I looked into Groom "Area 51" Lake a little while back. Comparison of then present and previous pics showed they'd installed a high flow jet fuel system designed for the SR-71, after the SR-71 had been retired. A few other planes could use the system, but none of them made use of cryogenics such as was being installed on the same site. I don't hold with the speculation generated, but it was a damn interesting use of non-censored imagery. The resolution was good enough that you could tell trucks from cars on the roads nearbby.
OTOH, if I were going to bamboozle unfriendlies who might use such imagery for nefarious reason, I'd simply have Google replace the shot with a photoshopped shot replacing the real version with half turned around and half falsified data. Anyone using Google stuff to infiltrate would find themselves lost and confused and either forced to leave or be very visible wandering around clueless. I know how often they moved around the gutted shell of a B-52 at a SAC base I was at to give spysats the impression there were more planes operational than there were. Don't assume similar trickery stopped with the end of the USSR or that Google wouldn't participate given sufficient nudge nudge incentive.
Note that the submitter merely quotes the article. The submitter may not be able to evaluate the article properly. The source, New Scientist, should know better. They've either knowingly passed along crap out of sheer laziness, or the they assigned it to someone completely unable to spot the fatal flaws in the press release that serves as their sole source.
"All that needs to be done now is build a system able to decode the light signatures."
If there is as yet no decoder, there is no evidence the device does anything at all, much less what's asserted. As for "test any surface for just about anything", what TFA actually says is it can test pretty much any surface for contamination. That begs the question that of the surface being examined is completely covered with a layer of contamination, how would the device know that the surface being tested is contamination rather than the surface meant to be tested? It can't without being told what it's supposed to detect. This requires pre-knowledge by the operator. The device cannot test any surface, it can only test those surfaces for which the operator can give an accurate accounting of what's supposed to be there.
It is almost axiomatic that when someone says "all you need to do is" with respect to something that hasn't yet been done, they have no idea how and so have no valid reason to say that, and it is either far more difficult than they imagine or impossible. There is not enough information presented (it probably doesn't exist any more than the "decoder") to determine how the proposed device improves on existing spectrography.
"If the findings of some political scientists are right, attempting to correct misinformation might do nothing more than reinforce the false belief."
Political scientists? That's been the finding of psychologists since Leon Festinger outlined cognitive dissonance 50 years ago. Even before it had that name, psychological operations specialists knew they could devise a falsehood that was so preferable to truth that people would adhere to it in the face of contrary evidence, including being told the falseness of the installed belief. And yes, they would hold to the preferable all the tighter rather than face the less secure situation of changing beliefs even to "truth". Throw some FUD (warranted or not) in with it, and people become desperate to believe the comfortable.
The only thing remotely novel about TFA is its overt application towards the US government and people. The fact that it occurs it not surprising to anyone who understands the concepts and applications. I'm thinking/. only finds it newsworthy because Ars Technica seems to. Well, it's worthy but it's not news. Unless you've been asleep since 2000. Come to think of it, that might explain things.
"Comcast deliberately limited traffic for certain applications."
That's wrong. It shouldn't be in past tense. Some IPs on Comcast space still drop p2p connection after 30 seconds. Dropping is common. Dropping consistently at 30 +/- 5 seconds from those IP blocks is too much coincidence to bear.
"The new system will not replace or be related to the company's earlier installment of bandwidth caps, which limited a user's data intake to 250GB per month."
Of course it won't replace their previous 'solution'. It will apply to uploading, as does their connection dropping, not to downloads.
If they can get their quotas to fly, they'll next offer to keep users off their slowdown list for a fee. That way they can charge users more without having to up their bandwidth.
Thanks, unnamed government agency who is not the NSA, DIA, DSA, CIA or FBI
REMAIN CALM
Of course there were black helicopters. They were flying cloaked, and so were invisible. Invisibly black cloaked stealth silent helicopters, yeah. They absolutely must exist, as they make it totally unnecessary to have such expensive and non-existent technology as orbital mind control lasers, which do not exist. Believe this message, not the quoted message. If you feel any confusion or discomfort, please email us at targeting@omcl.mil and provide your precise spatial coordinates, then stand clear of electrical devices and pets. Please refrain from using metalized headwear as it can cause hallucinations, double vision, double vision, conspiracy theories, fear, uncertainty and doubt. We only want you to be happy.
Signed, your pals at: Orbital Mind Control Lasers, Inc., Area 52 ("We're making progress"), Undisclosed Location, Nevada
PS: Nice t-shirt, get that from a trade show? And move that drink away from your keyboard, you could get electrocuted. What? Don't say what? But that's what will happen. Oh all right.... you could spill it and ruin your keyboard. Better? Good. Now, how do I edit this? No I don't know. Hey, it was your idea. Forget it, just set the beam to maximum dispersion on the next pass, and we'll get them all. Just be careful of concentrations of aluminum foil, you know how it causes backscatter.
The speed of light is also the maximum speed of causation...if these "super structures" are outside the observable universe, how in the hell are they affecting anything within the observable universe?
The speed of gravity waves is theorized to be the same as the speed of light. However the effect of gravity is not necessarily constrained http://metaresearch.org/cosmology/speed_of_gravity.asp . Gravitational effects that originate in some far off elseplace may affect the observable instantly. We accept such an instantaneous effect with quantum entanglement, one violation of Bell's Theorem. If gravity is a quantum force http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_gravity it may well be subject to the same "spooky action at a distance" that works on things like particle spin and wave polarization. Or it may be instantaneous for reasons far more fundamental and interesting than what we see happen to particles and waves existing within our universe, as it might be an effect on the universe itself rather than an effect seen within it.
I'd intended to add this to the summary, but forgot.
TFA has a very nice, if brief, explication on the "universe" vs. "observable universe". Too many people (science and science writing pros among them) make assertions about the former when they should specify the latter.
Go ahead and read it, it's only a space.com article (ie. very short).
The device is nothing more than a non-contact polygraph, what's commonly called a "lie detector". The device measures physiological response. It can detect a person in distress (negative response to stress). Unfortunately it can't determine the reason because it can't get into the person's thoughts, it can only detect if they're undergoing a period of physiological arousal.
Heaven help the person waiting at an airport who's afraid to fly. This device will flag them as a potential terrorist. Indeed, heaven help mostly those people who're fearful because this device will give them good reason to be. As for intended criminals, they need only practice yoga, biofeedback or any other means proven to promote control over physiological response in order to escape detection. This has always been true of polygraphy. I've got a lot of experience with physiological measurement as well as with hatha yoga, I know what's possible and not possible. The only thing newsworthy here is the non-contact part. The fact that they intend to use it, despite the flaws, is not newsworthy. It's just very scary, same as a lot of the other recent developments in the erosion of civil rights in the name of protecting the public.
Be that as it may, to call a user an "idiot" because he does not know the appropriate style for an error dialog box, or having seen an odd style, does not associate that with malware, but prefers to continue on task if possible, shows how arrogant the author of the summary is.
It does no such thing. Just because you want to insist that the author's intention was arrogant, despite your implicit agreement that it was humor (ie, "be that as it may"), does not make it so. You can not like the style of humor, and can say so, but you can't rightly ascribe intent that's contrary to the author's stated intent as well as your acceptance of same.
Or maybe you're right, and you can decide for others what their intention and base motives were. If so, you're not the only one. I claim the same right. Now turn in all those mod points and delete your post because it's obviously intended as flamebait. Don't argue -- I say it's so.
Summary is under ENTERTAINMENT. Tag says HUMOR. If it had been accurately reporting on the study, it would have been under SCIENCE. Read all the words.
"Need an accompaniment for your melody? Seeking a virtual dancer to try out your new choreography? Or perhaps you're making a new TV commercial, and you need a snippet of music that sounds something like Radiohead, but a bit more mellow."
To paraphrase Douglas Adams: This is apparently a use of the word of 'sophisticated' of which I was unaware. And here I thought things like time/frequency analysis of notes and harmonics of chord sequences using continuous wavelet transform or analysis of dimensional complexity of songs was what was meant by the word. Silly me for wasting my time of stuff like that when there's advertising jingles at stake.
The same people who don't want you to share your music with anyone are the ones supporting research in getting computers to pick your music for you, or manipulate music generation algorithms to alter song 'recipes' to produce that which they want you to find more acceptable. If they ever get programs to work as well as they hope, they'll still run into the fact that personal preferences are subjective, and while they might get some hits, they'll have some st00pid misses. Remember the ridiculous choices people's Tivos were making on their behalf? It'll be even more hilarious.
Host online open access journals. Start a series of journals that apply to the schools in your university, have said schools participate by having professors serve as reviewers/senior editors, enlist journalism students to serve as editors and summary writers, and put student research into the journals. Each journal would become a 'community' or subset of your original design, which was student access. Once operating open them to students at other universities. If it works out, open those journals to professionals and other non-students outside and have them participate in running them. It could put your university on the academic journal map. It would at least introduce students to publishing, something they'll greatly need if they continue in academic training. It could also provide journalism students with badly needed training in science/academic reporting and writing.
I recall a SciAm article about a couple such journals that started literally as a spare box under someone's desk and grew into well respected journals.
Study after study have shown no verifiable link between violence in the media and violence in real life.
Can you name said study after study? Because the ones I can name start with Bandura, A, D Ross & S A Ross (1961): 'Transmission of Aggression Through Imitation of Aggressive Models', Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 63: 575-82 and work their way forwards and they say exactly the opposite. Perhaps you're confusing "person after person said that study after study have shown" with "study after study have shown" because they often do say so. They're wrong.
The distance to the vertical antenna determines the pitch, whereas the distance to the horizontal circular antenna controls the volume.
That may be true of the "real" Theremin. Jean-Michel Jarre plays one in "Water For Life" among other video performances, and was shown on the late 50's Mickey Mouse Show. However, some have two vertical antennae, and some have plates flush with the top. There's (typically) pitch and volume antennae, and the configuration is irrelevant.
That said, another difference between a theremin and the iPhone widget is the fact that the former maintains a continuosly varying pitch, whereas the latter is programmed to chunk off the notes into a preselected scale.
Another similarity is that neither have a mechanical feedback mechanism, requiring that it be played by ear as much as by hand. Playing by ear requires some tonal ability. A lot of people don't have that innately and if they can learn it, it takes a long time. Probably longer than the desire to learn to play their phone.
At least theremin manipulation is roughly linear as opposed to rotational, so visual feedback can more easily be associated with the aural.
It should be "What ISPs and Telcos Said When Asked" etc. It's called "response bias", that someone will have an answer to pretty much anything if asked, because the asking implies they should have an answer to provide. I'm betting most respondents didn't actually have any such plans or concerns, and those that did had them placed firmly in the PR department rather than anyplace that might know about and have an effect on operations.
Somebody's sucking hard on the research teat. Anyone who knows "brain waves" worth a damn knows that different people have entirely different EEG profiles in general, in dynamic response and in contextual/environmental response. Trying to find an EEG response consistent enough to be used in a device that can be slapped on any head (GIs don't have time to train their brain helmets every morning) is going to suck up all US$4M and then some and still have its empty hand out.
Why all this golly gee whiz hand waving when subvocalization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization is nearly as reliable as spoken word and requires no new tech? Because somebody's sucking hard at the research teat.
I always provide attribution because it's part of the rest of the ethics of science. But for code, don't expect everyone to continue to attribute the paper itself, just the source lab and university. We use the EEG system most common to labs like ours. Everyone mentions the vendor in their work, but nobody mentions the validation papers and review of same. Similarly, everyone mentions what statistical analyses they use, but hardly anyone would even know where to begin to find the original publications validating them. If the code becomes widely accepted, expect it to become commonplace enough that the lab and university get mentioned, but not the paper.
And to be that widely accepted, you'd need to either provide ample validation in this publication, or better plan on doing a validation paper as a follow up. Enlisting similar labs for the latter would give your analysis more weight and them a worry-free pub, and everyone wins. If your analysis doesn't happen to be novel enough to warrant this (say, it's a mash up of previously known analyses) then your validation is reference of the sources, but it's not something you can expect much referencing to.
so how do they get the nitrogen out of the air ? they must use some power source, right ? power sources generally emit CO2, or leave stockpiles of materials with long half lives. Or are they using a clean power source ? If so, kinda begs the question, why not just use the clean power source in the first place and avoid all the hassle.
Now that question makes it more obvious what you were asking above. Parsed according to grammar, I answered to what you wrote rather than what you meant. And you're right to ask.
No power generation method provides an over all long term energy profit. They are all entropic. The process in TFA localizes the energy intake and by product output in a way more convenient than most. For the method they propose, read the full site linked to in the TR article and the references.
Apple paid to be able to use the stuff they saw at Xerox Parc. Paid with stock. MS did not pay, and in fact the only reason they didn't loos there shirts becasue they convinced the judge that there work was a derivative of the work they already did. In the contract with Apple appl allowed them to do that, except the contract wasn't for an OS it was for a different application.
You're right. Apple did pay for it. After the fact. Not before. They might end up paying Intellisync. After.
The above can be said of MS in other situations. IIRC, their original disk compression method was a clear rip off of someone else's code.
And anyone who thinks this or any other tussle between Apple and MS puts them on opposite sides isn't aware of a cooperative business relationship that stretches back to the Apple II Plus ROMs and now includes major stock holding of each by the other. "Paying" in stock is trading that could be planned before and could be reversed after. It is of less consequence to them than maintaining their "balance of trade" (and so their mutual earnings) by shuffling stock back and forth.
Jokes aside, I seriously doubt there is any kind of causal relationship here but merely a statistically significant correlation.
Correlation can't show causality within the design but it can show the probability of common cause. From that, third variables that can cause both can be sought. When one of the variables is a consistent objective physiological measurement, the third variable usually usually can be measured that way.
The problem with proving causality is that you'd have to manipulate the cause, in this case belief. Making someone believe something that would cause them to suffer potential harm is unethical. Increasing someone's startle reaction exposes them to more distress (negative consequences of stressors).
What the research doesn't address is whether the higher response group showed habituation to the startling stimulus. It looks at means but not decrease over trials which can account for the difference in means. Slower than normal habituation correlates with PTSD, faster than normal with sociopathy, for a couple of extreme forinstances.
In some cases causality is moot. Someone sensitive to startle is likely to develop strong beliefs as a defense mechanism, and someone who innately develops strong beliefs is likely to develop high startle response. The probability of climbing the feedback spiral is more relevant than the chicken or the egg.
Voters could demand alternative methods. One already exists as absentee voting. One need not be absent in order to use it. However, the results of that come too late to make a difference. Politicians are aware that alternative methods exist and could manipulate availability of them to their own ends. See, for example http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/0/4/1/5/2/p41525_index.html Since the last presidential election went to court, I think politicians are hoping future elections will be decided that way. That often means the best lawyers wins, as well as manipulating whether or not the case gets heard by a court sympathetic to them.
really, how much CO2 is generated in removing the nitrogen from the air used to combust the lignite ?
None. The carbon come from burning the lignite, which is predominantly carbon, not from the air. A minor difference but a crucial one. The atmosphere contains 0.01 to 0.1% CO2, so your question is reasonable. But that being so, one should look to the rest of the process for the source, the answer being a BGO (Blinding Glimpse of the Obvious). Almost pure carbon + almost pure oxygen = a lot of CO2.
I'm interested in knowing where the nitrogen goes. If dumped in the air as N2 one would hope precautions against exposure to high concentrations are going to be stringent.
If turned into ammonia, it could be very useful in many manufacturing processes. But one then wonders where the hydrogen will come from. The water vapor produced in the combustion process is going to be recycled, if I read the description properly. Even if it weren't, 78% of the atmosphere is nitrogen, requiring a lot of hydrogen to bind to. Pulling it from water would eat up a lot of the energy produced. "Waste" hydrocarbons left over from cracking crude oil would be a good source.
That is the way at Apple. They did the same with "windows", the mouse and the GUI by first copying the Xerox Star's look, feel and operation, then suing Microsoft when they attempted to patent these, and cemented their position by giving Alan Kay, the brain behind the Xerox Star, an Apple Fellowship. The last made it unlikely Kay would side against Apple in any further legal actions.
They may not be very nice sometimes, but they're not stupid.
And I seriously doubt that Intellisync came up with the idea. They may have created the first to be used on an iPhone, but the concept of prior art does not require a particular context. If a similar widget existed prior, then it's not novel. And the similarity need not be that strict. Automated notification is old hat. Three words: "You've Got Mail".
Slashdot Mirror
I looked into Groom "Area 51" Lake a little while back. Comparison of then present and previous pics showed they'd installed a high flow jet fuel system designed for the SR-71, after the SR-71 had been retired. A few other planes could use the system, but none of them made use of cryogenics such as was being installed on the same site. I don't hold with the speculation generated, but it was a damn interesting use of non-censored imagery. The resolution was good enough that you could tell trucks from cars on the roads nearbby.
OTOH, if I were going to bamboozle unfriendlies who might use such imagery for nefarious reason, I'd simply have Google replace the shot with a photoshopped shot replacing the real version with half turned around and half falsified data. Anyone using Google stuff to infiltrate would find themselves lost and confused and either forced to leave or be very visible wandering around clueless. I know how often they moved around the gutted shell of a B-52 at a SAC base I was at to give spysats the impression there were more planes operational than there were. Don't assume similar trickery stopped with the end of the USSR or that Google wouldn't participate given sufficient nudge nudge incentive.
Note that the submitter merely quotes the article. The submitter may not be able to evaluate the article properly. The source, New Scientist, should know better. They've either knowingly passed along crap out of sheer laziness, or the they assigned it to someone completely unable to spot the fatal flaws in the press release that serves as their sole source.
"All that needs to be done now is build a system able to decode the light signatures."
If there is as yet no decoder, there is no evidence the device does anything at all, much less what's asserted. As for "test any surface for just about anything", what TFA actually says is it can test pretty much any surface for contamination. That begs the question that of the surface being examined is completely covered with a layer of contamination, how would the device know that the surface being tested is contamination rather than the surface meant to be tested? It can't without being told what it's supposed to detect. This requires pre-knowledge by the operator. The device cannot test any surface, it can only test those surfaces for which the operator can give an accurate accounting of what's supposed to be there.
It is almost axiomatic that when someone says "all you need to do is" with respect to something that hasn't yet been done, they have no idea how and so have no valid reason to say that, and it is either far more difficult than they imagine or impossible. There is not enough information presented (it probably doesn't exist any more than the "decoder") to determine how the proposed device improves on existing spectrography.
"If the findings of some political scientists are right, attempting to correct misinformation might do nothing more than reinforce the false belief."
Political scientists? That's been the finding of psychologists since Leon Festinger outlined cognitive dissonance 50 years ago. Even before it had that name, psychological operations specialists knew they could devise a falsehood that was so preferable to truth that people would adhere to it in the face of contrary evidence, including being told the falseness of the installed belief. And yes, they would hold to the preferable all the tighter rather than face the less secure situation of changing beliefs even to "truth". Throw some FUD (warranted or not) in with it, and people become desperate to believe the comfortable.
The only thing remotely novel about TFA is its overt application towards the US government and people. The fact that it occurs it not surprising to anyone who understands the concepts and applications. I'm thinking /. only finds it newsworthy because Ars Technica seems to. Well, it's worthy but it's not news. Unless you've been asleep since 2000. Come to think of it, that might explain things.
"Comcast deliberately limited traffic for certain applications."
That's wrong. It shouldn't be in past tense. Some IPs on Comcast space still drop p2p connection after 30 seconds. Dropping is common. Dropping consistently at 30 +/- 5 seconds from those IP blocks is too much coincidence to bear.
"The new system will not replace or be related to the company's earlier installment of bandwidth caps, which limited a user's data intake to 250GB per month."
Of course it won't replace their previous 'solution'. It will apply to uploading, as does their connection dropping, not to downloads.
If they can get their quotas to fly, they'll next offer to keep users off their slowdown list for a fee. That way they can charge users more without having to up their bandwidth.
There were no black helicopters.
Thanks,
unnamed government agency who is not the NSA, DIA, DSA, CIA or FBI
REMAIN CALM
Of course there were black helicopters. They were flying cloaked, and so were invisible. Invisibly black cloaked stealth silent helicopters, yeah. They absolutely must exist, as they make it totally unnecessary to have such expensive and non-existent technology as orbital mind control lasers, which do not exist. Believe this message, not the quoted message. If you feel any confusion or discomfort, please email us at targeting@omcl.mil and provide your precise spatial coordinates, then stand clear of electrical devices and pets. Please refrain from using metalized headwear as it can cause hallucinations, double vision, double vision, conspiracy theories, fear, uncertainty and doubt. We only want you to be happy.
Signed, your pals at:
Orbital Mind Control Lasers, Inc.,
Area 52 ("We're making progress"),
Undisclosed Location, Nevada
PS: Nice t-shirt, get that from a trade show? And move that drink away from your keyboard, you could get electrocuted. What? Don't say what? But that's what will happen. Oh all right. ... you could spill it and ruin your keyboard. Better? Good. Now, how do I edit this? No I don't know. Hey, it was your idea. Forget it, just set the beam to maximum dispersion on the next pass, and we'll get them all. Just be careful of concentrations of aluminum foil, you know how it causes backscatter.
Aw, shi
The speed of light is also the maximum speed of causation...if these "super structures" are outside the observable universe, how in the hell are they affecting anything within the observable universe?
The speed of gravity waves is theorized to be the same as the speed of light. However the effect of gravity is not necessarily constrained http://metaresearch.org/cosmology/speed_of_gravity.asp . Gravitational effects that originate in some far off elseplace may affect the observable instantly. We accept such an instantaneous effect with quantum entanglement, one violation of Bell's Theorem. If gravity is a quantum force http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_gravity it may well be subject to the same "spooky action at a distance" that works on things like particle spin and wave polarization. Or it may be instantaneous for reasons far more fundamental and interesting than what we see happen to particles and waves existing within our universe, as it might be an effect on the universe itself rather than an effect seen within it.
I'd intended to add this to the summary, but forgot.
TFA has a very nice, if brief, explication on the "universe" vs. "observable universe". Too many people (science and science writing pros among them) make assertions about the former when they should specify the latter.
Go ahead and read it, it's only a space.com article (ie. very short).
The device is nothing more than a non-contact polygraph, what's commonly called a "lie detector". The device measures physiological response. It can detect a person in distress (negative response to stress). Unfortunately it can't determine the reason because it can't get into the person's thoughts, it can only detect if they're undergoing a period of physiological arousal.
Heaven help the person waiting at an airport who's afraid to fly. This device will flag them as a potential terrorist. Indeed, heaven help mostly those people who're fearful because this device will give them good reason to be. As for intended criminals, they need only practice yoga, biofeedback or any other means proven to promote control over physiological response in order to escape detection. This has always been true of polygraphy. I've got a lot of experience with physiological measurement as well as with hatha yoga, I know what's possible and not possible. The only thing newsworthy here is the non-contact part. The fact that they intend to use it, despite the flaws, is not newsworthy. It's just very scary, same as a lot of the other recent developments in the erosion of civil rights in the name of protecting the public.
Be that as it may, to call a user an "idiot" because he does not know the appropriate style for an error dialog box, or having seen an odd style, does not associate that with malware, but prefers to continue on task if possible, shows how arrogant the author of the summary is.
It does no such thing. Just because you want to insist that the author's intention was arrogant, despite your implicit agreement that it was humor (ie, "be that as it may"), does not make it so. You can not like the style of humor, and can say so, but you can't rightly ascribe intent that's contrary to the author's stated intent as well as your acceptance of same.
Or maybe you're right, and you can decide for others what their intention and base motives were. If so, you're not the only one. I claim the same right. Now turn in all those mod points and delete your post because it's obviously intended as flamebait. Don't argue -- I say it's so.
I'll bet your a joy to behold on April first.
Summary is under ENTERTAINMENT. Tag says HUMOR. If it had been accurately reporting on the study, it would have been under SCIENCE. Read all the words.
Not relevant to TFA, but to the /. crowd:
Unix/Linux admin and software engineer positions open at the L.A. facility. https://spacex.com/careers.php
The subject line is a ripoff of a ST:TNG episode. I'm not with SpaceX. I'm still trying.
"Need an accompaniment for your melody? Seeking a virtual dancer to try out your new choreography? Or perhaps you're making a new TV commercial, and you need a snippet of music that sounds something like Radiohead, but a bit more mellow."
To paraphrase Douglas Adams: This is apparently a use of the word of 'sophisticated' of which I was unaware. And here I thought things like time/frequency analysis of notes and harmonics of chord sequences using continuous wavelet transform or analysis of dimensional complexity of songs was what was meant by the word. Silly me for wasting my time of stuff like that when there's advertising jingles at stake.
The same people who don't want you to share your music with anyone are the ones supporting research in getting computers to pick your music for you, or manipulate music generation algorithms to alter song 'recipes' to produce that which they want you to find more acceptable. If they ever get programs to work as well as they hope, they'll still run into the fact that personal preferences are subjective, and while they might get some hits, they'll have some st00pid misses. Remember the ridiculous choices people's Tivos were making on their behalf? It'll be even more hilarious.
Host online open access journals. Start a series of journals that apply to the schools in your university, have said schools participate by having professors serve as reviewers/senior editors, enlist journalism students to serve as editors and summary writers, and put student research into the journals. Each journal would become a 'community' or subset of your original design, which was student access. Once operating open them to students at other universities. If it works out, open those journals to professionals and other non-students outside and have them participate in running them. It could put your university on the academic journal map. It would at least introduce students to publishing, something they'll greatly need if they continue in academic training. It could also provide journalism students with badly needed training in science/academic reporting and writing.
I recall a SciAm article about a couple such journals that started literally as a spare box under someone's desk and grew into well respected journals.
The same observatory reported the same thing 15 years ago: www.iac.es/folleto/research/preprints/files/PP08019.pdf
"And we're going to KEEP discovering it until you get it right!"
Study after study have shown no verifiable link between violence in the media and violence in real life.
Can you name said study after study? Because the ones I can name start with Bandura, A, D Ross & S A Ross (1961): 'Transmission of Aggression Through Imitation of Aggressive Models', Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 63: 575-82 and work their way forwards and they say exactly the opposite. Perhaps you're confusing "person after person said that study after study have shown" with "study after study have shown" because they often do say so. They're wrong.
The distance to the vertical antenna determines the pitch, whereas the distance to the horizontal circular antenna controls the volume.
That may be true of the "real" Theremin. Jean-Michel Jarre plays one in "Water For Life" among other video performances, and was shown on the late 50's Mickey Mouse Show. However, some have two vertical antennae, and some have plates flush with the top. There's (typically) pitch and volume antennae, and the configuration is irrelevant.
That said, another difference between a theremin and the iPhone widget is the fact that the former maintains a continuosly varying pitch, whereas the latter is programmed to chunk off the notes into a preselected scale.
Another similarity is that neither have a mechanical feedback mechanism, requiring that it be played by ear as much as by hand. Playing by ear requires some tonal ability. A lot of people don't have that innately and if they can learn it, it takes a long time. Probably longer than the desire to learn to play their phone.
At least theremin manipulation is roughly linear as opposed to rotational, so visual feedback can more easily be associated with the aural.
It should be "What ISPs and Telcos Said When Asked" etc. It's called "response bias", that someone will have an answer to pretty much anything if asked, because the asking implies they should have an answer to provide. I'm betting most respondents didn't actually have any such plans or concerns, and those that did had them placed firmly in the PR department rather than anyplace that might know about and have an effect on operations.
Somebody's sucking hard on the research teat. Anyone who knows "brain waves" worth a damn knows that different people have entirely different EEG profiles in general, in dynamic response and in contextual/environmental response. Trying to find an EEG response consistent enough to be used in a device that can be slapped on any head (GIs don't have time to train their brain helmets every morning) is going to suck up all US$4M and then some and still have its empty hand out.
Why all this golly gee whiz hand waving when subvocalization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization is nearly as reliable as spoken word and requires no new tech? Because somebody's sucking hard at the research teat.
"...what do other academic Slashdotters do?"
I always provide attribution because it's part of the rest of the ethics of science. But for code, don't expect everyone to continue to attribute the paper itself, just the source lab and university. We use the EEG system most common to labs like ours. Everyone mentions the vendor in their work, but nobody mentions the validation papers and review of same. Similarly, everyone mentions what statistical analyses they use, but hardly anyone would even know where to begin to find the original publications validating them. If the code becomes widely accepted, expect it to become commonplace enough that the lab and university get mentioned, but not the paper.
And to be that widely accepted, you'd need to either provide ample validation in this publication, or better plan on doing a validation paper as a follow up. Enlisting similar labs for the latter would give your analysis more weight and them a worry-free pub, and everyone wins. If your analysis doesn't happen to be novel enough to warrant this (say, it's a mash up of previously known analyses) then your validation is reference of the sources, but it's not something you can expect much referencing to.
so how do they get the nitrogen out of the air ? they must use some power source, right ? power sources generally emit CO2, or leave stockpiles of materials with long half lives. Or are they using a clean power source ? If so, kinda begs the question, why not just use the clean power source in the first place and avoid all the hassle.
Now that question makes it more obvious what you were asking above. Parsed according to grammar, I answered to what you wrote rather than what you meant. And you're right to ask.
No power generation method provides an over all long term energy profit. They are all entropic. The process in TFA localizes the energy intake and by product output in a way more convenient than most. For the method they propose, read the full site linked to in the TR article and the references.
Apple paid to be able to use the stuff they saw at Xerox Parc. Paid with stock.
MS did not pay, and in fact the only reason they didn't loos there shirts becasue they convinced the judge that there work was a derivative of the work they already did. In the contract with Apple appl allowed them to do that, except the contract wasn't for an OS it was for a different application.
You're right. Apple did pay for it. After the fact. Not before. They might end up paying Intellisync. After.
The above can be said of MS in other situations. IIRC, their original disk compression method was a clear rip off of someone else's code.
And anyone who thinks this or any other tussle between Apple and MS puts them on opposite sides isn't aware of a cooperative business relationship that stretches back to the Apple II Plus ROMs and now includes major stock holding of each by the other. "Paying" in stock is trading that could be planned before and could be reversed after. It is of less consequence to them than maintaining their "balance of trade" (and so their mutual earnings) by shuffling stock back and forth.
Jokes aside, I seriously doubt there is any kind of causal relationship here but merely a statistically significant correlation.
Correlation can't show causality within the design but it can show the probability of common cause. From that, third variables that can cause both can be sought. When one of the variables is a consistent objective physiological measurement, the third variable usually usually can be measured that way.
The problem with proving causality is that you'd have to manipulate the cause, in this case belief. Making someone believe something that would cause them to suffer potential harm is unethical. Increasing someone's startle reaction exposes them to more distress (negative consequences of stressors).
What the research doesn't address is whether the higher response group showed habituation to the startling stimulus. It looks at means but not decrease over trials which can account for the difference in means. Slower than normal habituation correlates with PTSD, faster than normal with sociopathy, for a couple of extreme forinstances.
In some cases causality is moot. Someone sensitive to startle is likely to develop strong beliefs as a defense mechanism, and someone who innately develops strong beliefs is likely to develop high startle response. The probability of climbing the feedback spiral is more relevant than the chicken or the egg.
Voters could demand alternative methods. One already exists as absentee voting. One need not be absent in order to use it. However, the results of that come too late to make a difference. Politicians are aware that alternative methods exist and could manipulate availability of them to their own ends. See, for example http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/0/4/1/5/2/p41525_index.html
Since the last presidential election went to court, I think politicians are hoping future elections will be decided that way. That often means the best lawyers wins, as well as manipulating whether or not the case gets heard by a court sympathetic to them.
really, how much CO2 is generated in removing the nitrogen from the air used to combust the lignite ?
None. The carbon come from burning the lignite, which is predominantly carbon, not from the air. A minor difference but a crucial one. The atmosphere contains 0.01 to 0.1% CO2, so your question is reasonable. But that being so, one should look to the rest of the process for the source, the answer being a BGO (Blinding Glimpse of the Obvious). Almost pure carbon + almost pure oxygen = a lot of CO2.
I'm interested in knowing where the nitrogen goes. If dumped in the air as N2 one would hope precautions against exposure to high concentrations are going to be stringent.
If turned into ammonia, it could be very useful in many manufacturing processes. But one then wonders where the hydrogen will come from. The water vapor produced in the combustion process is going to be recycled, if I read the description properly. Even if it weren't, 78% of the atmosphere is nitrogen, requiring a lot of hydrogen to bind to. Pulling it from water would eat up a lot of the energy produced. "Waste" hydrocarbons left over from cracking crude oil would be a good source.
That is the way at Apple. They did the same with "windows", the mouse and the GUI by first copying the Xerox Star's look, feel and operation, then suing Microsoft when they attempted to patent these, and cemented their position by giving Alan Kay, the brain behind the Xerox Star, an Apple Fellowship. The last made it unlikely Kay would side against Apple in any further legal actions.
They may not be very nice sometimes, but they're not stupid.
And I seriously doubt that Intellisync came up with the idea. They may have created the first to be used on an iPhone, but the concept of prior art does not require a particular context. If a similar widget existed prior, then it's not novel. And the similarity need not be that strict. Automated notification is old hat. Three words: "You've Got Mail".