Constant monitoring could be the next big thing in medicine.
We currently diagnose based on discrete measurements compared with cutoffs - "averages" and numbers which are rounded to easily-remembered values. For example, Type-II diabetes is indicated when glucose is over 200mg/dl 2 hours after an oral glucose test....that seems like an awfully contrived number, simply because it's so easy to remember.
Instead of single point cutoff measurements, maybe we could get better diagnoses if we could see the change in values over time. Perhaps a more accurate diagnosis of diabetes would come from characterizing the slope of several months worth of glucose measurements.
With the rise of cheap microprocessors, I think there's a lot of opportunity for medical monitoring. Something like a wristwatch which records 10 types of measurements every hour. Of course I don't know how this could be done - perhaps spectroscopic measurements of reflected light through the skin, or terahertz wave reflections.
I've often wondered if it's possible to make a USB peripheral that records to a TI Chronos wristwatch for later display.
I bet there's lots of interesting features there just waiting to be discovered.
As far as I can tell, OpenInvention has no no way to economically (as in "money") encourage membership. It's entirely voluntary.
For this to work, you need the economic incentives. As in the Mark Twain story, if members were allowed to work with non-members, then the union would fail.
The system only worked because the union members banded together to say that they would not work with a non-member. Non-members found it less hassle to join than lose the opportunity.
Additionally, a company can advertize a discount to customers who are members. If it's easy and free to become a member, this would cause their ranks to grow.
I don't see any of this at the OpenInvention project. It's nice and all, but it's only a feel-good voluntary wishful-thinking 'kinda thing.
OpenInvention doesn't have a way to incentivize membership.
Suppose some entity puts all of their software patents into a pool. For the sake of argument, let's say Google and IBM get together and pool all of their software patents into a sort of "co-op". Anyone who is a member of the co-op gets to use any and all the patents in the pool, royalty free.
Then they open up membership in the co-op.
Anyone who wants can join the co-op, with the following requirements: 1) They donate their own software patents (if any) to the pool 2) They agree not to sue any other co-op member over a software patent
And the following benefits: 1) They can use any patent in the pool royalty free 2) They won't be sued by anyone else in the co-op
Here's the best part: you can be a member of the co-op even if you *don't* have patents to donate. Membership is open to anyone - engineers, lawyers, businessmen... anyone.
With the big players taking the lead (Google and IBM in our example), everyone can now charge more or pay less, based on whether the other party is a co-op member.
Engineer looking for a job? We offer higher salaries to members of the co-op.
Vendor looking to sell? We discount our rates for members of the co-op.
Everyone in the group could adjust their prices depending on whether the other party is a member. The price adjustment reflects the "cost of doing business" with a particular class of people. The same as charging higher health insurance rates for smokers, or higher car insurance rates to teenagers.
Mark Twain once wrote about a small group of riverboat captains who banded together in this way, and effectively forced everyone to join their union. Initially no outsider wanted to join, but the members all agreed *not* to work with anyone who was not also a member. Captains found it easier to join the union than turn down a work opportunity.
The co-op model would also help stifle vague and overreaching patents. If someone in the co-op is sued (by an outsider), the member can refer to similar patents from the co-op which cover the same idea. Since in theory two patents cannot cover the same idea, the member can claim that the usage falls more within the co-op description than the troll-patent description.
If people could do this and stick to their guns, we would eliminate software patents in a couple of years.
Most comment systems are badly implemented. The builders implement whatever they think would work, and when it fails they throw up their hands and say "it can't work". Their main purpose isn't the commentary, so they have no incentive to make a good system.
Slashdot, on the other hand, directly relies on commentary. As a result, they have gone through several rounds of "we need to make this better". The current system is now robust and useful.
For example, many sites allow anyone to add commentary to a story. With no filtering, these tend to fill up with noise posts. Beyond the typical spamming, random users simply don't add much to the conversation. Agreement/disagreement with the points made, anecdotal evidence, "me too" posts, and so on. Lots of well-meaning posts with no substance.
Many sites require an admin to approve the comments. The admins tend to only allow comments which are favorable to a particular viewpoint. Posts which support the article, amplify or extend the central ideas - all well and good, but generally uninformative. You don't get a lot of contrast from Fox News, for instance.
Slashdot has the best of both worlds - the cream floats to the top. An insightful post will be modded up for all to see, while the noise gets relegated to the dungeons of +0 Troll.
Furthermore, since Slashdot itself isn't doing the moderation (with one notable exception), well written opposing viewpoints get modded up and stay there.
Reading Slashdot is, dare I say it, a mind expanding experience. It's a great way to get exposed to alternative viewpoints and learn their logical strengths and fallacies. It's much more enlightening than any of the mainstream newspapers.
This isn't a game or something that is fixed by simply throwing money at. It is a social problem first and foremost. The culture of this country does not appreciate education, and the idea of studying as hard as South Koreans or Japanese is seen as if it were child abuse or something like that.
>SNIP<
Do that and in a generation you'll see a change, all without throwing the coffers out of the window and without looking for the next e-silver bullet.
Wow, it's a good thing you're here and reading this! It sounds like you have this all figured out!
Increasing the number of hours, having children stand when the teacher enters and leaves the room, de-emphasizing college in favor of vocational training - all of that makes perfect sense!
It's almost like, dare I say it, you've got the answers in hand! All of your suggestions strike at the very heart of why education sucks in this country - have you contacted Peter yet? You should, you know...
Three things, though.
Firstly, children are naturally learners. Given the chance, they will drink from the fountain of information for as much as they can hold, and then come back for more the next day. Anyone who has raised children knows this - they are insatiably curious and inventive and experimental.
Secondly, learning is inherently fun and rewarding. This is an evolutionary survival trait, and is the reason for point #1 above. It takes a decade or more of forced, spoon-fed boredom before they come to associate learning with pain.
Thirdly, today we know a whole lot more about the psychology and physiology of learning than we did when the school system was first implemented. For example, do you know why the standard courses include trigonometry and not, for example, probability? Trig is important, but Prob is much more useful in daily life.
Your points are just a rehash of the authoritarian view commonly held by the American school system. It amounts to nothing more than insanity: since the techniques aren't working, let's do them even more!
The post, and Peter in particular, is looking for alternatives to the current system, not more of the same. It expresses the opinion that maybe there are ways that are better than what we are using.
The inquisition (yes, that one) was an expense account scam. Since the accused was required to pay for their own inquisition, the system simply padded the expenses to the limit of the available money.
The TSA is the same thing. People wail and moan about how stupid/intrusive/incompetent/useless they are, and miss the larger picture.
The TSA sends money to corporations, and the corporations grease the political wheels.
There's no rocket science, no ulterior motive, nothing else to consider. Like the inquisition, the TSA doesn't need to justify expenditures with usefulness or effectiveness. The more they spend, the more they get to spend. Cause and effect.
Why do you think they spend billions on technology, but pay only slightly above the minimum wage and spend so little on training?
People keep grousing about the TSA as if that will make a difference. It won't. They have been generally incompetent from the start, and there's nothing that people can do to unseat them from their position.
Voting hasn't helped. Contacting representatives hasn't helped. Complaining to the TSA or their employees hasn't helped. Legal action hasn't helped.
There's one obvious remaining course of action we can take to rein in all the government waste and corruption. Can anyone think of things to try before we take that last drastic step? I'm out of ideas...
We've really created a hostile environment for anyone wanting to study science as a kid.
Can't give your kid a chemistry set, those don't exist. Can't buy chemicals, you might be making a bomb.
For several years (after 9/11) you couldn't buy a model rocket engine, 'cause of course you could use it for terrorism somehow.
Until recently you couldn't build a UAV. Well, you could build it, but flying it was illegal.
Students are arrested if they bring electronics projects to school (Can't find the link, remember reading about this).
Having canning jars and a bag of fertilizer in your car can get you arrested for having bomb-making materials.
Taking apart a smoke detector (and using it to demonstrate alpha radiation) is a "grievous offense" (actual NRC term) and can get you raided and have *all* your lab equipment taken away.
Your hackerspace will be shut down instead of "given 30 days for compliance" as would be the case for a company.
Really... what's left? Mathematics? I'm surprised that we have *any* young people interested in science ATM. We make it nigh impossible and come down hard on them when they do.
The annual budget of NASA is around $18 billion. For comparison, the annual revenue of WalMart is $421, Toyota is $228 and AT&T is $124 (billion).
The budget of Bell Labs peaked at around $3.6 billion in today's dollars.
NASA claims to generate a ton of innovation which helps to drive the economy. I see no reason not to privatize NASA by running it in the same way as Bell Labs - work on all sorts of stuff, but sometimes direct your focus on useful stuff for both NASA's main mission and economic innovation.
NASA should be self supporting. Whenever they uncover something which would be useful in the marketplace, they should market it and get some return for the effort.
Over time we could slowly wean them away from the government teat, and allow them to be self directed. Instead of wasting gobs of cash on political projects with no good scientific mandate (*cough* space station *cough*), they could choose their own course and focus on things which actual scientists think is useful.
Licensing, patents, renting expertise, products (make and sell satellites), and charging for access to space come immediately to mind. Given the cost of sending a satellite into space, would it really be that hard to take in $18 billion in revenue?
I dunno, I'm probably not taking human nature into account.
In order to form an opinion on the matter, it would be useful to know if the treatments have any effect.
You know... evidence based science?
Model-based science is all the rage nowadays, and that we can't allow anything to happen unless we have a clear understanding of why it should happen before we try.
The debate as to whether these people should be labelled snake-oil salesmen or experimentalists would seem to rest on this. Is this government intrusion into people's right to choose, or a regulatory agency stepping in to keep people safe?
We need to know the risks and potential benefits in addition to the opinions of an insular, jargonized profession.
Instead of the dozen-or-so windows/widgets/mechanism systems we have now, we have one canvas with one interface managed by a standards community and improved over time.
To take a simple example, pick any of the windows systems (Tk, Gnome, Microsoft API) and consider how difficult it is to display text on the screen, including placement, size, font, color, and so on.
Now consider that same operation using the DOM model in Javascript: it's a simple English-like interface where you describe in a couple of words what you want to happen. Easy.
Add to this the fact that browsers work the same across all systems, the markup works largely the same across all browsers, and the interface documentation is available to anyone for free, and you've got a winning combination.
Wikipedia lists 14 free/OSS schematic capture programs. Almost universally, they are good in some aspects and fall short in others. For example: "Good graphics but lousy component library interface, but the library support will have to wait 'cause there's a ton of things we need which are more important". (Makes it 'kind of hard to use.)
With a universal canvas, people can get on board with ONE system so that everyone can pull the rope in the same direction. The fractured landscape of programs can be replaced by a single interface where people use their expertise to improve the system in the area in which they have expertise.
This should happen more often. There's a ton of competing GUI applications out there which could be consolidated into a single browser-implemented version, taking the best parts of each.
It seems to me that a capability model is the right solution.
Current OS access methods are woefully primitive and difficult to manage. To take two examples:
1) If you can write a file, you can make an executable
On windows, notepad can save a file as foo.exe, and you have an executable. On linux it's different but just as simple.
Very few programs actually need the capability to generate executables (the compiler, and the application installer, for instance). Allowing any and all programs to make executables along with regular file access means that any executable can be compromised into dropping malware onto your system.
Consider, for example, malware being sent around in pdf files or possibly image (ie - jpg) files.
A better model grants "can write executables" as a capability that is granted only to the programs that actually need it.
2) If an application can write a file, it can write a file anywhere any *other* application can write a file.
On windows and linux, file access is inherited from the user. This means, for example, that a program run by an administrator can write files virtually anywhere. To install an application means that you must trust the installation program because it can put anything anywhere.
A capability model could restrict a program to its install directory (c:\Program files\) and forbid access to system directories. This would prevent malware from being installed alongside good programs, and removing malware would be much easier (just delete the application install directory).
It sounds like we've finally come up with modern security models. This should make everyone safer, and perhaps completely eliminate malware.
When that's all done the answer will come back that it doesn't work at all, and you've just wasted $20M. So, you start all over again and burn through another $20M, and then do that another 5-10X until you get lucky.
Yep. It definitely won't work, because we know that things never change and there's no other possible way that things can be done. You probably didn't think Wikipedia was a good idea either.
It's obvious that the current system is flawed, and easily argued that the system is ineffective. We need other options.
You're unwilling to try new approaches, and you don't think anything will come of it. Fine, you're welcome to your opinion.
But we need change. We need it so much in so many different areas that we're willing to give up a tiny bit of safety to take a chance on something better. The chances of going bankrupt because of an idiot doctor, an inattentive nurse, or a heartless insurance company are so high that the risk/reward equation is heavily tipped in the other direction.
Doctors are allowed to try experimental treatments on their own patients. I see no reason why an open-source drug company couldn't partner with some meticulous and well-meaning doctors who are willing to try something different on the off-chance that it works out.
With full knowledge and consent of the patient, I don't see anything wrong with this.
And that's just off the top of my head. I'm sure there are other approaches to be taken...
All the anecdotal evidence posted as a result of this one article, and you still can't see the forest for the trees.
I'd love it if a caring, smart, motivated professional would take the time to diagnose my ills when I have them - I truly would.
The problem is that the professionals are neither motivated, smart, nor professional. Let me break that down for you in easy pieces:
Motivated: By the time you get to see a doctor, he's already got your money. There's no incentive to actually cure you, and every incentive to get you to come back for more appointments. If he makes a wrong diagnosis, you pay for another one. (Hint: Compare with getting your car fixed.)
Smart: As everyone here on this forum and everywhere else in the country are quick to point out, doctors are idiots. Rather than diagnose, they roll dice for your treatment. "Probably <common-problem>, try this and see if it gets better".
Professional: Just as doctors are nominally the best people to diagnose disease, doctors are also the best people to judge other doctors. And yet, issues of mistake or malpractice are generally hidden from public view by the doctors themselves. It's impossible to judge whether someone is a bad doctor, or a good doctor who made a rare mistake, or a good doctor doing inherently risky procedures.
Medical care in this country is broken in the way that it is set up. It's an overly expensive inflexible walled-garden. It takes informed choice away from people, and then derides them for attempting to learn more.
It's another one of those entrenched monopolies that we hear so much about. It'll take awhile, but eventually new technology will overtake the entrenched interests and surpass it - Just like the digital camera did to film cameras, iTunes is doing to music, P2P is doing to movies, and Udacity will soon be doing to universities.
If you want demonstrations and "proof of concept" stuff, you want a language which is expressive, not a language which is easy to learn or which generates heavily optimized code.
In the demo phase, you're not really worried about performance. The goal is to have something showing as quickly as possible, and not worry too much about how fast it runs, or how much memory it takes. Overspec your demo system for the time being (ie - make it really fast and install lots of memory), and once you have a reasonable interface go back and recode it in a simpler language which can be more easily optimized.
Languages which are simple to learn (c++, for example) are generally not very expressive. You end up wasting tons of time debugging issues of memory allocation, library interface details, and datatype conversion.
Languages which are expressive are a little harder to learn, but any individual line in the expressive language does a lot more. Since you are writing fewer lines, and since the fewer lines do more, you end up making programs more easily and in less time.
Yes, the programs will execute a little slower, but as mentioned, this is not important in the demo stage. Your productivity will be much higher.
Perl was written by a linguist, not an engineer. As such, it's harder to learn (it's got tons more keywords and context), but once you get the hang of it it's much more expressive. The following single line:
unfolds into several lines of C++, plus a subroutine definition with datatype definitions. The following line:
@Files = <c:/Windows/*.exe>;
can be implemented using one of over a dozen possible library calls in C++, but is builtin in perl. You don't have to look up the library call interface specific to your system.
I hear that Python is also expressive, although I don't use it.
Is this really the best that medical research can come up with?
There's a ton of potential correlations that people have noticed which would be medically relevant if only someone would take the time to check them out.
How about looking into the supplements people take to see if they have any effect? Not just the "trace doses on a population of subjects with a known genetic cause seems to have no effect" kind of study, but a real studies which could validate or dismiss the various claims that people make about supplements.
Does taking extra vitamin D correlate [inversely] with SAD? Or depression in general? How about correlating people who take iodine supplements with depression? Do magnesium supplements help? Does vitamin D help prevent cancer?
How about looking into diseases and conditions for which there is no known cause? Post prandial syndrome? Keratolysis exfoliativa? How about eliminating one or more proposed "possible causes", thus encouraging people to look elsewhere and to not spend money on treatments which can have no effect?
The research in the article has little obvious significance, throws very little light on what appears to be a non-problem, and since there is no sense of importance it doesn't inform policy. (Is this a problem? Should we be concerned? Does this cry out for regulation?)
By way of contrast, Erin Brockovich is looking into an apparent disease (or condition) affecting teenagers in western NY. It's salient, important, and useful both from a medical and political perspective. Even if she finds nothing, her research will eliminate one or more proposed causes.
Shouldn't we be doing that type of research? You know - the type that actually tries to help people?
Well, let's see here. Maybe not *in* the US, but *by* the US:
you can be gunned down by Apache helicopters for peacefully assembling you can be thrown into indefinite jail on the word of a paid informant If you are a foreign leader, you can be deposed and hung or deposed and brought into the US to stand trial for breaking US laws If you are a foreign citizen, you can be extradited and put in jail for breaking civil law If you are a US citizen the president can have you killed by the CIA You can be tortured by the US (for some definitions of torture) You can be shipped to another country and tortured (for all definitions of torture)
I dunno, it's a tough choice. Is Iran worse than the US because it visits harsh penalties on a few people, or is the US worse because it's actions are milder but more widespread?
Because, as we know, we can only oppose one evil at a time. Comparing the relative evil helps us to make that choice.
Yes, let's go back to working within the system because that has worked so well in the recent past.
Have you been paying the slightest bit of attention?
Do you honestly believe that educating the government will work when the entire SOPA blackout didn't?
All attempts at working within the system have failed. It's time to try other avenues.
Anonymous has chosen to promote change in their own way. It may work, it may not... but at least it has the *possibility* of working. We now know for certain that all the "right" ways will fail.
Perhaps someone should come up with a system similar to kickstarter, where people can donate money to fund the opponent of congressmen they don't like.
Lamar Smith introduced SOPA and is coming up for reelection this year (I think). Perhaps people should pledge money to a fund which will be given to his opponent, as a response.
Perhaps someone should start a super-PAC org and take donations to air ads against him.
There are lots of other things we could do - we just need some creativity.
This is the turning point in the battle between the forces of freedom and subjugation.
If the mobilized forces of the internet cannot prevent SOPA-style legislation, then it will be unarguably clear that working within the system will not work. It's the final last-ditch effort of the people to try to prevent oppression using lawful means.
When people tell us that we should "write our congressman", we can point to this incident.
When people tell us that we should "use the power of the vote", we can point to this incident.
When people tell us that we should not break the law or otherwise ignore the rules, we can point to this incident.
This incident will have far-reaching effects on the actions people take in the future. It's our "declaration of independence" moment. The results of this incident will determine whether in the future, people should simply ignore the government and feel good about it.
Losing access to your data is only one of the points to be made here.
There's also the question of the government having access to your information. With one blanket warrant (the website), the government now has access to all the files of all users, whether infringing or not.
This is roughly akin to the government getting a search warrant for a bank, and rooting around in all the safety deposit boxes.
Another question relates to the security of the data.
As I understand it, MegaUpload allows users to choose who has access to their data. If your data was valuable, what happens if that value is lost due to the feds losing control over it?
Does the government guarantee the safety of the data? Can the government be sued if your trade secrets mysteriously find their way to the hands of your competitors? Or to China?
Indicting the owners of MegaUpload is one thing, but every way you look at it the seizure of the data is an infringement of people's rights.
No, this is not our 3-part government working as expected, it's the new style of government aborning. With the rise of the internet and ubiquitous communications, the public at last has a way to influence government decisions.
We see it here in its early form.
At the moment the effect is fairly weak - Obama is only taking a position because he wants public support for reelection.
But despite self-serving motives, he is taking notice and he is opposing legislation, largely because of widespread grassroots opposition.
This will be the wave of the future. If community opinion, widely distributed and echoed on the internet, can presage community action, it will become increasingly difficult for political corruption. Corporations and politicians will be unable to do "bad" things for fear of being discovered by hackers, publicized by social media, and punished by public backlash.
It's the new boss. Curiously different from the old boss.
Your objection would be a valid one... if growing trees removed CO2 at the same rate as this method.
If these systems can remove 1000x the CO2 in a year than trees, then it may be more effective to use these systems.
If these systems can be automated and largely left unattended, then it may be more effective to use these systems.
If these systems can remove CO2 in areas which are *not* conducive to growing trees (much of the Australian outback, much of the southwest US, the various deserts of the world), then it may be more effective to use these systems.
So you're saying that biodiesel from advanced algae farming cannot supply the country's needs? What's your evidence?
I once calculated that the area needed to supply the entire US supply of gasoline per year to be a square 20 miles on a side.
This was a back-of-the-envelope calculation and was just to get a ballpark estimate. It didn't take into consideration access roads between the systems, for instance and transportation costs.
There are plenty of areas in the US which get a lot of sunlight and are otherwise unused - the Great Basin area of Nevada comes to mind. Much more than the 20x20 mile square is available.
You said "I hate to break it to you"... what unknown secret are you referring to? The fact that we're running out of oil? That bit was patently obvious.
It's not a show-stopper, just another problem that needs to be solved.
Everyone has this idea that the "obvious" solution to our carbon/energy/global warming problems is to reduce consumption. I'm especially amused by authors who try to "guilt" the US into reducing consumption in order to let other cultures have a "fair share" at dwindling resources.
This is poppycock, and it's the wrong solution.
The reason the US has such a high consumption is that people *like* this level of consumption and there should be nothing wrong with that.
The solution is not for us to go back to the stone age, but to arrange things so that everyone can have this level of consumption and not have to worry about it.
What will this entail? Some way to continually produce fossil fuels sufficient for our transportation needs, some way to produce electricity for our home needs, some way to produce food for our nutrition needs, and some way to produce biochemical resources sufficient for our manufacturing needs.
This is, of course, unsustainable without recycling, but we also have to include gas (as in atmospheric gas) recycling as well as solid recycling. That probably means harvesting CO2 from the atmosphere and using it as a resource along with recycled waste from physical items.
This discovery could be one step towards that solution. Imaging a solar reflector dish with a core of CO2 capturing material. In a sunny environment (Arizona, Utah, Nevada) this system could capture CO2 at night (low temperatures) and release it during the day when the temperature rises. Other than moving the gases this would be largely automated and require no moving parts.
What to do with the CO2: How about using it to flood a greenhouse to promote plant growth?
I'm not saying that there's a simple and easy solution which fixes all our problems, but it's obvious what the fix should look like, and this discovery is just one more baby-step towards that goal.
Even if we have no present use for the captured CO2, it's an exciting development that puts us directly closer to solving our most pressing issues.
It wasn't for entertainment, and it wasn't intended to be a flamewar.
There is no way to choose between candidates of any party because they won't take a stand on any issue.
This is important. To foment change in the future we need an answer for those people who still have faith in the system.
Of the myriad ways we have to change things, the majority can be dismissed simply because they are not 100% perfect. Vigilantes might make a mistake, innocent workers are affected more than the directors, the TSA agents aren't to blame, and so on.
What people don't realize is that there really is no other choice. There is no systemic way for people to express discontent, to put pressure on on our leaders to change things. We can't vote rationally because the candidates keep their views hidden.
Of the candidates, do any of them advocate:
1) Strong financial regulation? 2) Pulling out of Afghanistan? 3) A policy about carbon emissions? 4) A policy for future energy? 5) Health care? 6) Tax reform?
Ignore geek issues - these are things that are important to everyone in the country.
And yet - you can't use these to guide your hand in the voting booth. There is no way to judge what anyone will do with these issues if elected.
This needs to be publicized. It's the reason why people express their discontent in the "wrong" way.
Slashdot Mirror
Constant monitoring could be the next big thing in medicine.
We currently diagnose based on discrete measurements compared with cutoffs - "averages" and numbers which are rounded to easily-remembered values. For example, Type-II diabetes is indicated when glucose is over 200mg/dl 2 hours after an oral glucose test. ...that seems like an awfully contrived number, simply because it's so easy to remember.
Instead of single point cutoff measurements, maybe we could get better diagnoses if we could see the change in values over time. Perhaps a more accurate diagnosis of diabetes would come from characterizing the slope of several months worth of glucose measurements.
With the rise of cheap microprocessors, I think there's a lot of opportunity for medical monitoring. Something like a wristwatch which records 10 types of measurements every hour. Of course I don't know how this could be done - perhaps spectroscopic measurements of reflected light through the skin, or terahertz wave reflections.
I've often wondered if it's possible to make a USB peripheral that records to a TI Chronos wristwatch for later display.
I bet there's lots of interesting features there just waiting to be discovered.
prior art?
As far as I can tell, OpenInvention has no no way to economically (as in "money") encourage membership. It's entirely voluntary.
For this to work, you need the economic incentives. As in the Mark Twain story, if members were allowed to work with non-members, then the union would fail.
The system only worked because the union members banded together to say that they would not work with a non-member. Non-members found it less hassle to join than lose the opportunity.
Additionally, a company can advertize a discount to customers who are members. If it's easy and free to become a member, this would cause their ranks to grow.
I don't see any of this at the OpenInvention project. It's nice and all, but it's only a feel-good voluntary wishful-thinking 'kinda thing.
OpenInvention doesn't have a way to incentivize membership.
Suppose some entity puts all of their software patents into a pool. For the sake of argument, let's say Google and IBM get together and pool all of their software patents into a sort of "co-op". Anyone who is a member of the co-op gets to use any and all the patents in the pool, royalty free.
Then they open up membership in the co-op.
Anyone who wants can join the co-op, with the following requirements:
1) They donate their own software patents (if any) to the pool
2) They agree not to sue any other co-op member over a software patent
And the following benefits:
1) They can use any patent in the pool royalty free
2) They won't be sued by anyone else in the co-op
Here's the best part: you can be a member of the co-op even if you *don't* have patents to donate. Membership is open to anyone - engineers, lawyers, businessmen... anyone.
With the big players taking the lead (Google and IBM in our example), everyone can now charge more or pay less, based on whether the other party is a co-op member.
Engineer looking for a job? We offer higher salaries to members of the co-op.
Vendor looking to sell? We discount our rates for members of the co-op.
Everyone in the group could adjust their prices depending on whether the other party is a member. The price adjustment reflects the "cost of doing business" with a particular class of people. The same as charging higher health insurance rates for smokers, or higher car insurance rates to teenagers.
Mark Twain once wrote about a small group of riverboat captains who banded together in this way, and effectively forced everyone to join their union. Initially no outsider wanted to join, but the members all agreed *not* to work with anyone who was not also a member. Captains found it easier to join the union than turn down a work opportunity.
The co-op model would also help stifle vague and overreaching patents. If someone in the co-op is sued (by an outsider), the member can refer to similar patents from the co-op which cover the same idea. Since in theory two patents cannot cover the same idea, the member can claim that the usage falls more within the co-op description than the troll-patent description.
If people could do this and stick to their guns, we would eliminate software patents in a couple of years.
Most comment systems are badly implemented. The builders implement whatever they think would work, and when it fails they throw up their hands and say "it can't work". Their main purpose isn't the commentary, so they have no incentive to make a good system.
Slashdot, on the other hand, directly relies on commentary. As a result, they have gone through several rounds of "we need to make this better". The current system is now robust and useful.
For example, many sites allow anyone to add commentary to a story. With no filtering, these tend to fill up with noise posts. Beyond the typical spamming, random users simply don't add much to the conversation. Agreement/disagreement with the points made, anecdotal evidence, "me too" posts, and so on. Lots of well-meaning posts with no substance.
Many sites require an admin to approve the comments. The admins tend to only allow comments which are favorable to a particular viewpoint. Posts which support the article, amplify or extend the central ideas - all well and good, but generally uninformative. You don't get a lot of contrast from Fox News, for instance.
Slashdot has the best of both worlds - the cream floats to the top. An insightful post will be modded up for all to see, while the noise gets relegated to the dungeons of +0 Troll.
Furthermore, since Slashdot itself isn't doing the moderation (with one notable exception), well written opposing viewpoints get modded up and stay there.
Reading Slashdot is, dare I say it, a mind expanding experience. It's a great way to get exposed to alternative viewpoints and learn their logical strengths and fallacies. It's much more enlightening than any of the mainstream newspapers.
This isn't a game or something that is fixed by simply throwing money at. It is a social problem first and foremost. The culture of this country does not appreciate education, and the idea of studying as hard as South Koreans or Japanese is seen as if it were child abuse or something like that.
>SNIP<
Do that and in a generation you'll see a change, all without throwing the coffers out of the window and without looking for the next e-silver bullet.
Wow, it's a good thing you're here and reading this! It sounds like you have this all figured out!
Increasing the number of hours, having children stand when the teacher enters and leaves the room, de-emphasizing college in favor of vocational training - all of that makes perfect sense!
It's almost like, dare I say it, you've got the answers in hand! All of your suggestions strike at the very heart of why education sucks in this country - have you contacted Peter yet? You should, you know...
Three things, though.
Firstly, children are naturally learners. Given the chance, they will drink from the fountain of information for as much as they can hold, and then come back for more the next day. Anyone who has raised children knows this - they are insatiably curious and inventive and experimental.
Secondly, learning is inherently fun and rewarding. This is an evolutionary survival trait, and is the reason for point #1 above. It takes a decade or more of forced, spoon-fed boredom before they come to associate learning with pain.
Thirdly, today we know a whole lot more about the psychology and physiology of learning than we did when the school system was first implemented. For example, do you know why the standard courses include trigonometry and not, for example, probability? Trig is important, but Prob is much more useful in daily life.
Your points are just a rehash of the authoritarian view commonly held by the American school system. It amounts to nothing more than insanity: since the techniques aren't working, let's do them even more!
The post, and Peter in particular, is looking for alternatives to the current system, not more of the same. It expresses the opinion that maybe there are ways that are better than what we are using.
More of the same won't solve anything. STFU.
The inquisition (yes, that one) was an expense account scam. Since the accused was required to pay for their own inquisition, the system simply padded the expenses to the limit of the available money.
The TSA is the same thing. People wail and moan about how stupid/intrusive/incompetent/useless they are, and miss the larger picture.
The TSA sends money to corporations, and the corporations grease the political wheels.
There's no rocket science, no ulterior motive, nothing else to consider. Like the inquisition, the TSA doesn't need to justify expenditures with usefulness or effectiveness. The more they spend, the more they get to spend. Cause and effect.
Why do you think they spend billions on technology, but pay only slightly above the minimum wage and spend so little on training?
People keep grousing about the TSA as if that will make a difference. It won't. They have been generally incompetent from the start, and there's nothing that people can do to unseat them from their position.
Voting hasn't helped. Contacting representatives hasn't helped. Complaining to the TSA or their employees hasn't helped. Legal action hasn't helped.
There's one obvious remaining course of action we can take to rein in all the government waste and corruption. Can anyone think of things to try before we take that last drastic step? I'm out of ideas...
We've really created a hostile environment for anyone wanting to study science as a kid.
Can't give your kid a chemistry set, those don't exist. Can't buy chemicals, you might be making a bomb.
For several years (after 9/11) you couldn't buy a model rocket engine, 'cause of course you could use it for terrorism somehow.
Until recently you couldn't build a UAV. Well, you could build it, but flying it was illegal.
Students are arrested if they bring electronics projects to school (Can't find the link, remember reading about this).
Having canning jars and a bag of fertilizer in your car can get you arrested for having bomb-making materials.
Taking apart a smoke detector (and using it to demonstrate alpha radiation) is a "grievous offense" (actual NRC term) and can get you raided and have *all* your lab equipment taken away.
Your hackerspace will be shut down instead of "given 30 days for compliance" as would be the case for a company.
Really... what's left? Mathematics? I'm surprised that we have *any* young people interested in science ATM. We make it nigh impossible and come down hard on them when they do.
The annual budget of NASA is around $18 billion. For comparison, the annual revenue of WalMart is $421, Toyota is $228 and AT&T is $124 (billion).
The budget of Bell Labs peaked at around $3.6 billion in today's dollars.
NASA claims to generate a ton of innovation which helps to drive the economy. I see no reason not to privatize NASA by running it in the same way as Bell Labs - work on all sorts of stuff, but sometimes direct your focus on useful stuff for both NASA's main mission and economic innovation.
NASA should be self supporting. Whenever they uncover something which would be useful in the marketplace, they should market it and get some return for the effort.
Over time we could slowly wean them away from the government teat, and allow them to be self directed. Instead of wasting gobs of cash on political projects with no good scientific mandate (*cough* space station *cough*), they could choose their own course and focus on things which actual scientists think is useful.
Licensing, patents, renting expertise, products (make and sell satellites), and charging for access to space come immediately to mind. Given the cost of sending a satellite into space, would it really be that hard to take in $18 billion in revenue?
I dunno, I'm probably not taking human nature into account.
In order to form an opinion on the matter, it would be useful to know if the treatments have any effect.
You know... evidence based science?
Model-based science is all the rage nowadays, and that we can't allow anything to happen unless we have a clear understanding of why it should happen before we try.
The debate as to whether these people should be labelled snake-oil salesmen or experimentalists would seem to rest on this. Is this government intrusion into people's right to choose, or a regulatory agency stepping in to keep people safe?
We need to know the risks and potential benefits in addition to the opinions of an insular, jargonized profession.
It's not always about trusting the experts.
The browser is the new GUI. This is a good thing.
Instead of the dozen-or-so windows/widgets/mechanism systems we have now, we have one canvas with one interface managed by a standards community and improved over time.
To take a simple example, pick any of the windows systems (Tk, Gnome, Microsoft API) and consider how difficult it is to display text on the screen, including placement, size, font, color, and so on.
Now consider that same operation using the DOM model in Javascript: it's a simple English-like interface where you describe in a couple of words what you want to happen. Easy.
Add to this the fact that browsers work the same across all systems, the markup works largely the same across all browsers, and the interface documentation is available to anyone for free, and you've got a winning combination.
Wikipedia lists 14 free/OSS schematic capture programs. Almost universally, they are good in some aspects and fall short in others. For example: "Good graphics but lousy component library interface, but the library support will have to wait 'cause there's a ton of things we need which are more important". (Makes it 'kind of hard to use.)
With a universal canvas, people can get on board with ONE system so that everyone can pull the rope in the same direction. The fractured landscape of programs can be replaced by a single interface where people use their expertise to improve the system in the area in which they have expertise.
This should happen more often. There's a ton of competing GUI applications out there which could be consolidated into a single browser-implemented version, taking the best parts of each.
I hope to see many more of these in the future.
It seems to me that a capability model is the right solution.
Current OS access methods are woefully primitive and difficult to manage. To take two examples:
1) If you can write a file, you can make an executable
On windows, notepad can save a file as foo.exe, and you have an executable. On linux it's different but just as simple.
Very few programs actually need the capability to generate executables (the compiler, and the application installer, for instance). Allowing any and all programs to make executables along with regular file access means that any executable can be compromised into dropping malware onto your system.
Consider, for example, malware being sent around in pdf files or possibly image (ie - jpg) files.
A better model grants "can write executables" as a capability that is granted only to the programs that actually need it.
2) If an application can write a file, it can write a file anywhere any *other* application can write a file.
On windows and linux, file access is inherited from the user. This means, for example, that a program run by an administrator can write files virtually anywhere. To install an application means that you must trust the installation program because it can put anything anywhere.
A capability model could restrict a program to its install directory (c:\Program files\) and forbid access to system directories. This would prevent malware from being installed alongside good programs, and removing malware would be much easier (just delete the application install directory).
It sounds like we've finally come up with modern security models. This should make everyone safer, and perhaps completely eliminate malware.
When that's all done the answer will come back that it doesn't work at all, and you've just wasted $20M. So, you start all over again and burn through another $20M, and then do that another 5-10X until you get lucky.
Yep. It definitely won't work, because we know that things never change and there's no other possible way that things can be done. You probably didn't think Wikipedia was a good idea either.
It's obvious that the current system is flawed, and easily argued that the system is ineffective. We need other options.
You're unwilling to try new approaches, and you don't think anything will come of it. Fine, you're welcome to your opinion.
But we need change. We need it so much in so many different areas that we're willing to give up a tiny bit of safety to take a chance on something better. The chances of going bankrupt because of an idiot doctor, an inattentive nurse, or a heartless insurance company are so high that the risk/reward equation is heavily tipped in the other direction.
Doctors are allowed to try experimental treatments on their own patients. I see no reason why an open-source drug company couldn't partner with some meticulous and well-meaning doctors who are willing to try something different on the off-chance that it works out.
With full knowledge and consent of the patient, I don't see anything wrong with this.
And that's just off the top of my head. I'm sure there are other approaches to be taken...
But we won't know unless we try them.
All the anecdotal evidence posted as a result of this one article, and you still can't see the forest for the trees.
I'd love it if a caring, smart, motivated professional would take the time to diagnose my ills when I have them - I truly would.
The problem is that the professionals are neither motivated, smart, nor professional. Let me break that down for you in easy pieces:
Medical care in this country is broken in the way that it is set up. It's an overly expensive inflexible walled-garden. It takes informed choice away from people, and then derides them for attempting to learn more.
It's another one of those entrenched monopolies that we hear so much about. It'll take awhile, but eventually new technology will overtake the entrenched interests and surpass it - Just like the digital camera did to film cameras, iTunes is doing to music, P2P is doing to movies, and Udacity will soon be doing to universities.
It's a bubble-burst whose time has come.
If you want demonstrations and "proof of concept" stuff, you want a language which is expressive, not a language which is easy to learn or which generates heavily optimized code.
In the demo phase, you're not really worried about performance. The goal is to have something showing as quickly as possible, and not worry too much about how fast it runs, or how much memory it takes. Overspec your demo system for the time being (ie - make it really fast and install lots of memory), and once you have a reasonable interface go back and recode it in a simpler language which can be more easily optimized.
Languages which are simple to learn (c++, for example) are generally not very expressive. You end up wasting tons of time debugging issues of memory allocation, library interface details, and datatype conversion.
Languages which are expressive are a little harder to learn, but any individual line in the expressive language does a lot more. Since you are writing fewer lines, and since the fewer lines do more, you end up making programs more easily and in less time.
Yes, the programs will execute a little slower, but as mentioned, this is not important in the demo stage. Your productivity will be much higher.
Perl was written by a linguist, not an engineer. As such, it's harder to learn (it's got tons more keywords and context), but once you get the hang of it it's much more expressive. The following single line:
@Lines = sort { $a->{Name} cmp $b->{Name} } @Lines;
unfolds into several lines of C++, plus a subroutine definition with datatype definitions. The following line:
@Files = <c:/Windows/*.exe>;
can be implemented using one of over a dozen possible library calls in C++, but is builtin in perl. You don't have to look up the library call interface specific to your system.
I hear that Python is also expressive, although I don't use it.
Is this really the best that medical research can come up with?
There's a ton of potential correlations that people have noticed which would be medically relevant if only someone would take the time to check them out.
How about looking into the supplements people take to see if they have any effect? Not just the "trace doses on a population of subjects with a known genetic cause seems to have no effect" kind of study, but a real studies which could validate or dismiss the various claims that people make about supplements.
Does taking extra vitamin D correlate [inversely] with SAD? Or depression in general? How about correlating people who take iodine supplements with depression? Do magnesium supplements help? Does vitamin D help prevent cancer?
How about looking into diseases and conditions for which there is no known cause? Post prandial syndrome? Keratolysis exfoliativa? How about eliminating one or more proposed "possible causes", thus encouraging people to look elsewhere and to not spend money on treatments which can have no effect?
The research in the article has little obvious significance, throws very little light on what appears to be a non-problem, and since there is no sense of importance it doesn't inform policy. (Is this a problem? Should we be concerned? Does this cry out for regulation?)
By way of contrast, Erin Brockovich is looking into an apparent disease (or condition) affecting teenagers in western NY. It's salient, important, and useful both from a medical and political perspective. Even if she finds nothing, her research will eliminate one or more proposed causes.
Shouldn't we be doing that type of research? You know - the type that actually tries to help people?
Well, let's see here. Maybe not *in* the US, but *by* the US:
you can be gunned down by Apache helicopters for peacefully assembling
you can be thrown into indefinite jail on the word of a paid informant
If you are a foreign leader, you can be deposed and hung
or deposed and brought into the US to stand trial for breaking US laws
If you are a foreign citizen, you can be extradited and put in jail for breaking civil law
If you are a US citizen the president can have you killed by the CIA
You can be tortured by the US (for some definitions of torture)
You can be shipped to another country and tortured (for all definitions of torture)
I dunno, it's a tough choice. Is Iran worse than the US because it visits harsh penalties on a few people, or is the US worse because it's actions are milder but more widespread?
Because, as we know, we can only oppose one evil at a time. Comparing the relative evil helps us to make that choice.
Oh, and let's not forget China.
Yes, let's go back to working within the system because that has worked so well in the recent past.
Have you been paying the slightest bit of attention?
Do you honestly believe that educating the government will work when the entire SOPA blackout didn't?
All attempts at working within the system have failed. It's time to try other avenues.
Anonymous has chosen to promote change in their own way. It may work, it may not... but at least it has the *possibility* of working. We now know for certain that all the "right" ways will fail.
Perhaps someone should come up with a system similar to kickstarter, where people can donate money to fund the opponent of congressmen they don't like.
Lamar Smith introduced SOPA and is coming up for reelection this year (I think). Perhaps people should pledge money to a fund which will be given to his opponent, as a response.
Perhaps someone should start a super-PAC org and take donations to air ads against him.
There are lots of other things we could do - we just need some creativity.
This is the turning point in the battle between the forces of freedom and subjugation.
If the mobilized forces of the internet cannot prevent SOPA-style legislation, then it will be unarguably clear that working within the system will not work. It's the final last-ditch effort of the people to try to prevent oppression using lawful means.
When people tell us that we should "write our congressman", we can point to this incident.
When people tell us that we should "use the power of the vote", we can point to this incident.
When people tell us that we should not break the law or otherwise ignore the rules, we can point to this incident.
This incident will have far-reaching effects on the actions people take in the future. It's our "declaration of independence" moment. The results of this incident will determine whether in the future, people should simply ignore the government and feel good about it.
It'll be fun to watch.
Losing access to your data is only one of the points to be made here.
There's also the question of the government having access to your information. With one blanket warrant (the website), the government now has access to all the files of all users, whether infringing or not.
This is roughly akin to the government getting a search warrant for a bank, and rooting around in all the safety deposit boxes.
Another question relates to the security of the data.
As I understand it, MegaUpload allows users to choose who has access to their data. If your data was valuable, what happens if that value is lost due to the feds losing control over it?
Does the government guarantee the safety of the data? Can the government be sued if your trade secrets mysteriously find their way to the hands of your competitors? Or to China?
Indicting the owners of MegaUpload is one thing, but every way you look at it the seizure of the data is an infringement of people's rights.
No, this is not our 3-part government working as expected, it's the new style of government aborning. With the rise of the internet and ubiquitous communications, the public at last has a way to influence government decisions.
We see it here in its early form.
At the moment the effect is fairly weak - Obama is only taking a position because he wants public support for reelection.
But despite self-serving motives, he is taking notice and he is opposing legislation, largely because of widespread grassroots opposition.
This will be the wave of the future. If community opinion, widely distributed and echoed on the internet, can presage community action, it will become increasingly difficult for political corruption. Corporations and politicians will be unable to do "bad" things for fear of being discovered by hackers, publicized by social media, and punished by public backlash.
It's the new boss. Curiously different from the old boss.
Your objection would be a valid one... if growing trees removed CO2 at the same rate as this method.
If these systems can remove 1000x the CO2 in a year than trees, then it may be more effective to use these systems.
If these systems can be automated and largely left unattended, then it may be more effective to use these systems.
If these systems can remove CO2 in areas which are *not* conducive to growing trees (much of the Australian outback, much of the southwest US, the various deserts of the world), then it may be more effective to use these systems.
So you're saying that biodiesel from advanced algae farming cannot supply the country's needs? What's your evidence?
I once calculated that the area needed to supply the entire US supply of gasoline per year to be a square 20 miles on a side.
This was a back-of-the-envelope calculation and was just to get a ballpark estimate. It didn't take into consideration access roads between the systems, for instance and transportation costs.
There are plenty of areas in the US which get a lot of sunlight and are otherwise unused - the Great Basin area of Nevada comes to mind. Much more than the 20x20 mile square is available.
You said "I hate to break it to you"... what unknown secret are you referring to? The fact that we're running out of oil? That bit was patently obvious.
It's not a show-stopper, just another problem that needs to be solved.
Everyone has this idea that the "obvious" solution to our carbon/energy/global warming problems is to reduce consumption. I'm especially amused by authors who try to "guilt" the US into reducing consumption in order to let other cultures have a "fair share" at dwindling resources.
This is poppycock, and it's the wrong solution.
The reason the US has such a high consumption is that people *like* this level of consumption and there should be nothing wrong with that.
The solution is not for us to go back to the stone age, but to arrange things so that everyone can have this level of consumption and not have to worry about it.
What will this entail? Some way to continually produce fossil fuels sufficient for our transportation needs, some way to produce electricity for our home needs, some way to produce food for our nutrition needs, and some way to produce biochemical resources sufficient for our manufacturing needs.
This is, of course, unsustainable without recycling, but we also have to include gas (as in atmospheric gas) recycling as well as solid recycling. That probably means harvesting CO2 from the atmosphere and using it as a resource along with recycled waste from physical items.
This discovery could be one step towards that solution. Imaging a solar reflector dish with a core of CO2 capturing material. In a sunny environment (Arizona, Utah, Nevada) this system could capture CO2 at night (low temperatures) and release it during the day when the temperature rises. Other than moving the gases this would be largely automated and require no moving parts.
What to do with the CO2: How about using it to flood a greenhouse to promote plant growth?
I'm not saying that there's a simple and easy solution which fixes all our problems, but it's obvious what the fix should look like, and this discovery is just one more baby-step towards that goal.
Even if we have no present use for the captured CO2, it's an exciting development that puts us directly closer to solving our most pressing issues.
It wasn't for entertainment, and it wasn't intended to be a flamewar.
There is no way to choose between candidates of any party because they won't take a stand on any issue.
This is important. To foment change in the future we need an answer for those people who still have faith in the system.
Of the myriad ways we have to change things, the majority can be dismissed simply because they are not 100% perfect. Vigilantes might make a mistake, innocent workers are affected more than the directors, the TSA agents aren't to blame, and so on.
What people don't realize is that there really is no other choice. There is no systemic way for people to express discontent, to put pressure on on our leaders to change things. We can't vote rationally because the candidates keep their views hidden.
Of the candidates, do any of them advocate:
1) Strong financial regulation?
2) Pulling out of Afghanistan?
3) A policy about carbon emissions?
4) A policy for future energy?
5) Health care?
6) Tax reform?
Ignore geek issues - these are things that are important to everyone in the country.
And yet - you can't use these to guide your hand in the voting booth. There is no way to judge what anyone will do with these issues if elected.
This needs to be publicized. It's the reason why people express their discontent in the "wrong" way.