I've done research and writing at federal institutions, private and state universities and commercial concerns, collaborated with people and labs in a dozen or so countries, and submitted to journals in several different fields. Never once did I hear LaTex mentioned as something available to write with or as a format acceptable for manuscript submission. I happen to be familiar with LaTex due to years of Linux tinkering, and from working with people who also happened to be at least modestly capable with it. Even so I'd use something that didn't require concern with command/control syntax. My brain is better used on the science and language syntax.
Microsoft Word can track changes according to collaborator. A particular format need only be created once, then saved as a template, many of which are available for download. There are various referencing packages that merge well with Word. I have run across other researchers who preferred something else for writing, but never have I run across one who did not have Word available or was not adequately familiar with it.
Perhaps there are fields I've not worked in that allow use of LaTex for writing and submission. I'll bet there are none that require it, and Word is acceptable to most if not all.
http://www.essex.ac.uk/linguistics/clmt/latex4ling/journals/ is a short article listing LaTex friendly journals. I disagree with the assessments about Springer and Elsevier, as every one of their journals I've written for did not list LaTex as acceptable. That leaves a very short list of journals that do accept it (and two major publishers that do not accept it). The list is a lot shorter than just the list of >35,000 journals referenced by NIH/National Library of Medicine's PubMed, the database I'm most familiar with.
Mod me down if you must for dropping the *nix flag and waving the enemy's, but these are the observations of a trained observer.
Anderson wants to blur only public buildings. He says nothing about the millions of lives that would have been saved had all private residences been blurred out also. Since it's inevitable that bad people will use the unblurred maps for terroristical purposes, we should go ahead and charge him with genocide now to save time later.
You can't attack a map, you can only attack physical objects/locations. If Anderson had any sense he'd blur out the actual buildings rather than their cartographical representations. Better yet, they could be totally obscured. All he have to do is to get a law passed requiring all bad people to cover their eyes when near a place where they intend to do bad things.
"Governments looking to silence critics and stymie opposition have added DDOS attacks to their censoring methods"
This was news 8 years ago when China first attacked individuals' pro-Tibet web sites. The attacks were readily traced back to their Ministry of Defense.
If it were a case of someone foisting old news as new on the knowledgeable, that would be pitiful. However, the conference where it was presented was specifically for newbies (both persons and companies) to the field. While hardly news to/. it was almost certainly news to the conference goers.
The debris wasn't from a smashed satellite, either from collision with another or blasted by a missile. It was their own trash, "a piece of a satellite rocket motor left behind by an earlier space shuttle mission". The chances of something from an entirely different orbit impacting a craft are still infinitesimal. To quote the philosopher Adams "Space is big. Really big. You wouldn't believe how mind-boggling big it is." Compare to broken junk floating around even near Earth orbit is that big.
DHS has announced several studies attempting to serve as lie detection. All of the others had a fatal flaw, as does this one. A major problem is that they detect physiological changes or signals but can't determine the reason. A person nervous about flying will respond to this measure the same as a person planning to blow it up. Another problem is that this measure requires 15 to 60 seconds for the body to react maximally. The amount of time being interrogated will build up to the point that most anyone would get annoyed, something else they can't differentiate. There's also the problem of overlap of the effect of sequential questions and the cognitive/emotional reaction to them. Two control questions in a row makes a person wonder "what are they getting at?" and that causes the same physiological reaction as the other causes.
DHS has no intention of wasting the money on real devices for this and the other measures. They know full well they won't work. They also know full well that the vast majority of people don't know these things wouldn't work. These press releases about lie detection devices are pure propoganda. DHS has become a junior Ministry of Truth in an attempt to remain viable. It has already failed in most of its mission, and anything that's not yet a failure gives them reason to continue working and absorbing funding. Psyops seems to be the only thing it's capable of.
It's so obvious that it's almost not worth having spent research money on it, but somebody has to prove even the obvious scientifically.
It's a good, solid result: kids with asthma sit around inside a lot (by choice or parental "concern") and so watch a lot of TV.
They wouldn't dare try to make the claim in the other direction, since it would be so easy for them to compare with kids that had the same condition but sat inside reading or doing other things instead of watching TV.
If TV caused all these problems, I'd be a mess. I spent much of my adolescence and early adulthood in my dad's TV shop. We had several to many TVs running constantly in the showroom, and several "cooking" (running to see if the repair worked) on the workbench. We had 4 TVs in the house, one of them always on, and I had one of the first car cigarette lighter powered portable, so I could watch TV even when I went out. If these awful TV-rays that cause all these problems really exist, I should be dead a couple times already. But there's nothing wrong with me that can be attributed to TV. Well, except for some visual oddities: "Everybody's made out of little thin lines. Sometimes their fingers are blue. Mine are too." -- Mike Nesmith, "Tonight", from Elephant Parts
Their website doesn't inspire confidence either. Plus, you're better off just learning the FFmpeg command line args - a possibly suspicious GUI isn't worth it.
Someone who tried all of FFmpeg's functions through SUPER, who was already familiar with using it via command line, would be able to tell whether there were any problems. They wouldn't resort to an ad hominem oxymoronic straw man such as "possibly suspicious". I wrote my piece with the less technically adept users in mind. Make no mistake that not all that use SUPER are unfamiliar with the programs is directs, yea verily even unto the line of commanding.
But you're right; their web site is very confusing and restrictive in how you must use it. It irks me constantly. But if you persist and make it into the discussion section, and do have a clear question/problem/suggestion, they do respond. Their several updates per year regularly contain both fixes and improvements, some of them suggested by users.
Just what really revolutionary devices have been developed and put into common use by MIT Media Lab? I see a lot of hype from them, and it's getting less and less realistic and more obviously pie-in-the-sky. Science in the popular media only requires this condition and that's where Media Lab seems to live now. Real applications require more. What concretely have they done, previously and lately?
If they're stuck in theory mode, so be it. But then they should present their theories as such, not as super duper gaming gizmos on the verge of revolutionizing everyday life.
I'm still waiting for my jeans with the embedded keyboard they "demo'd" a decade or more ago.
Let China put up a dozen "military" stations. The Manned Orbiting Laboratory (http://www.astronautix.com/craft/mol.htm ) was canceled for good reasons. Primarily that all the functions could be automated and/or ground controlled, without the extra mass, complexity and vulnerability of a manned station. It will provide them with many individual opportunities to practice maintaining manned stations, docking, crew and supply transfers, etc. We already have the experience and know which works best. But let them make their own mistakes. They many even pull off their entire program through lunar landing in their own fashion, but their particular path isn't the most efficient or effective. Perhaps the hard way will be the best way to learn. OTOH, they may develop technology and techniques we didn't because we didn't need to.
FFmpeg is extremely powerful and versatile. Those words are, for the newer user, synonymous with difficult and confusing when the program is based on command line or a very simplistic front end. FFmpeg is very fully implimented (along with MEncoder, ffmpeg2theora and RealProducer) in the free audio and video format and parameter conversion front end software SUPER, from erightsoft.com. Free to download and use but not FOSS: small loss since it is, after all, intended for the majority of users who'd have trouble running such as FFmpeg native, those users hardly likely to want the source anyway. There are very few functions of the internal programs not implemented (setting a max output file size is one of the few). SUPER is extremely powerful while having every available function made as obvious as possible (and all have float-over hints), making it also useful as a training device for learning audio and video compression and conversion. The authors of SUPER clearly and repeatedly insist that their program is simply a front end, and that all credit for the power inside their program go to the programs they've built their around, and the authors thereof.
A minor beef is they require you to use IE with security settings low in order to download it as well as participate in the (very well attended by the authors) chat area. The 5 year span since the last FFmpeg release is a complete surprise to me, a daily user of SUPER, because there's so much more of that program available through the front end than I ever use.
I purchased DivXPro so I could convert everything to DivX, in order to play it on my DivX capable home DVD player. I found SUPER (with which I run FFmpeg almost exclusively for video) to be so much more powerful, flexible and faster, that I made the comment in the chat area that "SUPER does for free what others can't do for money". They liked that phrase so much that they adopted it as a motto. This is the sole association I have with the folks from erightsoft's SUPER project, just so your sure this is a testimonial, not an advertisement. One other small beef, they won't let you put it up for download elsewhere, even with the best of intentions on the sites with the best reputations. You can only get it from them.
I'm quite confident that SUPER will make use of the greater power of the new FFmpeg. I'm less confident I and most of the other users who just want to make things go will learn all about them. For those that do want to learn about them, the SUPER front end provides an a priori description of what will happen if you select each.
Bring it on -- no doubt erightsoft is already working on the new impplementation. In the mean time, check out the current version to find out how powerful FFmpeg already is. I'll bet you'll be surprised.
A perfect candidate for the first annual award ceremony.
Terrorists don't bomb maps, they bomb people, places and things. If the general population can find the place despite blurring so can the terrorists. If one can't, the latter can't, and nobody can use it.
This is far too st00pid be be based on the stated intent. He's grandstanding for PR.
The first reply makes it quite clear that Google cannot have a "monopoly" over anything free. Paying for it unnecessarily and voluntarily was a kind gesture on Google's part.
If Google is to be lambasted for "only" paying up to $300 per work, then what's to be said of Project Gutenburg, which has been giving away text of out of copyright books for years, and has paid the authors absolutely nothing?
What's to be made of it all is TFA is a misguided, biased to the point of fictionalizing of details, underhanded attempt to foist tinfoil hat quality editorializing on/. in the guise of news. Had the MafIAA attempted to collect on out-of-copyright works, they'd be laughed out of court and rightfully humiliated in the press. That's the kind of treatment TFA deserves.
Most still apply Cartesian dualism (mind and brain as separate phenomena) to the brain. This error has propagated from Decartes' own self-admitted fear of The Church. He feared being persecuted as was Galileo unless he offered a sacrosanct seat for the soul. Scientifically he had no such leanings. Nor should we now, with our understanding of dynamics in complex systems. (Not to say we understand the complex system of the brain -- we don't -- but we know better why we don't.) It is probably best to consider mind in terms of process rather than object ("the" mind). More simply, "Brain is a noun, mind is a verb. Mind is what brain does." (Karl Pribram)
The subjects under consideration in TFA are no more engineering than bashing millions of atomic particles together in an accelerator is quantum engineering. Compared to the subtle and highly interdependent Hebbian cellular assemblies where processing occurs, they are massive invasive assaults.
To consider (as per the example) changes in personality only in terms of electrical and surgical interventions exemplifies the engineering slant and belies the lack of understanding of the neuro-. Changes in personality also occur due to chemical (including dietary) influences, as well as environmental factors during (life-long) development, not to mention social and other learning factors. If the ethical questions are regarding "self" and its generation, all must be considered. Thus these should not be considered (and are not) new questions for bioethics. Given the lack of subtlety of the interventions discussed, they should hardly even be grounds for considering a new outlook on the questions.
Changes in personality are probably the worst example to use. Our best understanding of personality is based on statistical correlations of test answers, self-reports and observations by trained and familiar observers, the best of which reach r=0.3 (30% correlation). That means they can explain less than 10% (for r=0.3, r^2=0.09) of the variance in the observations. Leaving 90% of the variance unexplained means you've said almost nothing useful. Since much of basic personality theory statistics are based on subjective consideration of the data ("trained" judgement in how much to rotate axis of plotted data to maximize the results) as well as subjective judgement of test results themselves (ie. inkblot test scoring) we're probably explaining for closer to 0% of the variance. Any results, then, are as illusory as personality itself.
That last statement is ironic -- an anti-truism. Despite the failure of science (especially statistics) to prove the existence of personality and its components, we continue to exhibit them. The failure is probably in our understanding and the language thereof. That being said, what was said regarding personality in TFA probably shouldn't have been either because despite the consensual agreement of its existence, we don't know much at all about what we're talking about.
Many small vs. one large makes good sense in case of failure(s). Either way, why not blast the dust away as the preparation stage? A squadron of small crawlers with a high gas expansion motor (for simplicity, monopropellant such as UDMH, as in Shuttle steering thrusters or H2O2 as in Armadillo's landers) pointed ahead and slightly down. They'd line up side by side, crawl away from the base site, blasting the dust away in front of them like a line of snow blowers.
Yes, this design might require more mass to be sent to the moon initially due to the mass of reaction gas. However it leaves a bunch of functional crawlers for other tasks plus a bunch of functional motors that can be used to construct suborbital lifters.
If there's water ice, they could be constructed to harvest it, use the solar UV to convert it to H2O2, and be self-refilling. This would be slower because where there's ice there's less sunlight. Armadillo's designs would be very likely to be adaptable because they've built not only H2O2 lifter motors, but also H2O2 production facilities. A digger/UV/vacuum design is very different from their fuel production design (quite likely far more reliable), but they have some experience with the subject, and already have award money for designing landers.
Three days notice. 20 to 50 meter diameter. Assume it's dense rock and a vertical impact trajectory into the ocean (avg. 1000 m depth).
Impact energy 116 kT to 1.8 MT. Very near the lowest energy potential impact of the known NEOs, actually. Not relevant here since the object quite clearly misses. But if and when one doesn't miss, someplace is going to catch a small to medium nuke sized blast, and there won't be time to do squat about it.
My money says we'll have the capability to defend ourselves against such an impact. The second time.
They want to sue investors and tech companies? Good. It will be suicide for them. They'll have to sue AOL for funding the development of Napster. In so doing they'll have to sue Time Warner, a member of the RIAA. Not to do so will show bias between members and non-members, making all their claims questionable and if I'm not mistaken leave them open to a RICO suit.
The news from the last year or two is misleading in saying Napster acquired AOL Music. AOL already held interest in Napster because they funded its development. Pages on AOL's web site stating this were major points used by Harlan Ellison's attorneys in Ellison v. Remarq, AOL and Various John Does. AOL's attorneys appeared to be completely unaware of this relationship which placed AOL firmly opposite to its own claims of being anti-sharing.
Such corporate merging, spin-off and reacquisition is a common occurrence giving surface activity for various legal and financial reasons while the investors and holding companies retain ownership all along. Whether the Mafiaa's landsharks are unaware of the above, or (more likely IMO) hoping the defense attorneys and the judged are, makes little difference as long as the relevant courts can be made aware of the information. Anyone interested in the specific supporting details can contact Charlie Petit at authorslawyer.com.
... Google should get. It wants you to name all those people? That's Sergey Brin and Larry Page. All of them. Google wants email addresses? Get a gmail account, tag them all with it, spoof yourself with it, and then surf a couple dozen porn sites and post to a bunch of usenet groups. Google wants mail? Give it to them.
The question that occurs to me, and likely will to any potential employers worth considering, if why, if it's so obvious that it's not you, are you trying so hard to make that point? Yes, there may be employers less capable of sussing it out. If they're going to take any random web site as valid without verifying it, you don't want to work for them. I'd say and do nothing and wait for the issue to be raised, and if it is, ask to be provided with a copy of any verifications they've done on such material.
Not likely to help much but for consideration: some attempt to take anything as valid if it appears formatted properly. An employer of mine did. I provided them with a copy of an email, including complete headers, from Pope John Paul II to Yasir Arafat, playing dozens with their respective holy figures ("Your prophet is so fat..."). It still took a while to get my point across, so dense were they. Had I provided it on disk instead of paper, they'd probably still be convinced of its authenticity despite both persons being deceased. That one fell to late under the "don't want to work for them" category.
TFA is more than most hyping of background and implications of a minor advancement, written so as to appear TFA is the origin. But this time there are even falsehoods in the summary.
The study tests a very physiologically based instinct and the effect if the drug to alter that response. Altering a physiological reaction is not the same as blocking part of a memory. Startle response is easily reduced in almost everyone by giving a startling or even sub-startling stimulus 1/2 second prior to the target. Nobody would dare argue that a stimulus prevents the effect of another simply because the body is unable to react to a second startle stimulus fast enough.
Recent research does not show that memories must be reconsolidated. Memories are constructed heuristically from components stored by association with prior stimuli similar to the present stimulus. The fastest good enough result to provide adequate response is accepted. Virtually never is anything recalled entirely accurately. It is during this construction phase that alterations from the original can and do occur. Such memories can be "meddled with" after this phase, as it is being held in consciousness. It is not because this memory exists in a malleable form, but rather because the brain continually refreshes the memory with a new construction, usually more accurate with time as new information (correct or not) becomes incorporated.
Impact risks are within. Pertinent to this article are the size estimates which are based on albedo (visual reflectivity) and so the mass and impact damage estimates.
The UK research team calculated that there should be 300 to 3000 dark comet bodies in system. We know of about 25, so there may be up to 100 times more. Current known Near Earth Asteroids total around 6000, with a similar estimate of ratio of known to unknown (1 : 10 to 100). Thus dark asteroids might be around 1% of total impact threat. It's how easily they're located that's the subject of TFA. We know they exist. Deep Space 1 investigated one of them.
Comets are listed under by the NEO program as Near Earth Comets. TFA stresses that completely outgassed comets may not appear easily in visible light as they would be mostly carbonaceous at the surface and have little coma. These would be pretty much invisible to visible light telescopes which are what are used by the NEO program. They would be more easily detected in the infrared (absorbed visible light has to re-radiate, and does so as heat). Space telescopes such as Spitzer would work great. Figure the odds on getting such devices brought to task when there's more 'important' science to be done.
The mass of these objects would be far less than similarly sized rocky bodies, and they would tend to be smaller overall. Consider a spongey body made of soft, runny (with chunks), powdery carbonaceous materials (including hydrocarbons), light gasses such as methane and some water. Cram that sucker into the atmosphere at miles per second. It will deform and take on the shape of the bow shock. The materials will vaporize and the hot vapor will be forced into the oxygen of the atmosphere. Given the relative softness, there's a good chance such a body will explode as an air burst rather than impact the surface/ocean.
An air burst including rapid oxidation of the material at the bow shock would look much like a fuel/air bomb: rapid expansion followed by implosion due to oxygen depletion. Say, 100 square miles of trees knocked down around ground zero but no visible burning because the burst would be at altitude. No remenants to be found because it all burnt up. Tunguska. Mass estimate 1/3 that of a rocky body.
Fearmongering? Three points: 1. 2008 TC3 was discovered October 6 2008. It was predicted to impact the next day. It did, over Sudan. It happens, several times a century, and now we know we can predict them correctly. 2. Dark cometary bodies would be harder to detect, with larger bodies being discovered only this early, if at all. If limited to ground based telescopes, the 'if at all' applies. 3. Impact risks are calculated per body. As more are detected, total known impact risk grows. Sum down the 4th column (cumulative impact risk) of the tables at http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/index.html to get the total cumulative impact risk over the next 100 years for the bodies presently known. As a rough estimate, multiply by 10 to include the bodies not yet detected.
It occurs to me that an individual might be responsible for causing an auto accident several times during their life time. Call it 'several times per century'. The risk is similar to that of an impact by a near earth object. If the combined cumulative impact risk estimate is, in your estimation, inconsequential, put your money where your math is -- drive around without insurance.
That's what a good deal of what "instincts" are better called. Such behaviors occur sometimes in animals that do not learn from their parents or other functioning adults. In order for these to exist, they had to have been incorporated genetically. Since the species did not exist at some time in the past, the species and the behavior had to have evolved concurrently. Surgical excision of the part of the brain known to relate to a behavior disrupts the behavior. If there were no pathway for acquired behaviors to be passed along genetically we'd all still be oozing around in a pool of slime mold. This is yet another 'science' article about a minor aspect of a known phenomenon, written in such a way as to make it seem this recent contribution discovered and/or explains it. If this occurs in 9 out of 10 articles on/. it's because that's how often it occurs in what now passes as science writing in the media.
Blindness can be induced by paralyzing the ocular muscles and immobilizing the head. This was done decades ago using curare. If the visual field remains constant, there is a loss of visual contrast until everything greys out. With practice this can be done by forcing the eyes to remain focused on a point. The visual system detects edges via saccades, movement or both, and fills in the remainder via a combination of detection and heuristic recognition. The process description and references are in Karl Pribram's book "Brain and Perception" (the same book erroneously blamed for the "holography" ridiculousity). We used a similar technique on rats in his lab to negate visual input while measuring whisker input, the bottom line of which was to show the calculation process in both to be very similar.
The old SciAm article others mention was probably "What The Frog's Eye Tells The Frog's Brain", which describes that the frog detects motion by remaining still so that the visual field blanks, and waiting for motion to cross the visual field and so become visible. If the visual system was always detecting everything, it would run slower and the frog would be less able to react quickly and snatch the flying insect out of the air with its tongue.
The article summary is wrong in that saccades have been understood for years. TFA is a novel contribution in the sense that it describes the process of illusory motion. Yet this is not entirely novel since it is a variation of the spinning room illusion familiar to anyone who's tried to lay down after too much to drink, as well as the 'waterfall illusion' wherein things appear to be moving upward after having watched a waterfall for some time.
But the "maintaining a coherent image" stuff? 50 years old. Karl took the curare trip himself in the 50s. Luckily he had the foresight to use a ventilator also. Curare paralyzes the diaphragm as well.
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I've done research and writing at federal institutions, private and state universities and commercial concerns, collaborated with people and labs in a dozen or so countries, and submitted to journals in several different fields. Never once did I hear LaTex mentioned as something available to write with or as a format acceptable for manuscript submission. I happen to be familiar with LaTex due to years of Linux tinkering, and from working with people who also happened to be at least modestly capable with it. Even so I'd use something that didn't require concern with command/control syntax. My brain is better used on the science and language syntax.
Microsoft Word can track changes according to collaborator. A particular format need only be created once, then saved as a template, many of which are available for download. There are various referencing packages that merge well with Word. I have run across other researchers who preferred something else for writing, but never have I run across one who did not have Word available or was not adequately familiar with it.
Perhaps there are fields I've not worked in that allow use of LaTex for writing and submission. I'll bet there are none that require it, and Word is acceptable to most if not all.
http://www.essex.ac.uk/linguistics/clmt/latex4ling/journals/ is a short article listing LaTex friendly journals. I disagree with the assessments about Springer and Elsevier, as every one of their journals I've written for did not list LaTex as acceptable. That leaves a very short list of journals that do accept it (and two major publishers that do not accept it). The list is a lot shorter than just the list of >35,000 journals referenced by NIH/National Library of Medicine's PubMed, the database I'm most familiar with.
Mod me down if you must for dropping the *nix flag and waving the enemy's, but these are the observations of a trained observer.
Anderson wants to blur only public buildings. He says nothing about the millions of lives that would have been saved had all private residences been blurred out also. Since it's inevitable that bad people will use the unblurred maps for terroristical purposes, we should go ahead and charge him with genocide now to save time later.
You can't attack a map, you can only attack physical objects/locations. If Anderson had any sense he'd blur out the actual buildings rather than their cartographical representations. Better yet, they could be totally obscured. All he have to do is to get a law passed requiring all bad people to cover their eyes when near a place where they intend to do bad things.
"Governments looking to silence critics and stymie opposition have added DDOS attacks to their censoring methods"
This was news 8 years ago when China first attacked individuals' pro-Tibet web sites. The attacks were readily traced back to their Ministry of Defense.
If it were a case of someone foisting old news as new on the knowledgeable, that would be pitiful. However, the conference where it was presented was specifically for newbies (both persons and companies) to the field. While hardly news to /. it was almost certainly news to the conference goers.
The debris wasn't from a smashed satellite, either from collision with another or blasted by a missile. It was their own trash, "a piece of a satellite rocket motor left behind by an earlier space shuttle mission". The chances of something from an entirely different orbit impacting a craft are still infinitesimal. To quote the philosopher Adams "Space is big. Really big. You wouldn't believe how mind-boggling big it is." Compare to broken junk floating around even near Earth orbit is that big.
DHS has announced several studies attempting to serve as lie detection. All of the others had a fatal flaw, as does this one. A major problem is that they detect physiological changes or signals but can't determine the reason. A person nervous about flying will respond to this measure the same as a person planning to blow it up. Another problem is that this measure requires 15 to 60 seconds for the body to react maximally. The amount of time being interrogated will build up to the point that most anyone would get annoyed, something else they can't differentiate. There's also the problem of overlap of the effect of sequential questions and the cognitive/emotional reaction to them. Two control questions in a row makes a person wonder "what are they getting at?" and that causes the same physiological reaction as the other causes.
DHS has no intention of wasting the money on real devices for this and the other measures. They know full well they won't work. They also know full well that the vast majority of people don't know these things wouldn't work. These press releases about lie detection devices are pure propoganda. DHS has become a junior Ministry of Truth in an attempt to remain viable. It has already failed in most of its mission, and anything that's not yet a failure gives them reason to continue working and absorbing funding. Psyops seems to be the only thing it's capable of.
It's so obvious that it's almost not worth having spent research money on it, but somebody has to prove even the obvious scientifically.
It's a good, solid result: kids with asthma sit around inside a lot (by choice or parental "concern") and so watch a lot of TV.
They wouldn't dare try to make the claim in the other direction, since it would be so easy for them to compare with kids that had the same condition but sat inside reading or doing other things instead of watching TV.
If TV caused all these problems, I'd be a mess. I spent much of my adolescence and early adulthood in my dad's TV shop. We had several to many TVs running constantly in the showroom, and several "cooking" (running to see if the repair worked) on the workbench. We had 4 TVs in the house, one of them always on, and I had one of the first car cigarette lighter powered portable, so I could watch TV even when I went out. If these awful TV-rays that cause all these problems really exist, I should be dead a couple times already. But there's nothing wrong with me that can be attributed to TV. Well, except for some visual oddities: "Everybody's made out of little thin lines. Sometimes their fingers are blue. Mine are too." -- Mike Nesmith, "Tonight", from Elephant Parts
I had to quote the title to make the response more obviously from the Epistles of Stooge:
"Slo-o-o-owly they turned.
Step by step.
Inch by inch...."
Their website doesn't inspire confidence either. Plus, you're better off just learning the FFmpeg command line args - a possibly suspicious GUI isn't worth it.
Someone who tried all of FFmpeg's functions through SUPER, who was already familiar with using it via command line, would be able to tell whether there were any problems. They wouldn't resort to an ad hominem oxymoronic straw man such as "possibly suspicious". I wrote my piece with the less technically adept users in mind. Make no mistake that not all that use SUPER are unfamiliar with the programs is directs, yea verily even unto the line of commanding.
But you're right; their web site is very confusing and restrictive in how you must use it. It irks me constantly. But if you persist and make it into the discussion section, and do have a clear question/problem/suggestion, they do respond. Their several updates per year regularly contain both fixes and improvements, some of them suggested by users.
Just what really revolutionary devices have been developed and put into common use by MIT Media Lab? I see a lot of hype from them, and it's getting less and less realistic and more obviously pie-in-the-sky. Science in the popular media only requires this condition and that's where Media Lab seems to live now. Real applications require more. What concretely have they done, previously and lately?
If they're stuck in theory mode, so be it. But then they should present their theories as such, not as super duper gaming gizmos on the verge of revolutionizing everyday life.
I'm still waiting for my jeans with the embedded keyboard they "demo'd" a decade or more ago.
Let China put up a dozen "military" stations. The Manned Orbiting Laboratory (http://www.astronautix.com/craft/mol.htm ) was canceled for good reasons. Primarily that all the functions could be automated and/or ground controlled, without the extra mass, complexity and vulnerability of a manned station. It will provide them with many individual opportunities to practice maintaining manned stations, docking, crew and supply transfers, etc. We already have the experience and know which works best. But let them make their own mistakes. They many even pull off their entire program through lunar landing in their own fashion, but their particular path isn't the most efficient or effective. Perhaps the hard way will be the best way to learn. OTOH, they may develop technology and techniques we didn't because we didn't need to.
FFmpeg is extremely powerful and versatile. Those words are, for the newer user, synonymous with difficult and confusing when the program is based on command line or a very simplistic front end. FFmpeg is very fully implimented (along with MEncoder, ffmpeg2theora and RealProducer) in the free audio and video format and parameter conversion front end software SUPER, from erightsoft.com. Free to download and use but not FOSS: small loss since it is, after all, intended for the majority of users who'd have trouble running such as FFmpeg native, those users hardly likely to want the source anyway. There are very few functions of the internal programs not implemented (setting a max output file size is one of the few). SUPER is extremely powerful while having every available function made as obvious as possible (and all have float-over hints), making it also useful as a training device for learning audio and video compression and conversion. The authors of SUPER clearly and repeatedly insist that their program is simply a front end, and that all credit for the power inside their program go to the programs they've built their around, and the authors thereof.
A minor beef is they require you to use IE with security settings low in order to download it as well as participate in the (very well attended by the authors) chat area. The 5 year span since the last FFmpeg release is a complete surprise to me, a daily user of SUPER, because there's so much more of that program available through the front end than I ever use.
I purchased DivXPro so I could convert everything to DivX, in order to play it on my DivX capable home DVD player. I found SUPER (with which I run FFmpeg almost exclusively for video) to be so much more powerful, flexible and faster, that I made the comment in the chat area that "SUPER does for free what others can't do for money". They liked that phrase so much that they adopted it as a motto. This is the sole association I have with the folks from erightsoft's SUPER project, just so your sure this is a testimonial, not an advertisement. One other small beef, they won't let you put it up for download elsewhere, even with the best of intentions on the sites with the best reputations. You can only get it from them.
I'm quite confident that SUPER will make use of the greater power of the new FFmpeg. I'm less confident I and most of the other users who just want to make things go will learn all about them. For those that do want to learn about them, the SUPER front end provides an a priori description of what will happen if you select each.
Bring it on -- no doubt erightsoft is already working on the new impplementation. In the mean time, check out the current version to find out how powerful FFmpeg already is. I'll bet you'll be surprised.
http://www.powerfilmsolar.com/
Flexible, thin film cells.
I use their components for rocketry.
Very tough stuff.
A perfect candidate for the first annual award ceremony.
Terrorists don't bomb maps, they bomb people, places and things. If the general population can find the place despite blurring so can the terrorists. If one can't, the latter can't, and nobody can use it.
This is far too st00pid be be based on the stated intent. He's grandstanding for PR.
The first reply makes it quite clear that Google cannot have a "monopoly" over anything free. Paying for it unnecessarily and voluntarily was a kind gesture on Google's part.
If Google is to be lambasted for "only" paying up to $300 per work, then what's to be said of Project Gutenburg, which has been giving away text of out of copyright books for years, and has paid the authors absolutely nothing?
What's to be made of it all is TFA is a misguided, biased to the point of fictionalizing of details, underhanded attempt to foist tinfoil hat quality editorializing on /. in the guise of news. Had the MafIAA attempted to collect on out-of-copyright works, they'd be laughed out of court and rightfully humiliated in the press. That's the kind of treatment TFA deserves.
Because the dust is deep... several meters IIRC.
No, 10 centimeters at best. See http://www.bautforum.com/conspiracy-theories/5770-lunar-dust.html for calculation and reference as well as some other points relevant to my statements.
Most still apply Cartesian dualism (mind and brain as separate phenomena) to the brain. This error has propagated from Decartes' own self-admitted fear of The Church. He feared being persecuted as was Galileo unless he offered a sacrosanct seat for the soul. Scientifically he had no such leanings. Nor should we now, with our understanding of dynamics in complex systems. (Not to say we understand the complex system of the brain -- we don't -- but we know better why we don't.) It is probably best to consider mind in terms of process rather than object ("the" mind). More simply, "Brain is a noun, mind is a verb. Mind is what brain does." (Karl Pribram)
The subjects under consideration in TFA are no more engineering than bashing millions of atomic particles together in an accelerator is quantum engineering. Compared to the subtle and highly interdependent Hebbian cellular assemblies where processing occurs, they are massive invasive assaults.
To consider (as per the example) changes in personality only in terms of electrical and surgical interventions exemplifies the engineering slant and belies the lack of understanding of the neuro-. Changes in personality also occur due to chemical (including dietary) influences, as well as environmental factors during (life-long) development, not to mention social and other learning factors. If the ethical questions are regarding "self" and its generation, all must be considered. Thus these should not be considered (and are not) new questions for bioethics. Given the lack of subtlety of the interventions discussed, they should hardly even be grounds for considering a new outlook on the questions.
Changes in personality are probably the worst example to use. Our best understanding of personality is based on statistical correlations of test answers, self-reports and observations by trained and familiar observers, the best of which reach r=0.3 (30% correlation). That means they can explain less than 10% (for r=0.3, r^2=0.09) of the variance in the observations. Leaving 90% of the variance unexplained means you've said almost nothing useful. Since much of basic personality theory statistics are based on subjective consideration of the data ("trained" judgement in how much to rotate axis of plotted data to maximize the results) as well as subjective judgement of test results themselves (ie. inkblot test scoring) we're probably explaining for closer to 0% of the variance. Any results, then, are as illusory as personality itself.
That last statement is ironic -- an anti-truism. Despite the failure of science (especially statistics) to prove the existence of personality and its components, we continue to exhibit them. The failure is probably in our understanding and the language thereof. That being said, what was said regarding personality in TFA probably shouldn't have been either because despite the consensual agreement of its existence, we don't know much at all about what we're talking about.
Many small vs. one large makes good sense in case of failure(s). Either way, why not blast the dust away as the preparation stage? A squadron of small crawlers with a high gas expansion motor (for simplicity, monopropellant such as UDMH, as in Shuttle steering thrusters or H2O2 as in Armadillo's landers) pointed ahead and slightly down. They'd line up side by side, crawl away from the base site, blasting the dust away in front of them like a line of snow blowers.
Yes, this design might require more mass to be sent to the moon initially due to the mass of reaction gas. However it leaves a bunch of functional crawlers for other tasks plus a bunch of functional motors that can be used to construct suborbital lifters.
If there's water ice, they could be constructed to harvest it, use the solar UV to convert it to H2O2, and be self-refilling. This would be slower because where there's ice there's less sunlight. Armadillo's designs would be very likely to be adaptable because they've built not only H2O2 lifter motors, but also H2O2 production facilities. A digger/UV/vacuum design is very different from their fuel production design (quite likely far more reliable), but they have some experience with the subject, and already have award money for designing landers.
Three days notice. 20 to 50 meter diameter. Assume it's dense rock and a vertical impact trajectory into the ocean (avg. 1000 m depth).
Impact energy 116 kT to 1.8 MT. Very near the lowest energy potential impact of the known NEOs, actually. Not relevant here since the object quite clearly misses. But if and when one doesn't miss, someplace is going to catch a small to medium nuke sized blast, and there won't be time to do squat about it.
My money says we'll have the capability to defend ourselves against such an impact. The second time.
They want to sue investors and tech companies? Good. It will be suicide for them. They'll have to sue AOL for funding the development of Napster. In so doing they'll have to sue Time Warner, a member of the RIAA. Not to do so will show bias between members and non-members, making all their claims questionable and if I'm not mistaken leave them open to a RICO suit.
The news from the last year or two is misleading in saying Napster acquired AOL Music. AOL already held interest in Napster because they funded its development. Pages on AOL's web site stating this were major points used by Harlan Ellison's attorneys in Ellison v. Remarq, AOL and Various John Does. AOL's attorneys appeared to be completely unaware of this relationship which placed AOL firmly opposite to its own claims of being anti-sharing.
Such corporate merging, spin-off and reacquisition is a common occurrence giving surface activity for various legal and financial reasons while the investors and holding companies retain ownership all along. Whether the Mafiaa's landsharks are unaware of the above, or (more likely IMO) hoping the defense attorneys and the judged are, makes little difference as long as the relevant courts can be made aware of the information. Anyone interested in the specific supporting details can contact Charlie Petit at authorslawyer.com.
... Google should get. It wants you to name all those people? That's Sergey Brin and Larry Page. All of them. Google wants email addresses? Get a gmail account, tag them all with it, spoof yourself with it, and then surf a couple dozen porn sites and post to a bunch of usenet groups. Google wants mail? Give it to them.
The question that occurs to me, and likely will to any potential employers worth considering, if why, if it's so obvious that it's not you, are you trying so hard to make that point? Yes, there may be employers less capable of sussing it out. If they're going to take any random web site as valid without verifying it, you don't want to work for them. I'd say and do nothing and wait for the issue to be raised, and if it is, ask to be provided with a copy of any verifications they've done on such material.
Not likely to help much but for consideration: some attempt to take anything as valid if it appears formatted properly. An employer of mine did. I provided them with a copy of an email, including complete headers, from Pope John Paul II to Yasir Arafat, playing dozens with their respective holy figures ("Your prophet is so fat..."). It still took a while to get my point across, so dense were they. Had I provided it on disk instead of paper, they'd probably still be convinced of its authenticity despite both persons being deceased. That one fell to late under the "don't want to work for them" category.
TFA is more than most hyping of background and implications of a minor advancement, written so as to appear TFA is the origin. But this time there are even falsehoods in the summary.
The study tests a very physiologically based instinct and the effect if the drug to alter that response. Altering a physiological reaction is not the same as blocking part of a memory. Startle response is easily reduced in almost everyone by giving a startling or even sub-startling stimulus 1/2 second prior to the target. Nobody would dare argue that a stimulus prevents the effect of another simply because the body is unable to react to a second startle stimulus fast enough.
Recent research does not show that memories must be reconsolidated. Memories are constructed heuristically from components stored by association with prior stimuli similar to the present stimulus. The fastest good enough result to provide adequate response is accepted. Virtually never is anything recalled entirely accurately. It is during this construction phase that alterations from the original can and do occur. Such memories can be "meddled with" after this phase, as it is being held in consciousness. It is not because this memory exists in a malleable form, but rather because the brain continually refreshes the memory with a new construction, usually more accurate with time as new information (correct or not) becomes incorporated.
My much longer summary didn't get used, so I'll pass out some relevant links.
NASA Near Earth Object program: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/index.html
Impact risks are within. Pertinent to this article are the size estimates which are based on albedo (visual reflectivity) and so the mass and impact damage estimates.
The UK research team calculated that there should be 300 to 3000 dark comet bodies in system. We know of about 25, so there may be up to 100 times more. Current known Near Earth Asteroids total around 6000, with a similar estimate of ratio of known to unknown (1 : 10 to 100). Thus dark asteroids might be around 1% of total impact threat. It's how easily they're located that's the subject of TFA. We know they exist. Deep Space 1 investigated one of them.
Comets are listed under by the NEO program as Near Earth Comets. TFA stresses that completely outgassed comets may not appear easily in visible light as they would be mostly carbonaceous at the surface and have little coma. These would be pretty much invisible to visible light telescopes which are what are used by the NEO program. They would be more easily detected in the infrared (absorbed visible light has to re-radiate, and does so as heat). Space telescopes such as Spitzer would work great. Figure the odds on getting such devices brought to task when there's more 'important' science to be done.
The mass of these objects would be far less than similarly sized rocky bodies, and they would tend to be smaller overall. Consider a spongey body made of soft, runny (with chunks), powdery carbonaceous materials (including hydrocarbons), light gasses such as methane and some water. Cram that sucker into the atmosphere at miles per second. It will deform and take on the shape of the bow shock. The materials will vaporize and the hot vapor will be forced into the oxygen of the atmosphere. Given the relative softness, there's a good chance such a body will explode as an air burst rather than impact the surface/ocean.
An air burst including rapid oxidation of the material at the bow shock would look much like a fuel/air bomb: rapid expansion followed by implosion due to oxygen depletion. Say, 100 square miles of trees knocked down around ground zero but no visible burning because the burst would be at altitude. No remenants to be found because it all burnt up. Tunguska. Mass estimate 1/3 that of a rocky body.
Fearmongering? Three points:
1. 2008 TC3 was discovered October 6 2008. It was predicted to impact the next day. It did, over Sudan. It happens, several times a century, and now we know we can predict them correctly.
2. Dark cometary bodies would be harder to detect, with larger bodies being discovered only this early, if at all. If limited to ground based telescopes, the 'if at all' applies.
3. Impact risks are calculated per body. As more are detected, total known impact risk grows. Sum down the 4th column (cumulative impact risk) of the tables at http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/index.html to get the total cumulative impact risk over the next 100 years for the bodies presently known. As a rough estimate, multiply by 10 to include the bodies not yet detected.
It occurs to me that an individual might be responsible for causing an auto accident several times during their life time. Call it 'several times per century'. The risk is similar to that of an impact by a near earth object. If the combined cumulative impact risk estimate is, in your estimation, inconsequential, put your money where your math is -- drive around without insurance.
That's what a good deal of what "instincts" are better called. Such behaviors occur sometimes in animals that do not learn from their parents or other functioning adults. In order for these to exist, they had to have been incorporated genetically. Since the species did not exist at some time in the past, the species and the behavior had to have evolved concurrently. Surgical excision of the part of the brain known to relate to a behavior disrupts the behavior. If there were no pathway for acquired behaviors to be passed along genetically we'd all still be oozing around in a pool of slime mold. This is yet another 'science' article about a minor aspect of a known phenomenon, written in such a way as to make it seem this recent contribution discovered and/or explains it. If this occurs in 9 out of 10 articles on /. it's because that's how often it occurs in what now passes as science writing in the media.
Blindness can be induced by paralyzing the ocular muscles and immobilizing the head. This was done decades ago using curare. If the visual field remains constant, there is a loss of visual contrast until everything greys out. With practice this can be done by forcing the eyes to remain focused on a point. The visual system detects edges via saccades, movement or both, and fills in the remainder via a combination of detection and heuristic recognition. The process description and references are in Karl Pribram's book "Brain and Perception" (the same book erroneously blamed for the "holography" ridiculousity). We used a similar technique on rats in his lab to negate visual input while measuring whisker input, the bottom line of which was to show the calculation process in both to be very similar.
The old SciAm article others mention was probably "What The Frog's Eye Tells The Frog's Brain", which describes that the frog detects motion by remaining still so that the visual field blanks, and waiting for motion to cross the visual field and so become visible. If the visual system was always detecting everything, it would run slower and the frog would be less able to react quickly and snatch the flying insect out of the air with its tongue.
The article summary is wrong in that saccades have been understood for years. TFA is a novel contribution in the sense that it describes the process of illusory motion. Yet this is not entirely novel since it is a variation of the spinning room illusion familiar to anyone who's tried to lay down after too much to drink, as well as the 'waterfall illusion' wherein things appear to be moving upward after having watched a waterfall for some time.
But the "maintaining a coherent image" stuff? 50 years old. Karl took the curare trip himself in the 50s. Luckily he had the foresight to use a ventilator also. Curare paralyzes the diaphragm as well.