I've never really understood how this comes under 'freedom of speech'. But I'm from the UK, so perhaps it's just because I think our laws make more sense in this regard.
I don't think that the state should have to raise the kids of its people. But I do think that kids should be shown age appropriate material. The fact that 'free speech' is so routinely trampled on (e.g. nipplegate, as mentioned above) shows that it's far from settled what does and what doesn't qualify as free speech.
How is banning a minor from watching a porno any different from not allowing them into a bar?
Find a like-minded geek. Slashdot seems like a good place to start.
Each needs:
- storage space - high speed internet - always-on connectivity - high-level security (by which I mean encrypt your own data as much as you need to)
Offer a swap. 100 GB each. You now have secure-enough (assuming good encryption), free (cost of your connection, already paid for), always-on (assuming each is geeky enough to leave computer on 24/7) backup and data storage.
Of course, it all depends who you link up with. But you can get a few and have some multiple redundancy.
I admit it has faults - but there are a few people here with large pipes, storage space, technical know-how and inclination to make it work. It has the added advantage of encouraging good encryption and security practices (i.e. if you don't follow them, your data is wide open).
Don't like it? Pay for one of these data centres. Or stick it on P2P.
Re:Dapper Hacks, or Ubuntu in general?
on
Ubuntu Hacks
·
· Score: 1
MRI shows much more than most x-rays (due to them showing up other tissues as well as bone well) - although MRIs are in fact all that good at showing bones (ultimately it depends what you're using it to look for).
MRIs are (currently) expensive and hard to interpret to most doctors as they just don't see enough. It's not so much a prefer thing as a 'different tools for different tasks' thing. That being said, all things being equal (time to get scans, cost) I'd prefer MRI as it would make diagnosing a lot easier for a variety of things - though I still think what I do is a bit of an art so that might lead me down the 'test rather than use clinical acumen route' that a lot of the US has taken (mostly due to ridiculous litigation).
MRI also takes a lot longer to read (simply there are more things to look at, and more pictures) - improving software and ability to do all sorts of 3D reconstructions of each individual tissue helps this - but as MRIs become more common, we'll all get better at reading them (although currently (almost) all are read by radiologists).
For what I do currently though (ER), plain old x-rays are better for most things.
The quality of a digital X-ray is as good as the old ones. You won't fail to make any diagnoses because of the changes. The advantages, however, are:
1. Cost - much lower 2. Radiation - much lower 3. Image manipulation - increases diagnostic yield in a variety of ways 4. Transmission - to other specialists, near instantaneously (depending on connection speed - usual rate-limiting factor is getting someone in front of the receiving screen to interpret the images) 5. Can't lose them (not quite true, but easier to back up) 6. Near instant results (check that the film doesn't need repeating after developing) 7. Can be viewed by multiple people at the same time (invaluable - no more x-ray on ward, can't be reported by radiologist)
So really, there's no question. Digital all the way. I am a doctor (emergency, so I look at probably around 100 x-ray images or more per day), having worked with both old and news flavours of x-rays - and there are no actual advantages with the higher resolution of the older type.
But we can't replace brains, and we can't cure cancer. Even stem cell brain cell regeneration would replace useful neuronal connections with random ones - i.e. not the same person (possibly not even able to d oanything usful). This gives a more likely maximum age of someone to be around 100-120 depending on when the stroke out. Until the brain is gone though, people can enjoy manual labour with those replacement hearts, lungs and kidneys until their 90s!
I used them a few years back for a personal website. Hosting was fine. I decided a year or so later that it was a waste of money. Cancellation was a total farce. Ended up paying for an extra year as the 'fill out 8 page web form, to get printable page to post or fax, emails ignored, telephone calls ignored' strategy they have effectively delayed things for longer than the time I had until the next contract. Auto opt-in for staying with them, so I got a bill regardless.
As far as I am concerned, any company which thinks it has to make things awkward to cancel is a crook. The same process to sign up and cancel should be reasonable.
I would thoroughly discourage anyone from using them as I still have a bad taste in my mouth about it, 3 years later. I think they still send me bills too but I've ignored them.
Service provision is all very well but customer service includes accepting the loss of a customer too.
I was merely pointing out that your implication of being smart due to your association with neuroscience is not necessarily true. I thought that by pointing out explicitly that this did not mean you were not smart (rather that it didn't prove you were smart either) would show it was a reasonable and fair point (which it remains). As another replied (to this same thread) - it was a follow on from the statement about Windows users having brains.
So I would say it was something constructive to add. It pointed out a logical fallacy. As you quite rightly pointed out, there are a range of smarts and a range of dumbs. I don't know where you are, and your post doesn't help either.
Of course, none of this stops me getting modded troll...
And don't worry - I won't take any offence. Of course your colleagues' opinions matter far more than mine - they know enough about you and your work to know where in the spectrum of intelligence you are. But the implication in your original post that neuroscience was a subject which inherently required you to be very intelligent to be involved in is clearly wrong - and that was the implication of your original post.(intended or not). The myth that subjects like neuroscience are only understandable by highly intelligent people is only there because most people know nothing about it all all... hence my statement of it 'meaning nothing' was not to say it meant nothing to those studying it, only that it still did not give any clues as to the intelligence of those same people.
I think you misread my original post as some sort of personal attack on your intelligence (despite the fact it was explicit in not being). Maybe your lack of understanding shows you are infact less intelligent than you think you are? Or maybe just a simple misunderstanding. Maybe I should ask your colleagues?
I once heard that you should spend 10% of the cash on a sound system on the cables. The rationale was something along the lines of: - they always chuck in cheap ones to cut costs - the sound is only as good as the weakest link in the system - good sound from good amp -> shit cables -> crap sound out of good speakers
I don't know if higher-end stereos have better cables these days - I bought a Denon Hifi back in 1996 (the only good bit of kit I have, stereo-wise) after getting a building society windfall (anyone in the UK will remember those...). I still have it. The cables are thin, cheap shit.
I never replaced them. Not really much of an audiophile. I do have a friend who has a nice set-up, and he spent a lot on the cables - but I don't know what they sound like with 'lesser' cables anyway.
So whether it works or not - don't know. But it makes sense that crap cables will affect the sound, particularly on lower-end budget Hifis which will cut corners.
This meets the criteria for the 'statistics' part of 'lies, damn lies, and statistics'. They seem to have broken no new ground, just agreed with those other guys.
I agree. Sounds like a misleading study. Mental agility is hard to measure across populations with simple tests - even when educated people start to lose a little, they often still perform well in tests as they have more 'reserve'. I imagine that there's probably a great deal of similarity in the amount of brain cells lost, but that the educated can continue to perform well in the tests as they can compensate. In the later stages of the disease, their reserve is exhausted and they decline faster. This agrees absolutely with what I have already read in textbooks when I was studying neuroscience (only a bit - in my medical student days, a few years ago now).
Sounds like lies, damn lies, and statistics. Fudging numbers to make claims rather than new ground.
Your understanding of neurophysiology is a little flawed - the way neurons work, once an action potential has been generated (enough stimulus to provoke a response (the all-or-nothing bit), it is propagated along the neuron by membrane depolarisation. This does require calcium, but except is extreme states of very high or low calcium (very rarely encountered even in disease) the local calcium concentration is fairly irrelevant.
Once a neuron has fired, the 'message' gets transmitted from one end to the other - the strength of the voltage difference doesn't matter.
When this reaches the end of the neuron, it releases chemicals when travel a short distance to the next link in the chain - whether these are released or not is not dependent on the size of the action potential, just whether there is one or not.
This is more like a digital system - it can't transmit different grades of response - just response, or no response. As for your comment about a record player - whether it is on or not (the state) is digital (0 or 1) - even if the music produced is analogue. In these situations digital is analogous to boolean.
Following are the remarks Mr. Platt made to the California senate judiciary committee, June 24, 2003, regarding senate resolution no. 20 - relative to eugenics.
Since the spring 2002, state governments in Virginia, Oregon, and South Carolina, have published statements of apology to tens of thousands of patients, mostly poor women, who were sterilized against their will in state hospitals between the 1900s and 1960s. In March 2003, Governor Davis and Attorney General Lockyer added their regrets for the injustices committed in the name of "race betterment." Now, the California Senate is considering a resolution, authored by Senator Dede Alpert (D-San Diego), which "expresses profound regret over the state's past role in the eugenics movement" and "urges every citizen of the state to become familiar with the history of the eugenics movement, in the hope that a more educated and tolerant populace will reject any similar abhorrent pseudoscientific movement should it arise in the future."
In 1924, the Immigration Act of 1924 was passed, with eugenicists for the first time playing a central role in the Congressional debate as expert advisers on the threat of "inferior stock" from Eastern and Southern Europe. [2] This reduced the number of immigrants from abroad to fifteen percent from previous years, to control the number of "unfit" individuals entering the country. The new Act strengthened existing laws prohibiting race mixing in an attempt to maintain the gene pool. Eugenic considerations also lay behind the adoption of incest laws in much of the USA and were used to justify many anti-miscegenation laws.
Some states sterilized "imbeciles" for much of the 20th century. The US Supreme Court ruled in the 1927 Buck v. Bell case that the state of Virginia could sterilize those they thought unfit. The most significant era of eugenic sterilization was between 1907 and 1963 when over 64,000 individuals were forcibly sterilized under eugenic legislation in the United States. A favorable report on the results of the sterilizations in California, by far the most sterilizing state, was published in book form by the biologist Paul Popenoe and was widely cited by the Nazi government as evidence that wide-reaching sterilization programs were feasible and humane. When Nazi administrators went on trial for war crimes in Nuremberg after World War II they justified the mass-sterilizations (over 450,000 in less than a decade) by citing the United States as their inspiration.(emphasis mine)
Not really, the neurons either fire or don't - the 'all or nothing' concept in physiology. Subsequent neurons either fire, or don't, based on the summation of positive and negative input from neighbouring neurons.
On top of that, various chemicals nearby make the general environment more or less prone to neuronal activation.
The neurons are 'on' or 'off' at any given time and could be called digital. The chemical environment - not so sure but the net result is still a digital message.
Slashdot Mirror
I've never really understood how this comes under 'freedom of speech'. But I'm from the UK, so perhaps it's just because I think our laws make more sense in this regard.
I don't think that the state should have to raise the kids of its people. But I do think that kids should be shown age appropriate material. The fact that 'free speech' is so routinely trampled on (e.g. nipplegate, as mentioned above) shows that it's far from settled what does and what doesn't qualify as free speech.
How is banning a minor from watching a porno any different from not allowing them into a bar?
Not really - these aren't real people causing hits.
You'll notice the timing of the traffic surge with recent terrorist event and subsequent legislation.
It's mostly just PATRIOT act research by the gummint to check out prospective employees.
Light v dark is not (much) related to exercise. It is more to do with what kind of muscle is there - 'slow twitch' versus 'fast twitch'.
Postural muscles (used a lot, don't need to be too quick) are slow twitch and darker. Fast twitch are usually for things like arms (flying in birds).
Neither are pure fast or slow - just varying amounts of each.
Explains why some people are sprinters and others are distance runners - they have more or less proportions of each.
Find a like-minded geek. Slashdot seems like a good place to start.
Each needs:
- storage space
- high speed internet
- always-on connectivity
- high-level security (by which I mean encrypt your own data as much as you need to)
Offer a swap. 100 GB each. You now have secure-enough (assuming good encryption), free (cost of your connection, already paid for), always-on (assuming each is geeky enough to leave computer on 24/7) backup and data storage.
Of course, it all depends who you link up with. But you can get a few and have some multiple redundancy.
I admit it has faults - but there are a few people here with large pipes, storage space, technical know-how and inclination to make it work. It has the added advantage of encouraging good encryption and security practices (i.e. if you don't follow them, your data is wide open).
Don't like it? Pay for one of these data centres. Or stick it on P2P.
Ubutu broke your printer glass?
Take that, linux fanboys!
MRI shows much more than most x-rays (due to them showing up other tissues as well as bone well) - although MRIs are in fact all that good at showing bones (ultimately it depends what you're using it to look for).
MRIs are (currently) expensive and hard to interpret to most doctors as they just don't see enough. It's not so much a prefer thing as a 'different tools for different tasks' thing. That being said, all things being equal (time to get scans, cost) I'd prefer MRI as it would make diagnosing a lot easier for a variety of things - though I still think what I do is a bit of an art so that might lead me down the 'test rather than use clinical acumen route' that a lot of the US has taken (mostly due to ridiculous litigation).
MRI also takes a lot longer to read (simply there are more things to look at, and more pictures) - improving software and ability to do all sorts of 3D reconstructions of each individual tissue helps this - but as MRIs become more common, we'll all get better at reading them (although currently (almost) all are read by radiologists).
For what I do currently though (ER), plain old x-rays are better for most things.
The quality of a digital X-ray is as good as the old ones. You won't fail to make any diagnoses because of the changes. The advantages, however, are:
1. Cost - much lower
2. Radiation - much lower
3. Image manipulation - increases diagnostic yield in a variety of ways
4. Transmission - to other specialists, near instantaneously (depending on connection speed - usual rate-limiting factor is getting someone in front of the receiving screen to interpret the images)
5. Can't lose them (not quite true, but easier to back up)
6. Near instant results (check that the film doesn't need repeating after developing)
7. Can be viewed by multiple people at the same time (invaluable - no more x-ray on ward, can't be reported by radiologist)
So really, there's no question. Digital all the way. I am a doctor (emergency, so I look at probably around 100 x-ray images or more per day), having worked with both old and news flavours of x-rays - and there are no actual advantages with the higher resolution of the older type.
Good idea - this was before you could get them (at least in the UK) but I'll keep it in mind.
But we can't replace brains, and we can't cure cancer. Even stem cell brain cell regeneration would replace useful neuronal connections with random ones - i.e. not the same person (possibly not even able to d oanything usful). This gives a more likely maximum age of someone to be around 100-120 depending on when the stroke out. Until the brain is gone though, people can enjoy manual labour with those replacement hearts, lungs and kidneys until their 90s!
I used them a few years back for a personal website. Hosting was fine. I decided a year or so later that it was a waste of money. Cancellation was a total farce. Ended up paying for an extra year as the 'fill out 8 page web form, to get printable page to post or fax, emails ignored, telephone calls ignored' strategy they have effectively delayed things for longer than the time I had until the next contract. Auto opt-in for staying with them, so I got a bill regardless.
As far as I am concerned, any company which thinks it has to make things awkward to cancel is a crook. The same process to sign up and cancel should be reasonable.
I would thoroughly discourage anyone from using them as I still have a bad taste in my mouth about it, 3 years later. I think they still send me bills too but I've ignored them.
Service provision is all very well but customer service includes accepting the loss of a customer too.
Is this a polite way of saying that his conception was an accident?
12 of 36 000 is 1/3000 = so your math is out by a factor of around 10.
$8 for a DVD isn't so bad (assuming the rest of your calcs are correct - I didn't check)
Well, they are analogue, so hold much much more than 64kbs. You could encode them at 1Gb/s and still not get all the information.
That most of the information is noise rather than signal, on the other hand...
I was merely pointing out that your implication of being smart due to your association with neuroscience is not necessarily true. I thought that by pointing out explicitly that this did not mean you were not smart (rather that it didn't prove you were smart either) would show it was a reasonable and fair point (which it remains). As another replied (to this same thread) - it was a follow on from the statement about Windows users having brains.
So I would say it was something constructive to add. It pointed out a logical fallacy. As you quite rightly pointed out, there are a range of smarts and a range of dumbs. I don't know where you are, and your post doesn't help either.
Of course, none of this stops me getting modded troll...
And don't worry - I won't take any offence. Of course your colleagues' opinions matter far more than mine - they know enough about you and your work to know where in the spectrum of intelligence you are. But the implication in your original post that neuroscience was a subject which inherently required you to be very intelligent to be involved in is clearly wrong - and that was the implication of your original post.(intended or not). The myth that subjects like neuroscience are only understandable by highly intelligent people is only there because most people know nothing about it all all... hence my statement of it 'meaning nothing' was not to say it meant nothing to those studying it, only that it still did not give any clues as to the intelligence of those same people.
I think you misread my original post as some sort of personal attack on your intelligence (despite the fact it was explicit in not being). Maybe your lack of understanding shows you are infact less intelligent than you think you are? Or maybe just a simple misunderstanding. Maybe I should ask your colleagues?
Being a neuroscientist doesn't necessarily mean you have brains.
Now, don't get me wrong, you might be smart. But you might not be. I have met a shitload of dumb folk in acadaemia in all disciplines.
Just because you have a degree in something that most people know nothing about... means nothing.
You're from the US then?
I once heard that you should spend 10% of the cash on a sound system on the cables. The rationale was something along the lines of:
- they always chuck in cheap ones to cut costs
- the sound is only as good as the weakest link in the system
- good sound from good amp -> shit cables -> crap sound out of good speakers
I don't know if higher-end stereos have better cables these days - I bought a Denon Hifi back in 1996 (the only good bit of kit I have, stereo-wise) after getting a building society windfall (anyone in the UK will remember those...). I still have it. The cables are thin, cheap shit.
I never replaced them. Not really much of an audiophile. I do have a friend who has a nice set-up, and he spent a lot on the cables - but I don't know what they sound like with 'lesser' cables anyway.
So whether it works or not - don't know. But it makes sense that crap cables will affect the sound, particularly on lower-end budget Hifis which will cut corners.
This meets the criteria for the 'statistics' part of 'lies, damn lies, and statistics'. They seem to have broken no new ground, just agreed with those other guys.
I agree. Sounds like a misleading study. Mental agility is hard to measure across populations with simple tests - even when educated people start to lose a little, they often still perform well in tests as they have more 'reserve'. I imagine that there's probably a great deal of similarity in the amount of brain cells lost, but that the educated can continue to perform well in the tests as they can compensate. In the later stages of the disease, their reserve is exhausted and they decline faster. This agrees absolutely with what I have already read in textbooks when I was studying neuroscience (only a bit - in my medical student days, a few years ago now).
Sounds like lies, damn lies, and statistics. Fudging numbers to make claims rather than new ground.
You need to know if you're leaving a country to avoid wanted criminals (in theory) escaping and for emigration statistics.
Not so!
First nuclear power powered by Intelligent Energy post!
Your understanding of neurophysiology is a little flawed - the way neurons work, once an action potential has been generated (enough stimulus to provoke a response (the all-or-nothing bit), it is propagated along the neuron by membrane depolarisation. This does require calcium, but except is extreme states of very high or low calcium (very rarely encountered even in disease) the local calcium concentration is fairly irrelevant.
Once a neuron has fired, the 'message' gets transmitted from one end to the other - the strength of the voltage difference doesn't matter.
When this reaches the end of the neuron, it releases chemicals when travel a short distance to the next link in the chain - whether these are released or not is not dependent on the size of the action potential, just whether there is one or not.
This is more like a digital system - it can't transmit different grades of response - just response, or no response. As for your comment about a record player - whether it is on or not (the state) is digital (0 or 1) - even if the music produced is analogue. In these situations digital is analogous to boolean.
It came from the latin, via french. The spelling was in fact pretty standardised. Or should I say standardized?
There are lots of American 'theatres'. Pearl Harbor was originally harbour, and was changed.
There are lots of examples of such dumbing down - not explained adequately by a sudden branch by 17th century immigrants.
I see little difference between my 'pretentiousness' and your pomposity.
Firstly - I am assuming you are american. Apologies if you are not.
Before you go off about the nazis - what about the bloody US? How are they so different?
From http://www.hnn.us/articles/1551.html
Following are the remarks Mr. Platt made to the California senate judiciary committee, June 24, 2003, regarding senate resolution no. 20 - relative to eugenics.
Since the spring 2002, state governments in Virginia, Oregon, and South Carolina, have published statements of apology to tens of thousands of patients, mostly poor women, who were sterilized against their will in state hospitals between the 1900s and 1960s. In March 2003, Governor Davis and Attorney General Lockyer added their regrets for the injustices committed in the name of "race betterment." Now, the California Senate is considering a resolution, authored by Senator Dede Alpert (D-San Diego), which "expresses profound regret over the state's past role in the eugenics movement" and "urges every citizen of the state to become familiar with the history of the eugenics movement, in the hope that a more educated and tolerant populace will reject any similar abhorrent pseudoscientific movement should it arise in the future."
In 1924, the Immigration Act of 1924 was passed, with eugenicists for the first time playing a central role in the Congressional debate as expert advisers on the threat of "inferior stock" from Eastern and Southern Europe. [2] This reduced the number of immigrants from abroad to fifteen percent from previous years, to control the number of "unfit" individuals entering the country. The new Act strengthened existing laws prohibiting race mixing in an attempt to maintain the gene pool. Eugenic considerations also lay behind the adoption of incest laws in much of the USA and were used to justify many anti-miscegenation laws.
Or from wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics:
Some states sterilized "imbeciles" for much of the 20th century. The US Supreme Court ruled in the 1927 Buck v. Bell case that the state of Virginia could sterilize those they thought unfit. The most significant era of eugenic sterilization was between 1907 and 1963 when over 64,000 individuals were forcibly sterilized under eugenic legislation in the United States. A favorable report on the results of the sterilizations in California, by far the most sterilizing state, was published in book form by the biologist Paul Popenoe and was widely cited by the Nazi government as evidence that wide-reaching sterilization programs were feasible and humane. When Nazi administrators went on trial for war crimes in Nuremberg after World War II they justified the mass-sterilizations (over 450,000 in less than a decade) by citing the United States as their inspiration.(emphasis mine)
Not really, the neurons either fire or don't - the 'all or nothing' concept in physiology. Subsequent neurons either fire, or don't, based on the summation of positive and negative input from neighbouring neurons.
On top of that, various chemicals nearby make the general environment more or less prone to neuronal activation.
The neurons are 'on' or 'off' at any given time and could be called digital. The chemical environment - not so sure but the net result is still a digital message.