There's a pretty active debate over how to classify it, and how it relates to "normal" functioning, and some of the major theories do at least hint in the direction that the picture of "normality" is complex.
One model, which has a clearer division, is that there is a specific etiology, which would make "autism" a more conventional "disease" in a sense, in that some people have it and some don't, and there is a known cause.
However another major model views the "autism spectrum" as something like the tail of a normal Bell-curve distribution for some cluster of traits. In that case, the dividing line between "normal" and "not normal" becomes a more subjective one having to do with how far in the tails you decide to put a cutoff, which probably involves some judgment of ability to function in society (which in turn depends on the society).
Other models think that we're conflating several etiologies in this big basket, and that some may be discrete diseases while others are tail-of-a-Bell-curve traits.
As seems depressingly common in science journalism, they vaguely mentioned the existence of a paper, but don't actually give the title or (dare we hope) a hyperlink to the paper. At least they did mention the name of the journal it was published in.
In any case, the paper is "Solar energy generation in three dimensions." If you're at a university with a subscription the official version (not open-access) is here. There is also an open-access preprint version at the arXiv.
Also, the government does not tax oil imports, so the tax differential appears to reflect an implicit government preference that we use import oil rather than solar panels, in cases where they can be interchanged.
That's often true, but there are a reasonable number of qualified people when it comes to internetworking technology who could serve on such a board, if it didn't take so many business connections and wheeling-and-dealing to get on the board in the first place. Some of the IETF folks, for example, work at national labs or in academia, rather than in industry.
The the opinion discusses that, since it's at the heart of the case. The key issue is that natural processes and abstract ideas aren't patentable, but processes or methods applying them may be, if the application involves something significant in its own right. However they found that in this case the application consisted of basically the natural law, combined with instructions to doctors to use the natural law, which was too trivial an application. As the opinion argues:
...to transform an unpatentable law of nature into a patent-eligible application of such a law, one must do more than simply state the law of nature while adding the words “apply it.”
In this specific case:
Prometheus’ patents set forth laws of nature --- namely, relationships between concentrations of certain metabolites in the blood and the likelihood that a dosage of a thiopurine drug will prove ineffective or cause harm. [...] While it takes a human action (the administration of a thiopurine drug) to trigger a manifestation of this relation in a particular person, the relation itself exists in principle apart from any human action. The relation is a consequence of the ways in which thiopurine compounds are metabolized by the body --- entirely natural processes. And so a patent that simply describes that relation sets forth a natural law.
The question before us is whether the claims do significantly more than simply describe these natural relations. To put the matter more precisely, do the patent claims add enough to their statements of the correlations to allow the processes they describe to qualify as patent-eligible processes that apply natural laws? We believe that the answer to this question is no.
Incidentally, the opinion is actually pretty clear and seems to "get" it, at least on this particular point. Contrary to usual practice when reading patent-related court opinions, I did not either: 1) fall asleep while doing so; or 2) feel the need to yell at the monitor.
On average, Greeks work about 50-hour weeks, among the highest in Europe. The average is higher than in wealthier countries largely because so many Greeks work at small family-owned businesses, while Germans are more likely to work at places with regulated work hours, like BMW. Greece is poor because small tavernas don't make as much money as BMW, not because Greeks aren't spending enough hours working at them.
A more accurate statement might be "by European-born Americans". The atomic age was not brought about in Europe, but only once Europeans from several nations emigrated to the United States, where they worked in a team of diverse ethnic origins (Germans, Hungarians, Americans, Poles, etc.), something that would've been unthinkable in Europe itself.
I think it depends a lot on the area. We're closer to replacing programming classes with online courses than we are to replacing, say, civil-engineering degrees; at least for the near-term future, nobody is going to license you to work on a bridge if you don't have a college degree, no matter how many online videos you've watched. Part of the reason imo is that it's easier to demonstrate competence in programming, e.g. by having a "Github resume" of non-trivial projects you've worked on in your spare time.
There are various places you can live on the axes of basic versus applied research, though. DARPA traditionally spent a larger proportion of its budget on basic research than it does today; nowadays the vast majority of DARPA projects intend practical outcomes in the 3-5-year timeframe, often pairing universities doing near-term applied research with companies like Lockheed who're simultaneously implementing it, and expected to exercise considerable pressure on the university partners to focus their research on the near-term "deliverable". Traditionally, that was part of the DARPA budget, while blue-skies research, often in the form of block grants to e.g. a physics or CS research group, was another part of it. The relative percentages have shifted a lot towards the former.
Some of the justification is that the NSF is supposed to fund basic research, while DARPA is supposed to fund things of near-term practical use to the military. That makes some sense conceptually, but a shift in DARPA priorities without a reallocation in funds between the NSF and DARPA means that in effect science/engineering research funding is being cut in favor of something that leans closer to military R&D.
Listing the wrong date seems to be a favorite tactic of misleading American robocalls. There was some legislation recently introduced to specifically tackle it, but it's probably illegal under existing laws as well. The main game seems to be whether, as here, political parties can feed the data to "third party" callers without it getting traced back to them.
I don't think that's universally true; for example, computers are much better at characterizing integer sequences than (almost?) any human is, because humans are just not that good at integer sequences, especially those with any sort of non-trivial mathematical relationship underpinning them. Humans are good at a fairly specific set of pattern-recognition tasks, like object recognition in images. Even there, they vary surprisingly strongly by the specific nature of the task; for example, humans are much better at recognizing faces than just about anything else--- and this ability is so specialized that humans generally can't process upside-down faces nearly as well.
That's true; a legitimate hypothesis is that this task involves very difficult skills that humans are naturally adept at, like object recognition in images does. My guess is that aligning DNA sequences is not as strong an example of one of those kinds of problems as object recognition, in particular because it doesn't involve the large amount of general knowledge about the world that we bring to bear when interpreting scenes; aligning sequences is more of a "formal" problem, than recognizing what constitutes a "chair". But I'll admit I could be wrong. One way to find out would be to try to see how much can be mined from the data.;-)
I'm highly skeptical that these gamers are really using some un-automatable human-only deep skills, especially since they aren't exactly extensively trained in this game, not to the level of, say, good Go players. So the interesting question to me is not that they beat current algorithms, but whether data mining these hundreds of thousands of alignments can tell us something about how they're doing it. My guess is that there are some heuristics that can be mined from this data that would massively speed up search.
That's a more general point about how these stories are always pushed, though, sometimes by media, sometimes by the researchers themselves. Imo the most exciting thing about successful uses of "human computation" isn't that we can harness people to do things, but that we can gain some large data sets that will make it so we don't have to get people to do them anymore. Or at least, that should be the baseline, imo: that humans can beat some hand-crafted algorithm is one thing, but can they beat machine-learned algorithms trained on those humans' own gameplay logs?
Somewhere right now their is a young guy sitting somewhere who has an idea in the back of his head which will become the next great innovation in gaming. It will require a lot more computing power than the current generation of PC's, much less consoles.
That was also my reaction on reading that--- why should we assume that the next great innovation in gaming will necessarily involve "a lot more computing power"? It's possible that there exist such innovations, but I'm also pretty confident that we haven't exploited the gaming possibilities of current hardware, or even of last-gen hardware. Heck, going back further, I don't think the SNES era actually explored all the gaming possibilities that one could've explored on an SNES; the market moved on so some avenues never got explored.
Farming it out to third-party contractors in uncontrolled working conditions (including internet cafes, apparently?) also seems to fail to uphold at least the spirit of their privacy policy. It's one thing to delete a nude photo that violates FB's privacy policy, and another thing to send it outside of Facebook's offices to third parties with nothing stopping them from saving it locally.
I was going to make a quip about how he'd be in charge of dupe-checking and ensuring all WaPo blog blurbs are high quality and accurate, but more seriously, this sounds like a cool job, so congrats!
The U.S. has some rules as well. Since fairly recently, federal politicians and high-level employees are restricted from working as lobbyists in their former areas for 1-2 years after leaving federal employment. However it doesn't look like the job Randall Long was high enough up to be covered (it's also not entirely clear if his new job constitutes lobbying, or if he's heading some sort of litigation group instead).
There's actually very little remaining peaceful right to protest anything, regardless of where on the political spectrum you are. Just about the only thing that's still legal is to show up to designated "free speech zones" and say your piece there.
I call this the "Love and Rockets objection": you cannot go against nature / because when you do / go against nature / it's part of nature too
It's useful as a rough organizing concept though, I think. The evolutionary mechanisms that led the black rat to diverge from the brown rat, and the mechanisms that led to the glow-in-the-dark rat, are probably worth studying separately.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a pretty active debate over how to classify it, and how it relates to "normal" functioning, and some of the major theories do at least hint in the direction that the picture of "normality" is complex.
One model, which has a clearer division, is that there is a specific etiology, which would make "autism" a more conventional "disease" in a sense, in that some people have it and some don't, and there is a known cause.
However another major model views the "autism spectrum" as something like the tail of a normal Bell-curve distribution for some cluster of traits. In that case, the dividing line between "normal" and "not normal" becomes a more subjective one having to do with how far in the tails you decide to put a cutoff, which probably involves some judgment of ability to function in society (which in turn depends on the society).
Other models think that we're conflating several etiologies in this big basket, and that some may be discrete diseases while others are tail-of-a-Bell-curve traits.
As seems depressingly common in science journalism, they vaguely mentioned the existence of a paper, but don't actually give the title or (dare we hope) a hyperlink to the paper. At least they did mention the name of the journal it was published in.
In any case, the paper is "Solar energy generation in three dimensions." If you're at a university with a subscription the official version (not open-access) is here. There is also an open-access preprint version at the arXiv.
Has anyone in history ever been criminally prosecuted for using an electronic device during takeoff or landing?
All the initial applications will have something to do with high-frequency trading.
Ah yes, the conservative mentality: children are pets of their adult owners.
New Government Bill Aimed At Vague Threat Turns Out To Benefit Government, Corporations More Than It Actually Protects You Or Me From Vague Threat
Also, the government does not tax oil imports, so the tax differential appears to reflect an implicit government preference that we use import oil rather than solar panels, in cases where they can be interchanged.
That's often true, but there are a reasonable number of qualified people when it comes to internetworking technology who could serve on such a board, if it didn't take so many business connections and wheeling-and-dealing to get on the board in the first place. Some of the IETF folks, for example, work at national labs or in academia, rather than in industry.
The the opinion discusses that, since it's at the heart of the case. The key issue is that natural processes and abstract ideas aren't patentable, but processes or methods applying them may be, if the application involves something significant in its own right. However they found that in this case the application consisted of basically the natural law, combined with instructions to doctors to use the natural law, which was too trivial an application. As the opinion argues:
In this specific case:
Incidentally, the opinion is actually pretty clear and seems to "get" it, at least on this particular point. Contrary to usual practice when reading patent-related court opinions, I did not either: 1) fall asleep while doing so; or 2) feel the need to yell at the monitor.
Or do these Congressmen support Big Hollywood peddling their ultra-violence directly into our CHILDREN's homes????
On average, Greeks work about 50-hour weeks, among the highest in Europe. The average is higher than in wealthier countries largely because so many Greeks work at small family-owned businesses, while Germans are more likely to work at places with regulated work hours, like BMW. Greece is poor because small tavernas don't make as much money as BMW, not because Greeks aren't spending enough hours working at them.
A more accurate statement might be "by European-born Americans". The atomic age was not brought about in Europe, but only once Europeans from several nations emigrated to the United States, where they worked in a team of diverse ethnic origins (Germans, Hungarians, Americans, Poles, etc.), something that would've been unthinkable in Europe itself.
I think it depends a lot on the area. We're closer to replacing programming classes with online courses than we are to replacing, say, civil-engineering degrees; at least for the near-term future, nobody is going to license you to work on a bridge if you don't have a college degree, no matter how many online videos you've watched. Part of the reason imo is that it's easier to demonstrate competence in programming, e.g. by having a "Github resume" of non-trivial projects you've worked on in your spare time.
You had better not be saying bad things about Mathnet.
There are various places you can live on the axes of basic versus applied research, though. DARPA traditionally spent a larger proportion of its budget on basic research than it does today; nowadays the vast majority of DARPA projects intend practical outcomes in the 3-5-year timeframe, often pairing universities doing near-term applied research with companies like Lockheed who're simultaneously implementing it, and expected to exercise considerable pressure on the university partners to focus their research on the near-term "deliverable". Traditionally, that was part of the DARPA budget, while blue-skies research, often in the form of block grants to e.g. a physics or CS research group, was another part of it. The relative percentages have shifted a lot towards the former.
Some of the justification is that the NSF is supposed to fund basic research, while DARPA is supposed to fund things of near-term practical use to the military. That makes some sense conceptually, but a shift in DARPA priorities without a reallocation in funds between the NSF and DARPA means that in effect science/engineering research funding is being cut in favor of something that leans closer to military R&D.
Listing the wrong date seems to be a favorite tactic of misleading American robocalls. There was some legislation recently introduced to specifically tackle it, but it's probably illegal under existing laws as well. The main game seems to be whether, as here, political parties can feed the data to "third party" callers without it getting traced back to them.
I don't think that's universally true; for example, computers are much better at characterizing integer sequences than (almost?) any human is, because humans are just not that good at integer sequences, especially those with any sort of non-trivial mathematical relationship underpinning them. Humans are good at a fairly specific set of pattern-recognition tasks, like object recognition in images. Even there, they vary surprisingly strongly by the specific nature of the task; for example, humans are much better at recognizing faces than just about anything else--- and this ability is so specialized that humans generally can't process upside-down faces nearly as well.
That's true; a legitimate hypothesis is that this task involves very difficult skills that humans are naturally adept at, like object recognition in images does. My guess is that aligning DNA sequences is not as strong an example of one of those kinds of problems as object recognition, in particular because it doesn't involve the large amount of general knowledge about the world that we bring to bear when interpreting scenes; aligning sequences is more of a "formal" problem, than recognizing what constitutes a "chair". But I'll admit I could be wrong. One way to find out would be to try to see how much can be mined from the data. ;-)
I'm highly skeptical that these gamers are really using some un-automatable human-only deep skills, especially since they aren't exactly extensively trained in this game, not to the level of, say, good Go players. So the interesting question to me is not that they beat current algorithms, but whether data mining these hundreds of thousands of alignments can tell us something about how they're doing it. My guess is that there are some heuristics that can be mined from this data that would massively speed up search.
That's a more general point about how these stories are always pushed, though, sometimes by media, sometimes by the researchers themselves. Imo the most exciting thing about successful uses of "human computation" isn't that we can harness people to do things, but that we can gain some large data sets that will make it so we don't have to get people to do them anymore. Or at least, that should be the baseline, imo: that humans can beat some hand-crafted algorithm is one thing, but can they beat machine-learned algorithms trained on those humans' own gameplay logs?
The post he was replying to said:
That was also my reaction on reading that--- why should we assume that the next great innovation in gaming will necessarily involve "a lot more computing power"? It's possible that there exist such innovations, but I'm also pretty confident that we haven't exploited the gaming possibilities of current hardware, or even of last-gen hardware. Heck, going back further, I don't think the SNES era actually explored all the gaming possibilities that one could've explored on an SNES; the market moved on so some avenues never got explored.
Farming it out to third-party contractors in uncontrolled working conditions (including internet cafes, apparently?) also seems to fail to uphold at least the spirit of their privacy policy. It's one thing to delete a nude photo that violates FB's privacy policy, and another thing to send it outside of Facebook's offices to third parties with nothing stopping them from saving it locally.
I was going to make a quip about how he'd be in charge of dupe-checking and ensuring all WaPo blog blurbs are high quality and accurate, but more seriously, this sounds like a cool job, so congrats!
The U.S. has some rules as well. Since fairly recently, federal politicians and high-level employees are restricted from working as lobbyists in their former areas for 1-2 years after leaving federal employment. However it doesn't look like the job Randall Long was high enough up to be covered (it's also not entirely clear if his new job constitutes lobbying, or if he's heading some sort of litigation group instead).
There's actually very little remaining peaceful right to protest anything, regardless of where on the political spectrum you are. Just about the only thing that's still legal is to show up to designated "free speech zones" and say your piece there.
I call this the "Love and Rockets objection": you cannot go against nature / because when you do / go against nature / it's part of nature too
It's useful as a rough organizing concept though, I think. The evolutionary mechanisms that led the black rat to diverge from the brown rat, and the mechanisms that led to the glow-in-the-dark rat, are probably worth studying separately.