, we have to revitalize an entire culture and economy towards innovation.
This method could be modified to avoid the prompting problem. Essentially the entire test can be buried in noise (i.e., random faces) so that the subject is never aware of the convergence process. It should also be possible to modify it to detect when the subject has insufficient information to identify the target. These sorts of techniques are quite common in experimental psychology when you need to suppress adaptation effects or do testing for medical purposes where the subject can't be trusted to be truthful.
To calculate "jobs saved" (whatever the hell that means) the correct factor would be 1.0184. 0.0184 would give you "jobs gained".
Opinions can be formed on the basis of false or incomplete information, or on conception of ideal reality (e.g. strict father vs nurturing family). The latter explains most of the idealogical differences between the two parties, but misinformation is the means most often exploited to push the border-line cases (moderates or independents if you will) one way or the other.
Its the false information that is disturbing, and this is where news organizations are falling terribly short. It really doesn't matter what sources they use--analysts, senators, tweets... its all noise. They have multiple sources on simultaneously making wildly different purely factual claims about the same thing. But they'd rather cut to the next 30-second segment on puppy dogs rather than actually give some work to the research team.