You could work in neuroscience research labs or other non-CS labs, all over. Most of them require a specific hardware/software manager who also does programming. You end up doing about half as much as you otherwise would. What programming you do would get done according to very specific parameters, so it's not that stressful. There's even wall street firms that hire newb CS guys. You start out assupport, but you get your chance to move up.
J. Edgar Hoover was in charge when the polygraph was sold to the FBI by no less an expert than the artist that drew Wonder Woman. So who would be getting the kickbacks this time?
Not sure what the point is. How can a person's expertise elsewhere have a bearing on their expertise in this subject? The puppet maker and performer that made Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smith household words in the fifties invented the artificial heart. So, did the person who drew Wonder Woman know his electrophysiology or not? You've done half your homework, finish it up. And while you're looking, did he not promote polygraph for interrogation of suspected criminals rather than screening for intent as it came to be used?
The FAST system detects physiological signs of stress. In testing it detected "hostile intent" in volunteers. The obvious question is how can volunteers have valid hostile intent? You can't test deception with fake deception. The generalizability of physiological response to stressors is a basic tenet of physiological psychology (the folks who brought you FAST's grand dad, the polygraph).
The volunteers knew they were volunteers in a study and in no danger. In practice, this device will trigger on every person who is nervous about flying, because the physiological markers for stress are the same regardless of the reason. There will be many, many more of those than with 'hostile intent'. The test study was unable to have adequate control (real, naive persons) to prove its claim.
Most people can learn simple biofeedback techniques to control physiological reactions to some degree. Those with hostile intent don't need to get very good at it, they just need to be able to control it better than an untrained person with a fear of flying.
FAST isn't supposed to work. Its owners know it can't. It's just supposed to be believable enough to convince the public that it could catch bad guys to increase public confidence, and to convince the government that further funding is warranted.
Stick the designers in it and ask them if it can tell hostile intent from fear of flying (and base GAO investigation of the program upon the result, to make it more salient). They'll say yes. Either it'll trigger and show them to be lying, or it won't and so it doesn't work.
Many small earthquakes may or may not be a sign of increased pressure, but it's definitely a sign of increased release of pressure. Not being released in small increments could mean a major quake later.
Rather than worrying about lots of earthquakes, maybe we should be worried when there's a lack of them.
There, that should give the professional Doomsdayologists in the media plenty to write about, since the lack of seismic activity almost everywhere may be a sign of impending (sometime, maybe, who knows, but let's call it this anyway) doom.
Language is whatever conveys meaning that is mutually understood between the speaker and the listener.
English, in particular, has no governing body that dictates the proper use of the language. I am fairly offended that these people have appointed themselves as some kind quasi-arbiter of our language.
2/3 of human communication is non-verbal. It conveys meaning and is mutually understood to some degree (culturally dependent). It is comprised of kinesics, proxemics and chronemics, and except for thew subest comprised of predetermined signs (sign language) is not language.
As for the rest, do yourself a favor and go look at the section this article is in, and see if you can't head off that impending valium deficiency.
The government wants to gives us free wireless broadband, now without content restriction.
This is the same government that conducted warrantless wiretapping. If they own the bitwaves, there's less barrier to the same occurring.
If there's restrictions, people wanting privacy will go elsewhere. If the restrictions are lifted, people will be more likely to feel safe using it for more sensitive matters. The government will be more able to catch more people.
Can anyone conceive of a better way for the government to maximize its chances of catching people doing things they find undesirable while minimizing its chances of getting in trouble and so having to stop?
Comparative neuroanatomy findings indicate that all the various animals have identical brains that evolved identically, and that they all operate on a single function through a single pathway.
I could go on but I'm not going to page through the article to pick at it more, and in so doing satisfy their click-through quota.
I used to really like the old, stodgy, stuffy SciAm. It said what it meant clearly and didn't end up with an oral-pedal inversion by trying to say more than was warranted, or that it felt it had to pump up with hype in the name of market share.
I like the new SciAm too, but I liked it better when it was called OMNI.
Once again, "confirm" is to be taken as "finds the thing we already knew was there", rather than the implied "found, and the data verified". More than 700 kg of lunar material has been returned by Apollo and Luna. We have a very good understanding of the content. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_rock
The actual main point of TFA is that the NASA device detects what it should if it were working properly, and so should, barring other problems, be able to map the surface in terms of mineral content. If and when it does, that will be news. Saying "it's not broke so far" isn't very newsworthy.
In the absence of substantive discoveries of its own (which I have no doubt will occur; there's much to learn and the Indian team is quite capable), ISRO tends to sound like the little brother tagging along with the big kids, chattering on about how he's a big kid now too, despite just being there as opposed to actually having done big kid stuff (TFA *is* about a NASA device, after all). In the mean time, the big kids might find it annoying, but you're not doing it for them, so get excited, wave that flag, and have a ball. Heck, I remember Houston breaking into cheers just because Apollo 8 fired its motor for trans-lunar insertion, a far cry from actually making it.
Patience guys, if you don't have a significant primary discovery all your own in 90 days (for the data; confirmatory analysis may take a while longer), either you're not trying or it broke.
"In addition to your PC, Microsoft also discloses plans to bring the chargeback scheme to your cellphone and automobile â" GPS, satellite radio, backseat video entertainment system."
Ever since AOL courted Time-Warner, marrying pay-for provider and pay-for content, the plans were always an eventual pay-per-anything net economy. MS has enough embedded device coverage now or planned, and fairly developed DRM, that they could become the first such provider. Whoever is, will become the defacto clearing house for content owners, essentially becoming the content front for the mafiAA.
As for the homework deal, consider the fact that kids won't buy it -- parents will. The system that calculates the metering will report in detail the usage to the parents. The electronic babysitter of the future will also be a tattle tale. OTOH, it will provide for a great new excuse when work is lost to the BSOD: "Bill Gates ate my homework."
Value means that something is inherently important or has become important through previous experience and reinforcement. The source of "value" is irrelevant; anything that is important is so because the experience has primed us to respond. That the brain should reflect such activity is not only trivial, it's well established.
TFA does not examine "value". It examines the effect of reinforcement to an arbitrary choice to subsequent choices. The paradigm used is a "go-no go" design. There's nothing in the study that differentiates value from simple learning and response selection.
Particularly egregious is the author's attempt to connect this poorly designed research to addiction. If this held, then the more something costs the more addictive it should be, and the less valuable it is the less addictive: free heroin is not habit forming.
The same visual technique can also be used to spot dim satellites. Start out fully de-focused looking over the entire sky. Before long, you'll feel an 'urge' to look to a particular place. DO NOT do so. Instead, look near that point but not quite focused. Then you can see the rather dim light moving slowly against the background. It may appear to blink out occasionally if you let it get too close to your central vision (it is a constant brightness, the blinking is a visual artifact).
It's also how those with very good or well corrected vision can see Mizar's visual double Alcor (the star in the center of the Big Dipper's handle). The separation is enough, but Alcor is much dimmer and difficult to perceive, especially with current levels of light pollution.
It's not the same. I've been an amateur astronomer for over 4 decades and am very familiar with the technique. It's based on the fact that the more light sensitive rods are squeezed out of the central visual field by the color sensitive cones, making things only a few degrees off center appear brighter. The off-center technique still results in conscious perception. Blindsight/night vision does not. OTOH, that makes night vision suck for astronomy; it does no good to look if you don't know you're seeing it.
Come to think on it now, it seems to me night vision requires movement, or a change in the visual field from not-there to there in the manner of a blink comparator. When I used night vision, if I wasn't moving I had to pan around to use it.
Let's say that up until now you haven't had the ability to monitor documents to the extent specified. You can't prove whether or not the leak occurred from within your domain. Neither can they: they don't have the ability either, or you'd know. So, neither can they can't disprove your (forthcoming) assertion that the leak came from within their domain, and you can't support it. But as we can see commonly happen, accusations carry more weight than mere questions, rightly or wrongly. Accusing them will wake them up and put you on even footing. From then on you can develop a mutually acceptable and workable security system.
It'll have to be rigorous, as in enlisting the OS to assist. Otherwise one could simply copy the file and open it outside a secured domain. And that too will take oversight, by one such as a security admin who'll be able to track the file's circulation including any instances of it being copied. Note that opening for editing constitutes an explicit copy until (at least) the changes are saved, which would show up, and copying the data from memory to a swap file would constitute an implicit copy that wouldn't normally get reported. It could, however, be used to grab a copy (of a copy) of the file just as we used to use a browser's cache for grabbing copies of streamed media that weren't otherwise easily snagged.
Of course you could use the information above to show they can't support their assertion and so you could sue them for defamation. Better, you could give them the choice of that or joining you in investigating the security problems and solutions, and possibly investigating the competitor for espionage. Once again, accusations can carry a lot of weight. But then the competitor might be willing to join the investigation in order to be able to track their own as well as (as could everyone) prove that any infringements didn't come from their domain. The best security comes when all are watchers and all watch each other in the open.
Plekto, are you reading my mind? I purposefully withheld mention of my own night vision. You supplied not only details of it, but of how I developed it. Your accounting tells the tale so exactly it's almost spooky. But given the mind that I have, it ends up as considering how much more likely I am to be able to find and test enough people in a similar task in order to determine why some have this and others do not.
One point of contention, there are not "some women that see in 4 colors". There are some people called tetrachromats who have four color receptors. They do not see four colors, they see the same appx. 3.5 million colors. They just have better color acuity (they can tell the difference between two colors better).
There are two distinct causes of blindsight (and deafhearing and alien limb syndrome), damage to the primary sensory cortext but not the secondary or assosiation cortices, and damage to the association cortex, but not the sensory.
The latter is easy to explain. The person can perceive, but can't incorporate the fact of it into their conscious experience. They can't "own" the perception. This is very often found in damage to the somatosensory cortex which leaves partial paralysis. Often the person can't perceive the limb attached to their body as 'theirs'. Sensations in the limb do not become perceptions for them. Similarly, vison and hearing can occur, and the brain can make use of the data, but the person can't perceive it because it's not coming from "them".
The former is harder to explain. There seems to be a parallel visual (and auditory) system through which information can pass and the brain make use of, but which bypasses the association cortex. The person can't perceive normally, but if tested they react as if they can. They can, for instance, consistently "guess" the number of fingers shown them. There is a similar system for somatosensory. Perception of touch to, say, the hand, has highly detailed "maps" elsewhere on the body. For the hand it's on the cheek and on the back just below the shoulder. Just why this secondary pathway exists is a mystery. But it does, in most people.
Around 20 years ago in Coevolution Quarterly there was an article about a 'school' in (IIRC) New Mexico that taught people to use their blindsight to navigate in the desert at night. The secondary visual pathway that persons with the second form of blindsight use, exists intact in everybody. It's not something you develop because of damage, it's something that's there in case you need it but below the level of consciousness so as not to interfere with normal perception. Occasionaly hunters, hiker/campers or survival technique practioners will hear of a person who can literally run through a pitch black forest without running into anything. These people have the ability to react to the subliminal perception from the secondary visual system in what occurs to them as instinctive reactions because they don't consciously perceive anything.
Above posted modded "interesting" should be modded "funny". For those that didn't get the joke, it appears to be an ironic attempt to apply the "El Naschie" technique in a Slashdot comment. He's basically throwing around a lot of unfounded complicated nonsense signifying nothing in an attempt to get modded up. Much as "El Naschie" does the same in his papers when really it's just, IMHO, a stream of conciousness drooling on the keyboard crackpot spew.
The above is an attempt to discredit based solely upon repetition of the only tactic they seem to have at their disposal, unsupportable assertion. It is a weak, transparent attempt. I salute your effort if not the result.
When I mean to be funny, I can get it published in such as "The Best Of AIR". When I mean to be serious I can diagnose. When I mean to out a net.kook or collection thereof, I do so with clear intent, just as I have above.
Claims of being funny, including being modded as such, only work in my favor. More will read it than if it appeared serious. By now far more have read it than read the math blog which is the source of irritation, and credit for that is in part yours. I appreciate your attempts to assist me. Feel free to continue.
You may be interested to know that the blog's author invented the Crackpot Index.
Thanks, I checked it out. It's weak. I've seen much better.
You might be interested to know that the commenter (myself) is a kookologist of long standing, and was a frequent contributor of both administration and material to the operations of alt.usenet.kooks and the many kookological awards dispensed. I've studied networkish psychoceramics for well over a decade. I know it when I see it, whether it's in its natural native form, is developed intentionally as an art form (Meow), or is an effort conducted in response to a perceived kook of choice with or without wrong doing directed at those exhibiting kookness. TFA is of the last form, and I suspect perceived wrongdoing against them to be the driving force.
It does not help the cause of the sole source of criticism, a math blog from U. Texas, to have ostensibly technical criticism asserting incorrectness but admitting ignorance (see second link in summary). The author takes issue with some points in an article of which he has some experience. However, he points out several things that he has no knowledge of and admits as much. He then asserts from this admitted position of ignorance that the material with which has is not familiar is somehow fraudulent. To make that claim valid the author would have to be able to determine that with certainty, but he can't.
This technical criticism is produced in support of a posting elsewhere in the same blog, the author of which makes the same sort of assertions, and likewise fails to support most of them. In fact he can produce partial support for only one, and then claims support from others which is not produced. Some of this supposedly comes from his own administration which he admits does not support his work pursuing the matter.
I take no position with regards to the central issue. I've seen a couple journals with very incestuous editorial policies and staffs. It makes it hard for others to get published. However, the situation evolved into this because those people did a lot of work with each other, not because any of it was fraudulent, so this can happen in an absence of any wrong doing.
Claims of wrong doing are extremely serious, as the occurrence of such things are. Such claims should be supportable. The claims made in TFA that are supportable are not of evidence wrong doing, and claims of wrong doing are unsupported, and by admission, unsupportable by those making them. As far as I can tell this is a single blog's flamefest with more crackpot value than what they claim is due their target.
In short, the accusers appear to be embedded in at least as much pot and crack as they accuse others of, failing utterly to differentiate themselves from kettle. They may have a valid point, but they fail to show it, instead making themselves look all the worse through the use of reciprocal psychoceramics.
I've never seen a definition of "space" that was based on the altitude of the ionosphere before. I've never seen a claim that the ionosphere was at a certain altitude, rather than a range with upper and lower bounds before. Most articles I see give about a 500 to 600 km altitude range, such as http://www.dcs.lancs.ac.uk/iono/ionosphere_intro/
Still, that's the ionosphere, not "space", and it's subject to wide variations of many different periods. TFA fails to show whether the result is a permanent feature or simply the measurement they found. It can hardly be anything other than the latter because there have been many, many measurements of the ionosphere, starting with numerous sounding rockets during the International Geophysical Year, 1957-58. TFA fails to account for their one results being at odds with many others.
And by "space" they mean "outer space", ie. outside the earth's atmosphere. If they meant simply "space", it could be the simple Euclidian definition of 3 extent dimensions. As such, we all exist in "space".
"Three days hardly seems enough time to reconfigure a national network."
It's not. OTOH it's about 3 times longer than I expect it to take for a work-around patch to appear on one platform or another, and the same amount of time it'll take to get it ported to most of the others, as well as other common work-arounds such as proxies to become common knowledge.
IMO the Minister of Information Blockage simply refuses to admit the effort has failed before launch and is trying to scare those who don't have the savvy to realize this.
I'm sorry to say, this SSP white paper is simply that--a piece of paper with a pie-in-the-sky proposal that is unlikely to get funded to the same extent as fusion energy by the DOE.
I almost added some similar editorializing to the submission, but opted to leave it as it was. I'm also very skeptical of the proposal itself. However, I find the interest in it as compared to the other proposals on change.gov to be encouraging. This is especially so since Obama was at first hardly pro-space. Their interest in this proposal is another step away from that stance. And I believe Obama's team still to be capable of being influenced and directed to better things. This proposal is too far off, but it makes a good focus point for choosing a more positive direction. O'Neill's ideas were similarly distant, but they persist as well developed starting points.
When you see such hype-marks as "undeniable facts" (you can deny anything; something's status as a fact won't change with or without denial), you can be pretty certain that you're seeing the work of a True Believer. Pro- or con- is irrelevant, they all sound the same. So convinced are they of the "proof" of the "evidence" (both being assertions, typically having circular reasoning connecting them).
Chapter 1 starts off with such an error: "Acupuncture, homeopathy, chiropractic have plenty of first-person anecdotes, but a lack of controlled studies with real data to back up their spurious claims." At the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine exists to oversee such ongoing studies. Results of such work are reported as journal articles listed in the National Library of Medicine's PubMed (entire alternative medicine journals exist and are referenced) and in consumer-friendly format in their MedlinePlus. Both positive and negative results are reported. On the NCCAM page itself there is an article summary about testing "essentially worthless" acupuncture with fMRI (the worthless results are positive; acupuncture has an effect that sham acupuncture doesn't), as well as several regarding "limited value" herbal treatments (as opposed to really-truly-scientific stuff which has unlimited value? Hype-marks).
I have no idea if the authors have ever heard of NCCAM. I do know that PubMed has heard of Edzard Ernst. He has published many cautiously positive articles on alternative therapies. He seems to favor the summary phrase "encouraging but not compelling", an empty weasel-phrase that can be applied with validity but no effect to most any bit of science. He even seems to favor it in cases the book claims are "essentially worthless".
What we have here is a book that pretends to science under the guise of "skepticism", which is in fact one pole of the True Believer scale. Like most who make the same pretense, they fail to grasp that skepticism is an activity internal to science, requiring rejection of belief and acceptance of only supportable data and logic, not an a priori stance one can take. That is, unless one wants to reel in the gullable masses with entertainment framed in the manner they too accept as valid in their attempts to claim superiority with evidence that isn't, including considering lack of as evidence.
Perhaps, as the reviewer states, this is an important and eye opening book. Hopefully some eyes will be opened to the fact that hiding behind "skepticism" provides a subjective acceptance of material that under objective assessment would be fraudulent. To take it a step farther, if a researcher makes claims of one sort in one place and of the opposite in another, yet claims to be carrying out science, such hypocrisy should earn an investigation into whether the misconduct happening is scientific or journalistic, or both.
Note that I do not take the reviewer to task here. His purpose was to review the book, not the field. I happen to have experience in the field through the NCCAM's earlier form, the Office of Alternative Medicine, as well as in conducting and reviewing science. It is indicative of the pervasiveness of the problem of True Believers hiding behind science to find that one reason for the reorganization of OAM into NCCAM was to eliminate from its ranks those who sought to protect the unwashed from themselves based on appeal to (their own) authority, failing miserably to do so with much scientific rigor, or integrity. A prime example of the problem that required solving was research applications to OAM on alternative therapies being rejected because (and it said it right out loud) "the therapy proposed is not accepted as having scientific value." That mind set is part and parcel with the mindset that finds herbal therapies to be of "limited value" and fails to note that the vast majority of pharmacology exists because compounds of value were found in and/or derived from plants.
How many different independent forces could have influenced Beagle? Represent each with a variable. Calculate how many emergent properties could have influenced the craft (those arising from interactions between main variables). Assign these a variable. Estimate the range of values for each variable. Calculate the dynamics of each variable (ie. linear, logarithmic, hyperbolic, etc., including estimation of those whose behavior does not fit a simple function, instead requiring complex functions). For each variable, estimate a reasonable granularity (they may be analog, but the resulting computation would include infinities, so digitizing is necessary). Calculate the matrix necessary to represent all the possible results. Determine whether the calculations could be completed in polynomial time. Almost certainly not, so estimate how many variables (and their dynamics) must be retained and drop the rest. Calculate the solutions matrix for this reduced set. Check for polynomial time solution. If no, reduce yet again. With each reduction estimate the error range introduced, and whether any of them are unacceptable and the prior value retained.
Estimate the amount of computational power/time necessary to complete the solutions matrix, including the cost of buying/building/renting/etc. and your available resources. Calculate how many orders of magnitude there are between what's necessary to solve the problem and what you have to work with. From that estimate how much you have to reduce the solutions matrix in order to be able to arrive at some solutions, as well as how inaccurate any results will be.
Once you have the calculation of the solution set down to polynomial time and within your budget, look at how inaccurate your results will be. If the accuracy is found to be acceptable, and the calculation therefore worth doing, chances are you've made a mistake in your estimations. Almost certainly the inaccuracy will become too great before your reductions result in a solvable problem. Also note that the minimal matrix dimension will probably not be an integer. Choosing the best number of variables would be trivial, as you simply choose the next highest integer. However just because the solution here is between N and N+1 does not mean that there is only one variable with a fractional influence; estimate how many and which variables are best characterized as non-integers and select the best set of variables to use in the model. Calculate how far back into non-polynomial time your solution estimate has drifted, or at best how far over your resource budget the calculations will require.
Take a dose of analgesic of your choice sufficient to eliminate your headache. Begin building a model using the minimum number of (integer) variables necessary to arrive at a variable/value set that produces a result matching the behavior of the phenomenon you wish to model. Ignore the probability calculations that would indicate how likely it is you're wrong, and how many such wrong solutions you'll arrive at before you happen on a possibly right solution. Instead of using probability estimates to calculate statistical significance of any calculated solution, use the fact that a solution can be found that results in the same behavior as the one to be modeled, and wrongly call that accidental similarity 'practical significance'. Publish a factually unsupportable assertion that your model describes what happened based only on the fact that your model achieves the same result and count on the fact that nobody else on your research team, or anyone for that matter, is capable of accomplishing the necessary calculations described here to conclusively state you're wrong, or at best that you can't say you're right.
Estimate the positive influence the number of publications, regardless of validity, has on the probability of receiving future funding and amount thereof. Conclude that minimal-guess "modeling" provides you with the ability to say something that sounds reasonable whereas attempting to achieve real validity would take too
You can't develop a standard if you don't have similar technologies, and wireless power developers so far have been coming up with all kinds of different technologies. Remove the part of TFA that makes no sense in light of this, and you end up with an advertisement for this "consortium" disguised as a press release, faithfully and unquestioningly reproduced by PC Authority. Had PC Authority tried to do real journalism rather than simple reproduction, they'd have found that not only are the major proposed schemes so different that the idea of standardization is ridiculous, but that some of the members of the consortium aren't even developing any of those schemes.
"But there is still a lot of terrain left for the fox, and we've seen little more than a glimmer of fur."
That's a damn stretch from "confirms", especially coming from a primary in the research.
All the study confirmed was that early galaxies appear to have behaved in a manner as though gravity were different or affected by another force. It doesn't mean they did, it means their observations can be taken that way. It doesn't mean there was dark energy, it means they don't seem to act as though they not affected by gravity then as they would be now. The data support the delta-g (gravity changing over time) theory as much as dark energy. Other data makes it less likely (clumpiness in these an similar observations), but my argument is with the difference between the headline and the substance in TFA. If NYT is going to report everything as though it were common news, with the emphasis on spectacularism for the sake of sales, they should respect what science is supposed to be like (ie. accurate and objective to the extent possible) and not touch it.
Slashdot Mirror
You could work in neuroscience research labs or other non-CS labs, all over. Most of them require a specific hardware/software manager who also does programming. You end up doing about half as much as you otherwise would. What programming you do would get done according to very specific parameters, so it's not that stressful. There's even wall street firms that hire newb CS guys. You start out assupport, but you get your chance to move up.
J. Edgar Hoover was in charge when the polygraph was sold to the FBI by no less an expert than the artist that drew Wonder Woman. So who would be getting the kickbacks this time?
Not sure what the point is. How can a person's expertise elsewhere have a bearing on their expertise in this subject? The puppet maker and performer that made Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smith household words in the fifties invented the artificial heart. So, did the person who drew Wonder Woman know his electrophysiology or not? You've done half your homework, finish it up. And while you're looking, did he not promote polygraph for interrogation of suspected criminals rather than screening for intent as it came to be used?
The FAST system detects physiological signs of stress. In testing it detected "hostile intent" in volunteers. The obvious question is how can volunteers have valid hostile intent? You can't test deception with fake deception. The generalizability of physiological response to stressors is a basic tenet of physiological psychology (the folks who brought you FAST's grand dad, the polygraph).
The volunteers knew they were volunteers in a study and in no danger. In practice, this device will trigger on every person who is nervous about flying, because the physiological markers for stress are the same regardless of the reason. There will be many, many more of those than with 'hostile intent'. The test study was unable to have adequate control (real, naive persons) to prove its claim.
Most people can learn simple biofeedback techniques to control physiological reactions to some degree. Those with hostile intent don't need to get very good at it, they just need to be able to control it better than an untrained person with a fear of flying.
FAST isn't supposed to work. Its owners know it can't. It's just supposed to be believable enough to convince the public that it could catch bad guys to increase public confidence, and to convince the government that further funding is warranted.
Stick the designers in it and ask them if it can tell hostile intent from fear of flying (and base GAO investigation of the program upon the result, to make it more salient). They'll say yes. Either it'll trigger and show them to be lying, or it won't and so it doesn't work.
Many small earthquakes may or may not be a sign of increased pressure, but it's definitely a sign of increased release of pressure. Not being released in small increments could mean a major quake later.
Rather than worrying about lots of earthquakes, maybe we should be worried when there's a lack of them.
There, that should give the professional Doomsdayologists in the media plenty to write about, since the lack of seismic activity almost everywhere may be a sign of impending (sometime, maybe, who knows, but let's call it this anyway) doom.
Language is whatever conveys meaning that is mutually understood between the speaker and the listener.
English, in particular, has no governing body that dictates the proper use of the language. I am fairly offended that these people have appointed themselves as some kind quasi-arbiter of our language.
2/3 of human communication is non-verbal. It conveys meaning and is mutually understood to some degree (culturally dependent). It is comprised of kinesics, proxemics and chronemics, and except for thew subest comprised of predetermined signs (sign language) is not language.
As for the rest, do yourself a favor and go look at the section this article is in, and see if you can't head off that impending valium deficiency.
The government wants to gives us free wireless broadband, now without content restriction.
This is the same government that conducted warrantless wiretapping. If they own the bitwaves, there's less barrier to the same occurring.
If there's restrictions, people wanting privacy will go elsewhere. If the restrictions are lifted, people will be more likely to feel safe using it for more sensitive matters. The government will be more able to catch more people.
Can anyone conceive of a better way for the government to maximize its chances of catching people doing things they find undesirable while minimizing its chances of getting in trouble and so having to stop?
Let's try the alternative:
Comparative neuroanatomy findings indicate that all the various animals have identical brains that evolved identically, and that they all operate on a single function through a single pathway.
I could go on but I'm not going to page through the article to pick at it more, and in so doing satisfy their click-through quota.
I used to really like the old, stodgy, stuffy SciAm. It said what it meant clearly and didn't end up with an oral-pedal inversion by trying to say more than was warranted, or that it felt it had to pump up with hype in the name of market share.
I like the new SciAm too, but I liked it better when it was called OMNI.
> (BTW, I'm basically just spilling the thoughts that I'm sure anyone else is having when they read this stuff
Like the very next message? Are we perhaps illuminating a Blinding Glimpse of the Obvious?
Once again, "confirm" is to be taken as "finds the thing we already knew was there", rather than the implied "found, and the data verified". More than 700 kg of lunar material has been returned by Apollo and Luna. We have a very good understanding of the content. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_rock
The actual main point of TFA is that the NASA device detects what it should if it were working properly, and so should, barring other problems, be able to map the surface in terms of mineral content. If and when it does, that will be news. Saying "it's not broke so far" isn't very newsworthy.
In the absence of substantive discoveries of its own (which I have no doubt will occur; there's much to learn and the Indian team is quite capable), ISRO tends to sound like the little brother tagging along with the big kids, chattering on about how he's a big kid now too, despite just being there as opposed to actually having done big kid stuff (TFA *is* about a NASA device, after all). In the mean time, the big kids might find it annoying, but you're not doing it for them, so get excited, wave that flag, and have a ball. Heck, I remember Houston breaking into cheers just because Apollo 8 fired its motor for trans-lunar insertion, a far cry from actually making it.
Patience guys, if you don't have a significant primary discovery all your own in 90 days (for the data; confirmatory analysis may take a while longer), either you're not trying or it broke.
"In addition to your PC, Microsoft also discloses plans to bring the chargeback scheme to your cellphone and automobile â" GPS, satellite radio, backseat video entertainment system."
Ever since AOL courted Time-Warner, marrying pay-for provider and pay-for content, the plans were always an eventual pay-per-anything net economy. MS has enough embedded device coverage now or planned, and fairly developed DRM, that they could become the first such provider. Whoever is, will become the defacto clearing house for content owners, essentially becoming the content front for the mafiAA.
As for the homework deal, consider the fact that kids won't buy it -- parents will. The system that calculates the metering will report in detail the usage to the parents. The electronic babysitter of the future will also be a tattle tale. OTOH, it will provide for a great new excuse when work is lost to the BSOD: "Bill Gates ate my homework."
Value means that something is inherently important or has become important through previous experience and reinforcement. The source of "value" is irrelevant; anything that is important is so because the experience has primed us to respond. That the brain should reflect such activity is not only trivial, it's well established.
TFA does not examine "value". It examines the effect of reinforcement to an arbitrary choice to subsequent choices. The paradigm used is a "go-no go" design. There's nothing in the study that differentiates value from simple learning and response selection.
Particularly egregious is the author's attempt to connect this poorly designed research to addiction. If this held, then the more something costs the more addictive it should be, and the less valuable it is the less addictive: free heroin is not habit forming.
The same visual technique can also be used to spot dim satellites. Start out fully de-focused looking over the entire sky. Before long, you'll feel an 'urge' to look to a particular place. DO NOT do so. Instead, look near that point but not quite focused. Then you can see the rather dim light moving slowly against the background. It may appear to blink out occasionally if you let it get too close to your central vision (it is a constant brightness, the blinking is a visual artifact).
It's also how those with very good or well corrected vision can see Mizar's visual double Alcor (the star in the center of the Big Dipper's handle). The separation is enough, but Alcor is much dimmer and difficult to perceive, especially with current levels of light pollution.
It's not the same. I've been an amateur astronomer for over 4 decades and am very familiar with the technique. It's based on the fact that the more light sensitive rods are squeezed out of the central visual field by the color sensitive cones, making things only a few degrees off center appear brighter. The off-center technique still results in conscious perception. Blindsight/night vision does not. OTOH, that makes night vision suck for astronomy; it does no good to look if you don't know you're seeing it.
Come to think on it now, it seems to me night vision requires movement, or a change in the visual field from not-there to there in the manner of a blink comparator. When I used night vision, if I wasn't moving I had to pan around to use it.
Let's say that up until now you haven't had the ability to monitor documents to the extent specified. You can't prove whether or not the leak occurred from within your domain. Neither can they: they don't have the ability either, or you'd know. So, neither can they can't disprove your (forthcoming) assertion that the leak came from within their domain, and you can't support it. But as we can see commonly happen, accusations carry more weight than mere questions, rightly or wrongly. Accusing them will wake them up and put you on even footing. From then on you can develop a mutually acceptable and workable security system.
It'll have to be rigorous, as in enlisting the OS to assist. Otherwise one could simply copy the file and open it outside a secured domain. And that too will take oversight, by one such as a security admin who'll be able to track the file's circulation including any instances of it being copied. Note that opening for editing constitutes an explicit copy until (at least) the changes are saved, which would show up, and copying the data from memory to a swap file would constitute an implicit copy that wouldn't normally get reported. It could, however, be used to grab a copy (of a copy) of the file just as we used to use a browser's cache for grabbing copies of streamed media that weren't otherwise easily snagged.
Of course you could use the information above to show they can't support their assertion and so you could sue them for defamation. Better, you could give them the choice of that or joining you in investigating the security problems and solutions, and possibly investigating the competitor for espionage. Once again, accusations can carry a lot of weight. But then the competitor might be willing to join the investigation in order to be able to track their own as well as (as could everyone) prove that any infringements didn't come from their domain. The best security comes when all are watchers and all watch each other in the open.
Plekto, are you reading my mind? I purposefully withheld mention of my own night vision. You supplied not only details of it, but of how I developed it. Your accounting tells the tale so exactly it's almost spooky. But given the mind that I have, it ends up as considering how much more likely I am to be able to find and test enough people in a similar task in order to determine why some have this and others do not.
One point of contention, there are not "some women that see in 4 colors". There are some people called tetrachromats who have four color receptors. They do not see four colors, they see the same appx. 3.5 million colors. They just have better color acuity (they can tell the difference between two colors better).
There are two distinct causes of blindsight (and deafhearing and alien limb syndrome), damage to the primary sensory cortext but not the secondary or assosiation cortices, and damage to the association cortex, but not the sensory.
The latter is easy to explain. The person can perceive, but can't incorporate the fact of it into their conscious experience. They can't "own" the perception. This is very often found in damage to the somatosensory cortex which leaves partial paralysis. Often the person can't perceive the limb attached to their body as 'theirs'. Sensations in the limb do not become perceptions for them. Similarly, vison and hearing can occur, and the brain can make use of the data, but the person can't perceive it because it's not coming from "them".
The former is harder to explain. There seems to be a parallel visual (and auditory) system through which information can pass and the brain make use of, but which bypasses the association cortex. The person can't perceive normally, but if tested they react as if they can. They can, for instance, consistently "guess" the number of fingers shown them. There is a similar system for somatosensory. Perception of touch to, say, the hand, has highly detailed "maps" elsewhere on the body. For the hand it's on the cheek and on the back just below the shoulder. Just why this secondary pathway exists is a mystery. But it does, in most people.
Around 20 years ago in Coevolution Quarterly there was an article about a 'school' in (IIRC) New Mexico that taught people to use their blindsight to navigate in the desert at night. The secondary visual pathway that persons with the second form of blindsight use, exists intact in everybody. It's not something you develop because of damage, it's something that's there in case you need it but below the level of consciousness so as not to interfere with normal perception. Occasionaly hunters, hiker/campers or survival technique practioners will hear of a person who can literally run through a pitch black forest without running into anything. These people have the ability to react to the subliminal perception from the secondary visual system in what occurs to them as instinctive reactions because they don't consciously perceive anything.
Above posted modded "interesting" should be modded "funny". For those that didn't get the joke, it appears to be an ironic attempt to apply the "El Naschie" technique in a Slashdot comment. He's basically throwing around a lot of unfounded complicated nonsense signifying nothing in an attempt to get modded up. Much as "El Naschie" does the same in his papers when really it's just, IMHO, a stream of conciousness drooling on the keyboard crackpot spew.
The above is an attempt to discredit based solely upon repetition of the only tactic they seem to have at their disposal, unsupportable assertion. It is a weak, transparent attempt. I salute your effort if not the result.
When I mean to be funny, I can get it published in such as "The Best Of AIR". When I mean to be serious I can diagnose. When I mean to out a net.kook or collection thereof, I do so with clear intent, just as I have above.
Claims of being funny, including being modded as such, only work in my favor. More will read it than if it appeared serious. By now far more have read it than read the math blog which is the source of irritation, and credit for that is in part yours. I appreciate your attempts to assist me. Feel free to continue.
You may be interested to know that the blog's author invented the Crackpot Index.
Thanks, I checked it out. It's weak. I've seen much better.
You might be interested to know that the commenter (myself) is a kookologist of long standing, and was a frequent contributor of both administration and material to the operations of alt.usenet.kooks and the many kookological awards dispensed. I've studied networkish psychoceramics for well over a decade. I know it when I see it, whether it's in its natural native form, is developed intentionally as an art form (Meow), or is an effort conducted in response to a perceived kook of choice with or without wrong doing directed at those exhibiting kookness. TFA is of the last form, and I suspect perceived wrongdoing against them to be the driving force.
It does not help the cause of the sole source of criticism, a math blog from U. Texas, to have ostensibly technical criticism asserting incorrectness but admitting ignorance (see second link in summary). The author takes issue with some points in an article of which he has some experience. However, he points out several things that he has no knowledge of and admits as much. He then asserts from this admitted position of ignorance that the material with which has is not familiar is somehow fraudulent. To make that claim valid the author would have to be able to determine that with certainty, but he can't.
This technical criticism is produced in support of a posting elsewhere in the same blog, the author of which makes the same sort of assertions, and likewise fails to support most of them. In fact he can produce partial support for only one, and then claims support from others which is not produced. Some of this supposedly comes from his own administration which he admits does not support his work pursuing the matter.
I take no position with regards to the central issue. I've seen a couple journals with very incestuous editorial policies and staffs. It makes it hard for others to get published. However, the situation evolved into this because those people did a lot of work with each other, not because any of it was fraudulent, so this can happen in an absence of any wrong doing.
Claims of wrong doing are extremely serious, as the occurrence of such things are. Such claims should be supportable. The claims made in TFA that are supportable are not of evidence wrong doing, and claims of wrong doing are unsupported, and by admission, unsupportable by those making them. As far as I can tell this is a single blog's flamefest with more crackpot value than what they claim is due their target.
In short, the accusers appear to be embedded in at least as much pot and crack as they accuse others of, failing utterly to differentiate themselves from kettle. They may have a valid point, but they fail to show it, instead making themselves look all the worse through the use of reciprocal psychoceramics.
I've never seen a definition of "space" that was based on the altitude of the ionosphere before. I've never seen a claim that the ionosphere was at a certain altitude, rather than a range with upper and lower bounds before. Most articles I see give about a 500 to 600 km altitude range, such as http://www.dcs.lancs.ac.uk/iono/ionosphere_intro/
Still, that's the ionosphere, not "space", and it's subject to wide variations of many different periods. TFA fails to show whether the result is a permanent feature or simply the measurement they found. It can hardly be anything other than the latter because there have been many, many measurements of the ionosphere, starting with numerous sounding rockets during the International Geophysical Year, 1957-58. TFA fails to account for their one results being at odds with many others.
And by "space" they mean "outer space", ie. outside the earth's atmosphere. If they meant simply "space", it could be the simple Euclidian definition of 3 extent dimensions. As such, we all exist in "space".
"Three days hardly seems enough time to reconfigure a national network."
It's not. OTOH it's about 3 times longer than I expect it to take for a work-around patch to appear on one platform or another, and the same amount of time it'll take to get it ported to most of the others, as well as other common work-arounds such as proxies to become common knowledge.
IMO the Minister of Information Blockage simply refuses to admit the effort has failed before launch and is trying to scare those who don't have the savvy to realize this.
I'm sorry to say, this SSP white paper is simply that--a piece of paper with a pie-in-the-sky proposal that is unlikely to get funded to the same extent as fusion energy by the DOE.
I almost added some similar editorializing to the submission, but opted to leave it as it was. I'm also very skeptical of the proposal itself. However, I find the interest in it as compared to the other proposals on change.gov to be encouraging. This is especially so since Obama was at first hardly pro-space. Their interest in this proposal is another step away from that stance. And I believe Obama's team still to be capable of being influenced and directed to better things. This proposal is too far off, but it makes a good focus point for choosing a more positive direction. O'Neill's ideas were similarly distant, but they persist as well developed starting points.
When you see such hype-marks as "undeniable facts" (you can deny anything; something's status as a fact won't change with or without denial), you can be pretty certain that you're seeing the work of a True Believer. Pro- or con- is irrelevant, they all sound the same. So convinced are they of the "proof" of the "evidence" (both being assertions, typically having circular reasoning connecting them).
Chapter 1 starts off with such an error: "Acupuncture, homeopathy, chiropractic have plenty of first-person anecdotes, but a lack of controlled studies with real data to back up their spurious claims." At the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine exists to oversee such ongoing studies. Results of such work are reported as journal articles listed in the National Library of Medicine's PubMed (entire alternative medicine journals exist and are referenced) and in consumer-friendly format in their MedlinePlus. Both positive and negative results are reported. On the NCCAM page itself there is an article summary about testing "essentially worthless" acupuncture with fMRI (the worthless results are positive; acupuncture has an effect that sham acupuncture doesn't), as well as several regarding "limited value" herbal treatments (as opposed to really-truly-scientific stuff which has unlimited value? Hype-marks).
I have no idea if the authors have ever heard of NCCAM. I do know that PubMed has heard of Edzard Ernst. He has published many cautiously positive articles on alternative therapies. He seems to favor the summary phrase "encouraging but not compelling", an empty weasel-phrase that can be applied with validity but no effect to most any bit of science. He even seems to favor it in cases the book claims are "essentially worthless".
What we have here is a book that pretends to science under the guise of "skepticism", which is in fact one pole of the True Believer scale. Like most who make the same pretense, they fail to grasp that skepticism is an activity internal to science, requiring rejection of belief and acceptance of only supportable data and logic, not an a priori stance one can take. That is, unless one wants to reel in the gullable masses with entertainment framed in the manner they too accept as valid in their attempts to claim superiority with evidence that isn't, including considering lack of as evidence.
Perhaps, as the reviewer states, this is an important and eye opening book. Hopefully some eyes will be opened to the fact that hiding behind "skepticism" provides a subjective acceptance of material that under objective assessment would be fraudulent. To take it a step farther, if a researcher makes claims of one sort in one place and of the opposite in another, yet claims to be carrying out science, such hypocrisy should earn an investigation into whether the misconduct happening is scientific or journalistic, or both.
Note that I do not take the reviewer to task here. His purpose was to review the book, not the field. I happen to have experience in the field through the NCCAM's earlier form, the Office of Alternative Medicine, as well as in conducting and reviewing science. It is indicative of the pervasiveness of the problem of True Believers hiding behind science to find that one reason for the reorganization of OAM into NCCAM was to eliminate from its ranks those who sought to protect the unwashed from themselves based on appeal to (their own) authority, failing miserably to do so with much scientific rigor, or integrity. A prime example of the problem that required solving was research applications to OAM on alternative therapies being rejected because (and it said it right out loud) "the therapy proposed is not accepted as having scientific value." That mind set is part and parcel with the mindset that finds herbal therapies to be of "limited value" and fails to note that the vast majority of pharmacology exists because compounds of value were found in and/or derived from plants.
This book is as f
How many different independent forces could have influenced Beagle? Represent each with a variable. Calculate how many emergent properties could have influenced the craft (those arising from interactions between main variables). Assign these a variable. Estimate the range of values for each variable. Calculate the dynamics of each variable (ie. linear, logarithmic, hyperbolic, etc., including estimation of those whose behavior does not fit a simple function, instead requiring complex functions). For each variable, estimate a reasonable granularity (they may be analog, but the resulting computation would include infinities, so digitizing is necessary). Calculate the matrix necessary to represent all the possible results. Determine whether the calculations could be completed in polynomial time. Almost certainly not, so estimate how many variables (and their dynamics) must be retained and drop the rest. Calculate the solutions matrix for this reduced set. Check for polynomial time solution. If no, reduce yet again. With each reduction estimate the error range introduced, and whether any of them are unacceptable and the prior value retained.
Estimate the amount of computational power/time necessary to complete the solutions matrix, including the cost of buying/building/renting/etc. and your available resources. Calculate how many orders of magnitude there are between what's necessary to solve the problem and what you have to work with. From that estimate how much you have to reduce the solutions matrix in order to be able to arrive at some solutions, as well as how inaccurate any results will be.
Once you have the calculation of the solution set down to polynomial time and within your budget, look at how inaccurate your results will be. If the accuracy is found to be acceptable, and the calculation therefore worth doing, chances are you've made a mistake in your estimations. Almost certainly the inaccuracy will become too great before your reductions result in a solvable problem. Also note that the minimal matrix dimension will probably not be an integer. Choosing the best number of variables would be trivial, as you simply choose the next highest integer. However just because the solution here is between N and N+1 does not mean that there is only one variable with a fractional influence; estimate how many and which variables are best characterized as non-integers and select the best set of variables to use in the model. Calculate how far back into non-polynomial time your solution estimate has drifted, or at best how far over your resource budget the calculations will require.
Take a dose of analgesic of your choice sufficient to eliminate your headache. Begin building a model using the minimum number of (integer) variables necessary to arrive at a variable/value set that produces a result matching the behavior of the phenomenon you wish to model. Ignore the probability calculations that would indicate how likely it is you're wrong, and how many such wrong solutions you'll arrive at before you happen on a possibly right solution. Instead of using probability estimates to calculate statistical significance of any calculated solution, use the fact that a solution can be found that results in the same behavior as the one to be modeled, and wrongly call that accidental similarity 'practical significance'. Publish a factually unsupportable assertion that your model describes what happened based only on the fact that your model achieves the same result and count on the fact that nobody else on your research team, or anyone for that matter, is capable of accomplishing the necessary calculations described here to conclusively state you're wrong, or at best that you can't say you're right.
Estimate the positive influence the number of publications, regardless of validity, has on the probability of receiving future funding and amount thereof. Conclude that minimal-guess "modeling" provides you with the ability to say something that sounds reasonable whereas attempting to achieve real validity would take too
You can't develop a standard if you don't have similar technologies, and wireless power developers so far have been coming up with all kinds of different technologies. Remove the part of TFA that makes no sense in light of this, and you end up with an advertisement for this "consortium" disguised as a press release, faithfully and unquestioningly reproduced by PC Authority. Had PC Authority tried to do real journalism rather than simple reproduction, they'd have found that not only are the major proposed schemes so different that the idea of standardization is ridiculous, but that some of the members of the consortium aren't even developing any of those schemes.
"But there is still a lot of terrain left for the fox, and we've seen little more than a glimmer of fur."
That's a damn stretch from "confirms", especially coming from a primary in the research.
All the study confirmed was that early galaxies appear to have behaved in a manner as though gravity were different or affected by another force. It doesn't mean they did, it means their observations can be taken that way. It doesn't mean there was dark energy, it means they don't seem to act as though they not affected by gravity then as they would be now. The data support the delta-g (gravity changing over time) theory as much as dark energy. Other data makes it less likely (clumpiness in these an similar observations), but my argument is with the difference between the headline and the substance in TFA. If NYT is going to report everything as though it were common news, with the emphasis on spectacularism for the sake of sales, they should respect what science is supposed to be like (ie. accurate and objective to the extent possible) and not touch it.