And what you're not getting is these articles are NOT doom and gloom.
The REASON we always find something else to do when technology makes it possible to do less is BECAUSE we haven't put a system in place that could ALLOW us to linearly extrapolate. We continue to work because we have to, not because we want to. We WANT to see 95% unemployment at some point in the future. Enough is enough.
A UBI would allow us to stop using worthless regulations to create non-value added (and thus utterly dehumanizing) jobs to keep our employment rates up. It would free capitalism of a burden that it is already carrying in other ways and allow it to return to its glory days.
And, personally, I think that the UBI does need to be "universal". Even if you make a million dollars a year, you should get it. Let's view it as a right earned for all by the successes of our ancestors - not as welfare.
There are SO many jobs being done right now that just need to stop. No one should do them for ANY amount of pay. Are we just going to keep going until we're paying people to wipe our @$$e$ or are we going to find another way?
I think they are way off the mark as to the nature of the problem they are trying to solve as well as the timing of it. I believe there is a good possibility that we will have not thousands or tens of thousands, but millions of smaller drones in the air by 2020. And, yes, they will be autonomous or semi-autonomous. Putting Google cars on the road is harder than making drones autonomous.
The key to understanding here is that these are just robots. As we move further into the age of personal robotics, there will be many many tasks that a robot that can fly will be better able to do for us than a robot that is limited to walking or rolling around. Many of these devices are also very small. Once they become quieter and smart enough to auto-fly through hallways and crowds, I see no reason why these devices wouldn't go everywhere we go. I foresee them flying through doors into buildings, possibly switching into and out of rolling modes and delivering items right to a person, not just to a building. Or, to get away from the delivery theme, they could be flying around picking up trash, washing windows, getting leaves off of roofs, trimming trees, stringing poles so that nobody has to climb up them, changing lights on towers, flying the rounds of a security guard (even through halls),,, who knows, disposable cameras might even have the ability to sprout a prop, fly off 15 feet, take your picture, come back and land on your hand (there was a bracelet that did something like this on YouTube recently). It's all moving fast enough now that none of this is unrealistic.
So, given that it would take the government 15-20 years to deploy a system, it will be way too late. The need, the explosion of devices, will come from the home-based, personal uses, not commercial businesses, and it will come in the next few years. I've already seen devices that automatically launch, perform a chore, dock, and recharge. It's one of the next big things, and it is way closer than people think. If companies don't do it for us, we're going to do it ourselves.
These systems are going to have to control their traffic the same way people do, with eyes, ears, and some rules of the road. They are going to be interacting and intermingling directly with us, not just each other. Even thinking about centralized control is just a way to subsidize some scientist who would do better economically spending his time designing these devices himself instead of telling others how to control them. We're not waiting for his advice.
The wedding data is very interesting in that eloping scored really bad, having a wedding with 200+ people really good, how much you spend on wedding bad... but since a 200+ person wedding is going to be expensive, perhaps it's good if the bride's parent's pay as opposed to the couple paying for it themselves? Anyway, these factors and the going to church factor could all be interpreted as peer pressure factors. A big wedding paid for by the parents would provide pressure both from the parents and the 200+ people who attended.
In addition, I know from a few marital situations that I have observed that having a lot of money doesn't just ease life together, it also acts as it's own pressure. At least one and likely both partners will drop in financial status in the event of divorce unless they find other partners prior to the divorce.
The question this brings up for me is whether this says good things or bad things. There is a benefit if pressure keeps a relationship together through a rough time if the relationship becomes better later. But it is a bad thing if pressure keeps a relationship together that is (often mutually) destructive.
What I'd really like to see is a study that takes the word "marriage" out of the equation, looks at romantic partnerships in general, looks at both the length and the healthiness of the relationship, and looks at the factors that got them there. From that, you could perhaps start to discover what conditions best support healthy, stable relationships which I do believe are a benefit to both those involved and society and thus worthy of pursuit.
into this announcement needs to be drummed out of the industry. Whether it was the researcher or someone along the announcement chain that introduced the mention of transmitting a virus in order to (I have to assume) increase the viewership of the announcement, it is a tactic that does far more harm to science than the reward justifies. Science the world over is being limited far too often by unreasoned fear. Let us at the least not encourage it. But let us also go further than that and make sure that people who try to take advantage of this fear for profit receive no further support from the true science community.
These tests are no longer testing the most valuable skills of our students. Instead of making them take tests with both hands tied behind their backs, tests should be embracing the internet. It isn't cheating as long as you're not simply looking up the answers at a site that has cracked the test in some way. The best scientists, engineers, researchers, developers, etc. recognize what tasks need to be performed largely on their own and then perform them as efficiently and accurately as possible without breaking the law. The ability to ask the right questions of the right sites on the internet and recognize the best answer without being led down to many rabbit trails is critical to many if not most non physical disciplines today. In others, the ability to create scripts or programs to solve minor problems quickly might be critical. The internet and programming are tools for extending our minds that need to be embraced during years when the mind is still very flexible in order for the individual to gain maximum advantage. Eventually, these will be integrated into our mind to the point that turning them off will cause major disorientation at the least.
The ideal tests for students should use all of the tools that they are being prepared to use after school. If they aren't being prepared to use the internet and to extend their problem solving skills with at least simple scripts, then you should find them a new school. The tests of course should be much harder because the tools we have for extending ourselves today are much better. We need to embrace and institutionalize the progress we've made.
Actually, I think we might. The smaller outfits within America can't compete either. And the reasons behind that also explain (IMO) why this regulation won't work. The movie companies do not won't to deal with dozens of media content providers. It takes companies the size of Netflix to make the deals that make the business possible. Without these large companies, the vacuum would not be filled by many small companies. Instead the business simply either would not exist or it would only be direct from the movie companies.
In June of 1989, similarly horrible and grotesque videos and pictures made their way out of the Tiananmen Square massacre, including a graphic shot of the crushed remains of the head of a student run over by a tank. The massacre was unquestionably a terrorist act designed to regain control of the people through their fears by the creation of maximum horror. The government wanted the message to get out. But does anyone really believe it worked for them in the end? Have we sunk so low that we would make the dissemination of such truths illegal today?
ISIL has reached the status of a government. Governments don't have to be recognized to "be". For now, they govern a territory and its people. Like all of the videos of terrorist government atrocities, this video does not generate sympathy for that government. Instead, it builds anger against it.
Furthermore, this man was a journalist. What do you think he would want? Perhaps for the horror of his death to cause change? I'm not a journalist and I know that I'd want the world to see.
Passwords don't simply show your identity. Making the choice to enter them also shows your permission. Sure they can be snooped, but they can't be easily extracted against your will. All biometric based keys are available with a warrant. The password is the only one that I know of that I have any chance of hiding.
By carefully employing different passwords for every site with the aid of KeePass or a similar tool and changing them all periodically (would be nice if KeePass automated this) and guarding KeePass with the strongest encryption, a very strong password, and another key, I've got a better chance of controlling access to my data (which I consider little different from my mind) than with any other approach I've heard of.
Water is about the least likely initial source for the hydrogen to be used in a hydrogen economy. The hydrogen contained in oil and gas is far easier to extract than the hydrogen in water. So, we'll simply be using an oil or gas fueled extraction plant to pull hydrogen from oil or gas. Hydrogen is not an energy source, just a means of centering all the pollution output to central sites where there is a possibility of containing it. For example, if you did it all right at the oil fields, you could pump the CO2 and all other waste products right back into the ground, thus producing a nearly pollution free overall system since nothing but hydrogen and materials for use in making plastics, tires, etc. leave the field.
It is far more widely useful to view this as a means of finding people who have common interest and may actually be collaborating. Imagine building a database of relationships, appointments, investments, etc that concentrates on the rich and famous, businessmen, politicians, and others with power and then running these algorithms on those relationships. Imagine examining those relationships in the context of subjects (relationship strengths should differ depending on the subject through which the relationship is being judged). The world of politics could be turned on its heels if a useful map of relationships could be created for each political subject and easily traversed by strength. Surely though, this isn't new. In particular, I've seen many calls for research into this aspect of datamining from the intelligence community, a community that has also been investing in the creation of database technologies that can hold and semantically access many petabytes of data.
Well, in today's world, that would be any doctor who follows insurance or industry (AMA) scripted treatment protocols or any of many laws as opposed to applying all of his knowledge, all the facts that he can gather about the patient both physical and otherwise, and all of his instinct to recommend a custom course of action that is best for the patient regardless of industry, insurance, or legal issues.
Hmmmm. I think that would pretty much cover every doctor but one that I've encountered in the last 15 years. Diagnosis and treatment of individuals as unique individuals is in many cases illegal and at best puts the doctor at unacceptable risk for suit.
Witness the many drugs that are refused approval due to killing as few as a hundred out of a million people, even when methods are available to determine who, due to their uniqueness, is likely to be one of those hundred and even though the judgement of what risk is worth taking is a hugely personal decision. There are many glaring examples of drugs that work well on the vast majority of people being blocked due to this. Some of these drugs can be safely administered simply by seeing that the individual is not of a particular race that has proven very vulnerable to a particular side effect. Thus the decision is being taken away from the doctor due to the fact that some "people" are hurt by a therapy even though the "individual" patient the doctor is seeing could be determined to be a safe candidate or careful monitoring of the therapy could avoid the risk.
I am currently being denied androgel therapy by the fact that I can't find a doctor near my current location that has adopted new thinking on it. While receiving this therapy in another city, I had many health problems go away including goutic arthitis and other joint issues, frequent muscle and tendon injuries, pinched nerves due to inflammation and swelling (as in CTS in both hands, Urnal tunnel and shoulder issues, memory, and clarity problems. Now that I cannot receive it, all of the problems have returned and my current doctors are treating them with far less success using combinations of many drugs with side effects that are really bothering me and multiple surgeries. This is my personal example of doctors following their "conventional" wisdom to my known and proven detriment and over all of my attempts to correct the situation. And they do so because of pseudo-scientific, ie. statistical, based studies have shown them that there are "probabilities" that I could have serious side effects in spite of many studies showing that different men have different requirements for testosterone and that many men benefit greatly from treatment without having undesirable side effects. The one physician who treated me put aside the conventional rules and continually ran batteries of blood and other tests to make sure that I as an individual needed, was benefitting from, and was not being harmed by the treatment.
In short, I agree with your argument as to the language, however, the effective and practiced definition/understanding of practices or process guidelines placed in writing such as the hippocratic oath should be judged from their results and the practices of those who are utilizing it. There are mounds of evidence both in law and otherwise that the statistical or population based approach that classifies a patient's problem within a rather narrow pool of possibilities that frequently maps 100s of problems to a single diagnosis and then uses a prescribed treatment for that classification with little individualization is the predominate medical practice of the day. This medical practice represents a huge injustice and abuse of the individual.
And to get back to the article, studies that shoot to identify blanket health recommendations that statistically benefit the population as opposed to identifying or lowering the cost of direct physics, biological, chemical, etc. based testing means that might be applied to an individual to assist them in more closely, perhaps even daily
When we're talking about using a new technology like this, I believe that penalty has less effect. For that to have an effect, it has to be relatively easy to get permission for the tap. When tapping in a new way, that permission is not as easy to get. Thus, the likelihood of being able to gather data usable in court by these means is very low. So, an investigator with access to this capability does not have the incentive to use it legally so that it can be used in trial. But, he still needs a way to solve his case. With no aboveboard means to gather the information, what's left is catching the criminal red-handed. To do that, you either need to have great instinct and insight, or instinct and insight aided by artificial means such as listening in on conversations. Noone ever needs to know that it wasn't sheer luck that the criminal was caught red-handed.
The scariest use of things like this though is the possibility of mass surveillance. Let's say for example that an agency pushed software to all the cell phones in contact with a particular tower with intent to find a suspected terrorist through voice or word recognition. Furthermore, in doing so, they by chance recorded a powerful individual having sex with someone other than their spouse, a famous couple involved in sexual acts including fantasy role playing, teenagers mouthing off about killing one another like half of them do several times a day, or drunk folks in bars talking of things they don't really mean and would likely never do. What is the chance that they would do something with this "accidentally" collected information?
I think it a guarantee that if such software is plausible, it has already been developed and is in use by the military and other organizations. Consider the fact that Iraq has seen a huge boom in cell phones as a faster means of restoring communications infrastructure after the war. Perhaps there was another reason why we so eagerly helped them to become heavy cell phone users.....
And don't forget the most glaring assumption, that back strain is the only thing that we should use to judge seating posture. Quality of life is far harder to measure than that. Other factors that might be considered are how the seating posture effects the tightness of your abs, leg pains (some chairs actually make my legs go numb), the availability of a good carpal tunnel prevention solution that mates with the posture, alertness, effectiveness of lungs in maintaining blood oxygen levels, how you look (real consideration for many), etc. This is very much akin to studies that assume we all want to live longer at virtually any cost or that we all have limitless willpower to fight biologically reinforced habits.
We are a long long way from science being able to give us personalized solutions that strike a balance in the nearly limitless factors contributing to health decisions. Even life and death decisions are only sometimes near black and white. The medical establishment as a whole needs to be woken up to the fact that we aren't even really out of the dark ages of medicine until we can address every human as a unique biological, psychological, and spiritual being. This problem permeates modern medicine all the way to its core, even to the hypocratic oath itself which states "I will follow that system of regimen which, according to my ability and judgment, I consider for the benefit of my patients, and abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous.", a statement full of "I"s and "my"s without any "your"s that would cause the physician to consider the uniqueness, desires, or personal quality of life measurements of the individual being treated.
6 bits of color control per color allows for 32 shades of that color to be created. A 24 bit color printer produces 256 shades for each of 3 colors giving over 16 million colors.
24-bit fidelity would allow over 16 million colors. In fact, it appears to me that they are allowing for much less fidelity than that. Assuming a 1200dpi print capability (most modern dot matrix can do better than that, especially on the horizontal) and a 3x3 matrix for the shapes we get the following:
Using some of the other print resolutions commonly available such as 1440 DPI or 2880 DPI could easily reduce the color scanner accuracy requirements to less than the 18 bits I assumed here. Note that much of the accuracy requirement could be met without "absolute" accuracy from the color scanner. It merely has to have "relative" accuracy if a small calibration area of known colors is provided. Also, I didn't account for the possibility of having multiple color regions per shape which could further increase density.
Yeh, I've worked in avionics much of my career and have worked with many blackboard-like systems. In general though, I think the systems like the one you've linked to are surpassed by hybrid systems. Blackboards with a central location in the physical world become bottlenecked at the data access point unless the data is operated on by relatively large algorithms that take a fair amount of time. Publish/subscribe systems however essentially create a virtual blackboard where all of the information is passed to exactly the processes that need them, thus optimizing the data transfers while maintaining the consistency in data knowledge. A publish/subscribe system equipped with the ability to automatically distribute and wake up processes and a central coherent store that exists as nothing more than a backup or to provide "why" or "what if" capabilities holds more potential. One such system which I believe could be built on to get there is RTI's NDDS. Regrettably, it is heading in directions that could exacerbate its downside and not fixing its problems such as the need for a better, preferably distributed hash based, topics catalog and its need for a better transport protocol that allows much larger numbers of participants and places no limit on the number of different NDDS based systems using the same network.
I sincerely hope that the CIA is getting all of the help they can from Google and many other large companies. 9/11 was as much a failure in data mining as anything. Since 9/11, the number of data sources has grown dramatically and made the data mining operation even more hopeless. Solving the data mining problem with Petabyte databases is definitely a Google type of problem.
The problem is that we keep trying to come up with programs to automagically twist programs written in a single tasking paradigm into a multitasking paradigm. Unless we could completely represent the program mathematically and apply a mathematical transformation, that will never be efficient. It would be easier to create a new paradigm to begin with. But we're blinded by our current focus on data. A focus on process oriented programming paradigms that utilize microprocesses to perform small bits of work on large data pools in a manner that works together to create complex processes in new ways will produce the results we need. The key will be to train ourselves to be very comfortable with chaotic math and processes.
Unfortunately we don't have a frame of reference for these types of things.
I beg to differ. If we had a frame of reference, it would mean we had competition. Its bad enough to have the competition of ideologies without the competition of species too.
AV programs today replace critical OS components, sap unbelievable amounts of system memory resources, slow the overall system down a lot for programs that access a lot of files and frequently are the culprit in installation problems that can cause whole days to be lost. I've said it before and I'll say it again. I've lost far far far more time diagnosing performance or other more serious problems that ultimately were caused by the AV software than I've ever lost due to actual virus attacks. And further, I don't believe that I've ever been saved from a virus by the AV software despite actively downloading and running thousands of programs over the last 20 years.
Slashdot Mirror
And what you're not getting is these articles are NOT doom and gloom.
The REASON we always find something else to do when technology makes it possible to do less is BECAUSE we haven't put a system in place that could ALLOW us to linearly extrapolate. We continue to work because we have to, not because we want to. We WANT to see 95% unemployment at some point in the future. Enough is enough.
A UBI would allow us to stop using worthless regulations to create non-value added (and thus utterly dehumanizing) jobs to keep our employment rates up. It would free capitalism of a burden that it is already carrying in other ways and allow it to return to its glory days.
And, personally, I think that the UBI does need to be "universal". Even if you make a million dollars a year, you should get it. Let's view it as a right earned for all by the successes of our ancestors - not as welfare.
There are SO many jobs being done right now that just need to stop. No one should do them for ANY amount of pay. Are we just going to keep going until we're paying people to wipe our @$$e$ or are we going to find another way?
I think they are way off the mark as to the nature of the problem they are trying to solve as well as the timing of it. I believe there is a good possibility that we will have not thousands or tens of thousands, but millions of smaller drones in the air by 2020. And, yes, they will be autonomous or semi-autonomous. Putting Google cars on the road is harder than making drones autonomous.
The key to understanding here is that these are just robots. As we move further into the age of personal robotics, there will be many many tasks that a robot that can fly will be better able to do for us than a robot that is limited to walking or rolling around. Many of these devices are also very small. Once they become quieter and smart enough to auto-fly through hallways and crowds, I see no reason why these devices wouldn't go everywhere we go. I foresee them flying through doors into buildings, possibly switching into and out of rolling modes and delivering items right to a person, not just to a building. Or, to get away from the delivery theme, they could be flying around picking up trash, washing windows, getting leaves off of roofs, trimming trees, stringing poles so that nobody has to climb up them, changing lights on towers, flying the rounds of a security guard (even through halls),,, who knows, disposable cameras might even have the ability to sprout a prop, fly off 15 feet, take your picture, come back and land on your hand (there was a bracelet that did something like this on YouTube recently). It's all moving fast enough now that none of this is unrealistic.
So, given that it would take the government 15-20 years to deploy a system, it will be way too late. The need, the explosion of devices, will come from the home-based, personal uses, not commercial businesses, and it will come in the next few years. I've already seen devices that automatically launch, perform a chore, dock, and recharge. It's one of the next big things, and it is way closer than people think. If companies don't do it for us, we're going to do it ourselves.
These systems are going to have to control their traffic the same way people do, with eyes, ears, and some rules of the road. They are going to be interacting and intermingling directly with us, not just each other. Even thinking about centralized control is just a way to subsidize some scientist who would do better economically spending his time designing these devices himself instead of telling others how to control them. We're not waiting for his advice.
The wedding data is very interesting in that eloping scored really bad, having a wedding with 200+ people really good, how much you spend on wedding bad... but since a 200+ person wedding is going to be expensive, perhaps it's good if the bride's parent's pay as opposed to the couple paying for it themselves? Anyway, these factors and the going to church factor could all be interpreted as peer pressure factors. A big wedding paid for by the parents would provide pressure both from the parents and the 200+ people who attended.
In addition, I know from a few marital situations that I have observed that having a lot of money doesn't just ease life together, it also acts as it's own pressure. At least one and likely both partners will drop in financial status in the event of divorce unless they find other partners prior to the divorce.
The question this brings up for me is whether this says good things or bad things. There is a benefit if pressure keeps a relationship together through a rough time if the relationship becomes better later. But it is a bad thing if pressure keeps a relationship together that is (often mutually) destructive.
What I'd really like to see is a study that takes the word "marriage" out of the equation, looks at romantic partnerships in general, looks at both the length and the healthiness of the relationship, and looks at the factors that got them there. From that, you could perhaps start to discover what conditions best support healthy, stable relationships which I do believe are a benefit to both those involved and society and thus worthy of pursuit.
And you're naive. The point could have easily been made with many terms other than one that's top in the news now due to the Ebola scare.
into this announcement needs to be drummed out of the industry. Whether it was the researcher or someone along the announcement chain that introduced the mention of transmitting a virus in order to (I have to assume) increase the viewership of the announcement, it is a tactic that does far more harm to science than the reward justifies. Science the world over is being limited far too often by unreasoned fear. Let us at the least not encourage it. But let us also go further than that and make sure that people who try to take advantage of this fear for profit receive no further support from the true science community.
These tests are no longer testing the most valuable skills of our students. Instead of making them take tests with both hands tied behind their backs, tests should be embracing the internet. It isn't cheating as long as you're not simply looking up the answers at a site that has cracked the test in some way. The best scientists, engineers, researchers, developers, etc. recognize what tasks need to be performed largely on their own and then perform them as efficiently and accurately as possible without breaking the law. The ability to ask the right questions of the right sites on the internet and recognize the best answer without being led down to many rabbit trails is critical to many if not most non physical disciplines today. In others, the ability to create scripts or programs to solve minor problems quickly might be critical. The internet and programming are tools for extending our minds that need to be embraced during years when the mind is still very flexible in order for the individual to gain maximum advantage. Eventually, these will be integrated into our mind to the point that turning them off will cause major disorientation at the least.
The ideal tests for students should use all of the tools that they are being prepared to use after school. If they aren't being prepared to use the internet and to extend their problem solving skills with at least simple scripts, then you should find them a new school. The tests of course should be much harder because the tools we have for extending ourselves today are much better. We need to embrace and institutionalize the progress we've made.
Actually, I think we might. The smaller outfits within America can't compete either. And the reasons behind that also explain (IMO) why this regulation won't work. The movie companies do not won't to deal with dozens of media content providers. It takes companies the size of Netflix to make the deals that make the business possible. Without these large companies, the vacuum would not be filled by many small companies. Instead the business simply either would not exist or it would only be direct from the movie companies.
if these new media companies would simply stop their feed to Ontario IPs for a week just to make the point for once?
In June of 1989, similarly horrible and grotesque videos and pictures made their way out of the Tiananmen Square massacre, including a graphic shot of the crushed remains of the head of a student run over by a tank. The massacre was unquestionably a terrorist act designed to regain control of the people through their fears by the creation of maximum horror. The government wanted the message to get out. But does anyone really believe it worked for them in the end? Have we sunk so low that we would make the dissemination of such truths illegal today?
ISIL has reached the status of a government. Governments don't have to be recognized to "be". For now, they govern a territory and its people. Like all of the videos of terrorist government atrocities, this video does not generate sympathy for that government. Instead, it builds anger against it.
Furthermore, this man was a journalist. What do you think he would want? Perhaps for the horror of his death to cause change? I'm not a journalist and I know that I'd want the world to see.
Passwords don't simply show your identity. Making the choice to enter them also shows your permission. Sure they can be snooped, but they can't be easily extracted against your will. All biometric based keys are available with a warrant. The password is the only one that I know of that I have any chance of hiding. By carefully employing different passwords for every site with the aid of KeePass or a similar tool and changing them all periodically (would be nice if KeePass automated this) and guarding KeePass with the strongest encryption, a very strong password, and another key, I've got a better chance of controlling access to my data (which I consider little different from my mind) than with any other approach I've heard of.
Maybe they should take the 2 by 4 out of their own eye first.
Water is about the least likely initial source for the hydrogen to be used in a hydrogen economy. The hydrogen contained in oil and gas is far easier to extract than the hydrogen in water. So, we'll simply be using an oil or gas fueled extraction plant to pull hydrogen from oil or gas. Hydrogen is not an energy source, just a means of centering all the pollution output to central sites where there is a possibility of containing it. For example, if you did it all right at the oil fields, you could pump the CO2 and all other waste products right back into the ground, thus producing a nearly pollution free overall system since nothing but hydrogen and materials for use in making plastics, tires, etc. leave the field.
It is far more widely useful to view this as a means of finding people who have common interest and may actually be collaborating. Imagine building a database of relationships, appointments, investments, etc that concentrates on the rich and famous, businessmen, politicians, and others with power and then running these algorithms on those relationships. Imagine examining those relationships in the context of subjects (relationship strengths should differ depending on the subject through which the relationship is being judged). The world of politics could be turned on its heels if a useful map of relationships could be created for each political subject and easily traversed by strength. Surely though, this isn't new. In particular, I've seen many calls for research into this aspect of datamining from the intelligence community, a community that has also been investing in the creation of database technologies that can hold and semantically access many petabytes of data.
Well, in today's world, that would be any doctor who follows insurance or industry (AMA) scripted treatment protocols or any of many laws as opposed to applying all of his knowledge, all the facts that he can gather about the patient both physical and otherwise, and all of his instinct to recommend a custom course of action that is best for the patient regardless of industry, insurance, or legal issues.
Hmmmm. I think that would pretty much cover every doctor but one that I've encountered in the last 15 years. Diagnosis and treatment of individuals as unique individuals is in many cases illegal and at best puts the doctor at unacceptable risk for suit.
Witness the many drugs that are refused approval due to killing as few as a hundred out of a million people, even when methods are available to determine who, due to their uniqueness, is likely to be one of those hundred and even though the judgement of what risk is worth taking is a hugely personal decision. There are many glaring examples of drugs that work well on the vast majority of people being blocked due to this. Some of these drugs can be safely administered simply by seeing that the individual is not of a particular race that has proven very vulnerable to a particular side effect. Thus the decision is being taken away from the doctor due to the fact that some "people" are hurt by a therapy even though the "individual" patient the doctor is seeing could be determined to be a safe candidate or careful monitoring of the therapy could avoid the risk.
I am currently being denied androgel therapy by the fact that I can't find a doctor near my current location that has adopted new thinking on it. While receiving this therapy in another city, I had many health problems go away including goutic arthitis and other joint issues, frequent muscle and tendon injuries, pinched nerves due to inflammation and swelling (as in CTS in both hands, Urnal tunnel and shoulder issues, memory, and clarity problems. Now that I cannot receive it, all of the problems have returned and my current doctors are treating them with far less success using combinations of many drugs with side effects that are really bothering me and multiple surgeries. This is my personal example of doctors following their "conventional" wisdom to my known and proven detriment and over all of my attempts to correct the situation. And they do so because of pseudo-scientific, ie. statistical, based studies have shown them that there are "probabilities" that I could have serious side effects in spite of many studies showing that different men have different requirements for testosterone and that many men benefit greatly from treatment without having undesirable side effects. The one physician who treated me put aside the conventional rules and continually ran batteries of blood and other tests to make sure that I as an individual needed, was benefitting from, and was not being harmed by the treatment.
In short, I agree with your argument as to the language, however, the effective and practiced definition/understanding of practices or process guidelines placed in writing such as the hippocratic oath should be judged from their results and the practices of those who are utilizing it. There are mounds of evidence both in law and otherwise that the statistical or population based approach that classifies a patient's problem within a rather narrow pool of possibilities that frequently maps 100s of problems to a single diagnosis and then uses a prescribed treatment for that classification with little individualization is the predominate medical practice of the day. This medical practice represents a huge injustice and abuse of the individual.
And to get back to the article, studies that shoot to identify blanket health recommendations that statistically benefit the population as opposed to identifying or lowering the cost of direct physics, biological, chemical, etc. based testing means that might be applied to an individual to assist them in more closely, perhaps even daily
When we're talking about using a new technology like this, I believe that penalty has less effect. For that to have an effect, it has to be relatively easy to get permission for the tap. When tapping in a new way, that permission is not as easy to get. Thus, the likelihood of being able to gather data usable in court by these means is very low. So, an investigator with access to this capability does not have the incentive to use it legally so that it can be used in trial. But, he still needs a way to solve his case. With no aboveboard means to gather the information, what's left is catching the criminal red-handed. To do that, you either need to have great instinct and insight, or instinct and insight aided by artificial means such as listening in on conversations. Noone ever needs to know that it wasn't sheer luck that the criminal was caught red-handed.
The scariest use of things like this though is the possibility of mass surveillance. Let's say for example that an agency pushed software to all the cell phones in contact with a particular tower with intent to find a suspected terrorist through voice or word recognition. Furthermore, in doing so, they by chance recorded a powerful individual having sex with someone other than their spouse, a famous couple involved in sexual acts including fantasy role playing, teenagers mouthing off about killing one another like half of them do several times a day, or drunk folks in bars talking of things they don't really mean and would likely never do. What is the chance that they would do something with this "accidentally" collected information?
I think it a guarantee that if such software is plausible, it has already been developed and is in use by the military and other organizations. Consider the fact that Iraq has seen a huge boom in cell phones as a faster means of restoring communications infrastructure after the war. Perhaps there was another reason why we so eagerly helped them to become heavy cell phone users.....
And don't forget the most glaring assumption, that back strain is the only thing that we should use to judge seating posture. Quality of life is far harder to measure than that. Other factors that might be considered are how the seating posture effects the tightness of your abs, leg pains (some chairs actually make my legs go numb), the availability of a good carpal tunnel prevention solution that mates with the posture, alertness, effectiveness of lungs in maintaining blood oxygen levels, how you look (real consideration for many), etc. This is very much akin to studies that assume we all want to live longer at virtually any cost or that we all have limitless willpower to fight biologically reinforced habits.
We are a long long way from science being able to give us personalized solutions that strike a balance in the nearly limitless factors contributing to health decisions. Even life and death decisions are only sometimes near black and white. The medical establishment as a whole needs to be woken up to the fact that we aren't even really out of the dark ages of medicine until we can address every human as a unique biological, psychological, and spiritual being. This problem permeates modern medicine all the way to its core, even to the hypocratic oath itself which states "I will follow that system of regimen which, according to my ability and judgment, I consider for the benefit of my patients, and abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous.", a statement full of "I"s and "my"s without any "your"s that would cause the physician to consider the uniqueness, desires, or personal quality of life measurements of the individual being treated.
Thanks. After rereading this whole exchange, I think that checking up on my drug regimen is in order :-)
6 bits of color control per color allows for 32 shades of that color to be created. A 24 bit color printer produces 256 shades for each of 3 colors giving over 16 million colors.
24-bit fidelity would allow over 16 million colors. In fact, it appears to me that they are allowing for much less fidelity than that. Assuming a 1200dpi print capability (most modern dot matrix can do better than that, especially on the horizontal) and a 3x3 matrix for the shapes we get the following:
(1200 * 1200)/(3 * 3) = 160,000
160,000 * 4 shapes = 640,000
640,000 * (32 shades (6 bits) ** 3) = 20,971,520,000
Using some of the other print resolutions commonly available such as 1440 DPI or 2880 DPI could easily reduce the color scanner accuracy requirements to less than the 18 bits I assumed here. Note that much of the accuracy requirement could be met without "absolute" accuracy from the color scanner. It merely has to have "relative" accuracy if a small calibration area of known colors is provided. Also, I didn't account for the possibility of having multiple color regions per shape which could further increase density.
Yeh, I've worked in avionics much of my career and have worked with many blackboard-like systems. In general though, I think the systems like the one you've linked to are surpassed by hybrid systems. Blackboards with a central location in the physical world become bottlenecked at the data access point unless the data is operated on by relatively large algorithms that take a fair amount of time. Publish/subscribe systems however essentially create a virtual blackboard where all of the information is passed to exactly the processes that need them, thus optimizing the data transfers while maintaining the consistency in data knowledge. A publish/subscribe system equipped with the ability to automatically distribute and wake up processes and a central coherent store that exists as nothing more than a backup or to provide "why" or "what if" capabilities holds more potential. One such system which I believe could be built on to get there is RTI's NDDS. Regrettably, it is heading in directions that could exacerbate its downside and not fixing its problems such as the need for a better, preferably distributed hash based, topics catalog and its need for a better transport protocol that allows much larger numbers of participants and places no limit on the number of different NDDS based systems using the same network.
I sincerely hope that the CIA is getting all of the help they can from Google and many other large companies. 9/11 was as much a failure in data mining as anything. Since 9/11, the number of data sources has grown dramatically and made the data mining operation even more hopeless. Solving the data mining problem with Petabyte databases is definitely a Google type of problem.
The problem is that we keep trying to come up with programs to automagically twist programs written in a single tasking paradigm into a multitasking paradigm. Unless we could completely represent the program mathematically and apply a mathematical transformation, that will never be efficient. It would be easier to create a new paradigm to begin with. But we're blinded by our current focus on data. A focus on process oriented programming paradigms that utilize microprocesses to perform small bits of work on large data pools in a manner that works together to create complex processes in new ways will produce the results we need. The key will be to train ourselves to be very comfortable with chaotic math and processes.
Unfortunately we don't have a frame of reference for these types of things.
I beg to differ. If we had a frame of reference, it would mean we had competition. Its bad enough to have the competition of ideologies without the competition of species too.
However, causation is a perfect subset of correlation.
AV programs today replace critical OS components, sap unbelievable amounts of system memory resources, slow the overall system down a lot for programs that access a lot of files and frequently are the culprit in installation problems that can cause whole days to be lost. I've said it before and I'll say it again. I've lost far far far more time diagnosing performance or other more serious problems that ultimately were caused by the AV software than I've ever lost due to actual virus attacks. And further, I don't believe that I've ever been saved from a virus by the AV software despite actively downloading and running thousands of programs over the last 20 years.