Prediction markets are a major interest of mine. I'm in a bit of a rush at the moment, so I'll have to make some more extensive comments later, but in the meantime here's some neat links on prediction markets:
* Tradesports, a real-money prediction market on political and news events. The 2008 president market currently gives a Democratic a 50% probability of winning the White House in 2008, Hillary Clinton a 55% probability of getting the Democratic nomination, and John McCain a 49% probability of getting the Republican nomination.
* Futarchy, a system of government semi-seriously proposed by Robin Hanson which would use prediction markets as a means of government decision-making. People would vote on values, and use a prediction market to determine the optimal government policies to achieve those values, which would help get around some of the godawful stupid things democracies tend to do.
* Storage Markets, a real-money (but limited access?) market on the computer storage industry
* The Policy Analysis Market, a proposed prediction market for policies in the Middle East. It was IMHO a great idea, and could have potentially prevented some of the stupid decisions which have been made in the Middle East. Unfortunately, the government ended the project after it was the media (including slashdot) had a knee-jerk reaction to it and demonized it. The funny thing is, after the project was cancelled and the media learned more about it, coverage of the project became much more positive.
For anybody that wants to try this thing out for themselves, there's a game demo available for download, although it doesn't seem to be available on the official site anymore (I think GamersHell.com is a reputable site, but you might want to run an AV scan on the binary first).
I tried playing the demo a few months ago. Overall, I thought it was pretty crappy, but it was kind of amusing and there were some game mechanics which I thought was pretty neat. For example, in most RTS games "converting" units to your side is a special thing which happens fairly rarely, while in Left Behind its a central game mechanic.
I wonder if they're counting the Wii as one of the next-gen systems. It'd be pretty amusing to use a Wiimote to play as a facehugger, hunting down a human and having a little mini-game where you're wiggling around the Wiimote to try to lay eggs in their throat. After gestation, then there could be the chestburster mini-game, using the Wiimote to try to jab through somebody's ribcage.:)
When I was watching the linked video I had a random idea... what if people put together a (Creative Commons?) library of short video clips like that for some of the instruments used in MIDI files? For example, you could have short video samples of people playing notes for the piano, trumpet, vocals, etc. Then, given a MIDI file you could automatically generate a video like the one Mr. Gjertsen did, perhaps having a separate split-screen for each MIDI channel.
If nothing else, it'd be a cool thing to have on display at parties.
Thankfully many of us have spent dozens of hours practising zombie destruction in computer games like dead rising and are well-versed in their destruction.
I've been interested in ideas like Sousveillance and the Transparent Society for a while -- just see my sig. I'm curious though: Does anybody know of ways to record images/video on something like a cellphone cam and have them automatically uploaded on-the-fly to a server someplace? I imagine that would be useful for situations where there's a high probability of having the recording device seized, such as when you're recording a protest or abuse of authority.
Because voters understand "Go to the Moon", because it can fit into a 5 second sound bite on TV news... but voters can't understand the economics of building cheaper heavy lift concepts, because it would require maybe 5 minutes to properly explain it to the average person.
Heavy-lift is a nice thing to shoot for in the long-term, but in the short- and medium-term the biggest clincher on launch costs is the flight rate.
Coincidentally, a pretty good article analyzing the planned launch architecture was published yesterday. Here's the link.
Additionally, aerospace engineer Jonathan Goff over at Selenian Boondocks has a post titled Lunar Much Sooner (and Better) which discusses a number of alternatives to NASA's current plan.
Finally, Selenian Boondocks also has another post about some things revealed by one of the architects of NASA's plans, suggesting that several of the design constraints imposed on the architecture may be somewhat dubious, (arguably) making the whole project much more expensive and unsustainable.
Uh... when I was growing up in Florida we heard the Emergency Alert System being used all the time, typically to warn us of severe thunderstorms, tornados, and such. I assure you that it isn't "fear propaganda," but actually something which is pretty useful.
HAH! I love all the discussion about Chinese censorship. The argument is that we are free, and see things objectively---but that is not true. We are merely free to choose the censorship we prefer.
I'm honestly not sure I follow. Are you suggesting that it's somehow just as bad to be able to choose how one filters one's information as it is to have somebody else impose such filtering on you? That seems a little like saying that spending your money and having somebody steal it are ethically equivalent.
I'd like to ask those of us who actually socially know a number of scientists: Are your scientist friends political?
As a grad student at a university in California, I'd say that it's about half-and-half: half of the scientists I know are apolitical, but the other half are pretty hardcore political liberals. There's also a few libertarians, but they tend to not be as vocal. In general, discussing how much Bush sux0rz is a pretty popular conversation topic.
Coincidentally, the other day I was a reading a paper by Cardiff & Klein (2004) of the political affiliations of professors at California universities. It's pretty interesting. Here's the abstract:
ABSTRACT: The party registration of tenure-track faculty at 11 California universities, ranging from small, private, religiously affiliated institutions to large, public, elite schools, shows that the "one-party campus" conjecture does not extend to all institutions or all departments. At one end of the scale, U.C. Berkeley has an adjusted Democrat:Republican ratio of almost 9:1, while Pepperdine University has a ratio of nearly 1:1. Academic field also makes a tremendous difference, with the humanities averaging a 10:1 D:R ratio and business schools averaging 1.3:1, and with departments ranging from sociology (44:1) to management (1.5:1). Across all departments and institutions, the D:R ratio is 5:1, while in the "soft" liberal-arts fields, the ratio is higher than 8:1.These findings are generally in line with comparable previous studies.
How long... before they make a actual exercise themed game?
The WarioWare: Smooth Moves game will have a number of different exercise-based minigames, including running, squats, jump-roping, and so forth. There's a short video here.
Personally though, I can't wait until somebody makes some kind of Glowstick Revolution game for it. The Wiimote form factor is just asking for it. I'm not sure what would be a good visual interface for conveying glowstick maneuvers, though.
I'm not sure if the first link is correct -- it isn't a research paper, just an intro-level lecture to integrate-and-fire models, one of the topics covered in computational neuroscience. The actual research paper by Earnshaw & Bressloff requires a subscription, but here's the abstract:
AMPA receptors mediate the majority of fast excitatory synaptic transmission in the CNS, and evidence suggests that AMPA receptor trafficking regulates synaptic strength, a phenomenon implicated in learning and memory. There are two major mechanisms of AMPA receptor trafficking: exocytic/endocytic exchange of surface receptors with intracellular receptor pools, and the lateral diffusion or hopping of surface receptors between the postsynaptic density and the surrounding extrasynaptic membrane. In this paper, we present a biophysical model of these trafficking mechanisms under basal conditions and during the expression of long-term potentiation (LTP) and depression (LTD). We show how our model reproduces a wide range of physiological data, and use this to make predictions regarding possible targets of second-messenger pathways activated during the induction phase of LTP/LTD.
Computational neuroscience is a great topic. If you're interested in learning more about it, there's a nice book by Gerstner & Kistler called Spiking Neuron Models, which can be purchased hard-copy or downloaded for free online. The wikipedia page is also pretty good, with plenty of links to fun neural simulation software.
(And yes, I Am A Computational Neuroscientist... or at least I'm in a computational neuroscience grad program;)
As a busy grad student, Modafinil seems a lot like the Best Drug Ever, and I've been reading about it for the past year or so. So far in this thread with 400-some comments, it seems that only one person has actually posted about their experiences with it.
Has anybody else tried it, or know somebody who has?
In all likelihood, the U.S. is also creeping towards a 'Surveillance Society'.
This is a controversial position, but I'd argue that such a surveillance society is a good thing if (and only if!) such surveillance is mutual. See David Brin's Transparent Society.
I think you fail to get it. A low performance engine cannot lift ANYTHING into space. No matter how cheap a reliable.
I think your dichotomy may need some adjusting. The proposition isn't cheap vs. expensive, but really expensive vs. absurdly expensive, or really high performance vs. absurdly high performance. As it is, the shuttle is optimized towards rather absurd performance margins, which is nice on paper, but doesn't really do much to try to reduce launch costs. If anything, launch costs are deliberately increased to help ensure that sufficient amounts of money go to the proper congressional districts.
This was the same guy who after Challenger said that the Shuttle fleet was going to be canned and that no more would ever be produced saying he heard "directly from Griffin."
I'm a little confused by your statement... Griffin wasn't administrator during the Challenger disaster. Also, there hasn't been a new shuttle produced since 1992, and official policy is that no more will be produced.
So we build these guys to start replicating and to stop replicating when we want them to... but when you make a billion of something you end up with some odd mutations. Even if you are talking about.001% mutation that's still 100,000 self replicating mistakes. If even one of those 100,000 mistakes is a mutation that just doesn't turn off self replication you now have a very bad problem.
Released, this nanite could theoretically convert the earth (see "grey goo") into a giant ball of itself.
Much the same logic could apply to cancer cells themselves, as they're self-replicating and mutate. Why isn't the world a giant ball of cancer cells?
(This is from something I wrote up earlier this year, regarding a question I asked Professor Kenneth Deffeyes (a proponent of peak oil ideas) during a Q&A session after a talk he gave at my university. If anybody has a better answer, I'd honestly be interested in hearing it.)
Today there was a talk in Beckman Auditorium by Kenneth Deffeyes, Princeton professor emeritus and author of one of the more popular books on that ever-popular meme, peak oil. He discussed his belief that we had hit peak oil sometime around this past Thanksgiving, and that oil prices are going to fluctuate wildly and rise in the next 5 years of so.
During the Q&A period I went up to the microphone and asked the following: During your talk you briefly mentioned the futures market. Currently on the oil futures market, you can purchase a contract for a barrel of oil to be delivered in, say, the year 2010 or 2011 which is actually cheaper than a barrel of oil today [edit: nowadays it's actually slightly higher, 62 vs. 58]. What are your thoughts on why this is the case?
In his response, he had mentioned that he had been asked a similar question after he gave his talk at Merrill Lynch, basically: "If you really think oil prices are going to rise, why don't you put your money where your mouth is and buy up futures contracts?" He said to them that he wasn't too knowledgeable about futures contracts, and afterwards read up on them a little and found some of their intricacies bewildering. He said that he would want to purchase futures options for the coming few years, due to the extreme price fluctuations he expects, followed by regular futures in the longer term.
I'm not sure I bought his answer. Although I'm not sure about how far ahead one can purchase futures options, regular futures can definitely be purchased for 2012, which should be well into the period of soaring prices he predicts.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, right you are. I guess I remembered something about them doing something with real cash, but I guess they're giving it out as a prize.
Prediction markets are a major interest of mine. I'm in a bit of a rush at the moment, so I'll have to make some more extensive comments later, but in the meantime here's some neat links on prediction markets:
* Tradesports, a real-money prediction market on political and news events. The 2008 president market currently gives a Democratic a 50% probability of winning the White House in 2008, Hillary Clinton a 55% probability of getting the Democratic nomination, and John McCain a 49% probability of getting the Republican nomination.
* Futarchy, a system of government semi-seriously proposed by Robin Hanson which would use prediction markets as a means of government decision-making. People would vote on values, and use a prediction market to determine the optimal government policies to achieve those values, which would help get around some of the godawful stupid things democracies tend to do.
* Storage Markets, a real-money (but limited access?) market on the computer storage industry
* The Policy Analysis Market, a proposed prediction market for policies in the Middle East. It was IMHO a great idea, and could have potentially prevented some of the stupid decisions which have been made in the Middle East. Unfortunately, the government ended the project after it was the media (including slashdot) had a knee-jerk reaction to it and demonized it. The funny thing is, after the project was cancelled and the media learned more about it, coverage of the project became much more positive.
For anybody that wants to try this thing out for themselves, there's a game demo available for download, although it doesn't seem to be available on the official site anymore (I think GamersHell.com is a reputable site, but you might want to run an AV scan on the binary first).
I tried playing the demo a few months ago. Overall, I thought it was pretty crappy, but it was kind of amusing and there were some game mechanics which I thought was pretty neat. For example, in most RTS games "converting" units to your side is a special thing which happens fairly rarely, while in Left Behind its a central game mechanic.
I wonder if they're counting the Wii as one of the next-gen systems. It'd be pretty amusing to use a Wiimote to play as a facehugger, hunting down a human and having a little mini-game where you're wiggling around the Wiimote to try to lay eggs in their throat. After gestation, then there could be the chestburster mini-game, using the Wiimote to try to jab through somebody's ribcage. :)
When I was watching the linked video I had a random idea... what if people put together a (Creative Commons?) library of short video clips like that for some of the instruments used in MIDI files? For example, you could have short video samples of people playing notes for the piano, trumpet, vocals, etc. Then, given a MIDI file you could automatically generate a video like the one Mr. Gjertsen did, perhaps having a separate split-screen for each MIDI channel.
If nothing else, it'd be a cool thing to have on display at parties.
Thankfully many of us have spent dozens of hours practising zombie destruction in computer games like dead rising and are well-versed in their destruction.
Everyone knows the best way to kill zombies is with a keyboard and a Sega Dreamcast strapped to your back.
(Coincidentally, I actually did dress up as a character from Typing of the Dead for Halloween)
I've been interested in ideas like Sousveillance and the Transparent Society for a while -- just see my sig. I'm curious though: Does anybody know of ways to record images/video on something like a cellphone cam and have them automatically uploaded on-the-fly to a server someplace? I imagine that would be useful for situations where there's a high probability of having the recording device seized, such as when you're recording a protest or abuse of authority.
Because voters understand "Go to the Moon", because it can fit into a 5 second sound bite on TV news... but voters can't understand the economics of building cheaper heavy lift concepts, because it would require maybe 5 minutes to properly explain it to the average person.
Heavy-lift is a nice thing to shoot for in the long-term, but in the short- and medium-term the biggest clincher on launch costs is the flight rate.
Coincidentally, a pretty good article analyzing the planned launch architecture was published yesterday. Here's the link.
Additionally, aerospace engineer Jonathan Goff over at Selenian Boondocks has a post titled Lunar Much Sooner (and Better) which discusses a number of alternatives to NASA's current plan.
Finally, Selenian Boondocks also has another post about some things revealed by one of the architects of NASA's plans, suggesting that several of the design constraints imposed on the architecture may be somewhat dubious, (arguably) making the whole project much more expensive and unsustainable.
Uh... when I was growing up in Florida we heard the Emergency Alert System being used all the time, typically to warn us of severe thunderstorms, tornados, and such. I assure you that it isn't "fear propaganda," but actually something which is pretty useful.
HAH! I love all the discussion about Chinese censorship. The argument is that we are free, and see things objectively---but that is not true. We are merely free to choose the censorship we prefer.
I'm honestly not sure I follow. Are you suggesting that it's somehow just as bad to be able to choose how one filters one's information as it is to have somebody else impose such filtering on you? That seems a little like saying that spending your money and having somebody steal it are ethically equivalent.
Look around. Is this something you want to see done to every planet that can be made marginally habitable?
Yes.
Humans are an insidious parasite that needs to stay quarantined on this one planet that we've already screwed over.
This is one of the most absurd statements I've ever read.
> I like that principle, but what do you do when you can' fix what you broke?
Take off and nuke the site from orbit?
I'd like to ask those of us who actually socially know a number of scientists: Are your scientist friends political?
As a grad student at a university in California, I'd say that it's about half-and-half: half of the scientists I know are apolitical, but the other half are pretty hardcore political liberals. There's also a few libertarians, but they tend to not be as vocal. In general, discussing how much Bush sux0rz is a pretty popular conversation topic.
Coincidentally, the other day I was a reading a paper by Cardiff & Klein (2004) of the political affiliations of professors at California universities. It's pretty interesting. Here's the abstract:
FACULTY PARTISAN AFFILIATIONS IN ALL DISCIPLINES: A VOTER-REGISTRATION STUDY
ABSTRACT: The party registration of tenure-track faculty at 11 California
universities, ranging from small, private, religiously affiliated institutions to
large, public, elite schools, shows that the "one-party campus" conjecture does
not extend to all institutions or all departments. At one end of the scale,
U.C. Berkeley has an adjusted Democrat:Republican ratio of almost 9:1,
while Pepperdine University has a ratio of nearly 1:1. Academic field also
makes a tremendous difference, with the humanities averaging a 10:1 D:R
ratio and business schools averaging 1.3:1, and with departments ranging
from sociology (44:1) to management (1.5:1). Across all departments and institutions,
the D:R ratio is 5:1, while in the "soft" liberal-arts fields, the
ratio is higher than 8:1.These findings are generally in line with comparable
previous studies.
I think ParaParaParadise would probably be a better fit for the Wii.
Also, like I mentioned in another comment, I think a Glowstick Revolution game would be awesome.
How long... before they make a actual exercise themed game?
The WarioWare: Smooth Moves game will have a number of different exercise-based minigames, including running, squats, jump-roping, and so forth. There's a short video here.
Personally though, I can't wait until somebody makes some kind of Glowstick Revolution game for it. The Wiimote form factor is just asking for it. I'm not sure what would be a good visual interface for conveying glowstick maneuvers, though.
I'm not sure if the first link is correct -- it isn't a research paper, just an intro-level lecture to integrate-and-fire models, one of the topics covered in computational neuroscience. The actual research paper by Earnshaw & Bressloff requires a subscription, but here's the abstract:
;)
Biophysical Model of AMPA Receptor Trafficking and Its Regulation during Long-Term Potentiation/Long-Term Depression
AMPA receptors mediate the majority of fast excitatory synaptic transmission in the CNS, and evidence suggests that AMPA receptor trafficking regulates synaptic strength, a phenomenon implicated in learning and memory. There are two major mechanisms of AMPA receptor trafficking: exocytic/endocytic exchange of surface receptors with intracellular receptor pools, and the lateral diffusion or hopping of surface receptors between the postsynaptic density and the surrounding extrasynaptic membrane. In this paper, we present a biophysical model of these trafficking mechanisms under basal conditions and during the expression of long-term potentiation (LTP) and depression (LTD). We show how our model reproduces a wide range of physiological data, and use this to make predictions regarding possible targets of second-messenger pathways activated during the induction phase of LTP/LTD.
Computational neuroscience is a great topic. If you're interested in learning more about it, there's a nice book by Gerstner & Kistler called Spiking Neuron Models, which can be purchased hard-copy or downloaded for free online. The wikipedia page is also pretty good, with plenty of links to fun neural simulation software.
(And yes, I Am A Computational Neuroscientist... or at least I'm in a computational neuroscience grad program
I really don't think that many people would take a drug that monkies with sleep patterns for it to make difference.
Are you saying many people don't take caffeine?
Ah, I guess I missed that one earlier. Thanks a lot!
As a busy grad student, Modafinil seems a lot like the Best Drug Ever, and I've been reading about it for the past year or so. So far in this thread with 400-some comments, it seems that only one person has actually posted about their experiences with it.
Has anybody else tried it, or know somebody who has?
In all likelihood, the U.S. is also creeping towards a 'Surveillance Society'.
This is a controversial position, but I'd argue that such a surveillance society is a good thing if (and only if!) such surveillance is mutual. See David Brin's Transparent Society.
I think you fail to get it. A low performance engine cannot lift ANYTHING into space. No matter how cheap a reliable.
I think your dichotomy may need some adjusting. The proposition isn't cheap vs. expensive, but really expensive vs. absurdly expensive, or really high performance vs. absurdly high performance. As it is, the shuttle is optimized towards rather absurd performance margins, which is nice on paper, but doesn't really do much to try to reduce launch costs. If anything, launch costs are deliberately increased to help ensure that sufficient amounts of money go to the proper congressional districts.
This was the same guy who after Challenger said that the Shuttle fleet was going to be canned and that no more would ever be produced saying he heard "directly from Griffin."
I'm a little confused by your statement... Griffin wasn't administrator during the Challenger disaster. Also, there hasn't been a new shuttle produced since 1992, and official policy is that no more will be produced.
So we build these guys to start replicating and to stop replicating when we want them to... but when you make a billion of something you end up with some odd mutations. Even if you are talking about .001% mutation that's still 100,000 self replicating mistakes. If even one of those 100,000 mistakes is a mutation that just doesn't turn off self replication you now have a very bad problem.
Released, this nanite could theoretically convert the earth (see "grey goo") into a giant ball of itself.
Much the same logic could apply to cancer cells themselves, as they're self-replicating and mutate. Why isn't the world a giant ball of cancer cells?
(This is from something I wrote up earlier this year, regarding a question I asked Professor Kenneth Deffeyes (a proponent of peak oil ideas) during a Q&A session after a talk he gave at my university. If anybody has a better answer, I'd honestly be interested in hearing it.)
Today there was a talk in Beckman Auditorium by Kenneth Deffeyes, Princeton professor emeritus and author of one of the more popular books on that ever-popular meme, peak oil. He discussed his belief that we had hit peak oil sometime around this past Thanksgiving, and that oil prices are going to fluctuate wildly and rise in the next 5 years of so.
During the Q&A period I went up to the microphone and asked the following: During your talk you briefly mentioned the futures market. Currently on the oil futures market, you can purchase a contract for a barrel of oil to be delivered in, say, the year 2010 or 2011 which is actually cheaper than a barrel of oil today [edit: nowadays it's actually slightly higher, 62 vs. 58]. What are your thoughts on why this is the case?
In his response, he had mentioned that he had been asked a similar question after he gave his talk at Merrill Lynch, basically: "If you really think oil prices are going to rise, why don't you put your money where your mouth is and buy up futures contracts?" He said to them that he wasn't too knowledgeable about futures contracts, and afterwards read up on them a little and found some of their intricacies bewildering. He said that he would want to purchase futures options for the coming few years, due to the extreme price fluctuations he expects, followed by regular futures in the longer term.
I'm not sure I bought his answer. Although I'm not sure about how far ahead one can purchase futures options, regular futures can definitely be purchased for 2012, which should be well into the period of soaring prices he predicts.