All very true, but I suspect that this sort of technique is going to push its way down into the pathology departments too. After all, a number of the pathology steps involve looking at things closely and pattern matching, which are the same types of things being done by the AI being discussed.
I don't expect it to happen any time soon but I can certainly envision a system in 15-20 years that would have a nurse practitioner scan a patient, take biopsies of flagged spots and feed the biopsies into a "pathologist in a box" machine that would do all the checks required - probably down to the DNA level.
Moving the bulk of the cost of diagnosis to a capital expense rather than a labor expense could eventually drive down medical costs tremendously - once we have machines that can do most of the work, the relentless pace of technology and process improvement will make the machines cheaper and cheaper.
Most of the post-WWII prosperity and middle-class grwoth in the US was thanks to most of the rest of the industrialized world being reduced to rubble. The 1950s-1970s boom in the US was a consequence of having the only industrial base that was completely intact after the war. Once the rest of the world rebuilt, that type of growth was impossible to sustain and we started to see stagnating wages and economic problems.
The US has reinvented itself a few times since (the tech, financial and services economies) which have provided periodic boosts to our economy, but we're never going to see the 1950s heydays again barring a dramatic technological shift.
That's not really the problem. The per-pupil spending in Chicago, for instance, is 33% higher than the state average, even though it is one of the worst performing systems in the state.
The real drivers of educational underachievement are social norms and immigration status. The children of low-skill recent immigrants make up the largest single percentage of children in the bottom two quintiles of achievement. Parental education level is the second best proxy of student achievement. This is not the fault of the children involved - second generation immigrant children (the children of the original students) have near-average achievement levels. Attempting to overcome learning a second language, poverty and lack of parental education is hard.
The US lags in worldwide educational achievement largely because it has imported a large cohort of poor and poorly-educated people who don't speak the language. It is to be expected that it will take time to pull them up to the national averages.
I’m not sure what the “point” of having Hawking in the role is other than it’s fun. He uses an outdated synthesis chip to read out the things he types. Are we to believe that he types out his lines and hits “play”? Or that they are simply fed into his (or a similar) device from a pre-typed script?
Stephen’s “voice” is distinctive only in that it uses antiquated technology. I assume he has come to enjoy it (it is distinctive in that few other people with speech synthesis devices are as famous as he) but I’m sure Intel could whip up a version that uses his own voice samples (recorded before his disease progressed). Maybe he just loved the game Berserk (I’d love to hear him say “Catch the Humanoid”).
I'm pretty sure it's acoustic reflex - muscle contractions within your inner ear that dampens your hearing response, caused by anticipation of loud noises, generally your own voice.
I distinctly experience it as some anticipatory pressure, followed by a tightening, then a release, which creates the "sound". (Yeah, I know that also sounds like the geekiest possible description of orgasm.)
I feel a little bit of pressure in my eyes as well when the pylon lands, which I'm assuming is also related. It could also explain the tinnitus effects.
Maybe these researchers have found the root neuronal cause of this, but it's hard to tell from their press release. The press release makes it seem like they discovered something wholly new rather than a new understanding of a very old bit of knowledge.
I was thinking the same damned thing. It was also in an old "Infinite Monkey Cage" episode (apropos, I suppose). The idea that the brain stops processing visual input while attention shifts is pretty common knowledge.
Completely wrong on McArdle's background. She started out as a technology consultant before deciding it wasn't fulfilling for her, got a business degree and became an economic policy journalist.
(The link goes into some of her background of building servers and whatnot and is a fairly compassionate take on the James Damore brouhaha.)
My understanding is that they separate them at the larval stage and there is a size difference - basically pour some water through a sieve and one side has females and the other side has males. It's something like 99.9% effective.
I'd rather see some sort of Password API that would allow LastPass or Dashlane be the backend (or front end) for Firefox's password cache. The existing functionality of these systems is OK but kind of hackworthy.
If I generate a password in LastPass, there's only a 30% chance LastPass will actually store that password - it gets confused very easily and suddenly you have a website that has a password that you don't have any more. (My workflow lately is to open a text editor, generate the password, copy it, paste it into the editor, then paste it into the website and update LastPass after everything has changed).
But Firefox is generally really good at grabbing and storing new and changed passwords. So some version of using Firefox's front-end feeding into LastPass's backend would be perfect (for me).
I can see the (different) security implications of either a front-end or back-end hook, so I'm not sure if Mozilla would ever implement such a scheme, but some way of integrating third-party password managers in a better way would be nice.
Certainly, a blood filled mosquito female has more calories than a male mosquito. They also fly slower. In highly constrained environments, in this case a netted area where bats were only allowed to eat mosquitoes, they ate enough females to decrease the mosquito egg population by 30%.
However, in reality, bats don’t do this. In the absolute best conditions (lots of swarming mosquitoes, no other insects, highly motivated bats) a bat can capture at most 10 mosquitoes a minute. There are about 100 mosquitoes per gram. A little brown bat weighs about 12 grams and eats 1/3 its body weight per feeding, so it would take 40 minutes of constant high-effort feeding in ideal conditions to consume a meal. In real world conditions other than maybe tundra in spring, you’d never have enough of a swarm to allow this. One or two moths or beetles supplies the same energy for a lot less effort.
And bats are much better at this than birds, so you won’t get help there either. Adult mosquitoes just aren’t really worth the effort - if one happens by, they’ll get eaten, but no large predator is targeting them.
Germany is one of the most intensively human modified environments in the world. The current goal of the Germans is to have 2% of their country be wilderness area by 2020 (it's currently 0.5%).
Doing a wildlife study of Germany and extrapolating globally from that is fairly ridiculous. It might apply to a few other countries in Europe and maybe New Jersey in the US, but otherwise is useless.
Bats, purple martins and other insectivores get a vanishingly small amount of their calories from mosquitoes - less than 1% of the stomach contents of bats. Mosquitoes are quite small and therefore not very calorically rich. Unlike midges and gnats, they don’t really swarm in a way that would allow insectivores to get a whole bunch in one swoop, so generally mosquitoes are providing fewer calories than the expense required to fly at them. Bats, martins and the like mostly end up eating moths and midges. Some species of dragonfly are mosquitovores but, again, not as a large percentage of their caloric intake.
There are a handful of species that target mosquito larvae, which bunch up enough to be worth it. The aptly named mosquitofish is one such creature.
But the saving grace even among mosquitofish is that they don’t care what species of mosquito larva they eat - getting rid of the handful that target humans will leave space for the hundreds of other species that exist in the US (let alone the thousands worldwide). There are approximately 3,500 species of mosquito and only about 40 that target humans. Most of the human targeting mosquitoes are invasive species in nearly all of their range, brought by humans. (Aedes aegypti and the Asian Tiger mosquito, for instance, shouldn't be found in the Americas...)
Contrast that with the enormous chemical inputs we put into our lakes, streams and rivers in order to just control mosquitoes - we are surely inadvertently killing off other species of insects just trying to control mosquitoes. And when we drain a wetland because of mosquitoes, we impact far, far more species than even the worst case scenario of mosquito extinction.
There have been a number of discussions among ecologists and the consensus is that wiping out human-targeting mosquito species is fine. Even E.O. Wilson, the famed biologist and campaigner for biodiversity, wants to kill them all. (He’s actually slightly more cautious, but basically wouldn’t spill any tears over eradicating human-feeding insects.)
If you go to simple.wikipedia.org, you get much simpler articles on this sort of thing.
There isn't a specific page for electroweak interaction, but it redirects you to Weak interaction, the text of which describes the electroweak interaction.
Mozilla even realized this and so started the Firefox OS project.
The people who ridicule Mozilla's lack of market share on mobile are the same people who complain about Mozilla's "lack of focus" for ever working on Firefox OS.
Mobile is where all the growth is for browsers and Firefox is shut out without an OS it controls. Its market share will continue to drift down as desktops make up a smaller and smaller part of the pie. With no good way of matching the integration of mobile to desktop that Google, Apple and even Microsoft offer, how can it compete? When it finally shuts down for good, all the complainers will switch to "why isn't there a non-Google/Apple/Microsoft browser"
And the memory leaks are largely caused by an unsafe extension system that is being replaced by a new, more thread-safe extension system. And the wailing and gnashing of teeth continue.
"Firefox has memory leaks!" "Fixed the ones in Firefox, the rest are bad extensions (probably AdBlock)"
Or, possibly, it's caused by hundreds of low-level but repeated exposures like kisses and sharing food. Many mothers (and fathers) pre-chew little pieces of tough food for their babies as they first start to wean, or play the "look, mummy's loves this food" game where mum takes a bite first to prove to the skeptical kid that puréed broccoli is "delicious".
Slashdot Mirror
All very true, but I suspect that this sort of technique is going to push its way down into the pathology departments too. After all, a number of the pathology steps involve looking at things closely and pattern matching, which are the same types of things being done by the AI being discussed.
I don't expect it to happen any time soon but I can certainly envision a system in 15-20 years that would have a nurse practitioner scan a patient, take biopsies of flagged spots and feed the biopsies into a "pathologist in a box" machine that would do all the checks required - probably down to the DNA level.
Moving the bulk of the cost of diagnosis to a capital expense rather than a labor expense could eventually drive down medical costs tremendously - once we have machines that can do most of the work, the relentless pace of technology and process improvement will make the machines cheaper and cheaper.
From Spotify's Audio Settings page:
Most of the post-WWII prosperity and middle-class grwoth in the US was thanks to most of the rest of the industrialized world being reduced to rubble. The 1950s-1970s boom in the US was a consequence of having the only industrial base that was completely intact after the war. Once the rest of the world rebuilt, that type of growth was impossible to sustain and we started to see stagnating wages and economic problems.
The US has reinvented itself a few times since (the tech, financial and services economies) which have provided periodic boosts to our economy, but we're never going to see the 1950s heydays again barring a dramatic technological shift.
That's not really the problem. The per-pupil spending in Chicago, for instance, is 33% higher than the state average, even though it is one of the worst performing systems in the state.
The real drivers of educational underachievement are social norms and immigration status. The children of low-skill recent immigrants make up the largest single percentage of children in the bottom two quintiles of achievement. Parental education level is the second best proxy of student achievement. This is not the fault of the children involved - second generation immigrant children (the children of the original students) have near-average achievement levels. Attempting to overcome learning a second language, poverty and lack of parental education is hard.
The US lags in worldwide educational achievement largely because it has imported a large cohort of poor and poorly-educated people who don't speak the language. It is to be expected that it will take time to pull them up to the national averages.
Why the quote ended there is a mystery only msmash can know.
Yet another reason not to use country (or region) level domains.
A good old fashioned .com domain has none of these issues.
I’m not sure what the “point” of having Hawking in the role is other than it’s fun. He uses an outdated synthesis chip to read out the things he types. Are we to believe that he types out his lines and hits “play”? Or that they are simply fed into his (or a similar) device from a pre-typed script?
Stephen’s “voice” is distinctive only in that it uses antiquated technology. I assume he has come to enjoy it (it is distinctive in that few other people with speech synthesis devices are as famous as he) but I’m sure Intel could whip up a version that uses his own voice samples (recorded before his disease progressed). Maybe he just loved the game Berserk (I’d love to hear him say “Catch the Humanoid”).
I prefer multimember districts with cumulative voting like they had in Illinois up to 1982.
Well, if you're going to have a map of Ladd, Illinois, it would behoove you to clearly mark Rip's Tavern, home of the best fried chicken in the state.
You really don't want to have hangry folks wandering about, desperately looking for their fried chicken fix. Google knows better than that...
I'm pretty sure it's acoustic reflex - muscle contractions within your inner ear that dampens your hearing response, caused by anticipation of loud noises, generally your own voice.
I distinctly experience it as some anticipatory pressure, followed by a tightening, then a release, which creates the "sound". (Yeah, I know that also sounds like the geekiest possible description of orgasm.)
I feel a little bit of pressure in my eyes as well when the pylon lands, which I'm assuming is also related. It could also explain the tinnitus effects.
OK, I looked it up. saccadic masking was discovered in 1898.
Maybe these researchers have found the root neuronal cause of this, but it's hard to tell from their press release. The press release makes it seem like they discovered something wholly new rather than a new understanding of a very old bit of knowledge.
I was thinking the same damned thing. It was also in an old "Infinite Monkey Cage" episode (apropos, I suppose). The idea that the brain stops processing visual input while attention shifts is pretty common knowledge.
The error is in the article text itself. I presume the numbers should be flipped.
Completely wrong on McArdle's background. She started out as a technology consultant before deciding it wasn't fulfilling for her, got a business degree and became an economic policy journalist.
(The link goes into some of her background of building servers and whatnot and is a fairly compassionate take on the James Damore brouhaha.)
The solution to bad government is more government
ImageZoom hasn't been updated, but there is ZoomImage which seems similar.
The developer behind Classic Theme Restorer has a set of custom CSS files that can tweak a lot of the interface.
My understanding is that they separate them at the larval stage and there is a size difference - basically pour some water through a sieve and one side has females and the other side has males. It's something like 99.9% effective.
I'd rather see some sort of Password API that would allow LastPass or Dashlane be the backend (or front end) for Firefox's password cache. The existing functionality of these systems is OK but kind of hackworthy.
If I generate a password in LastPass, there's only a 30% chance LastPass will actually store that password - it gets confused very easily and suddenly you have a website that has a password that you don't have any more. (My workflow lately is to open a text editor, generate the password, copy it, paste it into the editor, then paste it into the website and update LastPass after everything has changed).
But Firefox is generally really good at grabbing and storing new and changed passwords. So some version of using Firefox's front-end feeding into LastPass's backend would be perfect (for me).
I can see the (different) security implications of either a front-end or back-end hook, so I'm not sure if Mozilla would ever implement such a scheme, but some way of integrating third-party password managers in a better way would be nice.
Certainly, a blood filled mosquito female has more calories than a male mosquito. They also fly slower. In highly constrained environments, in this case a netted area where bats were only allowed to eat mosquitoes, they ate enough females to decrease the mosquito egg population by 30%.
However, in reality, bats don’t do this. In the absolute best conditions (lots of swarming mosquitoes, no other insects, highly motivated bats) a bat can capture at most 10 mosquitoes a minute. There are about 100 mosquitoes per gram. A little brown bat weighs about 12 grams and eats 1/3 its body weight per feeding, so it would take 40 minutes of constant high-effort feeding in ideal conditions to consume a meal. In real world conditions other than maybe tundra in spring, you’d never have enough of a swarm to allow this. One or two moths or beetles supplies the same energy for a lot less effort.
And bats are much better at this than birds, so you won’t get help there either. Adult mosquitoes just aren’t really worth the effort - if one happens by, they’ll get eaten, but no large predator is targeting them.
Germany is one of the most intensively human modified environments in the world. The current goal of the Germans is to have 2% of their country be wilderness area by 2020 (it's currently 0.5%).
Doing a wildlife study of Germany and extrapolating globally from that is fairly ridiculous. It might apply to a few other countries in Europe and maybe New Jersey in the US, but otherwise is useless.
Bats, purple martins and other insectivores get a vanishingly small amount of their calories from mosquitoes - less than 1% of the stomach contents of bats. Mosquitoes are quite small and therefore not very calorically rich. Unlike midges and gnats, they don’t really swarm in a way that would allow insectivores to get a whole bunch in one swoop, so generally mosquitoes are providing fewer calories than the expense required to fly at them. Bats, martins and the like mostly end up eating moths and midges. Some species of dragonfly are mosquitovores but, again, not as a large percentage of their caloric intake.
There are a handful of species that target mosquito larvae, which bunch up enough to be worth it. The aptly named mosquitofish is one such creature.
But the saving grace even among mosquitofish is that they don’t care what species of mosquito larva they eat - getting rid of the handful that target humans will leave space for the hundreds of other species that exist in the US (let alone the thousands worldwide). There are approximately 3,500 species of mosquito and only about 40 that target humans. Most of the human targeting mosquitoes are invasive species in nearly all of their range, brought by humans. (Aedes aegypti and the Asian Tiger mosquito, for instance, shouldn't be found in the Americas...)
Contrast that with the enormous chemical inputs we put into our lakes, streams and rivers in order to just control mosquitoes - we are surely inadvertently killing off other species of insects just trying to control mosquitoes. And when we drain a wetland because of mosquitoes, we impact far, far more species than even the worst case scenario of mosquito extinction.
There have been a number of discussions among ecologists and the consensus is that wiping out human-targeting mosquito species is fine. Even E.O. Wilson, the famed biologist and campaigner for biodiversity, wants to kill them all. (He’s actually slightly more cautious, but basically wouldn’t spill any tears over eradicating human-feeding insects.)
If you go to simple.wikipedia.org, you get much simpler articles on this sort of thing.
There isn't a specific page for electroweak interaction, but it redirects you to Weak interaction, the text of which describes the electroweak interaction.
The Simple page for graphene is decent enough.
Mozilla even realized this and so started the Firefox OS project.
The people who ridicule Mozilla's lack of market share on mobile are the same people who complain about Mozilla's "lack of focus" for ever working on Firefox OS.
Mobile is where all the growth is for browsers and Firefox is shut out without an OS it controls. Its market share will continue to drift down as desktops make up a smaller and smaller part of the pie. With no good way of matching the integration of mobile to desktop that Google, Apple and even Microsoft offer, how can it compete? When it finally shuts down for good, all the complainers will switch to "why isn't there a non-Google/Apple/Microsoft browser"
And the memory leaks are largely caused by an unsafe extension system that is being replaced by a new, more thread-safe extension system. And the wailing and gnashing of teeth continue.
"Firefox has memory leaks!"
"Fixed the ones in Firefox, the rest are bad extensions (probably AdBlock)"
"Firefox's Javascript is slow!"
"Fixed that"
"Firefox is slow"
"We'll move to a new threading model that's lots faster and requires us to fix our leaky extension model too"
"You're breaking my extensions - why don't you listen to what your users WANT???"
[sigh...]
Or, possibly, it's caused by hundreds of low-level but repeated exposures like kisses and sharing food. Many mothers (and fathers) pre-chew little pieces of tough food for their babies as they first start to wean, or play the "look, mummy's loves this food" game where mum takes a bite first to prove to the skeptical kid that puréed broccoli is "delicious".