Space biologist-turned-blogger Keith Cowing of NASA Watch was one of the participants in the Mars settlement analogue project over at Devon Island neart Earth's north pole. He posted yesterday that the photos that Phoenix has been sending back from the Martian north pole remind him a -lot- of the permafrost-created ground patterns he observed near Devon Island, and posted some comparison photos:
http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2008/05/deja_vu_on_mars.html
I had a rather strange case of deja vu tonight as the first images from Phoenix flashed on my computer screen. The image on the left was taken on 25 May 2008 on Mars at 68 deg North. I took the picture on the right on Devon Island, 75 deg North in July 2007. I'm just saying... those polygonal patterns on Mars are VERY familiar.
There were two good reasons for why lander updates were "frozen in time" for a couple hours. The first is that the lander ceases communications a minute after landing to save power while the solar panels are being deployed. The second is that the two satellites in orbit around Mars used to relay signals had to wait that long until they would be back in position.
Newer LCDs are getting better at this, but the main problem is response latencies: it can be problematic to present something like a 10ms flash at a precise time. Another problem is contrast ratios, particularly the difficulty of getting a really deep black.
This is very exciting as it could point to a future where you can literally hack your own brain. So far it looks like he can only temporarily disrupt parts of a person's brain... what about enhancement?
There's actually an Australian researcher, Allan Snyder, who uses TMS to try to invoke savant-like symptoms in people. The basic idea is that autistic savants are able to do Rainman-like feats like instantaneous counting of scattered matchsticks and photorealistic drawing because their higher-level processing regions are impaired, so that they operate based on lower-level, unfiltered representations. The idea is to see what happens when you try to impair these regions in other people. I should add the caveat though that I'm not aware of other labs which have replicated (or tried to replicate) his results yet, so they should be taken with the appropriate grain of salt. From the article:
The Medtronic was originally developed as a tool for brain surgery: by stimulating or slowing down specific regions of the brain, it allowed doctors to monitor the effects of surgery in real time. But it also produced, they noted, strange and unexpected effects on patients' mental functions: one minute they would lose the ability to speak, another minute they would speak easily but would make odd linguistic errors and so on. A number of researchers started to look into the possibilities, but one in particular intrigued Snyder: that people undergoing transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, could suddenly exhibit savant intelligence -- those isolated pockets of geniuslike mental ability that most often appear in autistic people....
A series of electromagnetic pulses were being directed into my frontal lobes, but I felt nothing. Snyder instructed me to draw something. ''What would you like to draw?'' he said merrily. ''A cat? You like drawing cats? Cats it is.''
I've seen a million cats in my life, so when I close my eyes, I have no trouble picturing them. But what does a cat really look like, and how do you put it down on paper? I gave it a try but came up with some sort of stick figure, perhaps an insect.....
While I drew, Snyder continued his lecture. ''You could call this a creativity-amplifying machine. It's a way of altering our states of mind without taking drugs like mescaline. You can make people see the raw data of the world as it is. As it is actually represented in the unconscious mind of all of us.''
Two minutes after I started the first drawing, I was instructed to try again. After another two minutes, I tried a third cat, and then in due course a fourth. Then the experiment was over, and the electrodes were removed. I looked down at my work. The first felines were boxy and stiffly unconvincing. But after I had been subjected to about 10 minutes of transcranial magnetic stimulation, their tails had grown more vibrant, more nervous; their faces were personable and convincing. They were even beginning to wear clever expressions.
I could hardly recognize them as my own drawings, though I had watched myself render each one, in all its loving detail. Somehow over the course of a very few minutes, and with no additional instruction, I had gone from an incompetent draftsman to a very impressive artist of the feline form....
As remarkable as the cat-drawing lesson was, it was just a hint of Snyder's work and its implications for the study of cognition. He has used TMS dozens of times on university students, measuring its effect on their ability to draw, to proofread and to perform difficult mathematical functions like identifying prime numbers by sight. Hooked up to the machine, 40 percent of test subjects exhibited extraordinary, and newfound, mental skills. That Snyder was able to induce these remarkable feats in a controlled, repeatable experim
There's actually another neat video (from an intro psych textbook website from a couple years ago) showing the effects of TMS on Broca's area. The guy counts numbers upwards, and as they stimulate Broca's on the left side he experiences a disruptive effect (afterwards saying, "That was cool";). They also stimulated on the analogous region on the right side, showing that this participant had no observable effect.
As long as the person is expecting their speech to be disturbed, and they can hear/feel the exact moment that the magnet is pulsing, the effect could be purely psychosomatic. They really need to test this on someone who's not expecting these effects. It may be ethically a bit strange, but it's the only true test.
There's actually a few different types of controls which are used experimentally. Here's what I can think of off the top of my head:
* use a sham coil that triggers the same sorts of clicking sound but doesn't actually stimulate anything
* more recently, a different type of sham coil has been developed which allows you to modify current directions on-the-fly, allowing you to create the sound/sensation of scalp stimulation, but causes minimal stimulation in the brain region (disclaimer: this coil was devised by people from the same lab as me)
* you can switch which side of the brain you're stimulating on, and if the subject isn't familiar with neuroanatomy they'll be none the wiser. About midway down this page there's a video of someone counting upwards, and it shows that even though there's a disruption when you stimulate Broca's area on the left side of the brain, no effect is observed when the symmetric area on the other side of the brain is stimulated.
Doesn't this imply that non-ionizing EM (for example, radio waves) may in fact disrupt brain function in some way? A high intensity pulse can apparently disrupt a major function.
Keep in mind that a typical TMS coil induces a current in brain neurons by generating a field which goes from 0 to 2 Tesla in about a tenth of a millisecond. Even then, the field is only effective at neural stimulation a centimeter or two away from the coil's focal point. I'm not too familiar with devices which generate non-ionizing EM, but I suspect you'd be hard-pressed to find something with those sorts of characteristics.
I wonder what would happen if the magnetic pulses were applied to more important sections of the brain, such as the area that controls autonomous bodily functions, like the heart. I suppose, if it is capable of knocking out the area of the brain that controls speech, it should be capable of knocking out the section of the brain that controls other, critical bodily functions. Is it only me, or do you see a potential weapons application for this in the future?
One thing to know about TMS is that 90-95% of the labs doing research with it use coils which are only capable of stimulating ~1-2cm deep, which is really only useful for hitting cortical areas (or cerebellum). Autonomic functions are controlled by subcortical brain regions, farther away from the scalp. There are a few labs however working with developing things like Deep TMS which should hypothetically be able to hit deeper regions, but I've never worked with those systems, so I don't know what sorts of safety measures they take.
But I bet that TMS has a similar effect on computers...
It's funny that you mention that. I do TMS research on visual areas and often have participants staring at a CRT screen while we apply TMS. One of the things we have to keep in mind is to time the TMS pulse while the vertical refresh is at the top of the screen, otherwise we get annoying screen artifacts (which look like a horizontal line) caused by the TMS pulse deflecting the beam from the electron gun inside the CRT.
Not sure about all the philosophical underpinnings, but i'd def. get something done to my eyes for better than natural vision...if it were cheap enough, i'd get some LED lights or something just for the hell of it...
Coincidentally, just the other day when I was looking up information on different types of contact lenses, and came across info on "light-filtering contacts," which seem to be a way to enhance one's vision in a fairly innocuous manner. I have no idea if various sports agencies have an official policy yet regarding these sorts of things:
http://www.allaboutvision.com/contacts/colors.htm
Light-filtering tints are a more recent development. These contact lenses are designed for sports use, because they enhance certain colors (such as optic yellow, the color of tennis balls and some softballs and golf balls), as a result of muting other colors. The result is that the ball stands out against the background and is easier to target. The lenses can also be used by spectators.
One type of light-filtering contact lens has been developed especially for golfers, so they can better distinguish between the various greens on a golf course. Amber-tinted ones have been worn by some professional baseball players, to help filter out the blue light that reduces their ability to see the baseball clearly. Other color contacts are being developed for trap-shooters, skiers and other sports enthusiasts.
Restrict those with cyborg legs to racing in their own class.
Sure... that's where this guy used to be competing (in the Paralympic Games). The issue is whether he should be competing in the Olympic Games "class".
Ok, I think the main point of disagreement here is whether we see it as a "big stretch" or a "little stretch." I should note that when I say "little stretch," I'm being mildly flippant, and also definitely not seeing it as a short-term thing. There's no way that in the next couple of years people will be chopping off their legs. However, 10-20 years from now, as technology improves and the human body remains constant, I see this sort of thing being somewhat more believable. For the life of me I can't seem the find the poll, but I could've sworn that I saw something a month or two ago where some decent percentage of athletes said they'd be willing to undergo a procedure (the poll probably dealt with performance-enhancing drugs) that would give them olympic-quality abilities without risk of getting caught/punished if it also curtailed their lifespan (or maybe it was a substantial degredation in quality of life after a period of years).
also, you didn't respond to my point about how no adapted sprinter has even come close to doing anything that an olympic hopeful would desire to emulate performance-wise.
Sure, but as materials and technologies advance, do you really think this will remain the case?
If several sprinters with adapted apparatuses were qualifying for national and world class events, some even winning and setting records, and it continued to progress such that adapted runners were winning in, say equal numbers to non-adapted runners...then your point of "this is bad, it will cause people to cut off their legs to be able to compete" will be viable...not until then.
Sure. I should also add in the caveat that I'm mildly transhumanist, so I don't think that people altering/augmenting their bodies in strange ways is necessarily a bad thing. In any case though, it'd probably be good for the various organizations to start thinking about this potential problem well before it becomes an issue.
Um... sorry to offend? I admittedly don't know much about the surgery and its use, but this NY Times article had some more interesting tidbits:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/20/sports/baseball/20surgery.html
The procedure is commonly known as Tommy John surgery, named after the former major league pitcher on whom it was first performed in 1974. The surgery has become so reliable, with a success rate of 80 to 85 percent, that it has prolonged the careers of hundreds of major leaguers. About one in seven pitchers in the major leagues this season has had the surgery.
Yet, several leading orthopedists say there are some troubling aspects to the procedure. First, it is becoming more commonplace among teenage pitchers who are injuring their arms through overuse at what surgeons call an alarming rate.
Second, the surgery's reliability has spawned misconceptions that a healthy arm can be enlivened by the surgery and that the procedure will increase an injured pitcher's velocity, making him better than ever.
The success of the surgery, and the resulting myths, are prompting young pitchers with marginal injuries, or overly optimistic assessments of their talent, to push for Tommy John surgery when they might not have in the past, doctors said.
Dr. Petty mentioned one patient, a minor leaguer whose elbow injury did not appear to warrant surgery, who later trumped up his symptoms and had the procedure performed by another physician....... Some parents and young pitchers, hoping for college scholarships or multimillion-dollar professional contracts, misguidedly view the surgery as a performance-enhancement technique instead of a last-resort corrective procedure, said Matt Poe, a speed and strength coach in Nashville....... Yet that appears to be a growing, if mistaken, notion. Dr. Petty and Poe, the strength coach, polled high school and college players with healthy arms in Nashville last month, asking if they believed that Tommy John surgery would allow them to throw the ball faster. Nine of the 46 respondents answered yes.
One of them was Jeff Hughes, 18, who will pitch at Austin Peay State University beginning this fall. Nick Hiter, who has coached Hughes, said the pitcher's father, Pete Hughes, once asked him: " 'What about that Tommy John surgery? I hear it makes you throw harder. If it works, we'd consider it.' "
If they think he has an unfair advantage, why don't they get their legs amputated, too?
It's not too much of a stretch. Apparently in baseball there's something called Tommy John surgery, where a ligament in the elbow is replaced by a (stronger) ligament from the wrist. It was originally intended to deal with injuries, although after pitchers found that their performance was better than it was before the injury some healthy players have become interested in getting the surgery performed.
FutureMap: This program hoped to use a kind of terrorism futures market to predict key developments and even attacks. It was thought market valuations of possible future events could reflect the probability of their occurring. However, FutureMap was scrapped in 2003 after the notion of betting on terrorist atrocities was called "ridiculous and grotesque" by US politicians. Robin Hanson (one of the pioneers for using futures markets to predict this sort of activity) has a really interesting post-mortem analysis of the project and the media reaction to it:
Here's an excerpt:
The past few years have seen an explosion of interest in prediction markets. We have long had speculative markets in gold, currency, pigs, and other commodities, which as a side effect do a remarkable job of aggregating information. Prediction markets turn this side effect into the main effect: if you want to know more on a topic, create and subsidize betting markets on that topic to elicit more accurate estimates. I have long been interested in how prediction markets can be used to improve decisions in the public arena. From 2001 to 2003 I had the opportunity to guide research on such markets that was sponsored by the U.S. government. The project, run by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), showed that general acceptance is still a long way off.Yet the academic support for the concept of prediction markets is old. In addition to the large literature on the information efficiency of financial markets (see Text Box 1), for several decades economists have been creating markets in the laboratory, showing since 1988 that markets with just a few traders trading for a few minutes can aggregate trader-held information.1 Also since 1988, researchers at the University of Iowa have used a special legal exemption (which no one else has obtained) to run a series of real money betting markets on U.S. elections. Although these were far from the first election betting markets,2 the added researcher-control they allow has led to new insights and academic attention....
On July 30, seventy-eight media articles on PAM appeared, even more negative. Newspapers reported that Poindexter resigned that day, and two months later all IAO research was ended. Over the following days, weeks, months, and years, more than 600 more media articles have mentioned PAM, many at first, and then gradually fading in frequency. Interestingly, the coverage gradually became more positive, and the most recent fifty articles on average give readers a positive impression of PAM. In a statistical analysis, eleven indicators of how informative an article is-- including time from the events until the article was published, citing someone with firsthand knowledge, article length, a news or an editorial style, author anonymity, and the awards, circulation, frequency, and topic specialties of the periodical-- individually predict that more informed articles give readers a more favorable impression of PAM. In a multiple regression model using six additional control variables, including media types, political leaning, and the author's gender, all six of the statistically significant variables predict that more informed articles favor PAM more.14 The more informed articles were more favorable, and eventually the average article was favorable, but the political decision to cancel PAM seems unlikely to be reversed anytime soon.
I really wanted to see if it would work - grotesque or not. It intrigued me that a "market" could be formed for things that aren't being bought and sold. And I wanted to see if the market could predict things. Same here. It's really interesting to see the slashdot discussion from 2003 about the project, with plenty of commenters freaking out about it with various knee-jerk reactions.
For-Profit Corporations have a focus on next quarters profits, not next decade. Are you claiming that companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin and Bigelow Aerospace are solely concerned with short-term profits and not focusing on the long-term of humanity in space? I would heartily disagree.
Heh, this is Nick Bostrom we're talking about, co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association. I think it's safe to assume he isn't ignoring the possibility of the Singularity -- in fact, he was an invited speaker at the Singularity Summit.
For the curious, here's the research abstract for the article published in Nature (unfortunately, the full article requires a subscription):
The missing memristor found
Dmitri B. Strukov1, Gregory S. Snider1, Duncan R. Stewart1 & R. Stanley Williams1
Anyone who ever took an electronics laboratory class will be familiar with the fundamental passive circuit elements: the resistor, the capacitor and the inductor. However, in 1971 Leon Chua reasoned from symmetry arguments that there should be a fourth fundamental element, which he called a memristor (short for memory resistor)1. Although he showed that such an element has many interesting and valuable circuit properties, until now no one has presented either a useful physical model or an example of a memristor. Here we show, using a simple analytical example, that memristance arises naturally in nanoscale systems in which solid-state electronic and ionic transport are coupled under an external bias voltage. These results serve as the foundation for understanding a wide range of hysteretic current-voltage behaviour observed in many nanoscale electronic devices2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 that involve the motion of charged atomic or molecular species, in particular certain titanium dioxide cross-point switches20, 21, 22. Here's the final paragraph of the research paper, which discusses some of the implications:
The rich hysteretic i-v characteristics detected in many thin-film, two-terminal devices can now be understood as memristive behaviour defined by coupled equations of motion: some for (ionized) atomic degrees of freedom that define the internal state of the device, and others for the electronic transport. This behaviour is increasingly relevant as the active region in many electronic devices continues to shrink to a width of only a few nanometres, so even a low applied voltage corresponds to a large electric field that can cause charged species to move. Such dopant or impurity motion through the active region can produce dramatic changes in the device resistance. Including memristors and memristive systems in integrated circuits has the potential to significantly extend circuit functionality as long as the dynamical nature of such devices is understood and properly used. Important applications include ultradense, semi-non-volatile memories and learning networks that require a synapse-like function. There's also a Nature News and Views, but I think that might also need a subscription.
I also just came across some interesting related commentary here:
http://www.hobbyspace.com/nucleus/index.php?itemid=5989&catid=49
NASA needs the Falcon 9/Dragon combo to attain crew service capability if the agency is to have a US based option for sending astronauts to the ISS sometime during the period between the end of the Shuttle program in 2010 and the start of Ares I/Orion operations in 2015. So far, all the designs reviews (e.g. here, here, and here) have found no fundamental flaws in either the Falcon 9 or Dragon designs. Assuming aerospace engineering does not involve black magic, this should mean something. Currently COTS is funding F9/Dragon (and also the Orbital Taurus II) only for cargo services. Increasing COTS funding to accelerate development of the Dragon for crew transport would seem a reasonable gamble, especially considering it would cost a fraction of what is going into the Ares/Orion program.
On the other hand, if Falcon 9/Dragon succeeds there will most likely arise overwhelming pressure to kill Ares I/Orion to save billions dollars in further development and operational costs. (NASA could alter its lunar exploration architecture to use the Dragon instead of Orion, e.g. see this powerful option.) Jeff Foust and Rand Simberg comment on recent statements from Mike Griffin as he tries to deal with this situation: /-- COTS contradictions? - Space Politics /-- Griffin's COTS Contradictions - Transterrestrial Musings
They expect to rely heavily on Soyuz spacecraft once the shuttles are retired in 2010.
One bit of hope is that NASA announced a few days ago that instead of using the Russian Progress vehicles for cargo transport to the ISS after 2010, they'll instead use US commercial providers. They haven't yet committed to using commercial providers for crew transport, but I imagine they're waiting to see how the sector performs first.
NASA Aims for All-Commercial ISS Resupply
NASA will base U.S. resupply of the International Space Station on the untried vehicles of the Commercial Orbital Transportation System (COTS) program, and will not buy cargo services from Russia after the space shuttle fleet retires.
U.S. space agency officials are set to begin discussions with Congress this week on continued use of Russia's Soyuz crew-launch vehicles following the final shuttle flight in 2010. But they won't ask for permission to keep using Russian Progress vehicles.
Instead, NASA plans to pay a U.S. commercial provider for delivery of at least 20 metric tons of cargo to the ISS between 2010 and 2015. Under the COTS program, SpaceX and Orbital Sciences Corp. are splitting almost $500 million in NASA seed money intended to spur development of a commercial route to the ISS....
Administrator Michael Griffin has sent a proposed amendment to Capitol Hill specifically excluding Progress vehicles from a request to continue using Soyuz capsules to deliver crew to the ISS after the shuttle retires. Griffin had no immediate comment, but William Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for spaceflight operations, says NASA believes one of the commercial vehicles in development under the COTS program eventually will be able to meet its ISS-supply needs.
Until a COTS vehicle is available, Gerstenmaier says, the U.S. agency plans to rely on prepositioned spare parts to be sent up before the shuttle retires. Two "contingency flights" among the 10 remaining shuttle missions to the ISS are slated to deliver station spares too large to get to orbit otherwise, he says.
Is this the death knell of private insurance? I think private health insurance is pretty much incompatible with genetic testing (GT) for disease predisposition, if said testing turns out to be of any use whatsoever.... The only solution I can see is single-payer universal coverage along the lines of the Canadian model, where everyone pays, and no one (insurer or patient) can game the system based on advance knowledge of the outcomes. Of course, it might be nice to have laws against genetic discrimination in single-payer and nationalized health systems as well. For example, the UK's National Health Systems discriminates (some would argue deservedly) against people who are old, obese, or smoke, denying surgeries and placing them at the bottom of wait-lists. It's not too much of a stretch for such discrimination to also be applied to those with particular genotypes, as they may be an inefficient application of the limited health resources of a single-payer system.
I'm actually wondering if maybe part of the reason for the announcement is to spare them from having to compete head-to-head with the SpaceX Dragon in the commercial sector, which will likely be carrying crew to orbit in the 2010 timeframe at a lower per-person price than the Soyuz. It'd be kind of humiliating for Energia to be out-done in the commercial space sector by a US startup company, but they can save face if they announce ahead of time that they're exiting the industry due to reasons of national pride.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, at least one false-color image has already been generated from combining photos with different filters.
http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00001461/
It looks pretty spectacular.
http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2008/05/deja_vu_on_mars.html I had a rather strange case of deja vu tonight as the first images from Phoenix flashed on my computer screen. The image on the left was taken on 25 May 2008 on Mars at 68 deg North. I took the picture on the right on Devon Island, 75 deg North in July 2007. I'm just saying
There were two good reasons for why lander updates were "frozen in time" for a couple hours. The first is that the lander ceases communications a minute after landing to save power while the solar panels are being deployed. The second is that the two satellites in orbit around Mars used to relay signals had to wait that long until they would be back in position.
Newer LCDs are getting better at this, but the main problem is response latencies: it can be problematic to present something like a 10ms flash at a precise time. Another problem is contrast ratios, particularly the difficulty of getting a really deep black.
There's actually an Australian researcher, Allan Snyder, who uses TMS to try to invoke savant-like symptoms in people. The basic idea is that autistic savants are able to do Rainman-like feats like instantaneous counting of scattered matchsticks and photorealistic drawing because their higher-level processing regions are impaired, so that they operate based on lower-level, unfiltered representations. The idea is to see what happens when you try to impair these regions in other people. I should add the caveat though that I'm not aware of other labs which have replicated (or tried to replicate) his results yet, so they should be taken with the appropriate grain of salt. From the article:
The Medtronic was originally developed as a tool for brain surgery: by stimulating or slowing down specific regions of the brain, it allowed doctors to monitor the effects of surgery in real time. But it also produced, they noted, strange and unexpected effects on patients' mental functions: one minute they would lose the ability to speak, another minute they would speak easily but would make odd linguistic errors and so on. A number of researchers started to look into the possibilities, but one in particular intrigued Snyder: that people undergoing transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, could suddenly exhibit savant intelligence -- those isolated pockets of geniuslike mental ability that most often appear in autistic people. ...
....
...
A series of electromagnetic pulses were being directed into my frontal lobes, but I felt nothing. Snyder instructed me to draw something. ''What would you like to draw?'' he said merrily. ''A cat? You like drawing cats? Cats it is.''
I've seen a million cats in my life, so when I close my eyes, I have no trouble picturing them. But what does a cat really look like, and how do you put it down on paper? I gave it a try but came up with some sort of stick figure, perhaps an insect.
While I drew, Snyder continued his lecture. ''You could call this a creativity-amplifying machine. It's a way of altering our states of mind without taking drugs like mescaline. You can make people see the raw data of the world as it is. As it is actually represented in the unconscious mind of all of us.''
Two minutes after I started the first drawing, I was instructed to try again. After another two minutes, I tried a third cat, and then in due course a fourth. Then the experiment was over, and the electrodes were removed. I looked down at my work. The first felines were boxy and stiffly unconvincing. But after I had been subjected to about 10 minutes of transcranial magnetic stimulation, their tails had grown more vibrant, more nervous; their faces were personable and convincing. They were even beginning to wear clever expressions.
I could hardly recognize them as my own drawings, though I had watched myself render each one, in all its loving detail. Somehow over the course of a very few minutes, and with no additional instruction, I had gone from an incompetent draftsman to a very impressive artist of the feline form.
As remarkable as the cat-drawing lesson was, it was just a hint of Snyder's work and its implications for the study of cognition. He has used TMS dozens of times on university students, measuring its effect on their ability to draw, to proofread and to perform difficult mathematical functions like identifying prime numbers by sight. Hooked up to the machine, 40 percent of test subjects exhibited extraordinary, and newfound, mental skills. That Snyder was able to induce these remarkable feats in a controlled, repeatable experim
There's actually another neat video (from an intro psych textbook website from a couple years ago) showing the effects of TMS on Broca's area. The guy counts numbers upwards, and as they stimulate Broca's on the left side he experiences a disruptive effect (afterwards saying, "That was cool" ;). They also stimulated on the analogous region on the right side, showing that this participant had no observable effect.
As long as the person is expecting their speech to be disturbed, and they can hear/feel the exact moment that the magnet is pulsing, the effect could be purely psychosomatic. They really need to test this on someone who's not expecting these effects. It may be ethically a bit strange, but it's the only true test.
There's actually a few different types of controls which are used experimentally. Here's what I can think of off the top of my head:
* use a sham coil that triggers the same sorts of clicking sound but doesn't actually stimulate anything
* more recently, a different type of sham coil has been developed which allows you to modify current directions on-the-fly, allowing you to create the sound/sensation of scalp stimulation, but causes minimal stimulation in the brain region (disclaimer: this coil was devised by people from the same lab as me)
* you can switch which side of the brain you're stimulating on, and if the subject isn't familiar with neuroanatomy they'll be none the wiser. About midway down this page there's a video of someone counting upwards, and it shows that even though there's a disruption when you stimulate Broca's area on the left side of the brain, no effect is observed when the symmetric area on the other side of the brain is stimulated.
Doesn't this imply that non-ionizing EM (for example, radio waves) may in fact disrupt brain function in some way? A high intensity pulse can apparently disrupt a major function.
Keep in mind that a typical TMS coil induces a current in brain neurons by generating a field which goes from 0 to 2 Tesla in about a tenth of a millisecond. Even then, the field is only effective at neural stimulation a centimeter or two away from the coil's focal point. I'm not too familiar with devices which generate non-ionizing EM, but I suspect you'd be hard-pressed to find something with those sorts of characteristics.
I wonder what would happen if the magnetic pulses were applied to more important sections of the brain, such as the area that controls autonomous bodily functions, like the heart. I suppose, if it is capable of knocking out the area of the brain that controls speech, it should be capable of knocking out the section of the brain that controls other, critical bodily functions. Is it only me, or do you see a potential weapons application for this in the future?
One thing to know about TMS is that 90-95% of the labs doing research with it use coils which are only capable of stimulating ~1-2cm deep, which is really only useful for hitting cortical areas (or cerebellum). Autonomic functions are controlled by subcortical brain regions, farther away from the scalp. There are a few labs however working with developing things like Deep TMS which should hypothetically be able to hit deeper regions, but I've never worked with those systems, so I don't know what sorts of safety measures they take.
But I bet that TMS has a similar effect on computers...
It's funny that you mention that. I do TMS research on visual areas and often have participants staring at a CRT screen while we apply TMS. One of the things we have to keep in mind is to time the TMS pulse while the vertical refresh is at the top of the screen, otherwise we get annoying screen artifacts (which look like a horizontal line) caused by the TMS pulse deflecting the beam from the electron gun inside the CRT.
Coincidentally, just the other day when I was looking up information on different types of contact lenses, and came across info on "light-filtering contacts," which seem to be a way to enhance one's vision in a fairly innocuous manner. I have no idea if various sports agencies have an official policy yet regarding these sorts of things:
http://www.allaboutvision.com/contacts/colors.htm Light-filtering tints are a more recent development. These contact lenses are designed for sports use, because they enhance certain colors (such as optic yellow, the color of tennis balls and some softballs and golf balls), as a result of muting other colors. The result is that the ball stands out against the background and is easier to target. The lenses can also be used by spectators.
One type of light-filtering contact lens has been developed especially for golfers, so they can better distinguish between the various greens on a golf course. Amber-tinted ones have been worn by some professional baseball players, to help filter out the blue light that reduces their ability to see the baseball clearly. Other color contacts are being developed for trap-shooters, skiers and other sports enthusiasts.
Restrict those with cyborg legs to racing in their own class.
Sure... that's where this guy used to be competing (in the Paralympic Games). The issue is whether he should be competing in the Olympic Games "class".
Ok, I think the main point of disagreement here is whether we see it as a "big stretch" or a "little stretch." I should note that when I say "little stretch," I'm being mildly flippant, and also definitely not seeing it as a short-term thing. There's no way that in the next couple of years people will be chopping off their legs. However, 10-20 years from now, as technology improves and the human body remains constant, I see this sort of thing being somewhat more believable. For the life of me I can't seem the find the poll, but I could've sworn that I saw something a month or two ago where some decent percentage of athletes said they'd be willing to undergo a procedure (the poll probably dealt with performance-enhancing drugs) that would give them olympic-quality abilities without risk of getting caught/punished if it also curtailed their lifespan (or maybe it was a substantial degredation in quality of life after a period of years).
also, you didn't respond to my point about how no adapted sprinter has even come close to doing anything that an olympic hopeful would desire to emulate performance-wise.
Sure, but as materials and technologies advance, do you really think this will remain the case?
If several sprinters with adapted apparatuses were qualifying for national and world class events, some even winning and setting records, and it continued to progress such that adapted runners were winning in, say equal numbers to non-adapted runners...then your point of "this is bad, it will cause people to cut off their legs to be able to compete" will be viable...not until then.
Sure. I should also add in the caveat that I'm mildly transhumanist, so I don't think that people altering/augmenting their bodies in strange ways is necessarily a bad thing. In any case though, it'd probably be good for the various organizations to start thinking about this potential problem well before it becomes an issue.
Just to emphasize the fact that players have only become interested. No one goes and gets Tommy John surgery without needing it.
I'm not sure how reliable the info is, but the examples in this NY Times article seem to disagree:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/20/sports/baseball/20surgery.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/20/sports/baseball/20surgery.html The procedure is commonly known as Tommy John surgery, named after the former major league pitcher on whom it was first performed in 1974. The surgery has become so reliable, with a success rate of 80 to 85 percent, that it has prolonged the careers of hundreds of major leaguers. About one in seven pitchers in the major leagues this season has had the surgery.
Yet, several leading orthopedists say there are some troubling aspects to the procedure. First, it is becoming more commonplace among teenage pitchers who are injuring their arms through overuse at what surgeons call an alarming rate.
Second, the surgery's reliability has spawned misconceptions that a healthy arm can be enlivened by the surgery and that the procedure will increase an injured pitcher's velocity, making him better than ever.
The success of the surgery, and the resulting myths, are prompting young pitchers with marginal injuries, or overly optimistic assessments of their talent, to push for Tommy John surgery when they might not have in the past, doctors said.
Dr. Petty mentioned one patient, a minor leaguer whose elbow injury did not appear to warrant surgery, who later trumped up his symptoms and had the procedure performed by another physician.
One of them was Jeff Hughes, 18, who will pitch at Austin Peay State University beginning this fall. Nick Hiter, who has coached Hughes, said the pitcher's father, Pete Hughes, once asked him: " 'What about that Tommy John surgery? I hear it makes you throw harder. If it works, we'd consider it.' "
If they think he has an unfair advantage, why don't they get their legs amputated, too?
It's not too much of a stretch. Apparently in baseball there's something called Tommy John surgery, where a ligament in the elbow is replaced by a (stronger) ligament from the wrist. It was originally intended to deal with injuries, although after pitchers found that their performance was better than it was before the injury some healthy players have become interested in getting the surgery performed.
http://hanson.gmu.edu/innovations.pdf
Here's an excerpt: The past few years have seen an explosion of interest in prediction markets. We
have long had speculative markets in gold, currency, pigs, and other commodities,
which as a side effect do a remarkable job of aggregating information. Prediction
markets turn this side effect into the main effect: if you want to know more on a
topic, create and subsidize betting markets on that topic to elicit more accurate
estimates. I have long been interested in how prediction markets can be used to
improve decisions in the public arena. From 2001 to 2003 I had the opportunity to
guide research on such markets that was sponsored by the U.S. government. The
project, run by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), showed
that general acceptance is still a long way off.Yet the academic support for the concept
of prediction markets is old. In addition to the large literature on the information
efficiency of financial markets (see Text Box 1), for several decades economists
have been creating markets in the laboratory, showing since 1988 that markets
with just a few traders trading for a few minutes can aggregate trader-held
information.1 Also since 1988, researchers at the University of Iowa have used a
special legal exemption (which no one else has obtained) to run a series of real
money betting markets on U.S. elections. Although these were far from the first
election betting markets,2 the added researcher-control they allow has led to new
insights and academic attention.
On July 30, seventy-eight media articles on PAM appeared, even more negative.
Newspapers reported that Poindexter resigned that day, and two months later
all IAO research was ended. Over the following days, weeks, months, and years,
more than 600 more media articles have mentioned PAM, many at first, and then
gradually fading in frequency. Interestingly, the coverage gradually became more
positive, and the most recent fifty articles on average give readers a positive impression
of PAM.
In a statistical analysis, eleven indicators of how informative an article is--
including time from the events until the article was published, citing someone with
firsthand knowledge, article length, a news or an editorial style, author anonymity,
and the awards, circulation, frequency, and topic specialties of the periodical--
individually predict that more informed articles give readers a more favorable
impression of PAM. In a multiple regression model using six additional control
variables, including media types, political leaning, and the author's gender, all six
of the statistically significant variables predict that more informed articles favor
PAM more.14 The more informed articles were more favorable, and eventually the
average article was favorable, but the political decision to cancel PAM seems
unlikely to be reversed anytime soon.
Heh, this is Nick Bostrom we're talking about, co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association. I think it's safe to assume he isn't ignoring the possibility of the Singularity -- in fact, he was an invited speaker at the Singularity Summit.
Dmitri B. Strukov1, Gregory S. Snider1, Duncan R. Stewart1 & R. Stanley Williams1
Anyone who ever took an electronics laboratory class will be familiar with the fundamental passive circuit elements: the resistor, the capacitor and the inductor. However, in 1971 Leon Chua reasoned from symmetry arguments that there should be a fourth fundamental element, which he called a memristor (short for memory resistor)1. Although he showed that such an element has many interesting and valuable circuit properties, until now no one has presented either a useful physical model or an example of a memristor. Here we show, using a simple analytical example, that memristance arises naturally in nanoscale systems in which solid-state electronic and ionic transport are coupled under an external bias voltage. These results serve as the foundation for understanding a wide range of hysteretic current-voltage behaviour observed in many nanoscale electronic devices2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 that involve the motion of charged atomic or molecular species, in particular certain titanium dioxide cross-point switches20, 21, 22. Here's the final paragraph of the research paper, which discusses some of the implications: The rich hysteretic i-v characteristics detected in many thin-film, two-terminal devices can now be understood as memristive behaviour defined by coupled equations of motion: some for (ionized) atomic degrees of freedom that define the internal state of the device, and others for the electronic transport. This behaviour is increasingly relevant as the active region in many electronic devices continues to shrink to a width of only a few nanometres, so even a low applied voltage corresponds to a large electric field that can cause charged species to move. Such dopant or impurity motion through the active region can produce dramatic changes in the device resistance. Including memristors and memristive systems in integrated circuits has the potential to significantly extend circuit functionality as long as the dynamical nature of such devices is understood and properly used. Important applications include ultradense, semi-non-volatile memories and learning networks that require a synapse-like function. There's also a Nature News and Views, but I think that might also need a subscription.
http://www.hobbyspace.com/nucleus/index.php?itemid=5989&catid=49 NASA needs the Falcon 9/Dragon combo to attain crew service capability if the agency is to have a US based option for sending astronauts to the ISS sometime during the period between the end of the Shuttle program in 2010 and the start of Ares I/Orion operations in 2015. So far, all the designs reviews (e.g. here, here, and here) have found no fundamental flaws in either the Falcon 9 or Dragon designs. Assuming aerospace engineering does not involve black magic, this should mean something. Currently COTS is funding F9/Dragon (and also the Orbital Taurus II) only for cargo services. Increasing COTS funding to accelerate development of the Dragon for crew transport would seem a reasonable gamble, especially considering it would cost a fraction of what is going into the Ares/Orion program.
On the other hand, if Falcon 9/Dragon succeeds there will most likely arise overwhelming pressure to kill Ares I/Orion to save billions dollars in further development and operational costs. (NASA could alter its lunar exploration architecture to use the Dragon instead of Orion, e.g. see this powerful option.) Jeff Foust and Rand Simberg comment on recent statements from Mike Griffin as he tries to deal with this situation:
[Update: Jon Goff also discusses the gap and COTS issues: Gap Math - Selenian Boondocks - Apr.8.08.]
One bit of hope is that NASA announced a few days ago that instead of using the Russian Progress vehicles for cargo transport to the ISS after 2010, they'll instead use US commercial providers. They haven't yet committed to using commercial providers for crew transport, but I imagine they're waiting to see how the sector performs first. NASA Aims for All-Commercial ISS Resupply
NASA will base U.S. resupply of the International Space Station on the untried vehicles of the Commercial Orbital Transportation System (COTS) program, and will not buy cargo services from Russia after the space shuttle fleet retires.
U.S. space agency officials are set to begin discussions with Congress this week on continued use of Russia's Soyuz crew-launch vehicles following the final shuttle flight in 2010. But they won't ask for permission to keep using Russian Progress vehicles.
Instead, NASA plans to pay a U.S. commercial provider for delivery of at least 20 metric tons of cargo to the ISS between 2010 and 2015. Under the COTS program, SpaceX and Orbital Sciences Corp. are splitting almost $500 million in NASA seed money intended to spur development of a commercial route to the ISS.
Administrator Michael Griffin has sent a proposed amendment to Capitol Hill specifically excluding Progress vehicles from a request to continue using Soyuz capsules to deliver crew to the ISS after the shuttle retires. Griffin had no immediate comment, but William Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for spaceflight operations, says NASA believes one of the commercial vehicles in development under the COTS program eventually will be able to meet its ISS-supply needs.
Until a COTS vehicle is available, Gerstenmaier says, the U.S. agency plans to rely on prepositioned spare parts to be sent up before the shuttle retires. Two "contingency flights" among the 10 remaining shuttle missions to the ISS are slated to deliver station spares too large to get to orbit otherwise, he says.
I'm actually wondering if maybe part of the reason for the announcement is to spare them from having to compete head-to-head with the SpaceX Dragon in the commercial sector, which will likely be carrying crew to orbit in the 2010 timeframe at a lower per-person price than the Soyuz. It'd be kind of humiliating for Energia to be out-done in the commercial space sector by a US startup company, but they can save face if they announce ahead of time that they're exiting the industry due to reasons of national pride.