It actually IS illegal (at least here) to arbitrarily take pictures of people (unless it is a "person of public interest", i.e. a celebrity). There are strict guidelines what you can and what you cannot film, as a "normal" person. You taking pictures of some landmark and someone runs through, that's ok, because you wanted to take a pic of the landmark and someone is "accidently" also in the picture. Singling out a person standing in front of the landmark and having the focus on the person is not.
Do you know of a good overview of such laws? It sounds like the line between what is legal and illegal is quite ambiguous. For example, what if somebody runs through the page of my camera and I'm running algorithms on it which are able to identify them and save the snapshot?
It would be different if there was a law requiring you to identify whenever you want to shop at whatever place.
I don't think anybody has even suggested this, but most of the comments in the thread seem to act like this is the case.
On September 13, 1848, Phineas Gage was working outside the small town of Cavendish, Vermont on the construction of a railroad track where he was employed as a foreman. One of his duties was to set explosive charges in holes drilled into large pieces of rock so they could be broken up and removed. This involved filling the hole with gunpowder, adding a fuse, and then packing in sand with the aid of a large tamping iron. Gage was momentarily distracted and forgot to pour the sand into one hole. Thus, when he went to tamp the sand down, the tamping iron sparked against the rock and ignited the gunpowder, causing the iron to be blown through Gage's head with such force that it landed almost thirty yards (27 meters) behind him.
The three foot (1 m) long tamping iron with a diameter of 1.25 inches (3.2 cm) weighing thirteen and a half pounds (6.12 kg) entered his skull below his left cheek bone and exited after passing through the anterior frontal cortex and white matter.
Anyone who believes they led a more private social-networking life before was living under a false pretense. I can't say it enough times: all of this information could quickly and easily be found in one location before - facebook.com. That has not changed.
No kidding. I mean, it would be almost trivial to put together a script which would achieve what Facebook's new feature does. Really, all the new feature does is making it more obvious to people what sorts of information they're putting up on the site.
I'm a facebook user myself, and I love the new feature. Of course, I also have the sense not to put anything on the site that I don't mind broadcasting openly.
As the anon coward said, by "NASA's technology" I was referring to aluminum walls, not NASA's technology in general (which includes Transhab). It's really too bad that Congress forced NASA to abandon Transhab, as it could've helped them to construct the International Space Station at a much lower cost, and probably with a larger size.
For any readers who might be unfamiliar with Transhab, there's a rather nice history of the project, and its further development by Bigelow:
It stops being ok if there is no chance to avoid it. Cameras don't discriminate between people who consider it ok to be filmed and those who don't.
I'm not sure I follow. Should it be illlegal for people to use cameras at all, since it's possible somebody who doesn't want to be filmed will wander into view?
As long as you can choose, it's fine. It's not when it is forced upon you.
What do you mean by being "forced upon you"? For example, to shop at Costco you -have- to have a membership card. Is that ok?
Retail facilities are not synominous with privacy.
Sure. Why should you have any expectation of privacy on somebody else's property, unless you're in an area where they explicitly tell you that you have that privacy? A store should have every right to station as many employees as it wants to around the store, or put up as many cameras it wants, and run whatever algorithms it wants to on them. Of course, if they explicitly tell you that you won't be watched in a certain area (such as a bathroom stall), they're obliged to follow through with that (e.g. no employees or cameras peeping at you in the stall).
I think once you bring your cost of launch down, this could become a sigificant revenue stream, but it's still at least 40 years away.
40 years away? People are already assembling sports leagues to compete on the weightless flights operated by the Zero Gravity Corporation. Here's an MSNBC article, Zero-gravity sports are close to reality. Of course, whether or not the business plans are economically viable remains to be seen.
Every time there's an article about Bigelow Aerospace here, there's a dozen or so commenters who are convinced that because the modules are self-expanding, they must therefore be delicate and vulnerable to space debris. In reality however, the walls of their modules are quite durable, probably even more so the aluminum walls of the International Space Station. The walls will be composed of multiple layers of materials like kevlar (the stuff used in bullet-proof vests) and vectran, resulting in a wall 16-inches thick. They've done a number of projectile tests, with results which compare favorably to NASA's.
> Doesn't Google already use Content Based Image Retrieval anyways for their image search?
I think they used to when Google Images first came out, but it didn't work very well, so they went back to mostly relying on click-tracking and textual context. With any luck though, the new Google Image Labeler should create a very nice database for training computer vision algorithms, so they might be able to still produce a decent CBIR in the future.
I'm pretty sure I've seen some university project identical to this some time (1 year ?) ago. So it's definitely been done before. Although google does make a perfect (or at least a lot more suited) maintainer for such a project.
It's basically a licensed version of the work by Luis von Ahn, a grad student (and now professor) at Carnegie Mellon. It's pretty similar to his Peekaboom game.
> That's my opinion. I believe I said, if we're basically giving up our lead role in space, it's not a bad choice, if overly expensive, to basically downgrade to this.
Instead of using a capsule for reentry and orbital transit, what do you think NASA should be doing instead? And what is it that other countries are doing which puts them in the lead?
I'm curious as to why you think it's inferior to the shuttle:
Is it because it doesn't have wings? (You don't need wings in space)
Is it because it doesn't carry cargo? (Carrying both crew and cargo on the same vehicle generally isn't a good idea)
That said, I'm rather perplexed by why it would cost $3.9 billion for NASA/Lockheed to develop a capsule when a company like SpaceX is developing their Dragon capsule for about a tenth of that cost.::shrugs::
The title of this story is wrong -- Lockheed Martin just won the contract for the Orion Crew & Service Module (CSM). The CSM is the party which will transport astronauts around in space, and land them back on Earth. The actual lunar lander, the Lunar Surface Access Module (LSAM), hasn't had its contract awarded yet, to say nothing of a "Mars Lander."
Of course, all this is rather confusing. I follow space news more closely than most, and I often get confused myself. Fortunately, Wikipedia's article on Project Constellation (the overall architecture) has a nice overview of what all the pieces are and how they fit together.
That said, I really wish that NASA would spend this money on the Commercial Orbital Transportation Systems program instead, accomplishing the same objectives in a more cost-effective manner. With COTS, companies only get paid if they succeed. NASA will instead be spending $3.9 billion (assuming there aren't cost overruns) just to get a capsule, while giving a total of $500 million (split between 2 companies) to COTS in order to get both rockets and capsules. To top it off, the COTS vehicles are scheduled to be completed years before the Lockheed Martin capsule is ready.
The Space Frontier Foundation has an interesting whitepaper arguing for why COTS should get they money instead of the Orion program.
> How was he not the first person they looked into?
I'm fairly certain he was. However, if I understand correctly, when called, Stevens and his staff kept on refusing to comment on whether or not he was the one who instated the hold.
Some additional points, in case you make another response:
> He has caused enormous pain and suffering and he needs to apologize.
IMHO, the activists have caused enormous pain and suffering and need to apologize. I suspect they won't be doing it anytime soon though, and just move onto the next victim.
> I often wonder how many people have suffered and died while waiting on a cure from those like Ringach who have had countless animals and money---resources--- to do research.
This part confuses me. Ringach wasn't doing medical research, but fundamental neuroscience.
> PFP is all for medical research but we want these resources to be channeled into areas that have proven track records.
Is he claiming that Ringach doesn't have a proven track record? I'm sure the hundreds of scientists who have cited his work in their papers would beg to differ.
> Not only that but the research industry is so caught up in graft, deception etc. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12749497/from/RSS/ is a story you may have heard about. Every week there's a new story where those in research have lied about their data or stolen tons of money.
This part is perplexing. Is he claiming that Ringach is involved in deception or fraud? It would be nice if he provided evidence of this.
> Don't even get me started about Dr. Graham's testimony about Vioxx and the other drugs he mentioned in his testimony to the US Senate!
Again, this has nothing to do with Ringach.
> If it was just about the money that would be understandable but people are depending on these cures and they believe the lies they are hearing and the animals are being used in experiments that the researchers know are only a way to get their federal grants renewed.
What cures is he talking about? As I mentioned before, Ringach does basic neuroscience. He studies fundamental principles, not medical conditions. And IMHO, having read much of his work, it's very good research and has done much to deepen our understanding of visual processing.
I should also add that a similar procedure is often carried out in humans, in treatment of severe epilepsy. A local anesthetic is applied, a hole is opened up in the skull, and microelectrodes are inserted to try to pinpoint the focal point of the epileptic seizures. The pinpointing procedure requires the patient to be conscious.
I'd say that eating brains scooped out of the skull of a live monkey would be totally equivalent to 'scientific' research for mere curiosity.
I'm somewhat intrigued by this notion of "mere curiosity" you mention. What do you feel is legitimate scientific research? Should research only be allowed if it has immediate medical applications? What about non-medical applications? (For example, Ringach's work has potential implications in the fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning)
To use an example I've used elsewhere in this thread, that of the Nobel prize-winning research of Hubel & Wiesel. In their experiments on anesthetized cats, they planted electrodes into visual cortex to gain an understanding of how the brain proceses visual information (the basic idea behind their experiments is quite similar to Ringach's, actually). Although their research advanced our basic understanding of the brain greatly enough for them to win the Nobel, it was basic research, without immediate medical applications. Do you feel their research was justified?
Like many, these people seem to believe that just because an experiment may contribute to our knowledge does not justify the use of primates in medical laboratories. The research is at a far remove from brining about substantive benefit to human beings and so would probably fail most reasonable standards of moral evaluation.
David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel won the 1982 Nobel Prize in Medicine for doing experiments which were methodologically quite similar to Ringach's, except in cats instead of macaques. Although their research has deepened our understanding of how the brain functions and processes visual information, I don't think there have been any direct medical benefits from Hubel and Wiesel's Nobel prize-winning research.
Do you think Hubel and Wiesel's research was justified?
The other article mentions surgery, was this just eye surgery or skull cracking I wonder.
The studies are focused on visual cortex, which requires opening a hole into the occipital lobe (back of the skull). Of course, that happens under anesthesia.
This doesn't seem like the junk science the protestors claim it is, but I can easily see some people being violently opposed to this procedure.
Slashdot Mirror
It actually IS illegal (at least here) to arbitrarily take pictures of people (unless it is a "person of public interest", i.e. a celebrity). There are strict guidelines what you can and what you cannot film, as a "normal" person. You taking pictures of some landmark and someone runs through, that's ok, because you wanted to take a pic of the landmark and someone is "accidently" also in the picture. Singling out a person standing in front of the landmark and having the focus on the person is not.
Do you know of a good overview of such laws? It sounds like the line between what is legal and illegal is quite ambiguous. For example, what if somebody runs through the page of my camera and I'm running algorithms on it which are able to identify them and save the snapshot?
It would be different if there was a law requiring you to identify whenever you want to shop at whatever place.
I don't think anybody has even suggested this, but most of the comments in the thread seem to act like this is the case.
Speaking of lesions, let's not forget the story of Phineas Gage, a classic case study in neuroscience:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage
On September 13, 1848, Phineas Gage was working outside the small town of Cavendish, Vermont on the construction of a railroad track where he was employed as a foreman. One of his duties was to set explosive charges in holes drilled into large pieces of rock so they could be broken up and removed. This involved filling the hole with gunpowder, adding a fuse, and then packing in sand with the aid of a large tamping iron. Gage was momentarily distracted and forgot to pour the sand into one hole. Thus, when he went to tamp the sand down, the tamping iron sparked against the rock and ignited the gunpowder, causing the iron to be blown through Gage's head with such force that it landed almost thirty yards (27 meters) behind him.
The three foot (1 m) long tamping iron with a diameter of 1.25 inches (3.2 cm) weighing thirteen and a half pounds (6.12 kg) entered his skull below his left cheek bone and exited after passing through the anterior frontal cortex and white matter.
Anyone know of a group for people who -support- the new changes? I'd be interested in joining such a group.
Anyone who believes they led a more private social-networking life before was living under a false pretense. I can't say it enough times: all of this information could quickly and easily be found in one location before - facebook.com. That has not changed.
No kidding. I mean, it would be almost trivial to put together a script which would achieve what Facebook's new feature does. Really, all the new feature does is making it more obvious to people what sorts of information they're putting up on the site.
I'm a facebook user myself, and I love the new feature. Of course, I also have the sense not to put anything on the site that I don't mind broadcasting openly.
As the anon coward said, by "NASA's technology" I was referring to aluminum walls, not NASA's technology in general (which includes Transhab). It's really too bad that Congress forced NASA to abandon Transhab, as it could've helped them to construct the International Space Station at a much lower cost, and probably with a larger size.
For any readers who might be unfamiliar with Transhab, there's a rather nice history of the project, and its further development by Bigelow:
A History of the Genesis I Private Space Module
It stops being ok if there is no chance to avoid it. Cameras don't discriminate between people who consider it ok to be filmed and those who don't.
I'm not sure I follow. Should it be illlegal for people to use cameras at all, since it's possible somebody who doesn't want to be filmed will wander into view?
As long as you can choose, it's fine. It's not when it is forced upon you.
What do you mean by being "forced upon you"? For example, to shop at Costco you -have- to have a membership card. Is that ok?
Retail facilities are not synominous with privacy.
Sure. Why should you have any expectation of privacy on somebody else's property, unless you're in an area where they explicitly tell you that you have that privacy? A store should have every right to station as many employees as it wants to around the store, or put up as many cameras it wants, and run whatever algorithms it wants to on them. Of course, if they explicitly tell you that you won't be watched in a certain area (such as a bathroom stall), they're obliged to follow through with that (e.g. no employees or cameras peeping at you in the stall).
I think once you bring your cost of launch down, this could become a sigificant revenue stream, but it's still at least 40 years away.
40 years away? People are already assembling sports leagues to compete on the weightless flights operated by the Zero Gravity Corporation. Here's an MSNBC article, Zero-gravity sports are close to reality. Of course, whether or not the business plans are economically viable remains to be seen.
Every time there's an article about Bigelow Aerospace here, there's a dozen or so commenters who are convinced that because the modules are self-expanding, they must therefore be delicate and vulnerable to space debris. In reality however, the walls of their modules are quite durable, probably even more so the aluminum walls of the International Space Station. The walls will be composed of multiple layers of materials like kevlar (the stuff used in bullet-proof vests) and vectran, resulting in a wall 16-inches thick. They've done a number of projectile tests, with results which compare favorably to NASA's.
> Doesn't Google already use Content Based Image Retrieval anyways for their image search?
I think they used to when Google Images first came out, but it didn't work very well, so they went back to mostly relying on click-tracking and textual context. With any luck though, the new Google Image Labeler should create a very nice database for training computer vision algorithms, so they might be able to still produce a decent CBIR in the future.
I'm pretty sure I've seen some university project identical to this some time (1 year ?) ago. So it's definitely been done before. Although google does make a perfect (or at least a lot more suited) maintainer for such a project.
It's basically a licensed version of the work by Luis von Ahn, a grad student (and now professor) at Carnegie Mellon. It's pretty similar to his Peekaboom game.
> That's my opinion. I believe I said, if we're basically giving up our lead role in space, it's not a bad choice, if overly expensive, to basically downgrade to this.
Instead of using a capsule for reentry and orbital transit, what do you think NASA should be doing instead? And what is it that other countries are doing which puts them in the lead?
I'm curious as to why you think it's inferior to the shuttle:
::shrugs::
Is it because it doesn't have wings? (You don't need wings in space)
Is it because it doesn't carry cargo? (Carrying both crew and cargo on the same vehicle generally isn't a good idea)
That said, I'm rather perplexed by why it would cost $3.9 billion for NASA/Lockheed to develop a capsule when a company like SpaceX is developing their Dragon capsule for about a tenth of that cost.
The title of this story is wrong -- Lockheed Martin just won the contract for the Orion Crew & Service Module (CSM). The CSM is the party which will transport astronauts around in space, and land them back on Earth. The actual lunar lander, the Lunar Surface Access Module (LSAM), hasn't had its contract awarded yet, to say nothing of a "Mars Lander."
Of course, all this is rather confusing. I follow space news more closely than most, and I often get confused myself. Fortunately, Wikipedia's article on Project Constellation (the overall architecture) has a nice overview of what all the pieces are and how they fit together.
That said, I really wish that NASA would spend this money on the Commercial Orbital Transportation Systems program instead, accomplishing the same objectives in a more cost-effective manner. With COTS, companies only get paid if they succeed. NASA will instead be spending $3.9 billion (assuming there aren't cost overruns) just to get a capsule, while giving a total of $500 million (split between 2 companies) to COTS in order to get both rockets and capsules. To top it off, the COTS vehicles are scheduled to be completed years before the Lockheed Martin capsule is ready.
The Space Frontier Foundation has an interesting whitepaper arguing for why COTS should get they money instead of the Orion program.
> How was he not the first person they looked into?
I'm fairly certain he was. However, if I understand correctly, when called, Stevens and his staff kept on refusing to comment on whether or not he was the one who instated the hold.
> I'm not destroyed by putting my curiosity on hold.
I disagree. Putting curiosity on hold is one of the most self-destructive behaviors there is.
> What you like this kind of research performed on you?
If I were a patient with severe epilepsy, then yes, I would hope that a similar procedure would be done on me.
Some additional points, in case you make another response:
> He has caused enormous pain and suffering and he needs to apologize.
IMHO, the activists have caused enormous pain and suffering and need to apologize. I suspect they won't be doing it anytime soon though, and just move onto the next victim.
> I often wonder how many people have suffered and died while waiting on a cure from those like Ringach who have had countless animals and money---resources--- to do research.
This part confuses me. Ringach wasn't doing medical research, but fundamental neuroscience.
> PFP is all for medical research but we want these resources to be channeled into areas that have proven track records.
Is he claiming that Ringach doesn't have a proven track record? I'm sure the hundreds of scientists who have cited his work in their papers would beg to differ.
> Not only that but the research industry is so caught up in graft, deception etc. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12749497/from/RSS/ is a story you may have heard about. Every week there's a new story where those in research have lied about their data or stolen tons of money.
This part is perplexing. Is he claiming that Ringach is involved in deception or fraud? It would be nice if he provided evidence of this.
> Don't even get me started about Dr. Graham's testimony about Vioxx and the other drugs he mentioned in his testimony to the US Senate!
Again, this has nothing to do with Ringach.
> If it was just about the money that would be understandable but people are depending on these cures and they believe the lies they are hearing and the animals are being used in experiments that the researchers know are only a way to get their federal grants renewed.
What cures is he talking about? As I mentioned before, Ringach does basic neuroscience. He studies fundamental principles, not medical conditions. And IMHO, having read much of his work, it's very good research and has done much to deepen our understanding of visual processing.
It's amazing to see how delusional these activists are. Thanks for posting this.
I should also add that a similar procedure is often carried out in humans, in treatment of severe epilepsy. A local anesthetic is applied, a hole is opened up in the skull, and microelectrodes are inserted to try to pinpoint the focal point of the epileptic seizures. The pinpointing procedure requires the patient to be conscious.
No I don't think that research was justified.
Interesting. Do you feel that Hubel & Wiesel's Nobel Prize should be revoked then?
I'd say that eating brains scooped out of the skull of a live monkey would be totally equivalent to 'scientific' research for mere curiosity.
I'm somewhat intrigued by this notion of "mere curiosity" you mention. What do you feel is legitimate scientific research? Should research only be allowed if it has immediate medical applications? What about non-medical applications? (For example, Ringach's work has potential implications in the fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning)
To use an example I've used elsewhere in this thread, that of the Nobel prize-winning research of Hubel & Wiesel. In their experiments on anesthetized cats, they planted electrodes into visual cortex to gain an understanding of how the brain proceses visual information (the basic idea behind their experiments is quite similar to Ringach's, actually). Although their research advanced our basic understanding of the brain greatly enough for them to win the Nobel, it was basic research, without immediate medical applications. Do you feel their research was justified?
Like many, these people seem to believe that just because an experiment may contribute to our knowledge does not justify the use of primates in medical laboratories. The research is at a far remove from brining about substantive benefit to human beings and so would probably fail most reasonable standards of moral evaluation.
David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel won the 1982 Nobel Prize in Medicine for doing experiments which were methodologically quite similar to Ringach's, except in cats instead of macaques. Although their research has deepened our understanding of how the brain functions and processes visual information, I don't think there have been any direct medical benefits from Hubel and Wiesel's Nobel prize-winning research.
Do you think Hubel and Wiesel's research was justified?
The other article mentions surgery, was this just eye surgery or skull cracking I wonder.
The studies are focused on visual cortex, which requires opening a hole into the occipital lobe (back of the skull). Of course, that happens under anesthesia.
This doesn't seem like the junk science the protestors claim it is, but I can easily see some people being violently opposed to this procedure.
Agreed.
Just in case you don't browse at 0, see the anonymous comment made to your post for the text of the methodology section.