The current cumulative impact probability of all objects tracked by SENTRY now exceeds 1.5% for the next 100 years. This is from ~300 known bodies with non-zero impact probability. They estimate that they've discovered 10% of such potential planetary post hole diggers.
The technology is 100+ years old and has been used for 80 on human brain waves.
Almost 20 years ago, work at Radford was able to guess with 70 to 80 percent accuracy which of three possibilities within three parameters (size, shape and color) was being looked at, or being imagined with and without there being an attempt to verbalize it. They used a standard 16 channel external EEG. And a dozen different subjects.
Which "speech center(s)"? There's two main regions, neither of which can do the job alone. There's the areas where the material to be translated into speech get placed, and they can be read without having to try to work around linguistic encoding. Then there's people who lose their entire speech area, but come out being able to speak anyway because of backup/trainable areas taking over the job, or simply doing it in parallel all along.
You've got to have a damn good reason to carve open a skull. Surgical correction for epilepsy is a good reason, but the brain being tested before and after the surgery is hardly one to draw generalizations from. Given that previous work bested this without cutting into anyone, this is a dead end stunt.
There is also existing technology that would do the vocalizing job, also without surgery. Adapting it to an input based on a neural net 'best guess' output after training on an individual would be trivial compared to cutting open heads. Millions of people have heard it work, on a Pink Floyd album: "For millions of years mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened to unleash the powers of his imagination -- he learned to talk." Many millions more have heard the same person/voice narrating the video version of his book "A Brief History Of Time".
TFA is some scary shit. With all the alternatives available, safer, better AND cheaper, there's no reason to do stuff like this, and none at all to suggest that it should be used as a basis to develop a technology.
Children do self-assemble, except for the initial cell.
Then I wasted two decades shoveling raw material in front of and into a couple of them, as well a spending half my waking life acquiring the means to obtain those raw materials?
Mine must be defective. They seemed to operate more on the principle of maximizing local entropy.
And here I've been hearing 'children are the future'. Those little bastards make noise, eat food, get sick and all kinds of annoyances. So good to know we'll have parts instead of children.
Wait a second. These wouldn't happen to be *children* parts, would they? Low maintenance is great, but self-assembly? It'd take away the only fun part about them -- making 'em.
How come all these semi-science articles have to quote someone else saying 'needs more proof' etc.? The primary researchers almost invariably say the same themselves. Is the science not worth wasting the ink if it can't be made to appear as if it's an argument? Being skeptical yourself is good. Someone else being skeptical is trivial. It's one thing to interview someone else if they have something to add, but to do it just to hang a name on the preplanned 'controversial' portion is st00pid to the point of insulting to bother interviewee and reader. As for the 'science' 'writers', most obviously aren't very good at either.
In fact it has been solved for some time. The basic process involved are well understood. But most people can't or don't think large enough to consider the entire contents of the solar system, or the huge number of different processes and resultants involved. Harold Morowitz has been doing so for years. His Energy Flow In Biology is a deceptively small book describing how life could have arisen (in fact probably had to) from the elements and energy available in this region of the solar system, which became this planet. All the specifics of the physical chemistry involved are in there, formulae and all. Anyone with a serious interest in the subject has either read this or needs to. Anyone who intends to argue the points should be given this book and asked to point out just where it's wrong, because it's far more a collection of known facts than any speculation. As if to prove his point prior to criticism, the back of the book contains a list of biochemicals that should be expected to arise given the conditions and contents.
This is not to say TFA is entirely wrong. A hydrothermal vent could serve as an energy source/sink and chemical environment every bit as well as the entire planet. The complex dynamics could just as easily give rise to compounds and emergent properties just as Morowitz describes. And heavy metals may be involved. But they don't *need* to be. Morowitz's book happens to describe a general principle that applies by its own nature. It can get applied to any similar situation or collection of chemicals capable of ectothermic complexification. It works for this planet, almost certainly does for hydrothermal vents, can be used to project whether of what should happen on any other planet or moon or even deep space itself. When one sees how results can be obtained from such a wide range of environments and can guess from the results what characteristics are likely to apply, one can get a realistic assessment of how narrow our definition of life is and how broad it ought to be when our arbitrary, unnecessary, Earth-centric specifics are removed.
Of all the people who've tried to argue this with me, only 4 have ever taken up the challenge to read the book. Of those, there have been exactly zero to come back with any criticism of the specifics in the book, including the conclusions drawn. One of them then went to study at George Mason, not directly under Morowitz, but in the same department.
Sure, I've seen criticisms of his stuff. I've also seen that he doesn't respond to them, and I know why: they don't understand what he said or the basic science behind it, they pay him lip service in an effort to 'respond' with their own unrelated agenda, or they don't bother to try and simply attack his publication with formulaic restrictions they think are requirements. Morowitz writes books. People make whiny noises about a lack of "peer review". They fail to grasp that this requires peers. Morowitz has a few peers, but mostly in his understanding of complex dynamic systems, not in his erstwhile 'field'. Those peers have little to say, and those with the most to say can't think large enough to enter the same realm. Nor do they seem to notice that the actual science being used is undergrad textbook level so well accepted that few reference the origin (except in historical background) and nobody dare criticize for fear of ridicule. Laws of thermodynamics, ideal gas law, that sort of stuff. They can't, won't or don't read and understand what he wrote. I wouldn't respond to that either.
Get the book and try it. It's not that difficult to follow. Check his material against textbook contents. He's not making up anything except how its put to use, and his one example -- the whole Earth -- is obviously not the only one it can apply to.
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The presence of Carbon 14 in their bones is PROOF! PerOOF I tell you! that they had empirical knowledge of radionuclide dating techniques, and consumed precisely enough of the stuff to tell us just exactly how long ago they lived. But how did they know how far in the future it would be when we got their bones and dated them? Because they had the same empirical knowledge of the same psychic pills being taken by the researchers who could read their dead minds to learn that they had empirical knowledge of antibiotics when the evidence only indicates they absorbed endemic soil bacteria whether or not it might have come along with something that they ate which grew in the soil.
I say they got it mixed up. The bones were buried in the soil with the bugs in it. The researchers were the ones with the beer. I have empirical proof: This is my empire and I say that it's so.
This news is better than it sounds. SCO's contract with its landsharks specified that, win or lose, they'd get a chunk of the company. Since there's no buyer as yet (per TFA) they must not want their pound of McBride-flesh. Meaning there ain't squat left from which anyone might try to rebuild this Tinker Toy tyranasaur into a viable enterprise. Go ahead and bury it and don't mind the twitches. Those are just press releases making it appear as if its still alive. Oh no, they say he's got to go, oh no Darlzilla.
There are near Earth objects of all types that would far easier to get to than in between Mars and Jupiter. Mining would be simpler. Solar observatories could be landed on L4/L5 Earth Trojans for better stability and longer life (no station keeping necessary). Get some samples from Cruinthe and figure out if it's truly a second body formed from our pre-solar neighborhood or an interloper.
And sooner or later someone is going to have to start practicing moving these things around so we're ready to if an when the time comes. According to the latest SENTRY data the cumulative impact probability of all known and tracked Earth orbit crossing objects with potential intersections is just over 1.5% for the next century, and they figure they've found around 10% of them. Sure, the big ones are too hard to move. The smaller ones aren't. If a bigger one's coming, hitting it with a smaller one (or more) makes more sense than throwing nukes at it.
Better to have committee members from problem child countries trying and failing to make everyone go along with them in public than each of them going their own way in private.
"Chile is the first country of the world to guarantee by law the principle of network neutrality,"
Isn't passing a law that makes something originally outside the law to remain outside the law rather oxymoronic? It's like the US requiring members of sovereign nations that exist within its own borders prove to the US that they are valid members of said nation before the US will recognize them as such; such is the requirement for tribal membership for Native Americans. To pass such a law Chile only proves that it an make laws regarding net neutrality. If it can make them, it can remake them. If net neutrality were an objective fact, no country's laws would matter. Since they obviously do, even a 100% granting of neutrality by all concerned is no more than lip service. And being international, such a law would require a treaty. Check out for yourself how many treaties get signed by all involved, and how few of those actually get honored. TFA is the appropriate first step, but unless it's followed with some far more powerful and reaching reforms, say, putting worldwide network administration under a UN component with the power to actually act, it's strictly superficial regardless of intentions.
... neither of them provide more performance than Captain Keds got out of his when he punched out of the big paper mache football and flew around the field at halftime of Superbowl 1 in 1967. Armadillo Aerospace is top notch in H2O2 propulsion systems, and they aren't building one. I bet there's a good reason.
Footnote, as it is in the link above, about the Avro Aircar. When it wouldn't work right, some of the engineers suggested putting a skirt around the edge to catch the blow-down and make it float on an air cushion. They head engineer refused to try it. Had he tried it, Avro might have gotten rich. Instead they failed. But less than 5 years later the Army was flying equipment into ports in Viet Nam too shallow for too far out to get their ROROs (roll on, roll off) ferry ships into, using their own hovercraft, usually called "blow boats". And they're still using them. And of the head engineer? Who knows. But the Avro aircar was finally taken off display outside the Army Transportation Museum at Ft. Eustis VA because nobody had the money to scrape off the rust and repaint it. They're still using the blow boats, AFAIK at Ft. Story (Va. Beach, VA) and in Hawaii.
"They" are "decidedly" "skeptical". They is one guy.
"decidedly skeptical" is an oxymoron. He's skeptical, period.
He is a scientist. He'd damn well better be skeptical.
He raises questions. The "science" magazine (not journal) Discover calls this a "smackdown".
TFA is so full of shit as to be worse than useless. It answers nothing and raises questions the original researchers themselves raise. A determined reporter doesn't have to look hard to find someone skeptical, and can easily impregnate their result with all manner of conflict-ridden verbiage. But a *good* reporter lets the science tell its own story.
It's aluminum. Take a six pack and some wrenches and take out your frustrations on it one afternoon. Then take it to the scrap yard and sell it. Aluminum has been going for $0.80 to $1.00 per pound the past year. Make sure it's "clean" with no ferrous metal still connected or you'll get maybe half that. While you're at it, take out the pipe it's set on and sell that too. Not much per pound, but lots of pounds. And then cover the hole over. And buy something nice with the money. And bring me some. You never take me anywhere anymore.
Here they are in these modern times finally placing their faith where it should be in such matter, with their infallible creator and they who sitith at the right hand of His Honor Almighty. Why, only 800 years perviously a (yes, I saw it, I like it better this way) FAR more barbaric time in this growing Savior's development, they were actually burning books, a self-limiting process. So desperate had they become for sources large enough to keep a mob in books until their fervor wore off that they had not only raided Alexanderia, the world's largest library and stripped it shelves clean, but fervor unabated had raided the daughter of the librarian there and had stripped her flesh bare of skin. What a pleasure to know that the pinnacle of rights management had been achieved 8 centuries ago and continues on today. Rightfully doubting the law of man when the One True Lawmaker is still on the job, Phillip Emmons "Isaac" Bonewits protected his 1971 treatise "Real Magic" ISBN 0-87728-688-4 with just such a shrink-wrap damnation. I am sorely tempted towards enjoining any who, giving up after struggling with their fourth 3 syllable word in this article and exercising their editor-given divine right to mod down what they can't understand, to find themselves forced pivvy-wise with sudden gusts of bowel explusions, but unable to gain entrance instead expulse perforce into their socks. In a public place. Instead I'll withhold the explicit and allow them to identify themselves herewith.
"A new technique developed at King’s College London"...is not a new technique at all. It is an application of an old, in fact the oldest, analysis technique for structural brain MR imaging....
"uses a fifteen minute MRI scan"... a very common, standard MR brain scan, followed by many hours of counting the voxels (volumetric pixels) in the area of interest. Followed by many more hours of the same, to estimate the reliability using inter-rater testing, necessary due to variations in size, shape, density, etc. of the region examined, between individuals.
Ten years ago applying the technique to corpus collosum imaging rather than the usual grey matter was new. Given that the 'technique' consists of lots of counting, it gets old quickly.
It's becoming more obvious that false statements can be made without risking accusations of ethics violation as long as the publication appears in a non-peer reviewed 'journal'.
Have someone else test it, preferably someone who doesn't know much about how it 'should' work. You do this for the same reason you have someone else proofread what you write: if you expect something, you're more likely to see that rather than what's really there.
Cultivate some beta testers who'll bash on your code for cheap. As in beer.
> every two days we create as much information as we did from the beginning of civilization through 2003
Bollocks. We create none; information is ordered matter and/or energy. It can only be transformed. We may be making more of it more readily accessible to ourselves, but it was energy before that, matter before that, etc. If we created information directly there'd be less problem with carbon dioxide now and Google wouldn't be planning an arctic climate data center just for the cold air. And don't bother with the narrow viewpoint caused by belief in thermodynamics instead of understanding; if entropy ruled locally you'd have gone from egg and sperm to waste.
Information can interact and generate apparently simplistic structures etc. out of complex dynamics, just as you appear to be a body rather than the similar set of complex dynamic interactions that you are. Don't confuse apparent structure with underlying dynamics or emergent properties with actual physical manifestation. Information metabolism.
If a "researcher" utterly fails to take into account the developmental progress of the kids they're studying, as well as applying the concept and ages of "middle school" in cultures that don't use the concept, I can't have any faith in their conclusion in particular or their "expertise" as specialists in education in general.
Formal operational stage: from age 12 onwards (development of abstract reasoning). Children develop abstract thought and can easily conserve and think logically in their mind. [Piaget's 4th stage of development]
"Middle school" kids are just entering it. They can grasp an abstract concept. What they can't do very well yet is switch between two of them. Both meanings of = are correct. Finding out that the culture that sells more calculators each year than it has members ends up teaching its kids to use an algebra based on them is kind of interesting, but too critical of itself to get published. Calling it "wrong" is hypocritical, a disservice to the people it's supposed to serve (and that the paper urges to 'read professional journals'), and shows disregard for the history of the "researchers" profession to the point of either incompetence or if purposely ignored to arrive at a conclusion, a violation of ethics.
Middle school is ages 12 and 13 (grades 7 and 8) in my Texas town, Arlington. Two thirds of middle school students either haven't achieved Piaget's 4th stage or finished first year algebra and so haven't been taught that the representative use of = is preferred over the functional use. Two thirds is close enough to 70% to fall within the range of the error (alpha) level considered acceptable by most semi-psychological researchers (p 0.05), who never learn even as professors or editors that an alpha level is what it is and there's no such thing as "acceptable" or not inherent in the concept. Kids grow out of this "inability". Sadly, nobody grows out of statistical misconceptions.
The result here has been seen before in other testing. It is known for being the failure of "new math", which is algebra relabeled in an attempt to make elementary kids learn it. They can't, no matter what it's called.
In other places they have ethnic jokes. In Texas we have (Texas A&M) Aggies. Ethic jokes tend to be the same jokes with the subject changed to suit the audience. Funny sometimes but rarely deserved. Aggie jokes tend to be different -- directly associated to how an agricultural school might view/teach such things as psychology or, well, teaching. Make your own assessment.
Ah, groupmind. Finally, he/she/we/us/it am evolving into a unitary consciousness.
We think it's an extremely slow news day, and the editor-lobe of our groupbrain has either become extremely lax in their/our selectivity, or they/we are being pulling our collective leg.
If you're writing for someone, write the way they want or expect. Articles for journals or other public media should be written according to authors' guidelines.
If you're writing for yourself, who gives a least significant bit about formatting?
If you think brain scans can help guide your career choice, doing brain imaging as a neuroscientist is not likely to be one of your more viable options.
Re:It's for 'Statistical' computing
on
R In a Nutshell
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· Score: 1
Thank you all for your comments, I've learned a lot, including the fact that others use the more mundane commercial programs to good advantage too.
The best comment was u38cq's "SPSS and SAS are, mostly, for solved problems. R is for unsolved problems." Certainly most analyses that use such as T-tests (don't sniff -- it's what we do for fMRI. but on a massive scale) and ANOVA/MANOVA are more easily done with something made to do them rather than write code for such simple things. But it's not the problems that are solved or not, it's that the processes are refined or not.
What SPSS etc. can't do for me is comparing a stack of similar X/Y plots, and cranking out a plot that gives the average, +variance, -variance, and s.d., then comparing two or more such stacks statistically to tell me how similar or different they are (the two are not the same), in total, across each column or line, point by point, and especially within areas that are significant peaks or sinks.
If someone wants to really make a splash, look up SPM (statistical probability mapping), the analysis we use on fMRI data, come up with something better, and write it. SPM does tens of thousands of t-tests simultaneously and tells us where things differ between conditions or some such. The correction required to keep it all p.05 is astounding, 12 decimal places being common. The data get skimmed so hard that... look up the guy that found that dead salmon can recognize human facial expressions, that's what can happen and it's a big reason why fMRI sucks (the other having to do with being unable to tell excitatory from inhibitory activity).
So, maybe I'll write R into my next proposal. What? Free? Great, so I'll use the money to buy a programmer instead.
Slashdot Mirror
The current cumulative impact probability of all objects tracked by SENTRY now exceeds 1.5% for the next 100 years. This is from ~300 known bodies with non-zero impact probability. They estimate that they've discovered 10% of such potential planetary post hole diggers.
The technology is 100+ years old and has been used for 80 on human brain waves.
Almost 20 years ago, work at Radford was able to guess with 70 to 80 percent accuracy which of three possibilities within three parameters (size, shape and color) was being looked at, or being imagined with and without there being an attempt to verbalize it. They used a standard 16 channel external EEG. And a dozen different subjects.
Which "speech center(s)"? There's two main regions, neither of which can do the job alone. There's the areas where the material to be translated into speech get placed, and they can be read without having to try to work around linguistic encoding. Then there's people who lose their entire speech area, but come out being able to speak anyway because of backup/trainable areas taking over the job, or simply doing it in parallel all along.
You've got to have a damn good reason to carve open a skull. Surgical correction for epilepsy is a good reason, but the brain being tested before and after the surgery is hardly one to draw generalizations from. Given that previous work bested this without cutting into anyone, this is a dead end stunt.
There is also existing technology that would do the vocalizing job, also without surgery. Adapting it to an input based on a neural net 'best guess' output after training on an individual would be trivial compared to cutting open heads. Millions of people have heard it work, on a Pink Floyd album: "For millions of years mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened to unleash the powers of his imagination -- he learned to talk." Many millions more have heard the same person/voice narrating the video version of his book "A Brief History Of Time".
TFA is some scary shit. With all the alternatives available, safer, better AND cheaper, there's no reason to do stuff like this, and none at all to suggest that it should be used as a basis to develop a technology.
Children do self-assemble, except for the initial cell.
Then I wasted two decades shoveling raw material in front of and into a couple of them, as well a spending half my waking life acquiring the means to obtain those raw materials?
Mine must be defective. They seemed to operate more on the principle of maximizing local entropy.
And here I've been hearing 'children are the future'. Those little bastards make noise, eat food, get sick and all kinds of annoyances. So good to know we'll have parts instead of children.
Wait a second. These wouldn't happen to be *children* parts, would they? Low maintenance is great, but self-assembly? It'd take away the only fun part about them -- making 'em.
How come all these semi-science articles have to quote someone else saying 'needs more proof' etc.? The primary researchers almost invariably say the same themselves. Is the science not worth wasting the ink if it can't be made to appear as if it's an argument? Being skeptical yourself is good. Someone else being skeptical is trivial. It's one thing to interview someone else if they have something to add, but to do it just to hang a name on the preplanned 'controversial' portion is st00pid to the point of insulting to bother interviewee and reader. As for the 'science' 'writers', most obviously aren't very good at either.
In fact it has been solved for some time. The basic process involved are well understood. But most people can't or don't think large enough to consider the entire contents of the solar system, or the huge number of different processes and resultants involved. Harold Morowitz has been doing so for years. His Energy Flow In Biology is a deceptively small book describing how life could have arisen (in fact probably had to) from the elements and energy available in this region of the solar system, which became this planet. All the specifics of the physical chemistry involved are in there, formulae and all. Anyone with a serious interest in the subject has either read this or needs to. Anyone who intends to argue the points should be given this book and asked to point out just where it's wrong, because it's far more a collection of known facts than any speculation. As if to prove his point prior to criticism, the back of the book contains a list of biochemicals that should be expected to arise given the conditions and contents.
This is not to say TFA is entirely wrong. A hydrothermal vent could serve as an energy source/sink and chemical environment every bit as well as the entire planet. The complex dynamics could just as easily give rise to compounds and emergent properties just as Morowitz describes. And heavy metals may be involved. But they don't *need* to be. Morowitz's book happens to describe a general principle that applies by its own nature. It can get applied to any similar situation or collection of chemicals capable of ectothermic complexification. It works for this planet, almost certainly does for hydrothermal vents, can be used to project whether of what should happen on any other planet or moon or even deep space itself. When one sees how results can be obtained from such a wide range of environments and can guess from the results what characteristics are likely to apply, one can get a realistic assessment of how narrow our definition of life is and how broad it ought to be when our arbitrary, unnecessary, Earth-centric specifics are removed.
Of all the people who've tried to argue this with me, only 4 have ever taken up the challenge to read the book. Of those, there have been exactly zero to come back with any criticism of the specifics in the book, including the conclusions drawn. One of them then went to study at George Mason, not directly under Morowitz, but in the same department.
Sure, I've seen criticisms of his stuff. I've also seen that he doesn't respond to them, and I know why: they don't understand what he said or the basic science behind it, they pay him lip service in an effort to 'respond' with their own unrelated agenda, or they don't bother to try and simply attack his publication with formulaic restrictions they think are requirements. Morowitz writes books. People make whiny noises about a lack of "peer review". They fail to grasp that this requires peers. Morowitz has a few peers, but mostly in his understanding of complex dynamic systems, not in his erstwhile 'field'. Those peers have little to say, and those with the most to say can't think large enough to enter the same realm. Nor do they seem to notice that the actual science being used is undergrad textbook level so well accepted that few reference the origin (except in historical background) and nobody dare criticize for fear of ridicule. Laws of thermodynamics, ideal gas law, that sort of stuff. They can't, won't or don't read and understand what he wrote. I wouldn't respond to that either.
Get the book and try it. It's not that difficult to follow. Check his material against textbook contents. He's not making up anything except how its put to use, and his one example -- the whole Earth -- is obviously not the only one it can apply to.
for the non-*crowd, set-top ready.
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The presence of Carbon 14 in their bones is PROOF! PerOOF I tell you! that they had empirical knowledge of radionuclide dating techniques, and consumed precisely enough of the stuff to tell us just exactly how long ago they lived. But how did they know how far in the future it would be when we got their bones and dated them? Because they had the same empirical knowledge of the same psychic pills being taken by the researchers who could read their dead minds to learn that they had empirical knowledge of antibiotics when the evidence only indicates they absorbed endemic soil bacteria whether or not it might have come along with something that they ate which grew in the soil.
1. Dirt (dirty dirt!) ...
2. Beer (dirty beer!)
3.
4. SCIENCE!
I say they got it mixed up. The bones were buried in the soil with the bugs in it. The researchers were the ones with the beer. I have empirical proof: This is my empire and I say that it's so.
This news is better than it sounds. SCO's contract with its landsharks specified that, win or lose, they'd get a chunk of the company. Since there's no buyer as yet (per TFA) they must not want their pound of McBride-flesh. Meaning there ain't squat left from which anyone might try to rebuild this Tinker Toy tyranasaur into a viable enterprise. Go ahead and bury it and don't mind the twitches. Those are just press releases making it appear as if its still alive. Oh no, they say he's got to go, oh no Darlzilla.
There are near Earth objects of all types that would far easier to get to than in between Mars and Jupiter. Mining would be simpler. Solar observatories could be landed on L4/L5 Earth Trojans for better stability and longer life (no station keeping necessary). Get some samples from Cruinthe and figure out if it's truly a second body formed from our pre-solar neighborhood or an interloper.
And sooner or later someone is going to have to start practicing moving these things around so we're ready to if an when the time comes. According to the latest SENTRY data the cumulative impact probability of all known and tracked Earth orbit crossing objects with potential intersections is just over 1.5% for the next century, and they figure they've found around 10% of them. Sure, the big ones are too hard to move. The smaller ones aren't. If a bigger one's coming, hitting it with a smaller one (or more) makes more sense than throwing nukes at it.
The topic is neutrality, not administration.
Better to have committee members from problem child countries trying and failing to make everyone go along with them in public than each of them going their own way in private.
"Chile is the first country of the world to guarantee by law the principle of network neutrality,"
Isn't passing a law that makes something originally outside the law to remain outside the law rather oxymoronic? It's like the US requiring members of sovereign nations that exist within its own borders prove to the US that they are valid members of said nation before the US will recognize them as such; such is the requirement for tribal membership for Native Americans. To pass such a law Chile only proves that it an make laws regarding net neutrality. If it can make them, it can remake them. If net neutrality were an objective fact, no country's laws would matter. Since they obviously do, even a 100% granting of neutrality by all concerned is no more than lip service. And being international, such a law would require a treaty. Check out for yourself how many treaties get signed by all involved, and how few of those actually get honored. TFA is the appropriate first step, but unless it's followed with some far more powerful and reaching reforms, say, putting worldwide network administration under a UN component with the power to actually act, it's strictly superficial regardless of intentions.
... neither of them provide more performance than Captain Keds got out of his when he punched out of the big paper mache football and flew around the field at halftime of Superbowl 1 in 1967. Armadillo Aerospace is top notch in H2O2 propulsion systems, and they aren't building one. I bet there's a good reason.
And none of them have ever worked well enough to produce. See http://www.vectorsite.net/avplatfm.html for the long, sad history of DARPA's drive to fly.
Footnote, as it is in the link above, about the Avro Aircar. When it wouldn't work right, some of the engineers suggested putting a skirt around the edge to catch the blow-down and make it float on an air cushion. They head engineer refused to try it. Had he tried it, Avro might have gotten rich. Instead they failed. But less than 5 years later the Army was flying equipment into ports in Viet Nam too shallow for too far out to get their ROROs (roll on, roll off) ferry ships into, using their own hovercraft, usually called "blow boats". And they're still using them. And of the head engineer? Who knows. But the Avro aircar was finally taken off display outside the Army Transportation Museum at Ft. Eustis VA because nobody had the money to scrape off the rust and repaint it. They're still using the blow boats, AFAIK at Ft. Story (Va. Beach, VA) and in Hawaii.
"They" are "decidedly" "skeptical".
They is one guy.
"decidedly skeptical" is an oxymoron.
He's skeptical, period.
He is a scientist. He'd damn well better be skeptical.
He raises questions. The "science" magazine (not journal) Discover calls this a "smackdown".
TFA is so full of shit as to be worse than useless. It answers nothing and raises questions the original researchers themselves raise. A determined reporter doesn't have to look hard to find someone skeptical, and can easily impregnate their result with all manner of conflict-ridden verbiage. But a *good* reporter lets the science tell its own story.
It's aluminum. Take a six pack and some wrenches and take out your frustrations on it one afternoon. Then take it to the scrap yard and sell it. Aluminum has been going for $0.80 to $1.00 per pound the past year. Make sure it's "clean" with no ferrous metal still connected or you'll get maybe half that. While you're at it, take out the pipe it's set on and sell that too. Not much per pound, but lots of pounds. And then cover the hole over. And buy something nice with the money. And bring me some. You never take me anywhere anymore.
"Maybe what we need are a few good old fashioned hangings." -- Commissioner Orson Swindell, Federal Trade Commission
at the first FTC spam conference.
Here they are in these modern times finally placing their faith where it should be in such matter, with their infallible creator and they who sitith at the right hand of His Honor Almighty. Why, only 800 years perviously a (yes, I saw it, I like it better this way) FAR more barbaric time in this growing Savior's development, they were actually burning books, a self-limiting process. So desperate had they become for sources large enough to keep a mob in books until their fervor wore off that they had not only raided Alexanderia, the world's largest library and stripped it shelves clean, but fervor unabated had raided the daughter of the librarian there and had stripped her flesh bare of skin. What a pleasure to know that the pinnacle of rights management had been achieved 8 centuries ago and continues on today. Rightfully doubting the law of man when the One True Lawmaker is still on the job, Phillip Emmons "Isaac" Bonewits protected his 1971 treatise "Real Magic" ISBN 0-87728-688-4 with just such a shrink-wrap damnation. I am sorely tempted towards enjoining any who, giving up after struggling with their fourth 3 syllable word in this article and exercising their editor-given divine right to mod down what they can't understand, to find themselves forced pivvy-wise with sudden gusts of bowel explusions, but unable to gain entrance instead expulse perforce into their socks. In a public place. Instead I'll withhold the explicit and allow them to identify themselves herewith.
"A new technique developed at King’s College London" ...is not a new technique at all. It is an application of an old, in fact the oldest, analysis technique for structural brain MR imaging....
"uses a fifteen minute MRI scan"... a very common, standard MR brain scan, followed by many hours of counting the voxels (volumetric pixels) in the area of interest. Followed by many more hours of the same, to estimate the reliability using inter-rater testing, necessary due to variations in size, shape, density, etc. of the region examined, between individuals.
Ten years ago applying the technique to corpus collosum imaging rather than the usual grey matter was new. Given that the 'technique' consists of lots of counting, it gets old quickly.
It's becoming more obvious that false statements can be made without risking accusations of ethics violation as long as the publication appears in a non-peer reviewed 'journal'.
Have someone else test it, preferably someone who doesn't know much about how it 'should' work. You do this for the same reason you have someone else proofread what you write: if you expect something, you're more likely to see that rather than what's really there.
Cultivate some beta testers who'll bash on your code for cheap. As in beer.
> every two days we create as much information as we did from the beginning of civilization through 2003
Bollocks. We create none; information is ordered matter and/or energy. It can only be transformed. We may be making more of it more readily accessible to ourselves, but it was energy before that, matter before that, etc. If we created information directly there'd be less problem with carbon dioxide now and Google wouldn't be planning an arctic climate data center just for the cold air. And don't bother with the narrow viewpoint caused by belief in thermodynamics instead of understanding; if entropy ruled locally you'd have gone from egg and sperm to waste.
Information can interact and generate apparently simplistic structures etc. out of complex dynamics, just as you appear to be a body rather than the similar set of complex dynamic interactions that you are. Don't confuse apparent structure with underlying dynamics or emergent properties with actual physical manifestation. Information metabolism.
If a "researcher" utterly fails to take into account the developmental progress of the kids they're studying, as well as applying the concept and ages of "middle school" in cultures that don't use the concept, I can't have any faith in their conclusion in particular or their "expertise" as specialists in education in general.
From Jean Piaget http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Piaget
Formal operational stage: from age 12 onwards (development of abstract reasoning). Children develop abstract thought and can easily conserve and think logically in their mind. [Piaget's 4th stage of development]
"Middle school" kids are just entering it. They can grasp an abstract concept. What they can't do very well yet is switch between two of them. Both meanings of = are correct. Finding out that the culture that sells more calculators each year than it has members ends up teaching its kids to use an algebra based on them is kind of interesting, but too critical of itself to get published. Calling it "wrong" is hypocritical, a disservice to the people it's supposed to serve (and that the paper urges to 'read professional journals'), and shows disregard for the history of the "researchers" profession to the point of either incompetence or if purposely ignored to arrive at a conclusion, a violation of ethics.
Middle school is ages 12 and 13 (grades 7 and 8) in my Texas town, Arlington. Two thirds of middle school students either haven't achieved Piaget's 4th stage or finished first year algebra and so haven't been taught that the representative use of = is preferred over the functional use. Two thirds is close enough to 70% to fall within the range of the error (alpha) level considered acceptable by most semi-psychological researchers (p 0.05), who never learn even as professors or editors that an alpha level is what it is and there's no such thing as "acceptable" or not inherent in the concept. Kids grow out of this "inability". Sadly, nobody grows out of statistical misconceptions.
The result here has been seen before in other testing. It is known for being the failure of "new math", which is algebra relabeled in an attempt to make elementary kids learn it. They can't, no matter what it's called.
In other places they have ethnic jokes. In Texas we have (Texas A&M) Aggies. Ethic jokes tend to be the same jokes with the subject changed to suit the audience. Funny sometimes but rarely deserved. Aggie jokes tend to be different -- directly associated to how an agricultural school might view/teach such things as psychology or, well, teaching. Make your own assessment.
"What does the Slashdot community think?"
Ah, groupmind. Finally, he/she/we/us/it am evolving into a unitary consciousness.
We think it's an extremely slow news day, and the editor-lobe of our groupbrain has either become extremely lax in their/our selectivity, or they/we are being pulling our collective leg.
If you're writing for someone, write the way they want or expect. Articles for journals or other public media should be written according to authors' guidelines.
If you're writing for yourself, who gives a least significant bit about formatting?
If you think brain scans can help guide your career choice, doing brain imaging as a neuroscientist is not likely to be one of your more viable options.
Thank you all for your comments, I've learned a lot, including the fact that others use the more mundane commercial programs to good advantage too.
The best comment was u38cq's "SPSS and SAS are, mostly, for solved problems. R is for unsolved problems." Certainly most analyses that use such as T-tests (don't sniff -- it's what we do for fMRI. but on a massive scale) and ANOVA/MANOVA are more easily done with something made to do them rather than write code for such simple things. But it's not the problems that are solved or not, it's that the processes are refined or not.
What SPSS etc. can't do for me is comparing a stack of similar X/Y plots, and cranking out a plot that gives the average, +variance, -variance, and s.d., then comparing two or more such stacks statistically to tell me how similar or different they are (the two are not the same), in total, across each column or line, point by point, and especially within areas that are significant peaks or sinks.
If someone wants to really make a splash, look up SPM (statistical probability mapping), the analysis we use on fMRI data, come up with something better, and write it. SPM does tens of thousands of t-tests simultaneously and tells us where things differ between conditions or some such. The correction required to keep it all p .05 is astounding, 12 decimal places being common. The data get skimmed so hard that ... look up the guy that found that dead salmon can recognize human facial expressions, that's what can happen and it's a big reason why fMRI sucks (the other having to do with being unable to tell excitatory from inhibitory activity).
So, maybe I'll write R into my next proposal.
What?
Free?
Great, so I'll use the money to buy a programmer instead.