A quick read of this article suggests that this will have a false positive problem with meat products. The nitrite (NO2) groups found in explosives that glow IR when exposed to green light are also found in meat products. I'm surprised the researchers did not test this potential source of false postives because other explosives detection technologies that look for nitrogen are also fooled by meat products.
Eat a hot dog or deli sandwich before going through security and you may end up in the dreaded secondary screening line when the bomb detector mistakes bologna for a bomb.
This story illustrates the power of groups and societies to coordinate to the detriment of individuals and outsiders. The Southampton team used a "secret handshake" to recognize members of the society and discriminate against outsiders. It is a natural explanation for people's fear of closed/secret societies -- people fear the group's ability to break the rules of individualistic "fair play."
If the agents in the game were capable of higher order reasoning and could see these coordinated actions between members, then they would become paranoid -- all the Southampton team members were "out to get them."
Many people use serious medications that could interact badly with other drug or they have critical medical conditions that affect treatment. In an accident, the EMTs need to know who you are without fumbling around for a wallet or purse (that may have been flung from the car) or jumbled if there are multiple people in the car. Even a med alert bracelet is only as good as it is secure on the wrist. An RFID implant and scanner makes it less likely that you will be separated for your ID.
Some people are working on an earthquake alert system that detects an earthquake at the epicenter and sends an wireless signal out to others. Because radio wave travel faster than ground waves, the alert reaches people seconds before the quake hits. Its not much of a warning, but it may be enough time to shut down some processes, park the heads on the disk drive, turn on the backup generator, etc.
demographics and buying habits
on
The Long Tail
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
This trend is also a generational phenomenon. In researching the buying habits of current teenagers for a client, I was shocked to find that the majority would be LESS likely to buy a product that was used by their favorite star ( see national youth survey on brand loyalty). Nor were the surveyed youth very prone to peer pressure. The results pointed to a high degree of individualism amongst this group.
If people stop buying what the stars are wearing/using and don't respond to peer pressure, then buyers will fragment and the long tail will rise in importance.
Since anyone, anywhere can test the network's integrity with ping, anyone can do their own network outage surveillance. (OK, they can't test the old circuit switched telephone net, but once VOIP gets going, it won't mater). What if ping falls in the hand of terrorists? Seems like not only is the cat out of the bag, but anyone who can run ping owns some scissors.
Onc can do similar observations with inverse optics using asteroid occultations. I suppose one could create an artificial asteroid and watch as it passes in front of stars as it orbits or create a detector satellite with an ion engine that visits occultation zones between selected stars and satellites.
The basic concept of any kind of PageRank is flawed because it assumes a monotonic ordering of sites on some single scale (e.g., popularity as defiend by linkage). The problem with PageRank is not the use of links to assess popularity, but the presumption of a single scale.
The search of "Apple" illustrates this well. This search, like many is deeply ambiguous. It could refer to the computer company, to the fruit, to the record company, to New York City, to the singer (Fiona), or to Apple Valley (MN or CA). Even if the search engine knows that it refers to the computer company, it's still ambiguous. It could refer to the company (as an investment), the products (for purchase), or a question (as in technical support).
The point is that each of these ambiguous alternatives creates an independent cluster of hits. One cannot even rank hits within a cluster due to a hierarchy of ambiguity. Within the Apple computer cluster are distinct subclusters for computer purchase, investment evalaution, and technical support. Although one can create a ranking within each subsubsubsubcluster, it is impossible to construct a meanful rank for all hits across all clusters - the second hit for "purchasing an Apple computer laptop" is not comparable to the 2nd hit for "Apple Records".
Instead of a pagerank scheme that sorts the universe of hits the instant the user enters the search, search engines should be more interactive. The first page of hits would emphasize breadth -- displaying hits most representative of a broad range of alternative clusters. The UI would enable a "more like this"/"fewer like this" selection process that tells the search engine what the searcher is actually looking for. As the searcher selects hits, the subsequent pages might show popularity-ranked hits within the clusters that seem to interest the searcher.
Each hit and each page would serve a double-duty -- serving the searcher's need to get information from the internet, and answering the search engine's question about the needs of the searcher for that particular search. Until the search engine understands each searcher and each search, it cannot hope to rank the hits.
It would be the ultimate "business method" patent, a patent on the creation of software patents. Whoever was the first company to create and file a software patent has a clear claim to this one. The holder of this patent on patent making could then sue all other companies for creating software patents and the software patent nightmare would be hoist on its own patented petard.
Imagine a world in which employers could only hire people within walking distance of the company. The quality of the workforce would go down and many people would be stuck in jobs that suck. Imagine a world in which the only goods you could buy were those found at tiny neghborhood shops within walking distance. The selection and pricing would suck.
The farther people can comfortably commute to work, the better the match between employer and employee. The farther people can comfortable travel to find goods and services, the better the selection and economies of scale. Current transportation systems (cars, buses, etc.) let people travel greater distances, but introduce stresses and uncertainties (traffic jams). If Intelligent Transportation System can increase the average speed of travel or reduce the uncertainties in travel times, people will enjoy less stress in life, find better jobs and find better goods and services.
I question the premise. Although games and stories are both entertainment, that does not imply that they can be successfully merged. On the one hand, what makes a story great is the ability to hear how someone else handled a problem or situation -- learning from another person's life and NOT controlling the story line. Call it lazy, but a passive vicarious experience can be pleasurable.
On the other hand, what makes games great is the ability to take control and run your own life in the game. You get to be someone you are not or try a persona or just compete for the thrill of it. Games are pleasurable for a diametrically different reason than stories. We like stories because they let us be passive and we like games because they let us be active.
I like green olives and I like chocolate and they are both food, but that does not mean they should be merged.
And this is due to massive multinational corporations spending billions on R&D and infrastructure. The amateur computer geeks would be virtually nonexistent if giants like MS, Intel, and various Asian chipmakers weren't commoditizing the industry.
Absolutely true! Pursuit of the trillions of dollars in consumer and business equipment markets has driven the R&D and economies of scale that make a DVD player cost only $50. The world market of private sector electronic goods has supplanted the military as the driver for innovation.
I don't think that I've ever seen anybody making semiconductors in their garage...
I had a semiconductor making kit when I was a kid. Made by Bell Labs (in the 1970s?), the kit included a disk wafer of silicon, polishing grit, etchants & dopants, a small 600W ceramic/electric oven, and a sheet of asbestos fireboard (arsenic and asbestos, what fun!). The kit let one make a silicon solar cell. But you are right that modern semiconductors (at a billion dollars a fab) require serious resources.
That amateurs can contribute is, in large part, due to the steady price deflation of equipment, especially equipment based on semiconductors. Declines in the cost of a near-studio quality audio rig, software engineering workstation, or a good quality CCD astrophotography camera make these tools accessible. Low cost chips that enable the networking of the amateurs (remember when 2400 baud dial-up was charged by the minute?) so they can work together.
I offer both agreement and an answer. I use an 4.5 year old Psion 5mx for word processing (taking notes at conferences, on airplanes, in line at the bank, etc.) spreadsheets, small databases, date & time around the globe, quickie calculations, scheduled reminders, and an occasional game. Its got a whopping 36 MHz processor, 16 MB RAM, and a 16-gray B/W half-VGA screen but that is all it really needs for these tasks. It is totally fantastic as a 12 oz. ultralite laptop because it does all the basic "office" type tasks and gets 20 to 35 hours per pair of AAs.
Like you, I don't see the need for faster/better (especially at the expense of battery life), although I can understand the attraction to wireless web access.
All inhabited spacecraft are inflated structures and all are prone to punctures. In space, you can't easily prevent the puncture (even aluminum capsules have some risk), but what happens next determines the survival of the crew. If the puncture just leaves a pinhole, then all that's needed is a patch. If the hole leads to a larger tear, then death soon ensues. This problem is not unique to space as a jet airliner is just a big balloon that will pop if poorly designed or maintained.
Materials such as rip-stop nylon use strong threads at crossing angles to prevent propagation of a hole or tear. The same principle could be used in inflatable spacecraft to limit the scope of an puncture damage. The interlacing threads would limit the damage to one or a few cells of the structural material.
Subduction zones (like those off the west coast of America) and volcanoes (such as St. Helens) are a big part of the long-term carbon cycle of the planet. Left to its own, life and chemical processes on this planet would convert all the atmospheric carbon into calcium carbonate that would be trapped in rock on the bottom of the ocean. Subduction zones and volcanoes reprocess this rock into CO2.
Once the Earth's crust cools enough, it will lock up and stop the cycle and CO2 will inexorable drop in concentration. I can't remember when this is predicted to happen, but I believe it is scheduled to occur before the Sun becomes a red giant. Of course, I'm sure our descendants (assuming we have them) will invent their own C02 extract factories to keep the Earth nicely carbonated when the time comes.
Although "harder than concrete" sounds "strong" it does not address the chief danger in long-term storage. Chemical erosion and leaching are a bigger issue than brute strength. Anyone who has ever thought about geology and objects like geodes will realize that quartz is both much harder than concrete, but also (over the long term) water soluble. The real trick is to encapsulate the waste in something that won't dissolve or allow the migration of waste isotopes in the heat, potential liquids, and long timescales of waste storage. (I'm sure hardness is somewhat of an issue when trapped alpha particles and decay products create expansion stresses in the glass)
I do think that vitrification is the way to go, but statements like these do the public no good when they mislead them on what characteristics actually make for a good containment system.
One major difference between human and computer viruses is topological. Because diseases spread by contact, connectivity regulates the pattern of transmission. For people, connectivity is largely 2-D -- the flu spreads through in neighborhoods and cities before moving across countries and the globe. (Exceptions do come from air travel and intracity connectivity is somewhat greater than 2-D). Human connectivity is also very sparse. A given person can only reach a minute fraction of the population in a day.
In contrast, computer connectivity is nearly infinite-dimensional as the latency between any pair of computers is nearly constant. Watching the spread of worms (e.g. Witty), the doubling time is not limited by travel times and all computers in the world are simultaneously vulnerable.
We toured the Buran in Sydney when it was an ill-fated tourist attraction. It was a very nice exhibit, video on Soviet space accomplishments and it included sitting in the actual cockpit.
The Buran in Sydney lacked the navigation avionics, leaving a rather large empty space in the deck below the cockpit. The Russians removed that before they exported the shuttle. The guide claimed the avionics were heavily borrowed from Russian ICBMs and had even included targeting data for U.S. sites.
It's sad that Buran failed as a tourist attraction.
In China they use bamboo for scaffolding - or they did.
They still do as of 2 years ago. I've even seen 50 story buildings in Hong Kong covered in a mesh of bamboo. It's both scary and amazing because the entire structure is only bamboo poles and tie-wraps. It makes for fast assembly and disassembly, but I'm sure a U.S. or European building or job-site inspector would have a heart attack.
I've always thought that Banyan trees would make a good basis for organic architecture. By weaving the dangling prop roots, people could make walls, doors, halls, rooms, etc. The tree could grow with the family.
Perhaps sites like this will encourage the creation of word flashmobs. A group of people would conspire to overuse some obscure word to boost its rating. Bombing the word within blogs, web pages, and postings might help the word spread into wider use and rise in the rankings. It could even be a competitive sport -- two teams pick two words of adjacent rank and the team whose word rises the most wins.
Well they don't do it because they wont to help the world. But spam means extra bandwidth, so extra cost.
I've heard many a system admin complain about the "cost of spam" to their networks, but have not seen a quantification of that cost. Given that spams are so small (the ones that I get average 4kB/spam), the storage costs of saving every spam (at 1$/GB) are about only 4 micro$/spam and the transfer costs (at $3/GB of transfer to pick a Google figure) are only 12 micro$/spam. Even CPU time is cheap. If a $2000 server CPU can handle only 10 messages per second (an underestimate?) then the cost in CPU time is only about 6 micro$/spam. In total, a million spams would cost an ISP maybe $20 or $30 which is far less that the burdened labor cost of one hour of a technician's time.
What am I missing here? Can any admins tell me the true dollar cost per spam? The only other reason, that I can think of, is that Earthlink fights spam to avoid blacklisting because blacklisting would drive up support costs when a million customers call at ask why their emails aren't getting through.
Simulation games, such as these medical games, share a core weakness in the design process. For example, in designing a 3-D tracking device, I simulating the sensor data and the wrote the algorithms for interpreting that data. It worked perfectly in simulation, but did not work when we made the actual device.
The problem was that I had made a minor sign error in some 3-D coordinate transformations. Because I designed both the simulation of the sensor and the software that processed that sensor data, I put the same mistake in both places. This sign error was self-consistent in silico, even as it was wrong in reality (or in vitro, as the medical researchers would say). Simulations can create false confidence.
By the same token, if the designers of the game have the same medical expert both create the simulated patient and the scoring of player's actions, then any errors in that expert's knowledge may create a false reality -- a simulation that is self-consistent but inaccurate. Doctors that are trained on the system may be to self-confident because they think they have seen a 1,000 simulated causes of X and think they know how such cases seem to progress/respond to treatment. But if this deep experience is based on erroneous "physics" then the learning is erroneous.
I'm not saying that simulation games are bad, simulations can help train doctors to recognize and respond to rare events (analogous to flight simulators that train pilots for an engine fire that they are unlikely to ever personally experience).
My point is that simulation games have a weakness in creating cognitive experiences that seem very real and very plausible, yet can be very wrong. Medical knowledge is, to date, too uncertain and too dynamic. If they do use simulations to train doctors and then discover an error in the simulation, they would need to recall both the simulation software and all the doctors trained on it.
Slashdot Mirror
A quick read of this article suggests that this will have a false positive problem with meat products. The nitrite (NO2) groups found in explosives that glow IR when exposed to green light are also found in meat products. I'm surprised the researchers did not test this potential source of false postives because other explosives detection technologies that look for nitrogen are also fooled by meat products.
Eat a hot dog or deli sandwich before going through security and you may end up in the dreaded secondary screening line when the bomb detector mistakes bologna for a bomb.
This story illustrates the power of groups and societies to coordinate to the detriment of individuals and outsiders. The Southampton team used a "secret handshake" to recognize members of the society and discriminate against outsiders. It is a natural explanation for people's fear of closed/secret societies -- people fear the group's ability to break the rules of individualistic "fair play."
If the agents in the game were capable of higher order reasoning and could see these coordinated actions between members, then they would become paranoid -- all the Southampton team members were "out to get them."
Many people use serious medications that could interact badly with other drug or they have critical medical conditions that affect treatment. In an accident, the EMTs need to know who you are without fumbling around for a wallet or purse (that may have been flung from the car) or jumbled if there are multiple people in the car. Even a med alert bracelet is only as good as it is secure on the wrist. An RFID implant and scanner makes it less likely that you will be separated for your ID.
Some people are working on an earthquake alert system that detects an earthquake at the epicenter and sends an wireless signal out to others. Because radio wave travel faster than ground waves, the alert reaches people seconds before the quake hits. Its not much of a warning, but it may be enough time to shut down some processes, park the heads on the disk drive, turn on the backup generator, etc.
Is the commentator/mixer on an iPod a PJ?
This trend is also a generational phenomenon. In researching the buying habits of current teenagers for a client, I was shocked to find that the majority would be LESS likely to buy a product that was used by their favorite star ( see national youth survey on brand loyalty). Nor were the surveyed youth very prone to peer pressure. The results pointed to a high degree of individualism amongst this group.
If people stop buying what the stars are wearing/using and don't respond to peer pressure, then buyers will fragment and the long tail will rise in importance.
Since anyone, anywhere can test the network's integrity with ping, anyone can do their own network outage surveillance. (OK, they can't test the old circuit switched telephone net, but once VOIP gets going, it won't mater). What if ping falls in the hand of terrorists? Seems like not only is the cat out of the bag, but anyone who can run ping owns some scissors.
Onc can do similar observations with inverse optics using asteroid occultations. I suppose one could create an artificial asteroid and watch as it passes in front of stars as it orbits or create a detector satellite with an ion engine that visits occultation zones between selected stars and satellites.
The basic concept of any kind of PageRank is flawed because it assumes a monotonic ordering of sites on some single scale (e.g., popularity as defiend by linkage). The problem with PageRank is not the use of links to assess popularity, but the presumption of a single scale.
The search of "Apple" illustrates this well. This search, like many is deeply ambiguous. It could refer to the computer company, to the fruit, to the record company, to New York City, to the singer (Fiona), or to Apple Valley (MN or CA). Even if the search engine knows that it refers to the computer company, it's still ambiguous. It could refer to the company (as an investment), the products (for purchase), or a question (as in technical support).
The point is that each of these ambiguous alternatives creates an independent cluster of hits. One cannot even rank hits within a cluster due to a hierarchy of ambiguity. Within the Apple computer cluster are distinct subclusters for computer purchase, investment evalaution, and technical support. Although one can create a ranking within each subsubsubsubcluster, it is impossible to construct a meanful rank for all hits across all clusters - the second hit for "purchasing an Apple computer laptop" is not comparable to the 2nd hit for "Apple Records".
Instead of a pagerank scheme that sorts the universe of hits the instant the user enters the search, search engines should be more interactive. The first page of hits would emphasize breadth -- displaying hits most representative of a broad range of alternative clusters. The UI would enable a "more like this"/"fewer like this" selection process that tells the search engine what the searcher is actually looking for. As the searcher selects hits, the subsequent pages might show popularity-ranked hits within the clusters that seem to interest the searcher.
Each hit and each page would serve a double-duty -- serving the searcher's need to get information from the internet, and answering the search engine's question about the needs of the searcher for that particular search. Until the search engine understands each searcher and each search, it cannot hope to rank the hits.
It would be the ultimate "business method" patent, a patent on the creation of software patents. Whoever was the first company to create and file a software patent has a clear claim to this one. The holder of this patent on patent making could then sue all other companies for creating software patents and the software patent nightmare would be hoist on its own patented petard.
Imagine a world in which employers could only hire people within walking distance of the company. The quality of the workforce would go down and many people would be stuck in jobs that suck. Imagine a world in which the only goods you could buy were those found at tiny neghborhood shops within walking distance. The selection and pricing would suck.
The farther people can comfortably commute to work, the better the match between employer and employee. The farther people can comfortable travel to find goods and services, the better the selection and economies of scale. Current transportation systems (cars, buses, etc.) let people travel greater distances, but introduce stresses and uncertainties (traffic jams). If Intelligent Transportation System can increase the average speed of travel or reduce the uncertainties in travel times, people will enjoy less stress in life, find better jobs and find better goods and services.
I question the premise. Although games and stories are both entertainment, that does not imply that they can be successfully merged. On the one hand, what makes a story great is the ability to hear how someone else handled a problem or situation -- learning from another person's life and NOT controlling the story line. Call it lazy, but a passive vicarious experience can be pleasurable.
On the other hand, what makes games great is the ability to take control and run your own life in the game. You get to be someone you are not or try a persona or just compete for the thrill of it. Games are pleasurable for a diametrically different reason than stories. We like stories because they let us be passive and we like games because they let us be active.
I like green olives and I like chocolate and they are both food, but that does not mean they should be merged.
And this is due to massive multinational corporations spending billions on R&D and infrastructure. The amateur computer geeks would be virtually nonexistent if giants like MS, Intel, and various Asian chipmakers weren't commoditizing the industry.
Absolutely true! Pursuit of the trillions of dollars in consumer and business equipment markets has driven the R&D and economies of scale that make a DVD player cost only $50. The world market of private sector electronic goods has supplanted the military as the driver for innovation.
I don't think that I've ever seen anybody making semiconductors in their garage...
I had a semiconductor making kit when I was a kid. Made by Bell Labs (in the 1970s?), the kit included a disk wafer of silicon, polishing grit, etchants & dopants, a small 600W ceramic/electric oven, and a sheet of asbestos fireboard (arsenic and asbestos, what fun!). The kit let one make a silicon solar cell. But you are right that modern semiconductors (at a billion dollars a fab) require serious resources.
That amateurs can contribute is, in large part, due to the steady price deflation of equipment, especially equipment based on semiconductors. Declines in the cost of a near-studio quality audio rig, software engineering workstation, or a good quality CCD astrophotography camera make these tools accessible. Low cost chips that enable the networking of the amateurs (remember when 2400 baud dial-up was charged by the minute?) so they can work together.
Thank You Gordon Moore!
I offer both agreement and an answer. I use an 4.5 year old Psion 5mx for word processing (taking notes at conferences, on airplanes, in line at the bank, etc.) spreadsheets, small databases, date & time around the globe, quickie calculations, scheduled reminders, and an occasional game. Its got a whopping 36 MHz processor, 16 MB RAM, and a 16-gray B/W half-VGA screen but that is all it really needs for these tasks. It is totally fantastic as a 12 oz. ultralite laptop because it does all the basic "office" type tasks and gets 20 to 35 hours per pair of AAs.
Like you, I don't see the need for faster/better (especially at the expense of battery life), although I can understand the attraction to wireless web access.
All inhabited spacecraft are inflated structures and all are prone to punctures. In space, you can't easily prevent the puncture (even aluminum capsules have some risk), but what happens next determines the survival of the crew. If the puncture just leaves a pinhole, then all that's needed is a patch. If the hole leads to a larger tear, then death soon ensues. This problem is not unique to space as a jet airliner is just a big balloon that will pop if poorly designed or maintained.
Materials such as rip-stop nylon use strong threads at crossing angles to prevent propagation of a hole or tear. The same principle could be used in inflatable spacecraft to limit the scope of an puncture damage. The interlacing threads would limit the damage to one or a few cells of the structural material.
Subduction zones (like those off the west coast of America) and volcanoes (such as St. Helens) are a big part of the long-term carbon cycle of the planet. Left to its own, life and chemical processes on this planet would convert all the atmospheric carbon into calcium carbonate that would be trapped in rock on the bottom of the ocean. Subduction zones and volcanoes reprocess this rock into CO2.
Once the Earth's crust cools enough, it will lock up and stop the cycle and CO2 will inexorable drop in concentration. I can't remember when this is predicted to happen, but I believe it is scheduled to occur before the Sun becomes a red giant. Of course, I'm sure our descendants (assuming we have them) will invent their own C02 extract factories to keep the Earth nicely carbonated when the time comes.
Although "harder than concrete" sounds "strong" it does not address the chief danger in long-term storage. Chemical erosion and leaching are a bigger issue than brute strength. Anyone who has ever thought about geology and objects like geodes will realize that quartz is both much harder than concrete, but also (over the long term) water soluble. The real trick is to encapsulate the waste in something that won't dissolve or allow the migration of waste isotopes in the heat, potential liquids, and long timescales of waste storage. (I'm sure hardness is somewhat of an issue when trapped alpha particles and decay products create expansion stresses in the glass)
I do think that vitrification is the way to go, but statements like these do the public no good when they mislead them on what characteristics actually make for a good containment system.
One major difference between human and computer viruses is topological. Because diseases spread by contact, connectivity regulates the pattern of transmission. For people, connectivity is largely 2-D -- the flu spreads through in neighborhoods and cities before moving across countries and the globe. (Exceptions do come from air travel and intracity connectivity is somewhat greater than 2-D). Human connectivity is also very sparse. A given person can only reach a minute fraction of the population in a day.
In contrast, computer connectivity is nearly infinite-dimensional as the latency between any pair of computers is nearly constant. Watching the spread of worms (e.g. Witty), the doubling time is not limited by travel times and all computers in the world are simultaneously vulnerable.
We toured the Buran in Sydney when it was an ill-fated tourist attraction. It was a very nice exhibit, video on Soviet space accomplishments and it included sitting in the actual cockpit.
The Buran in Sydney lacked the navigation avionics, leaving a rather large empty space in the deck below the cockpit. The Russians removed that before they exported the shuttle. The guide claimed the avionics were heavily borrowed from Russian ICBMs and had even included targeting data for U.S. sites.
It's sad that Buran failed as a tourist attraction.
In China they use bamboo for scaffolding - or they did.
They still do as of 2 years ago. I've even seen 50 story buildings in Hong Kong covered in a mesh of bamboo. It's both scary and amazing because the entire structure is only bamboo poles and tie-wraps. It makes for fast assembly and disassembly, but I'm sure a U.S. or European building or job-site inspector would have a heart attack.
I've always thought that Banyan trees would make a good basis for organic architecture. By weaving the dangling prop roots, people could make walls, doors, halls, rooms, etc. The tree could grow with the family.
Perhaps sites like this will encourage the creation of word flashmobs. A group of people would conspire to overuse some obscure word to boost its rating. Bombing the word within blogs, web pages, and postings might help the word spread into wider use and rise in the rankings. It could even be a competitive sport -- two teams pick two words of adjacent rank and the team whose word rises the most wins.
Well they don't do it because they wont to help the world. But spam means extra bandwidth, so extra cost.
I've heard many a system admin complain about the "cost of spam" to their networks, but have not seen a quantification of that cost. Given that spams are so small (the ones that I get average 4kB/spam), the storage costs of saving every spam (at 1$/GB) are about only 4 micro$/spam and the transfer costs (at $3/GB of transfer to pick a Google figure) are only 12 micro$/spam. Even CPU time is cheap. If a $2000 server CPU can handle only 10 messages per second (an underestimate?) then the cost in CPU time is only about 6 micro$/spam. In total, a million spams would cost an ISP maybe $20 or $30 which is far less that the burdened labor cost of one hour of a technician's time.
What am I missing here? Can any admins tell me the true dollar cost per spam? The only other reason, that I can think of, is that Earthlink fights spam to avoid blacklisting because blacklisting would drive up support costs when a million customers call at ask why their emails aren't getting through.
Simulation games, such as these medical games, share a core weakness in the design process. For example, in designing a 3-D tracking device, I simulating the sensor data and the wrote the algorithms for interpreting that data. It worked perfectly in simulation, but did not work when we made the actual device.
The problem was that I had made a minor sign error in some 3-D coordinate transformations. Because I designed both the simulation of the sensor and the software that processed that sensor data, I put the same mistake in both places. This sign error was self-consistent in silico, even as it was wrong in reality (or in vitro, as the medical researchers would say). Simulations can create false confidence.
By the same token, if the designers of the game have the same medical expert both create the simulated patient and the scoring of player's actions, then any errors in that expert's knowledge may create a false reality -- a simulation that is self-consistent but inaccurate. Doctors that are trained on the system may be to self-confident because they think they have seen a 1,000 simulated causes of X and think they know how such cases seem to progress/respond to treatment. But if this deep experience is based on erroneous "physics" then the learning is erroneous.
I'm not saying that simulation games are bad, simulations can help train doctors to recognize and respond to rare events (analogous to flight simulators that train pilots for an engine fire that they are unlikely to ever personally experience).
My point is that simulation games have a weakness in creating cognitive experiences that seem very real and very plausible, yet can be very wrong. Medical knowledge is, to date, too uncertain and too dynamic. If they do use simulations to train doctors and then discover an error in the simulation, they would need to recall both the simulation software and all the doctors trained on it.