Frankly, I wish more web sites still looked & worked like Greenspun's. They load instantly, and you can use ctrl-F to find & hit links of interest very quickly.
Not possible. If someone screams "Fuuuuuuuck!!!" at the top of their lungs, there is no way AI can distinguish whether it's anger, pain, frustration, surprise, or even joy, because the source signal may be identical for all of them. At best, this system is detecting high arousal and possibly unpleasant mood.
Well, your taste buds are in your tongue, which is where the receptors are which tell your brain what it's experiencing in terms of the salt, sweet, bitter, sour, and umami.
My friend, you are about 10-15 years behind in the neuroscience of perception. Flavor doesn't travel from your taste buds to your brain and cause a reaction. Instead, your brain predicts the flavor based on past experience, well before any sensory input arrives from your tongue. If the input confirms the prediction, then the prediction becomes your experience. But they don't always match -- sometimes your brain maintains the prediction in spite of the sensory input, or vice-versa. This whole process happens in milliseconds, outside of your awareness. Google "predictive coding neuroscience" for more info.
Likewise, when you smack your knee on a table, the pain doesn't travel from the knee to the brain. It's again a predictive process. That's why chronic pain exists: the brain predicts pain even in the absence of tissue damage, based on past experience, and the prediction becomes your current experience. Phantom limb syndrome works the same way.
I bought my cell phone in April 2006 and it's still running strong. I've dropped it dozens of times and even lost it once in a NYC taxi. (The driver mailed it back.) I've replaced the battery twice but that's it.
I can't download the full PDF of the study, but there are at least 2 things missing from the description in the news.
First, their results are based on a verbal report of what a person says he/she would do in a situation. This is completely different from what a person might actually do in real life.
Second, they haven't shown that the effect is specific to violent intent. Maybe the brain stimulation also reduces their (reported) desire to do anything active, like exercise, or eat cake, or go scuba diving. The prefrontal cortex has many functions.
Before you claim that a particular part of the brain is "for" any particular purpose, you have to pass a high bar.
I was on the tech job market recently and here are the responses I received from 14 job applications.
The bad:
- Submit application, and they never responded: 6 - Submit application, then 3 months of silence, then a form-letter rejection: 1 - On-site interview, then 3 weeks of silence, not responding to any of my emails, then a rejection: 1 - A 2-month interview process, including two rounds of on-site interviews, and finally they said, "We decided not to fill the position after all": 1
The good:
- Submit application, then a quick rejection: 3 - Phone screen, then quick rejection: 1 - Job offers: 2
As a developer, I "get it" that writing code to roll up VMs, firewalls, and so on results in repeatable software. But honestly, it's boring. I hate writing code to create Amazon EC2 instances on the fly, etc. I wish I had an Ops staff to handle these tasks.
This story says nothing special about YouTube. In any group of a billion people (i.e., YouTube users), some of them are going to be crazy, or violent, or both.
I miss Usenet: a single place where you could find communities centered on tens of thousands of topics. If I had a question on house painting, or progressive rock, or chip design, or whatever, there was usually a well-populated newsgroup for it, and it wasn't hard to find. Today, we have Stack Exchange, but its selection of topics is minimal compared to Usenet's. Or we can search the web for sites of interest, but in my experience, many of the communities centered on these sites are tiny and unresponsive. Usenet was a one-stop shop with tens of thousands of communities.
Yes, Usenet also had trolls and idiots and (eventually) spam. But that was IMHO a small price to pay for how well it worked. I made so many friends and learned so much on Usenet.
>Microexpressions are fast, involuntary facial expressions which other people may not >consciously recognize, but arise from our real emotions instead of the face we wish to >present to the world.
FYI, that is only a hypothesis, not a universal truth, and there's plenty of evidence against (and debate about) so-called microexpressions and "unconscious emotion." For example, if you place electrodes on people's faces and measure actual muscle movements during emotion, there's tremendous variety, not uniformity. There's also lots of evidence that emotional expressions in the face are neither universal nor innate.
I am the submitter of this story, and the details are correct. Here is the timeline of events as I experienced them.
1. I phoned Fidelity. A recording informed me that my rep would discuss MyVoice with me. 2. I spoke with the rep and conducted my financial business. MyVoice was not mentioned yet. 3. At the end of the call, the rep said to me, "We've enrolled you in a wonderful new security feature called MyVoice," and proceeded to describe it. She said that Fidelity had sampled my voice during the call to create a voiceprint. (Note that I was NOT asked first.) 4. I asked, "Can I opt out?" The rep was audibly surprised at my request, and said, "Yes, you can." So I opted out.
Some time later, I called back to check that my account still requires a password. It does. So the opt-out was successful.
Pick up some used Squeezebox devices on eBay. Their music server is open source, runs on Mac OS, and is compatible with iTunes. The devices sync beautifully. More info.
Pattern classification, as used in this study, is not neural mind-reading. Here's a good article by a neuroscientist that explains how it actually works -- and its limitations -- in plain English.
I'm 54 and split my time between coding, managing a team of developers, and providing mentorship to younger devs regarding technical and non-technical (soft skills) situations. Lots of mentorship -- just because someone can code doesn't mean they know how to navigate a company and work relationships.
Leadership positions don't have to be management.There's also technical leadership (thought leader), architecture, etc.
I'm a successful IT professional who has never owned/needed a smartphone, just a flip phone circa 2006 for emergency calls from my family, i.e., I almost never use it. This choice has not hurt my career nor my social life one bit.
At home, I have an iPad for those moments when an app would be useful, like depositing bank checks or using Uber. But I don't carry it with me.
I use Facebook and Twitter every day... at the end of the day, for a short time. Not constantly throughout the day. For texting, I use an email-to-text gateway. Sometimes people have to wait awhile for me to reply, but I have (intentionally) never set expectations that I reply immediately, so people have learned not to expect it.
The upshot? Freedom from interruption. When you and I have a conversation, you get my full attention because there are no phone notifications. I never have to wonder whether a buzzing in my pocket might be more important than talking to you.
The only real trade-off is that sometimes, I don't know the answer to a question, and I can't look it up online immediately. So I wait until the next time I'm back at my desktop. Gratification isn't always instant. It's not a big deal.
Damn, I clicked "Submit" too soon. When you read "for (i=0;" your brain is already predicting "i<n; i++" before the rest of the loop syntax even reaches your visual cortex.
Actually, you're wrong too. All humans (barring illness) read by predicting the words that come next, using concepts from their past experience. Milliseconds later, the actual visual input from the screen reaches the brain and either confirms or denies the prediction, and the brain adjusts if needed. This process happens outside of awareness.
From another point of view, CNN was perfectly within its rights to publish the critic's name, as the information is newsworthy, but they protected his/her anonymity. Calling CNN's final disclaimer a "threat" is a matter of perspective (and politics, perhaps)....
Few things in life have single, simple causes, such as "working long hours." Success is generally due to multiple factors, including persistence, education, emotional intelligence, connections/politics, good health, and just plain luck. People may look back and attribute their success to one magical moment, but it ain't so.
Slashdot Mirror
Frankly, I wish more web sites still looked & worked like Greenspun's. They load instantly, and you can use ctrl-F to find & hit links of interest very quickly.
Exactly. There is no single body signature for anger.
Not possible. If someone screams "Fuuuuuuuck!!!" at the top of their lungs, there is no way AI can distinguish whether it's anger, pain, frustration, surprise, or even joy, because the source signal may be identical for all of them. At best, this system is detecting high arousal and possibly unpleasant mood.
$ mv ~/* ~/.unseen
My friend, you are about 10-15 years behind in the neuroscience of perception. Flavor doesn't travel from your taste buds to your brain and cause a reaction. Instead, your brain predicts the flavor based on past experience, well before any sensory input arrives from your tongue. If the input confirms the prediction, then the prediction becomes your experience. But they don't always match -- sometimes your brain maintains the prediction in spite of the sensory input, or vice-versa. This whole process happens in milliseconds, outside of your awareness. Google "predictive coding neuroscience" for more info.
Likewise, when you smack your knee on a table, the pain doesn't travel from the knee to the brain. It's again a predictive process. That's why chronic pain exists: the brain predicts pain even in the absence of tissue damage, based on past experience, and the prediction becomes your current experience. Phantom limb syndrome works the same way.
All your senses operate by prediction.
Taste is a perception, an experience involving food and a brain. It's not simply built into the food. You can easily manipulate how things taste to a person just by changing the context. For example, if you tell people that the same piece of meat is or isn't humanely farmed, it tastes different.
I bought my cell phone in April 2006 and it's still running strong. I've dropped it dozens of times and even lost it once in a NYC taxi. (The driver mailed it back.) I've replaced the battery twice but that's it.
I guess we now know the answer to Do Businesses Really Need to Hire CS Majors?"
I can't download the full PDF of the study, but there are at least 2 things missing from the description in the news.
First, their results are based on a verbal report of what a person says he/she would do in a situation. This is completely different from what a person might actually do in real life.
Second, they haven't shown that the effect is specific to violent intent. Maybe the brain stimulation also reduces their (reported) desire to do anything active, like exercise, or eat cake, or go scuba diving. The prefrontal cortex has many functions.
Before you claim that a particular part of the brain is "for" any particular purpose, you have to pass a high bar.
I was on the tech job market recently and here are the responses I received from 14 job applications.
The bad:
- Submit application, and they never responded: 6
- Submit application, then 3 months of silence, then a form-letter rejection: 1
- On-site interview, then 3 weeks of silence, not responding to any of my emails, then a rejection: 1
- A 2-month interview process, including two rounds of on-site interviews, and finally they said, "We decided not to fill the position after all": 1
The good:
- Submit application, then a quick rejection: 3
- Phone screen, then quick rejection: 1
- Job offers: 2
As a developer, I "get it" that writing code to roll up VMs, firewalls, and so on results in repeatable software. But honestly, it's boring. I hate writing code to create Amazon EC2 instances on the fly, etc. I wish I had an Ops staff to handle these tasks.
This story says nothing special about YouTube. In any group of a billion people (i.e., YouTube users), some of them are going to be crazy, or violent, or both.
I miss Usenet: a single place where you could find communities centered on tens of thousands of topics. If I had a question on house painting, or progressive rock, or chip design, or whatever, there was usually a well-populated newsgroup for it, and it wasn't hard to find. Today, we have Stack Exchange, but its selection of topics is minimal compared to Usenet's. Or we can search the web for sites of interest, but in my experience, many of the communities centered on these sites are tiny and unresponsive. Usenet was a one-stop shop with tens of thousands of communities.
Yes, Usenet also had trolls and idiots and (eventually) spam. But that was IMHO a small price to pay for how well it worked. I made so many friends and learned so much on Usenet.
>Microexpressions are fast, involuntary facial expressions which other people may not
>consciously recognize, but arise from our real emotions instead of the face we wish to
>present to the world.
FYI, that is only a hypothesis, not a universal truth, and there's plenty of evidence against (and debate about) so-called microexpressions and "unconscious emotion." For example, if you place electrodes on people's faces and measure actual muscle movements during emotion, there's tremendous variety, not uniformity. There's also lots of evidence that emotional expressions in the face are neither universal nor innate.
See the recent TED Talk by neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett for a friendly overview.
Bravo! True wisdom.
Cool, thanks for the follow-up!
I am the submitter of this story, and the details are correct. Here is the timeline of events as I experienced them.
1. I phoned Fidelity. A recording informed me that my rep would discuss MyVoice with me.
2. I spoke with the rep and conducted my financial business. MyVoice was not mentioned yet.
3. At the end of the call, the rep said to me, "We've enrolled you in a wonderful new security feature called MyVoice," and proceeded to describe it. She said that Fidelity had sampled my voice during the call to create a voiceprint. (Note that I was NOT asked first.)
4. I asked, "Can I opt out?" The rep was audibly surprised at my request, and said, "Yes, you can." So I opted out.
Some time later, I called back to check that my account still requires a password. It does. So the opt-out was successful.
Pick up some used Squeezebox devices on eBay. Their music server is open source, runs on Mac OS, and is compatible with iTunes. The devices sync beautifully. More info.
Pattern classification, as used in this study, is not neural mind-reading. Here's a good article by a neuroscientist that explains how it actually works -- and its limitations -- in plain English.
Pattern Classification Explained
I'm 54 and split my time between coding, managing a team of developers, and providing mentorship to younger devs regarding technical and non-technical (soft skills) situations. Lots of mentorship -- just because someone can code doesn't mean they know how to navigate a company and work relationships.
Leadership positions don't have to be management.There's also technical leadership (thought leader), architecture, etc.
I'm a successful IT professional who has never owned/needed a smartphone, just a flip phone circa 2006 for emergency calls from my family, i.e., I almost never use it. This choice has not hurt my career nor my social life one bit.
At home, I have an iPad for those moments when an app would be useful, like depositing bank checks or using Uber. But I don't carry it with me.
I use Facebook and Twitter every day... at the end of the day, for a short time. Not constantly throughout the day. For texting, I use an email-to-text gateway. Sometimes people have to wait awhile for me to reply, but I have (intentionally) never set expectations that I reply immediately, so people have learned not to expect it.
The upshot? Freedom from interruption. When you and I have a conversation, you get my full attention because there are no phone notifications. I never have to wonder whether a buzzing in my pocket might be more important than talking to you.
The only real trade-off is that sometimes, I don't know the answer to a question, and I can't look it up online immediately. So I wait until the next time I'm back at my desktop. Gratification isn't always instant. It's not a big deal.
Damn, I clicked "Submit" too soon. When you read "for (i=0;" your brain is already predicting "i<n; i++" before the rest of the loop syntax even reaches your visual cortex.
Actually, you're wrong too. All humans (barring illness) read by predicting the words that come next, using concepts from their past experience. Milliseconds later, the actual visual input from the screen reaches the brain and either confirms or denies the prediction, and the brain adjusts if needed. This process happens outside of awareness.
In other words, when you read:
for (i=0;
your brain is already predicting i before
From another point of view, CNN was perfectly within its rights to publish the critic's name, as the information is newsworthy, but they protected his/her anonymity. Calling CNN's final disclaimer a "threat" is a matter of perspective (and politics, perhaps)....
Few things in life have single, simple causes, such as "working long hours." Success is generally due to multiple factors, including persistence, education, emotional intelligence, connections/politics, good health, and just plain luck. People may look back and attribute their success to one magical moment, but it ain't so.