Okay, besides the fact that this is the new scientist, the weekly world news of scientific discovery, that doesn't make this theory of prolific life in the universe any less valid than the theory of no other life in the universe.
Life on earth is prolific. There are no enviornments on earth which humanity has yet to explore which do not contain some form of life. Heck we've even disocvered complex ecosystems at the bottom of the ocean sustaining themselves no through the sun's energy but from chemical processes.
One day humanity is going to look back on the idea that earth is it and think of it in the same frame of mind that we now think of the age old theory that the earth is flat and you can fall off the edge.
When we do find alien life it may not resemble anything we know, but it will be everywhere.
Although the article is quite flawed the basic underlying premise, that bad research is geometrically propogated through inadequate review of sources, has some merit
This propogation reminds me of the myth surrounding history of the bathtub. H.L. Mencken once wrote a joke history of the bathtub to prove a point about the gullability of americans. The funny part is despite the admission that there was no truth whatsoever in the article, because of sources referencing unreviewed sources parts of it are still quoted as fact in modern history textbooks.
A dozen? Is that all? You must not be looking very hard just wander around in the silk market in Beijing (right in front of the american embassy) and when someone comes up to you and whispers "pssst DVD, VCD, CD , CD ROM" say yeah okay. <BR>
IF you are good at haggling, buy 30 of them and act nice, they might even let you know which ones are actual movies and which ones are fakes.
Morals have no place in science, the two mix like milk and lemon juice. Instead of John Q. Public learning the lessons of the plights of galelaio, socrates or the scopes trial, we have scientists afraid of the same sort of reprimand.
On the other hand without dancing around the argument, what is feared in the possibility of a human-mouse hybrid is that a mouse endowed in some small part with basic human genetic material may develop a human soul. An argument, which is basically religeous (read judeo christian) in nature. Well if religeon is to rule our science then we might as well save the time and take the argument straight to the Pope (or some other popular religeous figurehead, my vote is for Bob Dobbs).
The question of a soul in our human mouse hybrid is really a software issue, while the experiment is a hardware issue. But all of medical science is about dealing with hardware issues. The belief that we could endow a mouse with a human soul by introducing human stem cells, falls into the same category of garbage science as slicing Lenin's brain into fine sheets to see what made him such a good communist. Which is not much different than cutting your processor in half and looking at it through a microscope to try and determine what OS you're running.
The usefulness of the research is not what is in question here. A mouse with hardware genetically altered to inculde human elements would be far superior to your normal mouse in predicting the effects of drugs and diseases on humans.
Want an example of moral fear holding back useful scientific research, look no farther than child car safety. To make an effective crash test dummy a human cadaver is needed to run through a crash. By doing this the actual stresses on a human body can be determined and an effective system of sensors and calibrations can be made for the dummy. Unfortunately childern are not simply small adults when it comes to the forces involved in car crash, yet all we use today are smaller versions of adult dummys, greatly reducing car safety for childern. Why? because of the moral outrage at using actual child and infant cadavers in crash tests to build the dummies. Some german scientists tried to do just that in the late eighties and the ensuing moral outrage was so great that the experiments were discontinued and their lab eventually closed.
You broke one of the most important rules of employment. Never Work for free! Not only does it assign a zero value to your time, but it assignes a zero value to the time of anyone doing that task.
The second rule you broke, taking a lesson from M$ here, is that if they need you, you've got them exactly where you want the. Grease it up with vaseline and give it to them good and hard, to the tune of at least $100/ hour for skilled IT consulting
Many people have posted that, "You don't want to hurt your chance to use them as a reference." But then again, you don't want them letting your prospective employer that you're a cheap date either.
finally, for the question of returning to any employer as an employee (and not an independant consultant). Remeber this adage... Old Jobs are like old girlfriends, Never go back
I speak fluent Chinese and Japanese and occasionally moonlight as a professional translator, countless hours of watching Star Trek have lead to extensive hypothesizing on how to construct a universal translator. What's interesting about this article is that is what they're trying to do, but they seem to be going off half cocked.
It's not enough, and that's why I have big doubts about the usefulness of this project, to simply translate between languages with a one to one parity. Babelfish is a good example of the results of this.
Good language keeps in mind that language is completely symbolic and very referential. Words not only change meaning in context - think "booty" pirate treasure vs. "booty" T&A, they often symbolically refer to their use in other contexts, which leads to nuance.
In fact literacy can be though of as the thorough understanding of the nuance of a given phrase. For example if I say, "screw your courage" it not only has meaning in the immediate context, but refers to a line in Macbeth as well. Literate understanding comes only from understanding the references, although without the referential meaning the intended meaning comes across as well. Sometimes referential meaning is direct opposite to the meaning of the words taken alone - translation is tricky business.
Another thing to keep in mind is that whether we are aware of it or not all language has levels of politeness. In English this is often quite subtle: chug -drink - imbibe- quaff, they can all be used to mean the same thing but vary in politeness levels. In Japanese this politeness level in Language is painfully obvious.
Keeping this in mind, a Universal translator, like the one mentioned in the article, could be an effective tool but it would have to be a lot more complicated. First, every word would have to be assigned a politeness level. Second, multiple meanings would have to be assigned to each word for multiple contexts. This would go a long way to moving something like this away from the babelfish problem without having to do anything like correlating literary references between cultures.
Unfortunately, here they seem to be trying to create a distributed babelfish focused on developing a dictionary for obscure languages using the labor of people who probably aren't even on the Internet.
I speak fluent Chinese and Japanese and occasionally moonlight as a professional translator, countless hours of watching Star Trek have lead to extensive hypothesizing on how to construct a universal translator. What's interesting about this article is that is what they're trying to do, but they seem to be going off half cocked.
It's not enough, and that's why I have big doubts about the usefulness of this project, to simply translate between languages with a one to one parity. Babelfish is a good example of the results of this.
Good language keeps in mind that language is completely symbolic and very referential. Words not only change meaning in context - think "booty" pirate treasure vs. "booty" T&A, they often symbolically refer to their use in other contexts, which leads to nuance.
In fact literacy can be though of as the thorough understanding of the nuance of a given phrase. For example if I say, "screw your courage" it not only has meaning in the immediate context, but refers to a line in Macbeth as well. Literate understanding comes only from understanding the references, although without the referential meaning the intended meaning comes across as well. Sometimes referential meaning is direct opposite to the meaning of the words taken alone - translation is tricky business.
Another thing to keep in mind is that whether we are aware of it or not all language has levels of politeness. In English this is often quite subtle: chug -drink - imbibe- quaff, they can all be used to mean the same thing but vary in politeness levels. In Japanese this politeness level in Language is painfully obvious.
Keeping this in mind, a Universal translator, like the one mentioned in the article, could be an effective tool but it would have to be a lot more complicated. First, every word would have to be assigned a politeness level. Second, multiple meanings would have to be assigned to each word for multiple contexts. This would go a long way to moving something like this away from the babelfish problem without having to do anything like correlating literary references between cultures.
Unfortunately, here they seem to be trying to create a distributed babelfish focused on developing a dictionary for obscure languages using the labor of people who probably aren't even on the Internet.
I'm glad to see Baltimore at the top of the list. It's definately one of America's more underrated cities. Cost of living is darn cheap and it has a rather vibrant small business tech community. And besides, if significant migration from Sanfrancisco occours, it will drive up the value of my house:-)
The making and disposal of computers is dirty business, with all sorts of heavy metals and whatnot involved in the process. It's about time that we get taxed to insure their proper disposal. Here on slashdot, we always lament the lack of corporate social responsibility. It looks rather childish to lament that same sort of responsibility being placed on us.
So china plans on sending a human into space... Hmmm Oh my god! The Chinese are catching up on american technology, they're only 40 years behind our space program!!
I always find it interesting how subjectively the Slashdot community reads the news. I've lived in China for most of the last three years doing manufacturing management, which has taken me to many a middle of nowhere china and big city alike. And it constantly amazes me the kinds of myths that float around regarding Internet use in China.
First, Internet cafés are ubiquitous, and yes most of them are dimly lit holes with 12 computers sharing one ISDN line, or sometimes a 56k modem. Generally there are no bathrooms, the dimly lit room is filled with cigarette smoke and the whole place is grimy as the bathroom of your local pub. I.e. typical China, outside Beijing/ Shanghai/ Guangzhou. There are of course nice internet cafés in the big cities, like the one in shanghai that proudly displayed the chair President Clinton once sat it to surf the web, but those places are the exception.
Now just like any industry, there's licensing involved and in a Chinese Internet Café that means registering with the Chinese Bureau of Post and Telecommunications. Part of the Café license is the understanding that you'll filter all unsuitable content, which mostly consists of pornography (highly illegal in any form), actual dissident sites (yes they do exist, our government happily cracks down on the same sort of thing here) and yes BIG name foreign media. By big name I mean NY times, CNN, BBC, Washington Post etc. Anything that's local, or my mother wouldn't think of as a news source- i.e. Slashdot, Guerrilla News Network or the Economist, are not filtered at all.
Of course being a big place with a lot of people, regulation of this sort of thing isn't ubiquitous, which means that it's not that difficult to find Cafés that don't filter CNN and what not. They're just officially banned. And of course all bets are off when one uses any sort of proxy. Now the unofficial level of restriction raises and lowers depending on current circumstances. For example when we "accidentally" bombed the Chinese embassy a couple of years ago, the restriction was quite high. Chinese people were pissed at foreigners and the restriction level went up. On the flip side, after the Sept. 11th attack, they had an unofficial moratorium on the restriction of foreign news, which got extended all the way through the APEC conference.
When we hear that the Chinese government cracked down on internet Café's allowing subversive content through, what it generally means is the Cafés were letting in pornography. Most Chinese couldn't give a damn about foreign news, and of the few that do, the number that have the ability to read English is quite small. On the other hand the number of people who would be looking at pornography is quite large.
On average I would even venture to say that the aggregate level of information freedom of PR China is equal to or even greater than that of the United States when one takes into the account the development of intellectual property law. The Chinese didn't even have a concept of property when they opened up 20 years ago, so they sure as heck don't have a concept of IP, something that we're still struggling with, today. Hence buying pirated anything- software, music, movies- is many times easier than buying the officially licensed thing.
None of this is to say that the Chinese aren't being oppressed with regards to their online freedoms; it's just that the oppressors aren't nearly as strict as our own news tells us.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, besides the fact that this is the new scientist, the weekly world news of scientific discovery, that doesn't make this theory of prolific life in the universe any less valid than the theory of no other life in the universe.
Life on earth is prolific. There are no enviornments on earth which humanity has yet to explore which do not contain some form of life. Heck we've even disocvered complex ecosystems at the bottom of the ocean sustaining themselves no through the sun's energy but from chemical processes.
One day humanity is going to look back on the idea that earth is it and think of it in the same frame of mind that we now think of the age old theory that the earth is flat and you can fall off the edge.
When we do find alien life it may not resemble anything we know, but it will be everywhere.
Or one of it's subsideries. GE invented the 1-2-3 system, and has been screwing everyone with it for years.
Although the article is quite flawed the basic underlying premise, that bad research is geometrically propogated through inadequate review of sources, has some merit
This propogation reminds me of the myth surrounding history of the bathtub. H.L. Mencken once wrote a joke history of the bathtub to prove a point about the gullability of americans. The funny part is despite the admission that there was no truth whatsoever in the article, because of sources referencing unreviewed sources parts of it are still quoted as fact in modern history textbooks.
A dozen? Is that all? You must not be looking very hard just wander around in the silk market in Beijing (right in front of the american embassy) and when someone comes up to you and whispers "pssst DVD, VCD, CD , CD ROM" say yeah okay.
<BR>
IF you are good at haggling, buy 30 of them and act nice, they might even let you know which ones are actual movies and which ones are fakes.
Morals have no place in science, the two mix like milk and lemon juice. Instead of John Q. Public learning the lessons of the plights of galelaio, socrates or the scopes trial, we have scientists afraid of the same sort of reprimand.
On the other hand without dancing around the argument, what is feared in the possibility of a human-mouse hybrid is that a mouse endowed in some small part with basic human genetic material may develop a human soul. An argument, which is basically religeous (read judeo christian) in nature. Well if religeon is to rule our science then we might as well save the time and take the argument straight to the Pope (or some other popular religeous figurehead, my vote is for Bob Dobbs).
The question of a soul in our human mouse hybrid is really a software issue, while the experiment is a hardware issue. But all of medical science is about dealing with hardware issues. The belief that we could endow a mouse with a human soul by introducing human stem cells, falls into the same category of garbage science as slicing Lenin's brain into fine sheets to see what made him such a good communist. Which is not much different than cutting your processor in half and looking at it through a microscope to try and determine what OS you're running.
The usefulness of the research is not what is in question here. A mouse with hardware genetically altered to inculde human elements would be far superior to your normal mouse in predicting the effects of drugs and diseases on humans.
Want an example of moral fear holding back useful scientific research, look no farther than child car safety. To make an effective crash test dummy a human cadaver is needed to run through a crash. By doing this the actual stresses on a human body can be determined and an effective system of sensors and calibrations can be made for the dummy. Unfortunately childern are not simply small adults when it comes to the forces involved in car crash, yet all we use today are smaller versions of adult dummys, greatly reducing car safety for childern. Why? because of the moral outrage at using actual child and infant cadavers in crash tests to build the dummies. Some german scientists tried to do just that in the late eighties and the ensuing moral outrage was so great that the experiments were discontinued and their lab eventually closed.
So I repeat, keep your morals out of my science
You broke one of the most important rules of employment. Never Work for free! Not only does it assign a zero value to your time, but it assignes a zero value to the time of anyone doing that task.
The second rule you broke, taking a lesson from M$ here, is that if they need you, you've got them exactly where you want the. Grease it up with vaseline and give it to them good and hard, to the tune of at least $100/ hour for skilled IT consulting
Many people have posted that, "You don't want to hurt your chance to use them as a reference." But then again, you don't want them letting your prospective employer that you're a cheap date either.
finally, for the question of returning to any employer as an employee (and not an independant consultant). Remeber this adage... Old Jobs are like old girlfriends, Never go back
I speak fluent Chinese and Japanese and occasionally moonlight as a professional translator, countless hours of watching Star Trek have lead to extensive hypothesizing on how to construct a universal translator. What's interesting about this article is that is what they're trying to do, but they seem to be going off half cocked.
It's not enough, and that's why I have big doubts about the usefulness of this project, to simply translate between languages with a one to one parity. Babelfish is a good example of the results of this.
Good language keeps in mind that language is completely symbolic and very referential. Words not only change meaning in context - think "booty" pirate treasure vs. "booty" T&A, they often symbolically refer to their use in other contexts, which leads to nuance.
In fact literacy can be though of as the thorough understanding of the nuance of a given phrase. For example if I say, "screw your courage" it not only has meaning in the immediate context, but refers to a line in Macbeth as well. Literate understanding comes only from understanding the references, although without the referential meaning the intended meaning comes across as well. Sometimes referential meaning is direct opposite to the meaning of the words taken alone - translation is tricky business.
Another thing to keep in mind is that whether we are aware of it or not all language has levels of politeness. In English this is often quite subtle: chug -drink - imbibe- quaff, they can all be used to mean the same thing but vary in politeness levels. In Japanese this politeness level in Language is painfully obvious.
Keeping this in mind, a Universal translator, like the one mentioned in the article, could be an effective tool but it would have to be a lot more complicated. First, every word would have to be assigned a politeness level. Second, multiple meanings would have to be assigned to each word for multiple contexts. This would go a long way to moving something like this away from the babelfish problem without having to do anything like correlating literary references between cultures.
Unfortunately, here they seem to be trying to create a distributed babelfish focused on developing a dictionary for obscure languages using the labor of people who probably aren't even on the Internet.
I speak fluent Chinese and Japanese and occasionally moonlight as a professional translator, countless hours of watching Star Trek have lead to extensive hypothesizing on how to construct a universal translator. What's interesting about this article is that is what they're trying to do, but they seem to be going off half cocked. It's not enough, and that's why I have big doubts about the usefulness of this project, to simply translate between languages with a one to one parity. Babelfish is a good example of the results of this. Good language keeps in mind that language is completely symbolic and very referential. Words not only change meaning in context - think "booty" pirate treasure vs. "booty" T&A, they often symbolically refer to their use in other contexts, which leads to nuance. In fact literacy can be though of as the thorough understanding of the nuance of a given phrase. For example if I say, "screw your courage" it not only has meaning in the immediate context, but refers to a line in Macbeth as well. Literate understanding comes only from understanding the references, although without the referential meaning the intended meaning comes across as well. Sometimes referential meaning is direct opposite to the meaning of the words taken alone - translation is tricky business. Another thing to keep in mind is that whether we are aware of it or not all language has levels of politeness. In English this is often quite subtle: chug -drink - imbibe- quaff, they can all be used to mean the same thing but vary in politeness levels. In Japanese this politeness level in Language is painfully obvious. Keeping this in mind, a Universal translator, like the one mentioned in the article, could be an effective tool but it would have to be a lot more complicated. First, every word would have to be assigned a politeness level. Second, multiple meanings would have to be assigned to each word for multiple contexts. This would go a long way to moving something like this away from the babelfish problem without having to do anything like correlating literary references between cultures. Unfortunately, here they seem to be trying to create a distributed babelfish focused on developing a dictionary for obscure languages using the labor of people who probably aren't even on the Internet.
...and Milwaukee was ranked #1 city in the country for lesbians in 2001!
I'm glad to see Baltimore at the top of the list. It's definately one of America's more underrated cities. Cost of living is darn cheap and it has a rather vibrant small business tech community. And besides, if significant migration from Sanfrancisco occours, it will drive up the value of my house :-)
The making and disposal of computers is dirty business, with all sorts of heavy metals and whatnot involved in the process. It's about time that we get taxed to insure their proper disposal. Here on slashdot, we always lament the lack of corporate social responsibility. It looks rather childish to lament that same sort of responsibility being placed on us.
So china plans on sending a human into space... Hmmm Oh my god! The Chinese are catching up on american technology, they're only 40 years behind our space program!!
I always find it interesting how subjectively the Slashdot community reads the news. I've lived in China for most of the last three years doing manufacturing management, which has taken me to many a middle of nowhere china and big city alike. And it constantly amazes me the kinds of myths that float around regarding Internet use in China.
First, Internet cafés are ubiquitous, and yes most of them are dimly lit holes with 12 computers sharing one ISDN line, or sometimes a 56k modem. Generally there are no bathrooms, the dimly lit room is filled with cigarette smoke and the whole place is grimy as the bathroom of your local pub. I.e. typical China, outside Beijing/ Shanghai/ Guangzhou. There are of course nice internet cafés in the big cities, like the one in shanghai that proudly displayed the chair President Clinton once sat it to surf the web, but those places are the exception.
Now just like any industry, there's licensing involved and in a Chinese Internet Café that means registering with the Chinese Bureau of Post and Telecommunications. Part of the Café license is the understanding that you'll filter all unsuitable content, which mostly consists of pornography (highly illegal in any form), actual dissident sites (yes they do exist, our government happily cracks down on the same sort of thing here) and yes BIG name foreign media. By big name I mean NY times, CNN, BBC, Washington Post etc. Anything that's local, or my mother wouldn't think of as a news source- i.e. Slashdot, Guerrilla News Network or the Economist, are not filtered at all.
Of course being a big place with a lot of people, regulation of this sort of thing isn't ubiquitous, which means that it's not that difficult to find Cafés that don't filter CNN and what not. They're just officially banned. And of course all bets are off when one uses any sort of proxy. Now the unofficial level of restriction raises and lowers depending on current circumstances. For example when we "accidentally" bombed the Chinese embassy a couple of years ago, the restriction was quite high. Chinese people were pissed at foreigners and the restriction level went up. On the flip side, after the Sept. 11th attack, they had an unofficial moratorium on the restriction of foreign news, which got extended all the way through the APEC conference.
When we hear that the Chinese government cracked down on internet Café's allowing subversive content through, what it generally means is the Cafés were letting in pornography. Most Chinese couldn't give a damn about foreign news, and of the few that do, the number that have the ability to read English is quite small. On the other hand the number of people who would be looking at pornography is quite large.
On average I would even venture to say that the aggregate level of information freedom of PR China is equal to or even greater than that of the United States when one takes into the account the development of intellectual property law. The Chinese didn't even have a concept of property when they opened up 20 years ago, so they sure as heck don't have a concept of IP, something that we're still struggling with, today. Hence buying pirated anything- software, music, movies- is many times easier than buying the officially licensed thing.
None of this is to say that the Chinese aren't being oppressed with regards to their online freedoms; it's just that the oppressors aren't nearly as strict as our own news tells us.