Seriously, pick a career based on what you want to do. You'll be a happier person for it.
What if you don't care what career you end up with?
There are people out that just want a job that earns a comfortable wage and doesn't get in the way of raising a family and enjoying life. It might sound crazy to a workaholic like me, but they exist, and frankly, I envy people who don't value themselves largely by what they accomplish.
So your advice is fine and dandy for people like me, but don't throw it out there like some tidbit of universal wisdom. Different strokes for different folks and all.
Those are just to catch poor performers and weed them out, but they aren't frequent enough to keep people on their toes. You would need hundreds of such actors working at airports day and night for this purpose.
Check out the one called "Rare items often missed in visual searches. " This research, among others in the field, is funded by the DHS for precisely this purpose. May I add that the turnaround time from primary research to application is excellent. Jeremy and his lab are to be commended as an example of how pure research can contribute directly to the public good.
The TSA funds fundamental research in sustaining human performance in search tests to ensure that these baggage screeners are performing well.
One thing that has been found is that the human brain cannot keep searching efficiently for something that never appears, you just tend to zone out. We're not robots after all, and searching day in and day out for a 1 in a million event that may not occur for months or years is not a task we're equipped to do.
By giving the visual system periodic targets, it stays frosty. So some kind of periodic fake bomb is necessary.
Now you can do this in two ways: with real fake bombs, or images of bombs. One of these options is going to cost about 100 times as much to implement as the other and at the end of the day, if properly implemented, both will serve the same purpose. It all comes down to how much security can we get for our dollar, and paying actors to play dress up terrorists and slip fake-bombs through the baggage system is hugely inefficient compared to a software solution.
So you ca argue that the software solution is too vulnerable... but your suggestion is going to need to be accompanied by a list of other systems that can be scrapped to pay for the more costly alternative because it has to come from somewhere.
They haven't paid a financial cost, but I'm sure that the added stress of figuring out how to handle all this is causing at least a bit of worry at the top levels, which, on top of all their presumed hand wringing about vista, can't be good for Ballmer's blood pressure, or his ability to prevent himself from hurling chairs and expletives.
I think these subtle psychological factors play a bigger long term role in the outcome of events than they are normally given credit for, whether it's Ballmer's impending nervous breakdown, or the gradual erosion of consumer confidence in Microsoft's image as a bastion of competent software design.
Slashdot has always leaned left, but when it comes environmental issues the moderators are giving the smackdown to opposing viewpoints a bit too heavily these days. Does the other side not even get to be heard?
Where's the advantage for a normally sighted person?
It's much easier to just present the stimuli to the eyes rather than cutting out the eye and stimulating the optic nerve directly. We are a long long way from beating out the elegance of the retina and I doubt that DARPA is dumb enough to put funding into a scheme that begins with "First we cut out a soldier's eye".
But Wörgötter plans to develop a freestanding version next, and thinks it should be straightforward because the boom has only a small influence on its ability to walk.
Well what do you expect him to say, that this approach is hopelessly limited?
This isn't the first time we've seen great mobility from tethered robots, but somehow these guys never manage to produce the untethered version. Getting power and proper balancing to an untethered robot seems to be the critical stumbling block and I would be shocked if this one doesn't hit the same issues.
It is precisely because so little money is available that open source does what it does. As soon as you add serious money, open source becomes more like a business and all the "free as in beer" mojo goes right out the window. Money corrupts, and the greatest successes of open source have come from hobbyists who do their work well because they love doing it, not because there's a huge paycheck involved.
The Open Source community is not in any danger and things work as they always have. People do it because they love it. Those who happen to produce something particularly good get famous in some way and attract either donations or sell their product to industry.
While that rich guy might use as much electricity as 50 blue collar people, there's probably 200 blue collar people for every one of him.
I'm not saying that he and his ilk are not an issue, but don't write off the whole problem as something caused by the rich elite, it's a combination of everyone. Far more moderate middle class people who spend 2 hours in traffic per day in their gas guzzlers are probably a bigger problem when you consider their number.
If we were to use a non-percentage error metric I can easily write a reference source that beats the hell out of Britannica and Wikipedia. It goes like this:
1+1 = 2
You absolutely have to consider both the amount of content, and the number of errors. This is the percentage of errors.
Now it's non trivial to do this in a purely objective way, but that doesn't make the task hopeless, it just means you have to do your studies carefully.
And if Nature did it double-blind, that's hard data to refute! Britannica's on weak footing tackling this data just be refuting their own inaccuracies. After all, who's going to stand up for Wikipedia and post 10 pages of "We don't accept that this is an error because we say so"?
Yes, it's ugly what stupidity they've resorted to, but it's not surprising. What we're witnessing is the flip/flopping of a dying industry that has been murdered (or at least severely wounded) by new technology. These people used to have a stranglehold on a particular niche market and their jobs were secure in the Britannica trademark, so long as they didn't screw up very badly.
Suddenly their niche is disappearing and these people are stuck in a position defending their business model, which they have no experience doing (unlike the RIAA which has been sharpening its knives since before macrovision).
So unfortunately it's no surprise that they're going to do it poorly and come off pretty badly schooled by experts in critical thinking. It's MBA's vs scientists and they blundered in playing the scientists own game. They had no prayer of convincing the editorial staff of a top tier journal that it had erred scientifically. Britannica's only winning move seems to be to retreat to a smaller slice of the niche and refortify their business model around intangibles like brandname trust with advertising.
Reading that letter, you can almost feel Britannica's panic in rushing out a letter that is so poorly thought out.
Age, SES and IQ are to be used in matching subjects but not cancer? Why not? What makes those acceptable screening criteria and cancer not one?
The "outcome or effect" is brain cancer. People who have other kinds of cancer are a closer match than healthy controls.
The idea is that stress can decrease immune function and make people more prone to cancer (and a whole mess of other things). So assuming that early cell phone adopters tend to lead more stressful lifestyles, you'd expect to find increased cancer anywhere in the body, not just the brain. A lifestyle stress factor is a very likely candidate for causing an effect like this and since you're doing the study post-hoc, it has to be factored out somehow.
Selecting cancer victims also controls for exposure to pollutants and radioactivity.
Really they should have used both types of controls, healthy and non brain cancer victims.
The proper control group is patients with cancer in other parts of their body, not healthy controls.
That wipes out stress as a potential confound (under the reasonable assumption that people who were early adopters of cell phones were more often the type of people to have stressful jobs).
This is bad science, and that's usually the result of the fame motivation that comes with work in high profile areas. Projects like this generate front page news no matter what the result, hence they are extremely attractive.
There is going to be a huge selection bias in personality types that use cell phones heavily. For example, these people are probably overworked, stressed or just type-a people, in which case their immune system isn't running at quite the same level as non cell users (chronic stress causes hormonal reductions in the immune system as well as a whole range of other changes). This alone would account for increased cancer.
I wonder if these people also had increases of cancer in the rest of their body?
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, pick a career based on what you want to do. You'll be a happier person for it.
What if you don't care what career you end up with?
There are people out that just want a job that earns a comfortable wage and doesn't get in the way of raising a family and enjoying life. It might sound crazy to a workaholic like me, but they exist, and frankly, I envy people who don't value themselves largely by what they accomplish.
So your advice is fine and dandy for people like me, but don't throw it out there like some tidbit of universal wisdom. Different strokes for different folks and all.
It's not about testing humans for alertness, you misunderstand the purpose of the lures.
N ature05.pdf
The fake bomb images are there to IMPROVE performance.
The DHS & TSA fund research into optimizing human search. This implementation is a practical application of very recent research.
I refer you to
http://search.bwh.harvard.edu/pdf/WolfePrevalence
which is part of the research of Jeremy Wolfe's lab
http://search.bwh.harvard.edu/
Just read the first the first few paragraphs of the Nature paper I linked to understand the point.
Yea, stupid academics don't know nothin.
By the way, you used a computer to type this post didn't you?
This has happened one time.
To do the job of this software hack you would need actors working every airport in the country, day and night. The costs would be staggering.
Those are just to catch poor performers and weed them out, but they aren't frequent enough to keep people on their toes. You would need hundreds of such actors working at airports day and night for this purpose.
N ature05.pdf
Here's some research.
http://search.bwh.harvard.edu/pdf/WolfePrevalence
What brainiac thought this one up?
. htm
Jeremy Wolfe, possibly the world's foremost expert on human performance in visual search tasks did.
You can read about his research on his publications page here.
http://search.bwh.harvard.edu/recent_publications
Check out the one called "Rare items often missed in visual searches. " This research, among others in the field, is funded by the DHS for precisely this purpose. May I add that the turnaround time from primary research to application is excellent. Jeremy and his lab are to be commended as an example of how pure research can contribute directly to the public good.
And why would you want an adrenaline rush anyway?
It is not only a wise decision, it is essential.
The TSA funds fundamental research in sustaining human performance in search tests to ensure that these baggage screeners are performing well.
One thing that has been found is that the human brain cannot keep searching efficiently for something that never appears, you just tend to zone out. We're not robots after all, and searching day in and day out for a 1 in a million event that may not occur for months or years is not a task we're equipped to do.
By giving the visual system periodic targets, it stays frosty. So some kind of periodic fake bomb is necessary.
Now you can do this in two ways: with real fake bombs, or images of bombs. One of these options is going to cost about 100 times as much to implement as the other and at the end of the day, if properly implemented, both will serve the same purpose. It all comes down to how much security can we get for our dollar, and paying actors to play dress up terrorists and slip fake-bombs through the baggage system is hugely inefficient compared to a software solution.
So you ca argue that the software solution is too vulnerable... but your suggestion is going to need to be accompanied by a list of other systems that can be scrapped to pay for the more costly alternative because it has to come from somewhere.
They haven't paid a financial cost, but I'm sure that the added stress of figuring out how to handle all this is causing at least a bit of worry at the top levels, which, on top of all their presumed hand wringing about vista, can't be good for Ballmer's blood pressure, or his ability to prevent himself from hurling chairs and expletives.
I think these subtle psychological factors play a bigger long term role in the outcome of events than they are normally given credit for, whether it's Ballmer's impending nervous breakdown, or the gradual erosion of consumer confidence in Microsoft's image as a bastion of competent software design.
How is this flamebait?!
Slashdot has always leaned left, but when it comes environmental issues the moderators are giving the smackdown to opposing viewpoints a bit too heavily these days. Does the other side not even get to be heard?
The device stimulates the brain directly, not the optic nerve. Stories like this have been kicked around the block for quite awhile.
Where's the advantage for a normally sighted person?
It's much easier to just present the stimuli to the eyes rather than cutting out the eye and stimulating the optic nerve directly. We are a long long way from beating out the elegance of the retina and I doubt that DARPA is dumb enough to put funding into a scheme that begins with "First we cut out a soldier's eye".
But Wörgötter plans to develop a freestanding version next, and thinks it should be straightforward because the boom has only a small influence on its ability to walk.
Well what do you expect him to say, that this approach is hopelessly limited?
This isn't the first time we've seen great mobility from tethered robots, but somehow these guys never manage to produce the untethered version. Getting power and proper balancing to an untethered robot seems to be the critical stumbling block and I would be shocked if this one doesn't hit the same issues.
How would you tax a 3 digit /. ID?
It is precisely because so little money is available that open source does what it does. As soon as you add serious money, open source becomes more like a business and all the "free as in beer" mojo goes right out the window. Money corrupts, and the greatest successes of open source have come from hobbyists who do their work well because they love doing it, not because there's a huge paycheck involved.
The Open Source community is not in any danger and things work as they always have. People do it because they love it. Those who happen to produce something particularly good get famous in some way and attract either donations or sell their product to industry.
While that rich guy might use as much electricity as 50 blue collar people, there's probably 200 blue collar people for every one of him.
I'm not saying that he and his ilk are not an issue, but don't write off the whole problem as something caused by the rich elite, it's a combination of everyone. Far more moderate middle class people who spend 2 hours in traffic per day in their gas guzzlers are probably a bigger problem when you consider their number.
It's the attitude I'm commenting on, not the science.
What's with this?
Jamie adds: and all it took was twelve years of overwhelming scientific consensus.
What does this add to the story apart from boosting the image that is a hangout for extreme lefties?
And any use of consensus as an argument for scientific truth needs some boilerplate:
At some point, there was also an overwhelming consensus that the earth was flat.
Yea voting Green worked so well in the US.....
An error-rate IS a percentage.
If we were to use a non-percentage error metric I can easily write a reference source that beats the hell out of Britannica and Wikipedia. It goes like this:
1+1 = 2
You absolutely have to consider both the amount of content, and the number of errors. This is the percentage of errors.
Now it's non trivial to do this in a purely objective way, but that doesn't make the task hopeless, it just means you have to do your studies carefully.
And if Nature did it double-blind, that's hard data to refute! Britannica's on weak footing tackling this data just be refuting their own inaccuracies. After all, who's going to stand up for Wikipedia and post 10 pages of "We don't accept that this is an error because we say so"?
Yes, it's ugly what stupidity they've resorted to, but it's not surprising. What we're witnessing is the flip/flopping of a dying industry that has been murdered (or at least severely wounded) by new technology. These people used to have a stranglehold on a particular niche market and their jobs were secure in the Britannica trademark, so long as they didn't screw up very badly.
Suddenly their niche is disappearing and these people are stuck in a position defending their business model, which they have no experience doing (unlike the RIAA which has been sharpening its knives since before macrovision).
So unfortunately it's no surprise that they're going to do it poorly and come off pretty badly schooled by experts in critical thinking. It's MBA's vs scientists and they blundered in playing the scientists own game. They had no prayer of convincing the editorial staff of a top tier journal that it had erred scientifically. Britannica's only winning move seems to be to retreat to a smaller slice of the niche and refortify their business model around intangibles like brandname trust with advertising.
Reading that letter, you can almost feel Britannica's panic in rushing out a letter that is so poorly thought out.
Age, SES and IQ are to be used in matching subjects but not cancer? Why not? What makes those acceptable screening criteria and cancer not one?
The "outcome or effect" is brain cancer. People who have other kinds of cancer are a closer match than healthy controls.
The idea is that stress can decrease immune function and make people more prone to cancer (and a whole mess of other things). So assuming that early cell phone adopters tend to lead more stressful lifestyles, you'd expect to find increased cancer anywhere in the body, not just the brain. A lifestyle stress factor is a very likely candidate for causing an effect like this and since you're doing the study post-hoc, it has to be factored out somehow.
Selecting cancer victims also controls for exposure to pollutants and radioactivity.
Really they should have used both types of controls, healthy and non brain cancer victims.
The proper control group is patients with cancer in other parts of their body, not healthy controls.
That wipes out stress as a potential confound (under the reasonable assumption that people who were early adopters of cell phones were more often the type of people to have stressful jobs).
This is bad science, and that's usually the result of the fame motivation that comes with work in high profile areas. Projects like this generate front page news no matter what the result, hence they are extremely attractive.
Mod Parent Up.
This study is possibly even worse than that.
There is going to be a huge selection bias in personality types that use cell phones heavily. For example, these people are probably overworked, stressed or just type-a people, in which case their immune system isn't running at quite the same level as non cell users (chronic stress causes hormonal reductions in the immune system as well as a whole range of other changes). This alone would account for increased cancer.
I wonder if these people also had increases of cancer in the rest of their body?
Got it, and the point was well made.