According to a new study, if everyone else has arrived at a certain conclusion, you should too. According to a new study, using the phrase "a new study" will get it noticed in the popular science media who count on you failing to differentiate that from "a new result". According to a new study, they will continue to print such misleading non-news not because they're ignorant, but because they don't care whether something is worthy of note as long as they can fill their white space.
The problems that have been noted have not just "recently plagued similar brain imaging studies", they have been around since the 'boxcar' stimulus method and SPM analysis technique were applied to MRI research.
There are enough that know better now that fMRI can be rightly questioned. But here you run into the problem of science vs. scientists. There are so many of the latter that have attached their name to previously accepted research that they'd refuse to accept any reports of problems. For example, there was recently an fMRI article published by PNAS. That means there are enough highly placed reviewers and associates of theirs in the National Academy that didn't know there was a problem and so aren't likely to come forward and admit their previous ignorance. Any trying to do so unilaterally would face opposition more strenuous than merely scientific. Hell, I learned the technique as well as the underlying theories from a student of the guy who invented them, and I still have my theory based objections countered with mention of how many publications use the technique vs. how many publications cover these "problems".
Not the BioLabs stuff, the wild speculation and false statements spouted here being imaginary. Not a one here so far has attempted to find out if there actually were peer reviewed publications by Andrei Gudkov on the subject of radiation treatment and/or radioprotectants.
You'll get 52 results with his name given as 'Gudkov AV'; the abstracts make it clear it's him by giving his associations.
Repeat the search with 'Gudkov, Andrei radiation' as the search term.
You'll get 10 results, all of which pertain to radiation treatment, radioprotectants and specifically the role of p53.
Two of those entries are reviews. Those would be the most instructive to any who actually want to find out if there's actually research on the subject and what it's about. Here's the two abstracts:
(1) Nat Rev Cancer. 2003 Feb;3(2):117-29.
The role of p53 in determining sensitivity to radiotherapy.
Gudkov AV, Komarova EA.
Department of Molecular Biology, NC20, Lerner Research Institute, Cleveland Clinic Foundation, 9500 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio 44195, USA. gudkov@ccf.org
Ionizing radiation (IR) has proven to be a powerful medical treatment in the fight against cancer. Rational and effective use of its killing power depends on understanding IR-mediated responses at the molecular, cellular and tissue levels. Tumour cells frequently acquire defects in the molecular regulatory mechanisms of the response to IR, which sensitizes them to radiation therapy. One of the key molecules involved in a cell's response to IR is p53. Understanding these mechanisms indicates new rational approaches to improving cancer treatment by IR.
Biochem Biophys Res Commun. 2005 Jun 10;331(3):726-36.
Prospective therapeutic applications of p53 inhibitors.
Gudkov AV, Komarova EA.
Department of Molecular Genetics, Lerner Research Institute, The Cleveland Clinic Foundation, Cleveland, OH 44195, USA. gudkov@ccf.org
p53, in addition to being a key cancer preventive factor, is also a determinant of cancer treatment side effects causing excessive apoptotic death in several normal tissues during cancer therapy. p53 inhibitory strategy has been suggested to protect normal tissues from chemo- and radiotherapy, and to treat other pathologies associated with stress-mediated activation of p53. This strategy was validated by isolation and testing of small molecule p53 inhibitor pifithrin-alpha that demonstrated broad tissue protecting capacity. However, in some normal tissues and tumors p53 plays protective role by inducing growth arrest and preventing cells from premature entrance into mitosis and death from mitotic catastrophe. Inhibition of this function of p53 can sensitize tumor cells to chemo- and radiotherapy, thus opening new potential application of p53 inhibitors and justifying the need in pharmacological agents targeting specifically either pro-apoptotic or growth arrest functions of p53.
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Note: 'Apoptosis' is the tendency for cells to die off based on signals from other nearby cells that are dying off -- a 'suicide signal'. This happens in many situations, radiation exposure being one of them.
As for emphasis on ethnicity, sure, they do mention it. The source noted is an Israeli newspaper. They have right to be proud since one of their citizens is accomplishing something notable to the world. Nobody seems to find it a problem when US newspapers note that a scientist is from the US. That's so common that it's not even noticed, unless you're not from the US. 90% of scientific publications are from the US. In those from other countries it's common for such emphasis to be included so the w
If Apollo had continued, it would have stopped at Apollo 20. That was the plan. Apollo itself was the dead-end plan to win the space race. And strange as it may seem, the loss of soonest and long term success in space and the the formation of NASA were one in the same.
"On 10 July Brigadier General Homer A Boushey of Headquarters USAF informed ARDC that Eisenhower's Bureau of the Budget, firmly in favor of placing the manned space flight program in the new civilian agency, was blocking further release of funds for the program. On 16 July the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 was passed by Congress, and NASA was created out of the NACA and some Army and Navy rocket laboratories. But ARPA told the Air Force there was still a chance the White House would support MISS if costs could be kept to under $50 million in FY 1959. They could present the project as so far along, and with so low a cost to complete, that it would be a big setback to start all over with NASA.
But BMD couldn't make the figures come out this way. Funding of only $50 million in FY 1959 would delay the first American in space to early 1962. Instead, on 24 July, General Bernard Schriever at BMD issued the sixth revision to the MISS development plan. This had a total cost of $106.6 million with the bare Atlas as the booster. Salient features included establishment of a worldwide tracking network, resolving quickly the heat sink versus ablation heat shield issue, and continuing with design of the Thor WS-117L and Thor-Able as backups in case the Atlas proved to be unreliable. Assuming immediate authorization from ARPA, Schriever promised release of the final tender documents to the contractors within 24 hours, and orbiting of the first man in space by June 1960.
The next day there was one last session with ARPA Director Johnson at the Pentagon. BMD pointed out that only full, unrestricted, immediate program approval to go ahead with MISS would give the United States a real chance to be "soonest" with a man in space. Johnson flatly refused. Eisenhower saw no valid role for the military in manned space flight. NACA didn't plan to spend more than $40 million on their manned space program in FY 1959, fiscally much more attractive than the $107 million the Air Force was asking for.
On that day - 25 July 1958 - America gave up its chance to put the first man into space. A manager like Schriever could undoubtedly have rammed the project through on the promised schedule. The collection of scientists and tinkerers at NACA had no chance."
Had MISS progressed, Neil Armstrong may still have been first on the moon. However, he would almost certainly have been the first person ride a space craft into orbit and actually fly it home. He was scheduled to take the first orbital flight of Dynasoar http://www.astronautix.com/craft/dynasoar.htm in 1964. NASA's track placed this milestone under the space shuttle, 20 years later. The 'what if' scenario changed long before the question in TFA.
Had the original visions of space exploration been carried out, we may or may not have gotten where we did by 1970, but we darn sure would have gotten there with no intention of backing down and starting over again later. Instead of Ares and Orion, we'd have had true stepping-stone space stations building and launching manned planetary missions. Recall, some of Von Braun's ideas centered on building permanent construction sites in orbit, using the 'bicycle wheel' design. Time and again he was stifled and forced to channel his enormous talent from that which made good sense to that which he would be allowed to see succeed.
The front page of Encyclopedia Astronautica http://www.astronautix.com/ is covered with links to the actual history, the underlying and hidden history, and the might-have-beens of the race for the moon.
The conclusion is OK, the details presented suffer. That's common in pop-science writing, and sadly increasingly common in SciAm.
Left side = language: Based on the largest group of similar orientation, right handed males. Not even a majority -- 40%. Left handed males are right-side language almost the same proportion but are few overall. There are 'ipsilateral language' (same side as dominant hand, as opposed to 'contralateral', other-side), as well as 'undifferentiated', with language capability on both sides. Females are somewhat similar in breakdown but more undifferentiated overall. Also, the generalization is for non-tonal based languages such as English. See "right/other side" below.
Left cortex vs. right deep: All language functions are handled in the outer few millimeters of the brain, the cortex. Some processes may be driven by deep structures, but all higher order processing relies on cortical activity.
Right/other side cortex: Opposite (or mixed with, in 'undifferentiated' brains) the language centers there is an equally employed structure that controls "prosidy", or emotional processing, understanding and expression in language. It is more oriented to tonal processing making it central to music as well as to tonal-based languages. "Right side" or prosidic region damage can result in flat monotone response to expression about both winning the lottery and death of a loved one. Or it can result in inappropriate response, such as laughter, to everything.
If you consider the necessity of 'other-side' processing in tonal language and the large population that uses it, the western/English, right handed, males, contralateral language center "dominance" becomes a great deal less world wide (there are brains world wide, honest) than the 40% usually quoted in western language research literature and texts.
Moving the expresssion of distress from the language structure dominant area to the prosidic/emotional area does tap into underlying emotion processing. Then again, so would singing. I'd like to see replication with singing instead of cursing -- betcha it's similar in outcome. Evidence: stuttering is stress based; stutters frequently don't stutter when they sing, ask (according to his belt buckle) M-M-M-M-Mel Tillis. And, a naive hypothesis: I'd bet that while those that use tonal languages may curse in pain and such, they are far more likely to use coherent language with stress (in both senses) placed in the tonal aspect of what they're expressing. Any speakers or Chinese dialects or other east Asian languages care to comment?
Lastly, an aside: The 'left side' language centers make the brain larger on the left. This is taken as a dominance of language processing over other kinds. However (1) chimps have the same assymetry, with the same proportion of 'other-sided-language', larger on the right, as with humans; (2) cortical localization is both redundant (more than one area can do the job) and plastic (one can take over when another fails); and (3) the amount of cortex devoted to something implies it requires that much effort. The same amount of processing and behavioral control can be handled by smaller areas when the processing is made mo
The study does not, as stated in the summary, cover 'how Americans feel about science', and only briefly looks at how they value scientists or their work (per TFA).
For the most part it looks at whether (non-scientist, one assumes) Americans agree with (American?) scientists. More precisely, it illustrates what Americans believe, compared to what scientists understand or at least accept that science more-or-less 'accurately describes'.
Pew does some good work sometimes. Too bad they don't verbalate it gooder.
Behavioral momentum*** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_momentum is formally a term describing the quantification of resistance to change in opposition with the pressure to change. The latter is phrased in terms of reinforcement because it was comes from the efforts to quantify the component phenomena in learning theory as laid out by Skinner. It implies any and all sources of resistance be considered as a single force.
Informally, the 'resistance(s) to change' suffices when applying it to a situation such as in TFA. The PC World article correctly though accidentally calls it an 'anxiety'. It could be described in terms of cognitive dissonance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance but we're in the informal section now, so you can read the first line and see that it's an 'uncomfortable feeling' regarding (among other possibilities) 'awareness of one's behavior'.
There are few instances when one is more aware of one's behavior than when one is asked to perform a task in a way different from an accustomed manner. Being so aware of it is part and parcel with the awareness required to perform in an unfamiliar way and with the (performance, not separation, as per TFA) anxiety caused by the enforced change. That's an object summary of cognitive dissonance in action.
The greybeards out there may recall when they first encountered a mouse/GUI interface. Many noted that CLI worked just fine if not better. (You youngsters can ask them -- you know how they love to talk about the old days.) Making the switch was not that difficult because the new way was very easy to understand and so required little thought. But more importantly it was easier because it was very different and so didn't require unthinking an old way and new-thinking a new way without encountering as much anxiety provoking instances of potential or actual mistake making.
With the above we can then approach the nature of the problem in TFA and so the solution.
The average IT consumer knows little about what they're causing to happen other than pushing certain buttons causes certain things to happen that they need to happen in order to do their job. Making this easy for them to do is fine for getting them working quickly. But getting them working efficiently quickly does not teach them what they are doing. F'rinstance, if they want to move a section of words from one place to another, they don't even have to know what the names given to control-X and control-V are, they just know it does the job (and these days it's unlikely even you out there ever used scissors or razor blades and mucilage to cut and paste anything).
Along with the familiarity with the procedure, particularly without a grasp of the underlying mechanisms, and prior to any attempt to alter the procedure, comes behavioral momentum. People get used to doing something a certain way and *with a certain level of confidence*. Now, ask them to do exactly the same thing a different way. You've knocked them back down the front of the learning curve without the ladder of basic understanding.
Had they been taught how to do the same thing more than one way, and told what it is they're causing to happen, they could find that ladder. Trapped as they are though, they're aware of difficulty and incapability and little else. Anyone who's tried to teach someone a different method knows about that 'and little else'. It often seems they can't hear your instruction and can't get their head talking to their hands. They're frequently worse than complete neophytes because they'll freeze up when trying to do the most basic things that they know well in terms of 'how' with a different set of actions.
Those of us who've learned more than one OS or used learned several differently designed programs for doing the same things have an advantage not often appreciated by program designers and especially by those such as the Google group trying
Most any animal will orient to a novel stimulus. When they are repeatedly presented with a stimulus comprised of some stimulus components in a certain order they will habituate to that stimulus. When they are then presented with a stimulus comprised of the same components in a different order, they will react as if it is novel. Simply said, they can tell then difference, and that's all that need be said. In EEG research we study this a great deal using such habituated and novel stimuli composed from pairs of beeps of the same or different frequencies, pairs of clicks or tones that differ in temporal spacing by as little as 10%, pairs or trains of tones that are either increasing or decreasing in pitch or in volume, the list in huge. The evoked brain signal we study in these designs is called the mis-match negativity (MMN). Brains are so hard wired to detect all manner of differences like that that the design and analysis of the MMN has been used for clinical testing to tell for instance coma from vegetative state. It is of absolutely no import that the stimulus happens to be what we would call syllables. I have no doubt that I could replicate the study with humans listening to monkeys screeches chopped up and pasted together different ways and get the same result. But I wouldn't have the audacity to suggest that those results signified that humans were predisposed to understand monkey 'language'.
Fact is, I would make just that assertion bilaterally. But I most certainly wouldn't do it with the given stimulus and testing design.
If little magnets were going to affect your brain, wouldn't anyone who'd had a brain scan end up a vegetable?
Of course it pays to sell idiots little magnets and claim all sorts of health benefits. Some may even benefit from a placebo effect. (It doesn't pay to try to sell them MRI machines...there are so few idiots THAT rich).
I think i'll remain skeptical unless more solid evidence turns up.
You're confusing sterngth with field density. An MRI is indeed huge assed, 0.5 to several tesla. But within any given cubic millimeter there's precious little power. In transcranial magnetic stimulation, there's modest power, but it's focused in a very small area.
These facts didn;t keep California from upholding a lawsuit by an "ex-psychic" against a hospital. She clails she lost her psychic ability to a MRI.
Most of my psychology colleagues have no idea what they're looking at in fMRI. They assume if it lights up, it's making something go. They may know full well that neural activation can be excitatory or inhibitory, but fail to make the connection and figure out that what's lighting up may be de-activation. Both the gas pedal and the brakes appear the same to fMRI and nobody can tell which is which with this technology alone.
Even fewer even bother to try to grasp the math behind the analysis technique, statistical probability mapping. Every cubic pixel ("voxel") has to be compared to every one of its neighbors across the multiple data collections in each condition, and a T test applied. In order to prevent artifactual results due to this massive amount of statistical testing an error correcting normalization is applied. Statistical results of 0.05 or 5% are considered the limit for acceptable results. With the correction factor applied, each voxel that lights up is passing a statistical test with anywhere up to 22 digits below the zero that I've seen myself. Their lighting-up numbers are more far fetched than being hit by a falling meteor.
They almost invariably fail to mention areas that work with an area of their interest but fail to light up when their target does.
The problem extends beyond just the researchers. A recent article in the Proceedings of the National Academy was filled with these errors yet has become a part of a well respected body of works, poisoning it and giving others cause to continue believing their fallacies and compounding them with works justified by this one.
GE holographic storage disks are the size and weight of a DVD and hold 500 GB. A stack of 50 DVDs weighs about 1 KG (a bit less without the spindle and cover, but let's go with it). A stack of 50 holographic disks would hold 25 TB. 40 stacks of 50 would hold 1 PB and weigh 40 KG. Not in production, but in working prototype.
Vapor/patentware but interesting: http://colossalstorage.net/3d_holo.htm 40,000 terabits (5 petabytes) per cubic centimeter of a ferroelectric optical perovskite, specific gravity 4 give or take a fraction. 1 PB would be around a gram.
Most here will probably say to stick with tech. Probably with various degrees of vehemence. Most of them would probably do just that given the choice. That'd certainly clear the field of competition were you to go into management, and you'd be more likely to progress further faster.
And should you do so, you'll probably be competing for your job against other management types, quite likely with less hands on tech experience than yourself. You'd probably be able to compete against those successfully.
Of course the success in both cases depends upon competing in a context where your qualifications are taken into account. If you were trying for a job where the top dogs think management needs an MBA and expensive ties and little else, you wouldn't do well there. But with your qualifications you could judge which outfits were run by such weenies and steer clear of them.
I don't know if it's changed, but it used to be that the floor life of an engineer was about 15 years. By then they were obsoleted by progress. They then either went to management or to pasture (or fast food, etc.). Consider if that kind of situation exists in your field, and if so whether you're near enough to the cut off to make it worth switching now.
START requires only that the weapons be deactivated, not destroyed. The US currently has over 4,000 "deactivated" nuclear weapons. Believe someone who used to shove them up a Buff's (B-52) belly, they can be reactivated in short order.
Also, START is 'Strategic' Arms Reduction Treaty. It says nothing about tacticals, either battlefield or ship based weapons, or EMP devices.
I appreciate the alternate design as a neat hack. But I'm becoming frustrated with NASA's goal-only orientation. Just getting to the moon does nothing to promote or assist other programs. The stepping stone approach would make it possible achieve the same goal plus many more. It'd take longer and cost more at first, but in the end far more could be achieved with less money. Instead of getting to the moon in 5 years, spend that time and money turning ISS into a construction and fueling facility. In 10 years we could be sending as many vehicles to the moon each year as they'd plan to send on any of their presently considered designs in total. In 20 we could be sending the same amount of traffic to Mars. And in 40 years, rather than celebrating "One Small Step" with plans so have another small step and little else to follow, we could be sending mail on supply rockets to the colonies on the moon and Mars, and building Clarke's Jupiter (or Saturn in you read the book instead) mission vehicle Discovery. And during all this, building more orbital stepping stones, which would require long term or even permanent residents to carry out the work, and we'd be on track for O'Neil's vision of orbital habitats. So some are orbiting Boeing or Lockheed factories. At least they'd be there.
Besides the humanitarian lean of their universities, they're quite up on technology. They don't have a lot, but they like it. TFA is an example -- Ad Astra is based there in part. It's founder is a native of C.R. and ex-NASA astronaut, Dr. Franklin Chang-Diaz.
There's also been a few folks go down there to check it out for a possible launch site for commercial and private launches. It's around 10 degrees north latitude, close enough to the equator to go the same rotational boost as they get down there. Nothing announced yet, but the visits were very positive. After all, the VASMIR motor will never get off the ground on its own.
3 I use Excel heavily for transporting data between electrophysiology recorders and statistical analysis packages and so forth. I can see what you're saying. I'll try it. Thanks.
Why can't you support editions that you have prepared for in the past? Because it takes more effort?
Good question. There's more than one reason.
Working from an edition that doesn't have some of the material leaves those students out of discussion. The best intentioned of them comes unprepared. Our time and their money mean too much for me to waste it with me reading the missing parts to them. If I did do it for those with some parts missing, why not for all?
For online students, I have so far only been allowed to provide one test bank to be incorporated into any class. It can put together as many different versions of the test that it wants to from that bank, but only from that bank. The test bank comes with a given edition of the book. I can add questions as much as I like, but they'll only go into that one test bank, and I can tell it to pull them up at random, but not according to who has what book. This is, of course, an artifact of using publisher's materials and geared towards keeping them all using the most recent. Note too that the distance learning stuff is done via software designed for that, like Blackboard, and is administered by a distance learning component of the university IT. Neither of us can alter the software. Were I even allowed to design, write and administer my own software for distance learning that would be another half to full time job piled on top of what's covered next.
For a more direct answer, yes. It takes more effort, and therefore time. Typically I'm expected to do a full time job of teaching plus incidentals (committees, counseling, etc.), in addition part to full time work in research and related professional incidentals (presentations, manuscript reviewing, etc.). That's 1.5 to 2 jobs worth of stuff. The former gets arranged in time according to the whims of the university scheduling system, committee chairs' ability to schedule as conveniently as possibly (hopefully for others rather than themselves) and so forth. The latter has to get fit in around the former, despite the fact that it is difficult if not impossible to carve some of those things up to fit (ie. if I'm running a subject in an experiment and they run over time, do I trash the data for that run, or do I make my students wait?). And I have to do these two jobs without burning out and so making myself less able to do either of them as well as I should. Luckily I love the work and my field so much that I don't miss not having much life outside. I am, after all, a professional -- that is, this is what I profess to be, rather than just something I do. As such I try to work with my students as much as possible. That's why I let them choose what version to use. But they have to work with me too. There's two factors, flexibility for them, ease of administration for me, to consider. I ask they meet me half way, and I try to help them do so.
I have done one rather outlandish thing in trying to make things fair to all and leaving room for other editions and such, while requiring enough to satisfy the regulations. I give both on site and distance classes the same test, comprised of the entire test bank, typically 150-300 multiple choice questions. In the name of wanting to find out what it is they've learned, rather than what they haven't, they are allowed to answer whatever questions they wish. They can answer up to 50 questions and get 2 points for each right answer. If they answer wrong they lose half a point, making it against their interest to guess; they'd do better answering fewer. The ones they don't answer don't count. It works well for them. Not so much for me. Both dot readers and automated testing software such as comes with Blackboard don't allow for a difference between 'no answer given' and 'wrong', so I have to grade them all by hand on paper using a printed test key. This typically takes an entire weekend (12 to 24 hours work), four times a semester. I think that's plenty fair for my part of meeting them halfway, and is more than sufficient response to the question of "too much effort".
I have to teach out of one edition or another. Different editions can have different material, or can have it in different places. I have to test. When I have 4 classes with 200+ students, half of them online (as I have recently), I have to automate the process in order to give grades and feedback in a timely manner. To do that I have to test on one edition, rather than trying to develop tests for several. I spend a great deal of time developing additional instructional material just for the one edition and don;t have time to keep developing tests.
I tell my students that I don't care what edition they use, or indeed if they don't own a book at all. But they are responsible for covering the material in the chosen edition because that's what is tested in content and arrangement. A few take me up on it. Some manage to get an A (though not a perfect score) with a 'wrong' edition if they pay close attention to what's covered rather than just chapter numbers. Some gang up with others and compare books so they can copy the different material for each others' use. Most don't attempt this and go for the chosen edition. I'd make it easier on them all and teach from an older edition, but most sources don't redistribute older editions -- they often don't even buy them back. This one source might help in that respect, but it'll take many doing the same and doing it with older editions to make it possible for me to choose, teach and test from an older one.
ICE is "intrusional COUNTER electronics". Firewalls detect and reject. ICE fights back. A firewall might detect, say, attempts to locate an unsecured machine via banging on commonly used and traditionally unsecured ports. ICE might send back a response many times, each with an enormous payload of junk data, and convincing the origin to accept those oversize packets, in so doing slowing it down if not knocking it offline. Even more damaging payloads can easily be imagined. This would make for an even better bit of movie, the data cowboy having to evade an active defense response as opposed to just hacking through a passive wall.
Others have rightly called BS on TFA already for the grossly inflated copies-sold figure. If the movie comes out as planned http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1037220/ his total readership + moviegoers + game players for all his works and derivations might total something like the 160 million figure, but only if that's not constrained to sales of those.
Before taking the article to task for other details, it's worth noting that it's not very original. At the 20 year mark the Neuromancer was reviewed by Velvet Delorey http://www.geocities.com/canadian_sf/pages/media/delorey.htm for the Canadian SF web site Made In Canada http://www.geocities.com/canadian_sf/index.html (1998-2008, RIP). Rather than focusing on the tech itself, she made the observation that "Whatever aspects of the Eighties Neuromancer may have extrapolated from, however, much of the Eighties influences, both -punk and cyber-, seem to have taken their cues from Neuromancer, instead of the other way around," suggesting the influences were bidirectional, and social in nature. That appears closer to Gibson's own views, which although may carry some bias of their own, should be taken as closer to the truth than other viewpoints. This provides its own segue to criticism of TFA for focusing on science-fictionary special effects and giving them primacy, to the neglect of the reason for their creation.
William Gibson himself holds that where he created technology, it was to further the interaction of the characters and carry the plot, and was never meant to be prophetic in any sense. Furthermore he claims that when it has proven prophetic it was actually because it was instead descriptive of possibilities, and techies who were already engaged in development of things along the same lines read the book, then used it as a clearer description than they were capable of elucidating for what they were trying to develop. In a 2007 interview with The AV Club focusing on his then upcoming "Spook Country", http://www.avclub.com/articles/william-gibson,14143/ he says "There was a time in the late '80s, early '90s, when every government in the world decided to have a huge, lavishly funded virtual-reality conference, and I got invited to all of them. So I met lots and lots of the players in the goggles-and-gloves school of virtual reality. None of them actually became the man who invented television, which is what I think all of them expected to become. But to a man or woman, they all allowed as how I had really helped them out. They had this idea, but they'd never been able to explain to anybody what it was. Once they had Neuromancer, they could just go around with a suitcase full of copies, and when people said, "I just can't fathom what you're talking about," they'd say, "Read this. It's sort of like this." [Laughs.] I don't think they were just flattering me; I think they were actually doing that." So, Gibson didn't get any of the tech right or wrong. He just got some story points on paper. The tech, and the rights or wrongs about it, belong to the techies who tried to develop it (with or without Gibson's influence) and succeeded or failed.
As an aside, I'm writing this in a small Appalachian town known as the home of Mountain Dew and very little else. I'm 25 miles from Gibson's boyhood home. Despite the big green signs along Interstate 81 announcing that this is "Virginia's Technology Corridor" (thanks to the proximity to Virginia Tech, and no mention of William Gibson in sight) both can well be said to be "a place where modernity had arrived to some extent but was deeply distrusted", as was Gibson's account of his home town of 40 years ago. The future obviously arrives at different rates in different places, this place among the slowest. Luckily for some, when confronted with this fact in places like this, they construct that reluctant future in their heads. Luckily for the rest of us, some of them share it.
Now anyone think this story was posted just because the quark happens to be named "strange"?
It was posted because mention in TFA of the enormous data collection and analysis effort required to get the result. After submitting this I noticed a typo in that sentence. I submitted a request for correction. When it came out, rather than correcting that line, it was left out entirely.
The result announced was based on 16 events detected among over one quadrillion (10^15) collisions observed.
"Strange" just doesn't carry the in-joke quality needed for this discerning readership to carry out fruitful and meaningful discourse, even when the quantity is doubled. Now, had they detected an Asperger's quark, more people here would have 'admitted' to having at least one of those than there are expected to exist in the entire universe. Similarly, had it been a Distro quark, people would have lined up behind one of a multitude of those, despite the fact that the relevant force carrying particle, the Kernelon, reacts equally with all, making the distinction meaningless except for the chance to line up behind one or another and sound off about it. On the other hand, had it been about the Goat quark, a significant bipolar effect would have been noticed, with most being either repelled or attracted.
"From the academic-paper-reading-geek perspective, is it worth the money?"
HeeYELL no. IMO, papers are best read on paper. But with electronic journals coming to fore, you have to adapt. Those get sent as PDF to an email or similar account. Kindle doesn't do email and isn't paper. For $500 I can buy a laptop to do these things if needed, and still have enough for a major party.
This is twice in a week that someone has made assertions about mass extinctions, and both times their (different) numbers don't match the commonly accepted numbers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_way . (No, the Big W is not necessarily authoritative, but the sources referenced are.)
The solar system orbits the galactic center in 220 Myr. It oscillates through the galactic plane 2.7 times per orbit. That's a period of 81.5 Myr, and each crossing at half-period being 40.75 Myr. I doubt anyone would consider that an acceptable error margin.
Furthermore, the matter density in the galactic plane oscillates with a period 1/2 that of the galactic rotation, expanding out from the center in waves (density wave 25 Myr; spiral structure 50 Myr). Passing through the plane would have little effect unless these two coincide.
Muni already paid for the results from the operation, which are used to run the system. To my mind, NextBus is trying to double-dip by charging for what Muni has already paid to use.
Slashdot Mirror
Observational learning.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observational_learning
According to a new study, if everyone else has arrived at a certain conclusion, you should too. According to a new study, using the phrase "a new study" will get it noticed in the popular science media who count on you failing to differentiate that from "a new result". According to a new study, they will continue to print such misleading non-news not because they're ignorant, but because they don't care whether something is worthy of note as long as they can fill their white space.
The problems that have been noted have not just "recently plagued similar brain imaging studies", they have been around since the 'boxcar' stimulus method and SPM analysis technique were applied to MRI research.
There are enough that know better now that fMRI can be rightly questioned. But here you run into the problem of science vs. scientists. There are so many of the latter that have attached their name to previously accepted research that they'd refuse to accept any reports of problems. For example, there was recently an fMRI article published by PNAS. That means there are enough highly placed reviewers and associates of theirs in the National Academy that didn't know there was a problem and so aren't likely to come forward and admit their previous ignorance. Any trying to do so unilaterally would face opposition more strenuous than merely scientific. Hell, I learned the technique as well as the underlying theories from a student of the guy who invented them, and I still have my theory based objections countered with mention of how many publications use the technique vs. how many publications cover these "problems".
Not the BioLabs stuff, the wild speculation and false statements spouted here being imaginary. Not a one here so far has attempted to find out if there actually were peer reviewed publications by Andrei Gudkov on the subject of radiation treatment and/or radioprotectants.
Go to http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez
Put 'Gudkov, Andrei' in as the search term
You'll get 52 results with his name given as 'Gudkov AV'; the abstracts make it clear it's him by giving his associations.
Repeat the search with 'Gudkov, Andrei radiation' as the search term.
You'll get 10 results, all of which pertain to radiation treatment, radioprotectants and specifically the role of p53.
Two of those entries are reviews. Those would be the most instructive to any who actually want to find out if there's actually research on the subject and what it's about. Here's the two abstracts:
(1) Nat Rev Cancer. 2003 Feb;3(2):117-29.
The role of p53 in determining sensitivity to radiotherapy.
Gudkov AV, Komarova EA.
Department of Molecular Biology, NC20, Lerner Research Institute, Cleveland Clinic Foundation, 9500 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio 44195, USA. gudkov@ccf.org
Ionizing radiation (IR) has proven to be a powerful medical treatment in the fight against cancer. Rational and effective use of its killing power depends on understanding IR-mediated responses at the molecular, cellular and tissue levels. Tumour cells frequently acquire defects in the molecular regulatory mechanisms of the response to IR, which sensitizes them to radiation therapy. One of the key molecules involved in a cell's response to IR is p53. Understanding these mechanisms indicates new rational approaches to improving cancer treatment by IR.
Biochem Biophys Res Commun. 2005 Jun 10;331(3):726-36.
Prospective therapeutic applications of p53 inhibitors.
Gudkov AV, Komarova EA.
Department of Molecular Genetics, Lerner Research Institute, The Cleveland Clinic Foundation, Cleveland, OH 44195, USA. gudkov@ccf.org
p53, in addition to being a key cancer preventive factor, is also a determinant of cancer treatment side effects causing excessive apoptotic death in several normal tissues during cancer therapy. p53 inhibitory strategy has been suggested to protect normal tissues from chemo- and radiotherapy, and to treat other pathologies associated with stress-mediated activation of p53. This strategy was validated by isolation and testing of small molecule p53 inhibitor pifithrin-alpha that demonstrated broad tissue protecting capacity. However, in some normal tissues and tumors p53 plays protective role by inducing growth arrest and preventing cells from premature entrance into mitosis and death from mitotic catastrophe. Inhibition of this function of p53 can sensitize tumor cells to chemo- and radiotherapy, thus opening new potential application of p53 inhibitors and justifying the need in pharmacological agents targeting specifically either pro-apoptotic or growth arrest functions of p53.
===
Note: 'Apoptosis' is the tendency for cells to die off based on signals from other nearby cells that are dying off -- a 'suicide signal'. This happens in many situations, radiation exposure being one of them.
As for emphasis on ethnicity, sure, they do mention it. The source noted is an Israeli newspaper. They have right to be proud since one of their citizens is accomplishing something notable to the world. Nobody seems to find it a problem when US newspapers note that a scientist is from the US. That's so common that it's not even noticed, unless you're not from the US. 90% of scientific publications are from the US. In those from other countries it's common for such emphasis to be included so the w
If Apollo had continued, it would have stopped at Apollo 20. That was the plan. Apollo itself was the dead-end plan to win the space race. And strange as it may seem, the loss of soonest and long term success in space and the the formation of NASA were one in the same.
The alternative project "Man In Space Soonest" could have had an American in orbit well before Yuri Gagarin's flight. An excerpt from http://www.astronautix.com/craftfam/manonest.htm :
"On 10 July Brigadier General Homer A Boushey of Headquarters USAF informed ARDC that Eisenhower's Bureau of the Budget, firmly in favor of placing the manned space flight program in the new civilian agency, was blocking further release of funds for the program. On 16 July the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 was passed by Congress, and NASA was created out of the NACA and some Army and Navy rocket laboratories. But ARPA told the Air Force there was still a chance the White House would support MISS if costs could be kept to under $50 million in FY 1959. They could present the project as so far along, and with so low a cost to complete, that it would be a big setback to start all over with NASA.
But BMD couldn't make the figures come out this way. Funding of only $50 million in FY 1959 would delay the first American in space to early 1962. Instead, on 24 July, General Bernard Schriever at BMD issued the sixth revision to the MISS development plan. This had a total cost of $106.6 million with the bare Atlas as the booster. Salient features included establishment of a worldwide tracking network, resolving quickly the heat sink versus ablation heat shield issue, and continuing with design of the Thor WS-117L and Thor-Able as backups in case the Atlas proved to be unreliable. Assuming immediate authorization from ARPA, Schriever promised release of the final tender documents to the contractors within 24 hours, and orbiting of the first man in space by June 1960.
The next day there was one last session with ARPA Director Johnson at the Pentagon. BMD pointed out that only full, unrestricted, immediate program approval to go ahead with MISS would give the United States a real chance to be "soonest" with a man in space. Johnson flatly refused. Eisenhower saw no valid role for the military in manned space flight. NACA didn't plan to spend more than $40 million on their manned space program in FY 1959, fiscally much more attractive than the $107 million the Air Force was asking for.
On that day - 25 July 1958 - America gave up its chance to put the first man into space. A manager like Schriever could undoubtedly have rammed the project through on the promised schedule. The collection of scientists and tinkerers at NACA had no chance."
Had MISS progressed, Neil Armstrong may still have been first on the moon. However, he would almost certainly have been the first person ride a space craft into orbit and actually fly it home. He was scheduled to take the first orbital flight of Dynasoar http://www.astronautix.com/craft/dynasoar.htm in 1964. NASA's track placed this milestone under the space shuttle, 20 years later. The 'what if' scenario changed long before the question in TFA.
Had the original visions of space exploration been carried out, we may or may not have gotten where we did by 1970, but we darn sure would have gotten there with no intention of backing down and starting over again later. Instead of Ares and Orion, we'd have had true stepping-stone space stations building and launching manned planetary missions. Recall, some of Von Braun's ideas centered on building permanent construction sites in orbit, using the 'bicycle wheel' design. Time and again he was stifled and forced to channel his enormous talent from that which made good sense to that which he would be allowed to see succeed.
The front page of Encyclopedia Astronautica http://www.astronautix.com/ is covered with links to the actual history, the underlying and hidden history, and the might-have-beens of the race for the moon.
The conclusion is OK, the details presented suffer. That's common in pop-science writing, and sadly increasingly common in SciAm.
Left side = language: Based on the largest group of similar orientation, right handed males. Not even a majority -- 40%. Left handed males are right-side language almost the same proportion but are few overall. There are 'ipsilateral language' (same side as dominant hand, as opposed to 'contralateral', other-side), as well as 'undifferentiated', with language capability on both sides. Females are somewhat similar in breakdown but more undifferentiated overall. Also, the generalization is for non-tonal based languages such as English. See "right/other side" below.
Amygdala is "under the right": The amygdala is bilateral, with left and right parts. The right part is however functionally predisposed to processing stress handling behavior http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6SYP-4CT63XM-3&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=955088512&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=7d34a0fd5e2952f900c2698ce0abe684 .
Left cortex vs. right deep: All language functions are handled in the outer few millimeters of the brain, the cortex. Some processes may be driven by deep structures, but all higher order processing relies on cortical activity.
Right/other side cortex: Opposite (or mixed with, in 'undifferentiated' brains) the language centers there is an equally employed structure that controls "prosidy", or emotional processing, understanding and expression in language. It is more oriented to tonal processing making it central to music as well as to tonal-based languages. "Right side" or prosidic region damage can result in flat monotone response to expression about both winning the lottery and death of a loved one. Or it can result in inappropriate response, such as laughter, to everything.
If you consider the necessity of 'other-side' processing in tonal language and the large population that uses it, the western/English, right handed, males, contralateral language center "dominance" becomes a great deal less world wide (there are brains world wide, honest) than the 40% usually quoted in western language research literature and texts.
Moving the expresssion of distress from the language structure dominant area to the prosidic/emotional area does tap into underlying emotion processing. Then again, so would singing. I'd like to see replication with singing instead of cursing -- betcha it's similar in outcome. Evidence: stuttering is stress based; stutters frequently don't stutter when they sing, ask (according to his belt buckle) M-M-M-M-Mel Tillis. And, a naive hypothesis: I'd bet that while those that use tonal languages may curse in pain and such, they are far more likely to use coherent language with stress (in both senses) placed in the tonal aspect of what they're expressing. Any speakers or Chinese dialects or other east Asian languages care to comment?
Lastly, an aside: The 'left side' language centers make the brain larger on the left. This is taken as a dominance of language processing over other kinds. However (1) chimps have the same assymetry, with the same proportion of 'other-sided-language', larger on the right, as with humans; (2) cortical localization is both redundant (more than one area can do the job) and plastic (one can take over when another fails); and (3) the amount of cortex devoted to something implies it requires that much effort. The same amount of processing and behavioral control can be handled by smaller areas when the processing is made mo
The study does not, as stated in the summary, cover 'how Americans feel about science', and only briefly looks at how they value scientists or their work (per TFA).
For the most part it looks at whether (non-scientist, one assumes) Americans agree with (American?) scientists. More precisely, it illustrates what Americans believe, compared to what scientists understand or at least accept that science more-or-less 'accurately describes'.
Pew does some good work sometimes. Too bad they don't verbalate it gooder.
Behavioral momentum*** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_momentum is formally a term describing the quantification of resistance to change in opposition with the pressure to change. The latter is phrased in terms of reinforcement because it was comes from the efforts to quantify the component phenomena in learning theory as laid out by Skinner. It implies any and all sources of resistance be considered as a single force.
Informally, the 'resistance(s) to change' suffices when applying it to a situation such as in TFA. The PC World article correctly though accidentally calls it an 'anxiety'. It could be described in terms of cognitive dissonance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance but we're in the informal section now, so you can read the first line and see that it's an 'uncomfortable feeling' regarding (among other possibilities) 'awareness of one's behavior'.
There are few instances when one is more aware of one's behavior than when one is asked to perform a task in a way different from an accustomed manner. Being so aware of it is part and parcel with the awareness required to perform in an unfamiliar way and with the (performance, not separation, as per TFA) anxiety caused by the enforced change. That's an object summary of cognitive dissonance in action.
The greybeards out there may recall when they first encountered a mouse/GUI interface. Many noted that CLI worked just fine if not better. (You youngsters can ask them -- you know how they love to talk about the old days.) Making the switch was not that difficult because the new way was very easy to understand and so required little thought. But more importantly it was easier because it was very different and so didn't require unthinking an old way and new-thinking a new way without encountering as much anxiety provoking instances of potential or actual mistake making.
With the above we can then approach the nature of the problem in TFA and so the solution.
The average IT consumer knows little about what they're causing to happen other than pushing certain buttons causes certain things to happen that they need to happen in order to do their job. Making this easy for them to do is fine for getting them working quickly. But getting them working efficiently quickly does not teach them what they are doing. F'rinstance, if they want to move a section of words from one place to another, they don't even have to know what the names given to control-X and control-V are, they just know it does the job (and these days it's unlikely even you out there ever used scissors or razor blades and mucilage to cut and paste anything).
Along with the familiarity with the procedure, particularly without a grasp of the underlying mechanisms, and prior to any attempt to alter the procedure, comes behavioral momentum. People get used to doing something a certain way and *with a certain level of confidence*. Now, ask them to do exactly the same thing a different way. You've knocked them back down the front of the learning curve without the ladder of basic understanding.
Had they been taught how to do the same thing more than one way, and told what it is they're causing to happen, they could find that ladder. Trapped as they are though, they're aware of difficulty and incapability and little else. Anyone who's tried to teach someone a different method knows about that 'and little else'. It often seems they can't hear your instruction and can't get their head talking to their hands. They're frequently worse than complete neophytes because they'll freeze up when trying to do the most basic things that they know well in terms of 'how' with a different set of actions.
Those of us who've learned more than one OS or used learned several differently designed programs for doing the same things have an advantage not often appreciated by program designers and especially by those such as the Google group trying
Cool, a transfer protocol that adapts what's sent when according to traffic flow. It needs a catchy name.
I suggest Zmodem.
Most any animal will orient to a novel stimulus. When they are repeatedly presented with a stimulus comprised of some stimulus components in a certain order they will habituate to that stimulus. When they are then presented with a stimulus comprised of the same components in a different order, they will react as if it is novel. Simply said, they can tell then difference, and that's all that need be said. In EEG research we study this a great deal using such habituated and novel stimuli composed from pairs of beeps of the same or different frequencies, pairs of clicks or tones that differ in temporal spacing by as little as 10%, pairs or trains of tones that are either increasing or decreasing in pitch or in volume, the list in huge. The evoked brain signal we study in these designs is called the mis-match negativity (MMN). Brains are so hard wired to detect all manner of differences like that that the design and analysis of the MMN has been used for clinical testing to tell for instance coma from vegetative state. It is of absolutely no import that the stimulus happens to be what we would call syllables. I have no doubt that I could replicate the study with humans listening to monkeys screeches chopped up and pasted together different ways and get the same result. But I wouldn't have the audacity to suggest that those results signified that humans were predisposed to understand monkey 'language'.
Fact is, I would make just that assertion bilaterally. But I most certainly wouldn't do it with the given stimulus and testing design.
If little magnets were going to affect your brain, wouldn't anyone who'd had a brain scan end up a vegetable?
Of course it pays to sell idiots little magnets and claim all sorts of health benefits. Some may even benefit from a placebo effect. (It doesn't pay to try to sell them MRI machines...there are so few idiots THAT rich).
I think i'll remain skeptical unless more solid evidence turns up.
You're confusing sterngth with field density. An MRI is indeed huge assed, 0.5 to several tesla. But within any given cubic millimeter there's precious little power. In transcranial magnetic stimulation, there's modest power, but it's focused in a very small area.
These facts didn;t keep California from upholding a lawsuit by an "ex-psychic" against a hospital. She clails she lost her psychic ability to a MRI.
Most of my psychology colleagues have no idea what they're looking at in fMRI. They assume if it lights up, it's making something go. They may know full well that neural activation can be excitatory or inhibitory, but fail to make the connection and figure out that what's lighting up may be de-activation. Both the gas pedal and the brakes appear the same to fMRI and nobody can tell which is which with this technology alone.
Even fewer even bother to try to grasp the math behind the analysis technique, statistical probability mapping. Every cubic pixel ("voxel") has to be compared to every one of its neighbors across the multiple data collections in each condition, and a T test applied. In order to prevent artifactual results due to this massive amount of statistical testing an error correcting normalization is applied. Statistical results of 0.05 or 5% are considered the limit for acceptable results. With the correction factor applied, each voxel that lights up is passing a statistical test with anywhere up to 22 digits below the zero that I've seen myself. Their lighting-up numbers are more far fetched than being hit by a falling meteor.
They almost invariably fail to mention areas that work with an area of their interest but fail to light up when their target does.
The problem extends beyond just the researchers. A recent article in the Proceedings of the National Academy was filled with these errors yet has become a part of a well respected body of works, poisoning it and giving others cause to continue believing their fallacies and compounding them with works justified by this one.
GE holographic storage disks are the size and weight of a DVD and hold 500 GB. A stack of 50 DVDs weighs about 1 KG (a bit less without the spindle and cover, but let's go with it). A stack of 50 holographic disks would hold 25 TB. 40 stacks of 50 would hold 1 PB and weigh 40 KG. Not in production, but in working prototype.
Vapor/patentware but interesting: http://colossalstorage.net/3d_holo.htm
40,000 terabits (5 petabytes) per cubic centimeter of a ferroelectric optical perovskite, specific gravity 4 give or take a fraction. 1 PB would be around a gram.
Most here will probably say to stick with tech. Probably with various degrees of vehemence. Most of them would probably do just that given the choice. That'd certainly clear the field of competition were you to go into management, and you'd be more likely to progress further faster.
And should you do so, you'll probably be competing for your job against other management types, quite likely with less hands on tech experience than yourself. You'd probably be able to compete against those successfully.
Of course the success in both cases depends upon competing in a context where your qualifications are taken into account. If you were trying for a job where the top dogs think management needs an MBA and expensive ties and little else, you wouldn't do well there. But with your qualifications you could judge which outfits were run by such weenies and steer clear of them.
I don't know if it's changed, but it used to be that the floor life of an engineer was about 15 years. By then they were obsoleted by progress. They then either went to management or to pasture (or fast food, etc.). Consider if that kind of situation exists in your field, and if so whether you're near enough to the cut off to make it worth switching now.
START requires only that the weapons be deactivated, not destroyed. The US currently has over 4,000 "deactivated" nuclear weapons. Believe someone who used to shove them up a Buff's (B-52) belly, they can be reactivated in short order.
Also, START is 'Strategic' Arms Reduction Treaty. It says nothing about tacticals, either battlefield or ship based weapons, or EMP devices.
I appreciate the alternate design as a neat hack. But I'm becoming frustrated with NASA's goal-only orientation. Just getting to the moon does nothing to promote or assist other programs. The stepping stone approach would make it possible achieve the same goal plus many more. It'd take longer and cost more at first, but in the end far more could be achieved with less money. Instead of getting to the moon in 5 years, spend that time and money turning ISS into a construction and fueling facility. In 10 years we could be sending as many vehicles to the moon each year as they'd plan to send on any of their presently considered designs in total. In 20 we could be sending the same amount of traffic to Mars. And in 40 years, rather than celebrating "One Small Step" with plans so have another small step and little else to follow, we could be sending mail on supply rockets to the colonies on the moon and Mars, and building Clarke's Jupiter (or Saturn in you read the book instead) mission vehicle Discovery. And during all this, building more orbital stepping stones, which would require long term or even permanent residents to carry out the work, and we'd be on track for O'Neil's vision of orbital habitats. So some are orbiting Boeing or Lockheed factories. At least they'd be there.
Referring back to http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/06/27/0152216 , where someone asked about a freer country to move to, I suggested Costa Rica.
Besides the humanitarian lean of their universities, they're quite up on technology. They don't have a lot, but they like it. TFA is an example -- Ad Astra is based there in part. It's founder is a native of C.R. and ex-NASA astronaut, Dr. Franklin Chang-Diaz.
There's also been a few folks go down there to check it out for a possible launch site for commercial and private launches. It's around 10 degrees north latitude, close enough to the equator to go the same rotational boost as they get down there. Nothing announced yet, but the visits were very positive. After all, the VASMIR motor will never get off the ground on its own.
1 Not pwned, just answered.
2 and 3, thanks for the kind words.
3 I use Excel heavily for transporting data between electrophysiology recorders and statistical analysis packages and so forth. I can see what you're saying. I'll try it. Thanks.
And 2, watch the split infinitives.
Why can't you support editions that you have prepared for in the past? Because it takes more effort?
Good question. There's more than one reason.
Working from an edition that doesn't have some of the material leaves those students out of discussion. The best intentioned of them comes unprepared. Our time and their money mean too much for me to waste it with me reading the missing parts to them. If I did do it for those with some parts missing, why not for all?
For online students, I have so far only been allowed to provide one test bank to be incorporated into any class. It can put together as many different versions of the test that it wants to from that bank, but only from that bank. The test bank comes with a given edition of the book. I can add questions as much as I like, but they'll only go into that one test bank, and I can tell it to pull them up at random, but not according to who has what book. This is, of course, an artifact of using publisher's materials and geared towards keeping them all using the most recent. Note too that the distance learning stuff is done via software designed for that, like Blackboard, and is administered by a distance learning component of the university IT. Neither of us can alter the software. Were I even allowed to design, write and administer my own software for distance learning that would be another half to full time job piled on top of what's covered next.
For a more direct answer, yes. It takes more effort, and therefore time. Typically I'm expected to do a full time job of teaching plus incidentals (committees, counseling, etc.), in addition part to full time work in research and related professional incidentals (presentations, manuscript reviewing, etc.). That's 1.5 to 2 jobs worth of stuff. The former gets arranged in time according to the whims of the university scheduling system, committee chairs' ability to schedule as conveniently as possibly (hopefully for others rather than themselves) and so forth. The latter has to get fit in around the former, despite the fact that it is difficult if not impossible to carve some of those things up to fit (ie. if I'm running a subject in an experiment and they run over time, do I trash the data for that run, or do I make my students wait?). And I have to do these two jobs without burning out and so making myself less able to do either of them as well as I should. Luckily I love the work and my field so much that I don't miss not having much life outside. I am, after all, a professional -- that is, this is what I profess to be, rather than just something I do. As such I try to work with my students as much as possible. That's why I let them choose what version to use. But they have to work with me too. There's two factors, flexibility for them, ease of administration for me, to consider. I ask they meet me half way, and I try to help them do so.
I have done one rather outlandish thing in trying to make things fair to all and leaving room for other editions and such, while requiring enough to satisfy the regulations. I give both on site and distance classes the same test, comprised of the entire test bank, typically 150-300 multiple choice questions. In the name of wanting to find out what it is they've learned, rather than what they haven't, they are allowed to answer whatever questions they wish. They can answer up to 50 questions and get 2 points for each right answer. If they answer wrong they lose half a point, making it against their interest to guess; they'd do better answering fewer. The ones they don't answer don't count. It works well for them. Not so much for me. Both dot readers and automated testing software such as comes with Blackboard don't allow for a difference between 'no answer given' and 'wrong', so I have to grade them all by hand on paper using a printed test key. This typically takes an entire weekend (12 to 24 hours work), four times a semester. I think that's plenty fair for my part of meeting them halfway, and is more than sufficient response to the question of "too much effort".
Editions.
To expand:
I have to teach out of one edition or another. Different editions can have different material, or can have it in different places. I have to test. When I have 4 classes with 200+ students, half of them online (as I have recently), I have to automate the process in order to give grades and feedback in a timely manner. To do that I have to test on one edition, rather than trying to develop tests for several. I spend a great deal of time developing additional instructional material just for the one edition and don;t have time to keep developing tests.
I tell my students that I don't care what edition they use, or indeed if they don't own a book at all. But they are responsible for covering the material in the chosen edition because that's what is tested in content and arrangement. A few take me up on it. Some manage to get an A (though not a perfect score) with a 'wrong' edition if they pay close attention to what's covered rather than just chapter numbers. Some gang up with others and compare books so they can copy the different material for each others' use. Most don't attempt this and go for the chosen edition. I'd make it easier on them all and teach from an older edition, but most sources don't redistribute older editions -- they often don't even buy them back. This one source might help in that respect, but it'll take many doing the same and doing it with older editions to make it possible for me to choose, teach and test from an older one.
ICE is "intrusional COUNTER electronics". Firewalls detect and reject. ICE fights back. A firewall might detect, say, attempts to locate an unsecured machine via banging on commonly used and traditionally unsecured ports. ICE might send back a response many times, each with an enormous payload of junk data, and convincing the origin to accept those oversize packets, in so doing slowing it down if not knocking it offline. Even more damaging payloads can easily be imagined. This would make for an even better bit of movie, the data cowboy having to evade an active defense response as opposed to just hacking through a passive wall.
Others have rightly called BS on TFA already for the grossly inflated copies-sold figure. If the movie comes out as planned http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1037220/ his total readership + moviegoers + game players for all his works and derivations might total something like the 160 million figure, but only if that's not constrained to sales of those.
Before taking the article to task for other details, it's worth noting that it's not very original. At the 20 year mark the Neuromancer was reviewed by Velvet Delorey http://www.geocities.com/canadian_sf/pages/media/delorey.htm for the Canadian SF web site Made In Canada http://www.geocities.com/canadian_sf/index.html (1998-2008, RIP). Rather than focusing on the tech itself, she made the observation that "Whatever aspects of the Eighties Neuromancer may have extrapolated from, however, much of the Eighties influences, both -punk and cyber-, seem to have taken their cues from Neuromancer, instead of the other way around," suggesting the influences were bidirectional, and social in nature. That appears closer to Gibson's own views, which although may carry some bias of their own, should be taken as closer to the truth than other viewpoints. This provides its own segue to criticism of TFA for focusing on science-fictionary special effects and giving them primacy, to the neglect of the reason for their creation.
William Gibson himself holds that where he created technology, it was to further the interaction of the characters and carry the plot, and was never meant to be prophetic in any sense. Furthermore he claims that when it has proven prophetic it was actually because it was instead descriptive of possibilities, and techies who were already engaged in development of things along the same lines read the book, then used it as a clearer description than they were capable of elucidating for what they were trying to develop. In a 2007 interview with The AV Club focusing on his then upcoming "Spook Country", http://www.avclub.com/articles/william-gibson,14143/ he says "There was a time in the late '80s, early '90s, when every government in the world decided to have a huge, lavishly funded virtual-reality conference, and I got invited to all of them. So I met lots and lots of the players in the goggles-and-gloves school of virtual reality. None of them actually became the man who invented television, which is what I think all of them expected to become. But to a man or woman, they all allowed as how I had really helped them out. They had this idea, but they'd never been able to explain to anybody what it was. Once they had Neuromancer, they could just go around with a suitcase full of copies, and when people said, "I just can't fathom what you're talking about," they'd say, "Read this. It's sort of like this." [Laughs.] I don't think they were just flattering me; I think they were actually doing that." So, Gibson didn't get any of the tech right or wrong. He just got some story points on paper. The tech, and the rights or wrongs about it, belong to the techies who tried to develop it (with or without Gibson's influence) and succeeded or failed.
As an aside, I'm writing this in a small Appalachian town known as the home of Mountain Dew and very little else. I'm 25 miles from Gibson's boyhood home. Despite the big green signs along Interstate 81 announcing that this is "Virginia's Technology Corridor" (thanks to the proximity to Virginia Tech, and no mention of William Gibson in sight) both can well be said to be "a place where modernity had arrived to some extent but was deeply distrusted", as was Gibson's account of his home town of 40 years ago. The future obviously arrives at different rates in different places, this place among the slowest. Luckily for some, when confronted with this fact in places like this, they construct that reluctant future in their heads. Luckily for the rest of us, some of them share it.
Now anyone think this story was posted just because the quark happens to be named "strange"?
It was posted because mention in TFA of the enormous data collection and analysis effort required to get the result. After submitting this I noticed a typo in that sentence. I submitted a request for correction. When it came out, rather than correcting that line, it was left out entirely.
The result announced was based on 16 events detected among over one quadrillion (10^15) collisions observed.
"Strange" just doesn't carry the in-joke quality needed for this discerning readership to carry out fruitful and meaningful discourse, even when the quantity is doubled. Now, had they detected an Asperger's quark, more people here would have 'admitted' to having at least one of those than there are expected to exist in the entire universe. Similarly, had it been a Distro quark, people would have lined up behind one of a multitude of those, despite the fact that the relevant force carrying particle, the Kernelon, reacts equally with all, making the distinction meaningless except for the chance to line up behind one or another and sound off about it. On the other hand, had it been about the Goat quark, a significant bipolar effect would have been noticed, with most being either repelled or attracted.
"From the academic-paper-reading-geek perspective, is it worth the money?"
HeeYELL no. IMO, papers are best read on paper. But with electronic journals coming to fore, you have to adapt. Those get sent as PDF to an email or similar account. Kindle doesn't do email and isn't paper. For $500 I can buy a laptop to do these things if needed, and still have enough for a major party.
... and a dollar short.
This is twice in a week that someone has made assertions about mass extinctions, and both times their (different) numbers don't match the commonly accepted numbers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_way . (No, the Big W is not necessarily authoritative, but the sources referenced are.)
The solar system orbits the galactic center in 220 Myr. It oscillates through the galactic plane 2.7 times per orbit. That's a period of 81.5 Myr, and each crossing at half-period being 40.75 Myr. I doubt anyone would consider that an acceptable error margin.
Furthermore, the matter density in the galactic plane oscillates with a period 1/2 that of the galactic rotation, expanding out from the center in waves (density wave 25 Myr; spiral structure 50 Myr). Passing through the plane would have little effect unless these two coincide.
Muni already paid for the results from the operation, which are used to run the system. To my mind, NextBus is trying to double-dip by charging for what Muni has already paid to use.