Yeah sorry... I was trying to post a little too quickly there.... I hoped for once that this post wouldn't be lost in the masses because I do think it addresses some pertinent issues.... but oh well my fingers weren't quick enough:)
What a load....
on
Brain Privacy
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
That was one of the most poorly researched articles I've read about brain imaging. When will magazines and newspapers stop hyping up a technology that will never deliever the big brother scenarios they try to drum up ratings with....... For starters, MRI doesn't measure brain activity!
MRI imaging can only measure blood flow in a certain area, not the actual eletrical impulses of your brain. The way it works is by using huge magnetic pulses it forces all that wonderful iron-rich blood in your head to align in a certain orientation. After that, it essentially lets the "flash-magnetized" blood sink back out of alignment. Where your brain is working it's hardest (continually using "fresh" blood), it takes the longest for the blood to fall out of alignment relative to the rest of your sleepy noggin because of the increased iron content.
That is only the first step to getting those pretty magazine studies which most of the time are mere pseudo-science.
MRI has HORRIBLE temporal resolution. Anyone who has ever sat for an eternity in one of these machines knows this....It's the exact reverse problem of an EKG or similar system. An EKG is excellent at recording when electrical activity in the brain occurs, except for the fact that you have little or no idea where in the brain it is occuring. With MRI you get to find out exactly where in the brain this blood-consuming activity is occuring, but it takes considerably longer than instantaneous... COnsidering that most brain processes occur in under 250ms, this is like shooting in the dark. Only by repetative exposure to a given stimulus can you even hope to gain usable results...
Nor do the inaccuracies end there. After you've collected all of this wonderful MRI data from multiple test subjects (Doing a single on would be completely usualess as individual brain topology can vary) you need to compute thresholds, percent differences, and generally massage the data however you would like! The kicker is that most of these "scientific studies" never share the number crunching with any other group of scientists for independant verification..They just smile, show the pictures, and recieve the avalanche of funding.
Now I don't mean to suggest that MRI as a technology is without merit, but when you look at its limitations it can only produce useful data on a limited number of things. (Like FFA research, etc.) It certainly can't read the contents of your thoughts.
Now, even 50 years down the road if Mr. Executive placed an ultra-fine grid of sensors inside your skull, chances are you would still be safe for a long, long time. Staring at localized electrical impulses and trying to discover the functional equivalence of neural networks in a system as complex as the human brain is going to take a while.
Some variant of popular video on demand technology has been the holy grail of cable providers for a long time now and it finally seems as if the technology is catching up to the vision.
I think the comments concerning the ability to physically possess the movie on a disc will fade as the requisite broadband infrastructure for true VOD increases. What I envision is that the major broadband players, such as AOL/Time Warner will eventually capitalize on their market saturation and make a move into home entertainment hardware..
A large portion of Americans are already used to the ubiquitous cable box. Combine this with the massive and constantly increasing capacities of computer hard drives. I predict that DVD will kick the bucket when you can sit on your couch, purchase a movie which downloads within seconds, and the copy is stored on the internal hard drive so that you can watch it again and again. This will relegate the need for a physical disc to those who want to carry their movies on the go, but with high speed broadband, portable hard drive products such as the iPod, and DVD burning there are various ways to address this info. I think we will definately see Micro$oft somewhere in this mix. With the xbox and their home media PC's they have already indicated their intent to conquer the home entertainment realm. Throw their trustworthy computing initiative and DRM stuff into this mix and it is not hard to imagine them positioning themselves to deliver a secure home media server.
The truly interesting thing is behind all this we could see a titanic struggle between the big name studios and the cable/broadband providers. Someone major players on both sides of the fence will have to get in bed with eachother before we see a passing of the torch between DVD and a variant of VOD. What is almost certain is that the company or coalition of companies involved will insist on proprietary standards and security measures. If it comes down to a market share slugging match which it very well might, you can bet each company will be doing its best to make it's own format as proprietary as possible and rely on a "superior" feature set to kill off the other companies and their mutually incompatable harware.
I can understand the author's frusteration with the current infrastructure, and it might be nice if we could chuck all of the bad at once.
BUT, this is completely impractical and would never happen. The current installed base and backwards compatibility always have and always will act as insurmountable intertia to sudden and drastic changes. The innovators will keep on innovating while the rest of user base slowly upgrades their most woefully inadequate equipment/software to the new standards.
Let's face it: once the internet moved out of the realm of hobbyists and academia and into the commercial sphere it lost the willingness to accept drastic changes. While it continually evolves (the emergence of ipv6, internet2, etc), I don't think we will be seeing a real, identifiable revolution anytime soon.
My point is that while you think we spend a "lot" of money on these things, I believe our space programs in general are underfunded. Any time you have a limited amount of resources you must take into account this fact and try to put it to the greatest possible use. I just do not see how this project amounts to a practical use of funds.
Wouldn't it be much more likely that a society advanced enough to be detectable across the vast reaches of interstellar space would find humans based upon primitive radio frequency transmissions? We might be able to just kick back and hope for our sake they don't take any of those hitler or vietnam broadcasts too seriously...
While the possibility of extra-terrestrial life is a fascinating one, aren't there a lot more equally fascinating yet infinitely more practical aspects of space exploration to spend tons of money on?
Wow, was I surprised to wake up and find this on the main page of slashdot;) This program originally written by two classmates senior project at Phillips Exeter Academy last spring. I remember playing around with an early version of it as well as checking out the web page (it hasn't really changed).
It appears as if one year and many cases of beer later, a lot of the kinks have been worked out. This program is great if you use it frequently enough for it to learn your preferences, or if you have a lot of downloaded music with malformed names that need correcting.
I would much rather see it as a plugin because otherwise I miss out on using my favorite software stereo expander and other DSP plugins.
Slashdot Mirror
Measuring brain activity using blood flow with lousy temporal resolution != reading your mind :)
Yeah sorry... I was trying to post a little too quickly there.... I hoped for once that this post wouldn't be lost in the masses because I do think it addresses some pertinent issues.... but oh well my fingers weren't quick enough :)
That was one of the most poorly researched articles I've read about brain imaging. When will magazines and newspapers stop hyping up a technology that will never deliever the big brother scenarios they try to drum up ratings with....... For starters, MRI doesn't measure brain activity!
MRI imaging can only measure blood flow in a certain area, not the actual eletrical impulses of your brain. The way it works is by using huge magnetic pulses it forces all that wonderful iron-rich blood in your head to align in a certain orientation. After that, it essentially lets the "flash-magnetized" blood sink back out of alignment. Where your brain is working it's hardest (continually using "fresh" blood), it takes the longest for the blood to fall out of alignment relative to the rest of your sleepy noggin because of the increased iron content.
That is only the first step to getting those pretty magazine studies which most of the time are mere pseudo-science.
MRI has HORRIBLE temporal resolution. Anyone who has ever sat for an eternity in one of these machines knows this....It's the exact reverse problem of an EKG or similar system. An EKG is excellent at recording when electrical activity in the brain occurs, except for the fact that you have little or no idea where in the brain it is occuring. With MRI you get to find out exactly where in the brain this blood-consuming activity is occuring, but it takes considerably longer than instantaneous... COnsidering that most brain processes occur in under 250ms, this is like shooting in the dark. Only by repetative exposure to a given stimulus can you even hope to gain usable results...
Nor do the inaccuracies end there. After you've collected all of this wonderful MRI data from multiple test subjects (Doing a single on would be completely usualess as individual brain topology can vary) you need to compute thresholds, percent differences, and generally massage the data however you would like! The kicker is that most of these "scientific studies" never share the number crunching with any other group of scientists for independant verification..They just smile, show the pictures, and recieve the avalanche of funding.
Now I don't mean to suggest that MRI as a technology is without merit, but when you look at its limitations it can only produce useful data on a limited number of things. (Like FFA research, etc.) It certainly can't read the contents of your thoughts.
Now, even 50 years down the road if Mr. Executive placed an ultra-fine grid of sensors inside your skull, chances are you would still be safe for a long, long time. Staring at localized electrical impulses and trying to discover the functional equivalence of neural networks in a system as complex as the human brain is going to take a while.
Some variant of popular video on demand technology has been the holy grail of cable providers for a long time now and it finally seems as if the technology is catching up to the vision.
I think the comments concerning the ability to physically possess the movie on a disc will fade as the requisite broadband infrastructure for true VOD increases. What I envision is that the major broadband players, such as AOL/Time Warner will eventually capitalize on their market saturation and make a move into home entertainment hardware..
A large portion of Americans are already used to the ubiquitous cable box. Combine this with the massive and constantly increasing capacities of computer hard drives. I predict that DVD will kick the bucket when you can sit on your couch, purchase a movie which downloads within seconds, and the copy is stored on the internal hard drive so that you can watch it again and again. This will relegate the need for a physical disc to those who want to carry their movies on the go, but with high speed broadband, portable hard drive products such as the iPod, and DVD burning there are various ways to address this info. I think we will definately see Micro$oft somewhere in this mix. With the xbox and their home media PC's they have already indicated their intent to conquer the home entertainment realm. Throw their trustworthy computing initiative and DRM stuff into this mix and it is not hard to imagine them positioning themselves to deliver a secure home media server.
The truly interesting thing is behind all this we could see a titanic struggle between the big name studios and the cable/broadband providers. Someone major players on both sides of the fence will have to get in bed with eachother before we see a passing of the torch between DVD and a variant of VOD. What is almost certain is that the company or coalition of companies involved will insist on proprietary standards and security measures. If it comes down to a market share slugging match which it very well might, you can bet each company will be doing its best to make it's own format as proprietary as possible and rely on a "superior" feature set to kill off the other companies and their mutually incompatable harware.
I can understand the author's frusteration with the current infrastructure, and it might be nice if we could chuck all of the bad at once.
BUT, this is completely impractical and would never happen. The current installed base and backwards compatibility always have and always will act as insurmountable intertia to sudden and drastic changes. The innovators will keep on innovating while the rest of user base slowly upgrades their most woefully inadequate equipment/software to the new standards.
Let's face it: once the internet moved out of the realm of hobbyists and academia and into the commercial sphere it lost the willingness to accept drastic changes. While it continually evolves (the emergence of ipv6, internet2, etc), I don't think we will be seeing a real, identifiable revolution anytime soon.
My point is that while you think we spend a "lot" of money on these things, I believe our space programs in general are underfunded. Any time you have a limited amount of resources you must take into account this fact and try to put it to the greatest possible use. I just do not see how this project amounts to a practical use of funds.
Wouldn't it be much more likely that a society advanced enough to be detectable across the vast reaches of interstellar space would find humans based upon primitive radio frequency transmissions? We might be able to just kick back and hope for our sake they don't take any of those hitler or vietnam broadcasts too seriously...
While the possibility of extra-terrestrial life is a fascinating one, aren't there a lot more equally fascinating yet infinitely more practical aspects of space exploration to spend tons of money on?
I did have the decency of reading their site :)
Wow, was I surprised to wake up and find this on the main page of slashdot ;) This program originally written by two classmates senior project at Phillips Exeter Academy last spring. I remember playing around with an early version of it as well as checking out the web page (it hasn't really changed).
It appears as if one year and many cases of beer later, a lot of the kinks have been worked out. This program is great if you use it frequently enough for it to learn your preferences, or if you have a lot of downloaded music with malformed names that need correcting.
I would much rather see it as a plugin because otherwise I miss out on using my favorite software stereo expander and other DSP plugins.