Attacks by the Chinese are known to have occurred for at least 10 years. The first amateurish and easily traced attacks were against a particular US based "free Tibet" web site owned by a Brit, and followed by attacks on other sites of a similar nature. Within weeks the same IP range (clearly within the Chinese ministry of defense) was used to breach a mail relay at a US naval installation in Virginia. (To be fair to the Navy, the system was a relic with the then still common non-closed relay, and was a purely administrative system, not part of anything security or defense-sensitive). The reports were publicly released and largely ignored, as have been some that followed. The little public attention waned as rapidly as it tends to for larger events that fall out of the news over time. I suspect escalation, probably by both sides, occurred after attention fell off, taking advantage of that and adding expert spoofing to insure that most would not be able to consider further reports reliable.
If I were going to conduct surgical attacks against a government from within a large IP block, I'd allow others with less ambitious nasty plans to use it, and hide my activities within the flood from them, like hiding an artillery attack within a thunderstorm. I have little doubt that there are "Nigerian spammers" and such using Chinese machines. That doesn't preclude their government doing it -- to my mind it indicates the probability.
And they wouldn't want reports to be entirely absent either. Taking over or subverting the infrastructure that carries content is as much a part of psychological warfare as is the content itself. Subversion of the medium is also the message, and that must become known to the system's owners and their allies. It causes mistrust in the system, its owners, and any messages to come from them. The general public wouldn't care or pay attention, but those who did care would get the intended message. And you have.
This is the war that the General who recently answered/. questions was recruiting for. It's already in progress. I'd enjoy the hell out of serving again, and being able to do so without having to put on a uniform. I'd especially enjoy it when I found that the majority of "combatants" were somewhere below my own level of expertise, though somewhat higher than script kiddies -- interesting but not too frustrating.
> It's not quite telepathy, but it's pretty close.
Jaheezus criminy, must people make/. look so 14 year old golly gee whiz?
It's absolutely nothing like telepathy. The band is picking up electrical signals in the muscles (called EMG: electromyography) controlling the vocal cords . They can react to reading silently, particularly if you read something "out loud to yourself". If you imagine your own voice while reading something or even imagine speaking, this will happen. It's called subvocalization, and the muscle movements are similar to, but not the same as, speech. That's why the device can differentiate between spoken and "silent" speech. This has been known for decades. Someone has managed to build something that decodes the signals into something like the original words being read or imagined.
There is no transmission of anything, much less thoughts. Although a novel approach, this is simply another human-machine interface. And one that I'll wager will require fairly extensive training for each individual using it, including training it to read them in different physiological states.
The article was worth reporting here without the crap in the last sentence of the summary. I sincerely hope that crap was not what got it approved.
> Connectomics -- Brain wiring diagrams. Neat, but it's too soon to tell if it'll reveal anything exciting.
It won't. No neuron is more than 6 connections from any other, the average being around 3. The connections do not dictate the function, the simultaneous activity (synchrony) of a collection of 1000 to 10000 neurons do. These are called Hebbian Cellular Assemblies.
Without knowing which neurons are operating with certain others, we'd have to consider all the possibilities, which is 10 billion neurons with 100,000 connections on each. Someone with the temerity can work out the degrees of freedom for that map, or at least estimate the calculation time required to determine it. And without the dynamics of the Hebbian activity, the map would be as "exciting" as a dead brain.
The claim this is the first paper in Science regarding music theory is wrong. There have been others, including some on music theory and the physiological basis of music perception.
The use of the circle to described musical perceptions is not new. It's been used to describe among other things the "ascending/descending" illusion. However, the use of other topological/dimensional concepts is novel, and pretty damn awesome. I've studied musical perception and its physiology, and a circle is definitely insufficient. More dimensions are required, as the waveforms involved are never (as early as the ear, much less in neural processing) sine waves. A simple example is the fact that inclusion of noise improves reception. The ear itself introduces noise, quite possibly for this purpose. Another is the multimodal (ie. harmonics) nature of most musical instruments. For instance, look inside a piano. The "notes" have more than one string. Even a single string vibrates in a complex set of harmonic frequencies. Now consider that the complex harmonics alone can be used to recreate the missing fundamental (the "main") note in perception, and possibly even in the instrument. Many different multimodal waveforms can create the same result. That requires different approach paths to the solution, and that requires more dimensions.
Sadly, very few in the relevant psychological fields are prepared to understand and incorporate this theory into their work. I still can't find more than a handful that can understand nonlinear statistics above 2 dimensions, even though they often use them for such as fMRI (the vast majority team up with biophysicists who do understand it). When they do manage to grasp the concepts in TFA, or find enough people from a relevant field who do with whom they can work, the results will be damn interesting.
> What ever happened to the ravages of online piracy?
Going to the movies is an event. People will go even when they have access to downloaded versions because the movie itself is not the whole of the event.
Concerts are also an event, but are far more expensive, more rare and almost invariably less convenient than going to the movies. Plus, a concert is almost never exactly what an album is in content, whereas a movie is. Having seen a movie in a theater, and given the much greater size (ie. download time and storage requirement) fewer are likely to then download it. Even if they've been to a concert, people are more likely to download a studio album with some similar material.
TFA was not about DVD and other pay-per-content venues. However, the statements probably hold for those too, because the margin on DVDs etc. is much less as well as downloads being less frequent. The "loss" the MPAA would hypothesize would be far less a proportion of the gross.
Note that the MPAA et al. would still report a loss even if the opposite effect (increased sales due to downloading) holds, as has been hypothesized. I'm not confident the data collection and analysis supports that hypothesis, although neither would it support an MPAA report of loss. MPAA has to report loss regardless, as failure to do so would mean not supporting claims of copyright violation. Doing that not only means loss of any relevant piracy lawsuits, but also potentially loss of the copyright involved. Failure to protect them can result in loss of them. That point explains the variance between the claims and actions of MPAA/RIAA etc. and any hard data, or lack thereof, supporting any "loss" or the opposite. Claims of loss are almost invariably just that -- claims. They are usually arbitrary and grossly inflated guesstimates. That improves the chances in lawsuits.
I read exactly the same thing in one of the very excellent series of childrens' science books, The Golden Book of Astronomy. It had things wrong, such as the moon forming from a bulge in the then molten Earth, but I remember quite distinctly the fate of the Earth being swallowed up by the expanding sun as it went red giant. I've read the same countless times ever since.
Yet another example of the sort of science non-story listed in the recent/. article on bad science reporting. If it's a bad science story in the media, it'll be misquoted to increase its FUD value on/.
(1) provide broad- and net-cast of the proceedings, and
(2) provide for text and voice reception to the panel for questions from the audience, local and remote, and
(3) provide a moderator whose job it is to see that the relevant questions are answered, or else specifically and overtly note that the relevant questions were non-answered with misdirection through irrelevant and worthless answers.
Announce that this is how it's going to run, and I'll give 10 to 1 that Comcast will refuse to participate. Announce that independent testing has confirmed they've lied about their "packet shaping" blockage of P2P traffic, and I'll raise it to 100 to 1.
Any day now one or another of these traffic blocking ISPs is going to blame participation in the goobermint's wire tapping program for the "unavoidable periodic slowdowns of certain types of traffic due to redirection of 'traffic of interest'" for analysis by the spooks. It's a lie that they all know will be recognized a such, but will be allowed to slip by the sheeple since it's for catching the terrorists who might want to blow up the Grand Canyon or some such.
NSA: War Is Peace Freedom is Slavery We're Running a Little Behind
The posts should read "SOME Anti-depressants..." and "SOME people". TFA referenced is similarly titled misleadingly. Within TFA, they state they studied four drugs (out of dozens used for the same problem). It is absolutely no surprise that some people don't respond to SSRIs. Doctors are well aware some people require different kinds of medication, and change prescriptions accordingly.
First, about 3% of people are allergic to SSRIs. They suffer "serotonin storm" when they take these. Second, some people have mood swings which look like bipolar but have a different source. Lamotragine and lithium carbonate are effective for these, SSRIs aren't. The later is particularly true for people who, when their swings are stabilized, have a baseline which is significantly higher or lower than "normal". Third, some people have imbalances in other neurotransmitters which cause imbalances in monoamine oxidase, the enzyme that recycles the amine transmitters (dopamine, serotonin, epinephrine and norepinephrine). An example of this is vitiligo, the skin condition that causes patches of albino-like skin. What doesn't turn into melanin (skin pigment) turns into epinephrine and norepinephrine, sometimes several times the normal amount. The body then produces an equivalent amount of MAO to cope with this over-productions. But the same MAO degrades the relatively normal amount of dopamine and serotonin, producing symptoms similar to (respectively) Parkinson's and depression. Dopaminergic drugs (ie. L-DOPA) and serotinergic drugs (SSRIs) don't work for these. MAO inhibitors won't either because they leave the epinephrine and norepinephrine too high (in the body rather that the brain, these are known as arenalin and noradrenalin; you can guess the potential problem here).
Very few people actually have a biologically based shortage of serotonin production, for which SSRIs are designed. More, but by no means a majority have such a temporary (though chronic and self-reinforcing) imbalance due to being situationally depressed resulting in such and imbalance. For those, and for the far more people have imbalances of other types, or simply situational depression it is the situation that needs changed, not the neurotransmitters. There are also those who have suffered a lesion or other brain dysfunction in either the areas that produce or react to serotonin. SSRIs can't possibly correct these problems.
This story is no more surprising than one that finds that the four most used antibiotics are often not effective. These too are specialized for certain things. When they don't work, others are used. The old stand-by sulfa is still used when the newer antibiotics aren't effective.
In any case SSRIs are not intended to "cure" depression except in those few who actually have a biological and reversible deficiency in serotonin production or reception/reaction. In most people they are intended to ameliorate the symptoms so the person can have the ability to work on the situational cause of the depression. Without doing the latter the former is a waste of time and the depression will continue.
Finally, there are people with chronic diseases such as cancer, Parkinson's, or organic brain damage such as post-stroke lesions with brain dysfunction which makes them understandably depressed. As long as the disease continues they will continue to be depressed, and no amount of SSRI will change that.
Despite all these, SSRIs are the first drugs tried for depression. If they don't work, as is frequently the case, psychiatrists are accustom to trying different classes of drugs. If they determine the causes is another reason such as those noted, they won't even start with SSRIs.
TFA looks like something significant, and potentially cases of misdiagnosis or misprescription, except to those who actually treat the conditions for which these drugsare sometimes used. Those who treat are completely familiar with the ideas presented, and much more besides. About the only use for TFA is to tell the public that if they're taking S
Any chance people could read, digest and apply the material referred to in their/. postings?
A (very) few popular science media outlets include goofy references in their articles, but not nearly to the extent of/. posts, who apparently think nobody will read them if they don't include SF references or FUDish statements, or a combination of the two.
And I do suspect it's the editorial policy. I've submitted many decent articles only to have the same material printed with a bunch of that sort of junk included.
But hey, that's the AAAS and the subject is about science publication and education, not ad supported web sites.
SciAm, Discover and Alan Boyle's Cosmic Log on MSNBC have all covered CERN's history and present project(s; there's two different Higgs experiments being built), and managed to do so without the silly-assed references to God particles, The Force and Star Wars. Is it too much to hope for that/. will someday stop putting out stuff written for adolescent mentalities and tastes? Probably so, since it's getting worse instead of better.
> wouldn't an international super power war pretty much immediately mean the downing of every satellite in orbit?
Not every one. There's too many. And many others are in too high an orbit. The sat USA 193 they just shot down was 130 miles up. Higher sat would be easier to hit because they orbit slower, but it's much harder to get the altitude.
I think it was William James, appx. 100 years ago, who said "If you believe something to be true, it will be true in its consequences." If you believe you see something, you will see it. It won't be there in reality, but you'll see it.
My first job, 42 years ago, was testing vacuum tubes scavenged from TV's. We sold the new ones and hauled away the old as a favor. Any good tubes got saved and used in other sets that needed them (with a discount for being used). Now days you can hardly find a tube tester, though they used to be in drug stores, supermarkets, etc.
US Patent 4,877,027 Issue date: Oct 31, 1989 Inventor: Wayne B. Brunkan
Abstract
Sound is induced in the head of a person by radiating the head with microwaves in the range of 100 megahertz to 10,000 megahertz that are modulated with a particular waveform....
> I find it quaint, the notion that the real reason they have to shoot the satellite down is because it has a tank of hydrazine onboard
If the tank survives to low atmosphere or impacts the earth, the by then gaseous (boiling point 114 C) hydrazine would come flying out when the tank ruptured. It would be heated by the still hot tank shards and explode (flash point 37 C). A 1,000 lbs. cloud of gas burning a large volume of oxygen would leave behind a large vacuum and cause a major implosion. This is how a daisy cutter bomb works. Those are hardly quaint.
And if it didn't blow itself out with an implosion, it'd be a large 800 C fireball. It'd set an enormous fire, another non-quaint outcome. The land areas under the last orbits are southern Africa and mid Russia/Siberia. Lots of flammable land area. Either way the result would be much worse than a few pieces of radioactive material landing in small lumps, such as the Cosmos that crashed into Canada.
The headline and summary are almost worse than TFA in terms of being misleading junk. Almost.
TFA: > Using an algorithm, the creators discovered a set of brainwave patterns, to each pattern a pre-programmed behavior was assigned.
They *assigned* a pre-programmed behavior to an EEG pattern. The programmed behavior has nothing to do with what was actually going on in the mind.
They seem to entirely skip over the fact that EEG patterns can be identical to the point of high statistical significance and be cause by extremely different stimuli.
"Using an algorithm".... well, that makes it all scientifical and everything, so that's OK then. What a verbal turd.
"Will this form of user-driven reporting (with which we are well acquainted) come to challenge or supplant traditional new broadcasting?"
This can be done for free. That doesn't sell advertising. CNN et al. would never let that happen. Instead they're encapsulating the user generated stuff within their own domain where they can use it to support their ad money generating bread and butter. Not embedding this stuff within their own output would be more of a threat.
And as a cognitive neuroscientist, I say he's off the mark entirely. As per Minsky, a fish swims under water; would you say a submarine swims?
What exactly is the "level of humans"? Passing the Turing test? (Fatally flawed because it's not double blind, btw.) Part of human intelligence includes affective input; are we to expect intelligence to be like human intelligence because it includes artificial emotions, or are we supposed to accept a new definition of intelligence without affective input? Surely they're not going to wave the "consciousness" flag. Well, Kurzweil might. Venter might follow that flag because he doesn't know better and he's as big a media hog as Kurzweil.
I think it's a silly pursuit. Why hobble a perfectly good computer by making it pretend to be something that runs on an entirely different basis? We should concentrate on making computers be the best computers and leave being human to the billions of us who do it without massive hardware.
The problem isn't the sat or pieces of it, it's the half ton of frozen hydrazine that could survive reentry and land in a lump. Nasty poison, that.
The solution is to to hit it with a Terrier-based SM-3 kinetic warhead (http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/stardsm3.htm). It hasn't hit a target yet, and those attempts were suborbital velocity and altitude ballistic missiles.
If the SM-3 warhead were replaced with the anti-sat equivalent of a shotgun shell, and it were launched to intercept from in front of the sat at say 1/2 orbital speed, it'd riddle the sat and hydrazine tank at 1.5 x orbital speed and the pellets would fall back in less than 1 orbit. The kinetic energy would help de-orbit the sat, but since it'd be full of holes, where ever that happened it'd come apart. It's a lot easier to hit a sat with at least some of a large number of smaller pellets than a single warhead.
Of course this is an old SDI idea (Smart Pebbles) which was never meant to be used, so it won't be.
> to allow them to deploy against and take out anti-satellite launch sites before the enemy can fire their missiles.
Which would require the device and/or operators to known it's going to happen so far ahead of time that not even the attacker knows for sure yet. Mach 6 would still take hours to get from the US to any major missile launching sites elsewhere. An anti-sat capable solid fueled platform could get from storage to flight in under an hour, far less if it's stored on its launcher.
The US anti-sat missile launcher was an F-15. Other countries could easily do something similar. Unless we could see underneath their planes, we'd need mind reading to know what they're planning. IIRC, the CIA shut down its remote viewing program, and I don't see it on the DARPA budget.
Perhaps the USAF is expecting anyone intending to launch an anti-sat will oblige us and use some cumbersome behemoth that requires construction and fueling for launch prep, as well as using a payload section that couldn't be mistaken for something else, like say a weather satellite or exatmospheric scientific sounding rocket.
The statements made in TFA were intended for mass consumption by sheeples who'd be impressed since they wouldn't know how long the spokesdroid's nose had gotten. The USAF knows better as do the other countries. But it sure sounds cool.
sumd00dsez: What is the point in advertising this thing? It is completely useless once it becomes public knowledge.
Psychological operations.They can't be sure we can't do it, so they have to assume any attempt is wasted. Regan ran the USSR into bankruptcy trying to keep up with out mostly theoretical and unworkable SDI.
As for a car full of crazies transporting open material they'll probably end up as a relatively minor hazmat job when they all bleed out and crash. This system can keep track of thst.
If, however, it's built into a casing with a arming device, they detectors won't see it, nor will anyone else until the wide spectrum EMP burst.
> "It's such lame and dishonest branding the marketing group should be ashamed."
The two subspecies that are parasitic on businesses, marketoids and attournasaurus, are able to function in large part because they *don't* feel shame. Their conscience has been eaten away by malignant greedanoma. The same could be said of many politicians, but politics and business are symbiotic with each other. They gang up to prey on the vast herds of sheeple that, contrary to nature's way, continually run *towards* the predators, and attract their attention by throwing money at them for any reason the predators invent.
Slashdot Mirror
Attacks by the Chinese are known to have occurred for at least 10 years. The first amateurish and easily traced attacks were against a particular US based "free Tibet" web site owned by a Brit, and followed by attacks on other sites of a similar nature. Within weeks the same IP range (clearly within the Chinese ministry of defense) was used to breach a mail relay at a US naval installation in Virginia. (To be fair to the Navy, the system was a relic with the then still common non-closed relay, and was a purely administrative system, not part of anything security or defense-sensitive). The reports were publicly released and largely ignored, as have been some that followed. The little public attention waned as rapidly as it tends to for larger events that fall out of the news over time. I suspect escalation, probably by both sides, occurred after attention fell off, taking advantage of that and adding expert spoofing to insure that most would not be able to consider further reports reliable.
/. questions was recruiting for. It's already in progress. I'd enjoy the hell out of serving again, and being able to do so without having to put on a uniform. I'd especially enjoy it when I found that the majority of "combatants" were somewhere below my own level of expertise, though somewhat higher than script kiddies -- interesting but not too frustrating.
If I were going to conduct surgical attacks against a government from within a large IP block, I'd allow others with less ambitious nasty plans to use it, and hide my activities within the flood from them, like hiding an artillery attack within a thunderstorm. I have little doubt that there are "Nigerian spammers" and such using Chinese machines. That doesn't preclude their government doing it -- to my mind it indicates the probability.
And they wouldn't want reports to be entirely absent either. Taking over or subverting the infrastructure that carries content is as much a part of psychological warfare as is the content itself. Subversion of the medium is also the message, and that must become known to the system's owners and their allies. It causes mistrust in the system, its owners, and any messages to come from them. The general public wouldn't care or pay attention, but those who did care would get the intended message. And you have.
This is the war that the General who recently answered
> It's not quite telepathy, but it's pretty close.
/. look so 14 year old golly gee whiz?
Jaheezus criminy, must people make
It's absolutely nothing like telepathy. The band is picking up electrical signals in the muscles (called EMG: electromyography) controlling the vocal cords . They can react to reading silently, particularly if you read something "out loud to yourself". If you imagine your own voice while reading something or even imagine speaking, this will happen. It's called subvocalization, and the muscle movements are similar to, but not the same as, speech. That's why the device can differentiate between spoken and "silent" speech. This has been known for decades. Someone has managed to build something that decodes the signals into something like the original words being read or imagined.
There is no transmission of anything, much less thoughts. Although a novel approach, this is simply another human-machine interface. And one that I'll wager will require fairly extensive training for each individual using it, including training it to read them in different physiological states.
The article was worth reporting here without the crap in the last sentence of the summary. I sincerely hope that crap was not what got it approved.
> Connectomics -- Brain wiring diagrams. Neat, but it's too soon to tell if it'll reveal anything exciting.
It won't. No neuron is more than 6 connections from any other, the average being around 3. The connections do not dictate the function, the simultaneous activity (synchrony) of a collection of 1000 to 10000 neurons do. These are called Hebbian Cellular Assemblies.
Without knowing which neurons are operating with certain others, we'd have to consider all the possibilities, which is 10 billion neurons with 100,000 connections on each. Someone with the temerity can work out the degrees of freedom for that map, or at least estimate the calculation time required to determine it. And without the dynamics of the Hebbian activity, the map would be as "exciting" as a dead brain.
The claim this is the first paper in Science regarding music theory is wrong. There have been others, including some on music theory and the physiological basis of music perception.
The use of the circle to described musical perceptions is not new. It's been used to describe among other things the "ascending/descending" illusion. However, the use of other topological/dimensional concepts is novel, and pretty damn awesome. I've studied musical perception and its physiology, and a circle is definitely insufficient. More dimensions are required, as the waveforms involved are never (as early as the ear, much less in neural processing) sine waves. A simple example is the fact that inclusion of noise improves reception. The ear itself introduces noise, quite possibly for this purpose. Another is the multimodal (ie. harmonics) nature of most musical instruments. For instance, look inside a piano. The "notes" have more than one string. Even a single string vibrates in a complex set of harmonic frequencies. Now consider that the complex harmonics alone can be used to recreate the missing fundamental (the "main") note in perception, and possibly even in the instrument. Many different multimodal waveforms can create the same result. That requires different approach paths to the solution, and that requires more dimensions.
Sadly, very few in the relevant psychological fields are prepared to understand and incorporate this theory into their work. I still can't find more than a handful that can understand nonlinear statistics above 2 dimensions, even though they often use them for such as fMRI (the vast majority team up with biophysicists who do understand it). When they do manage to grasp the concepts in TFA, or find enough people from a relevant field who do with whom they can work, the results will be damn interesting.
> What ever happened to the ravages of online piracy?
Going to the movies is an event. People will go even when they have access to downloaded versions because the movie itself is not the whole of the event.
Concerts are also an event, but are far more expensive, more rare and almost invariably less convenient than going to the movies. Plus, a concert is almost never exactly what an album is in content, whereas a movie is. Having seen a movie in a theater, and given the much greater size (ie. download time and storage requirement) fewer are likely to then download it. Even if they've been to a concert, people are more likely to download a studio album with some similar material.
TFA was not about DVD and other pay-per-content venues. However, the statements probably hold for those too, because the margin on DVDs etc. is much less as well as downloads being less frequent. The "loss" the MPAA would hypothesize would be far less a proportion of the gross.
Note that the MPAA et al. would still report a loss even if the opposite effect (increased sales due to downloading) holds, as has been hypothesized. I'm not confident the data collection and analysis supports that hypothesis, although neither would it support an MPAA report of loss. MPAA has to report loss regardless, as failure to do so would mean not supporting claims of copyright violation. Doing that not only means loss of any relevant piracy lawsuits, but also potentially loss of the copyright involved. Failure to protect them can result in loss of them. That point explains the variance between the claims and actions of MPAA/RIAA etc. and any hard data, or lack thereof, supporting any "loss" or the opposite. Claims of loss are almost invariably just that -- claims. They are usually arbitrary and grossly inflated guesstimates. That improves the chances in lawsuits.
I read exactly the same thing in one of the very excellent series of childrens' science books, The Golden Book of Astronomy. It had things wrong, such as the moon forming from a bulge in the then molten Earth, but I remember quite distinctly the fate of the Earth being swallowed up by the expanding sun as it went red giant. I've read the same countless times ever since.
/. article on bad science reporting. If it's a bad science story in the media, it'll be misquoted to increase its FUD value on /.
Yet another example of the sort of science non-story listed in the recent
Do it again, but
(1) provide broad- and net-cast of the proceedings, and
(2) provide for text and voice reception to the panel for questions from the audience, local and remote, and
(3) provide a moderator whose job it is to see that the relevant questions are answered, or else specifically and overtly note that the relevant questions were non-answered with misdirection through irrelevant and worthless answers.
Announce that this is how it's going to run, and I'll give 10 to 1 that Comcast will refuse to participate. Announce that independent testing has confirmed they've lied about their "packet shaping" blockage of P2P traffic, and I'll raise it to 100 to 1.
Any day now one or another of these traffic blocking ISPs is going to blame participation in the goobermint's wire tapping program for the "unavoidable periodic slowdowns of certain types of traffic due to redirection of 'traffic of interest'" for analysis by the spooks. It's a lie that they all know will be recognized a such, but will be allowed to slip by the sheeple since it's for catching the terrorists who might want to blow up the Grand Canyon or some such.
NSA:
War Is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
We're Running a Little Behind
The posts should read "SOME Anti-depressants..." and "SOME people". TFA referenced is similarly titled misleadingly. Within TFA, they state they studied four drugs (out of dozens used for the same problem). It is absolutely no surprise that some people don't respond to SSRIs. Doctors are well aware some people require different kinds of medication, and change prescriptions accordingly.
First, about 3% of people are allergic to SSRIs. They suffer "serotonin storm" when they take these. Second, some people have mood swings which look like bipolar but have a different source. Lamotragine and lithium carbonate are effective for these, SSRIs aren't. The later is particularly true for people who, when their swings are stabilized, have a baseline which is significantly higher or lower than "normal". Third, some people have imbalances in other neurotransmitters which cause imbalances in monoamine oxidase, the enzyme that recycles the amine transmitters (dopamine, serotonin, epinephrine and norepinephrine). An example of this is vitiligo, the skin condition that causes patches of albino-like skin. What doesn't turn into melanin (skin pigment) turns into epinephrine and norepinephrine, sometimes several times the normal amount. The body then produces an equivalent amount of MAO to cope with this over-productions. But the same MAO degrades the relatively normal amount of dopamine and serotonin, producing symptoms similar to (respectively) Parkinson's and depression. Dopaminergic drugs (ie. L-DOPA) and serotinergic drugs (SSRIs) don't work for these. MAO inhibitors won't either because they leave the epinephrine and norepinephrine too high (in the body rather that the brain, these are known as arenalin and noradrenalin; you can guess the potential problem here).
Very few people actually have a biologically based shortage of serotonin production, for which SSRIs are designed. More, but by no means a majority have such a temporary (though chronic and self-reinforcing) imbalance due to being situationally depressed resulting in such and imbalance. For those, and for the far more people have imbalances of other types, or simply situational depression it is the situation that needs changed, not the neurotransmitters. There are also those who have suffered a lesion or other brain dysfunction in either the areas that produce or react to serotonin. SSRIs can't possibly correct these problems.
This story is no more surprising than one that finds that the four most used antibiotics are often not effective. These too are specialized for certain things. When they don't work, others are used. The old stand-by sulfa is still used when the newer antibiotics aren't effective.
In any case SSRIs are not intended to "cure" depression except in those few who actually have a biological and reversible deficiency in serotonin production or reception/reaction. In most people they are intended to ameliorate the symptoms so the person can have the ability to work on the situational cause of the depression. Without doing the latter the former is a waste of time and the depression will continue.
Finally, there are people with chronic diseases such as cancer, Parkinson's, or organic brain damage such as post-stroke lesions with brain dysfunction which makes them understandably depressed. As long as the disease continues they will continue to be depressed, and no amount of SSRI will change that.
Despite all these, SSRIs are the first drugs tried for depression. If they don't work, as is frequently the case, psychiatrists are accustom to trying different classes of drugs. If they determine the causes is another reason such as those noted, they won't even start with SSRIs.
TFA looks like something significant, and potentially cases of misdiagnosis or misprescription, except to those who actually treat the conditions for which these drugsare sometimes used. Those who treat are completely familiar with the ideas presented, and much more besides. About the only use for TFA is to tell the public that if they're taking S
Any chance people could read, digest and apply the material referred to in their /. postings?
/. posts, who apparently think nobody will read them if they don't include SF references or FUDish statements, or a combination of the two.
A (very) few popular science media outlets include goofy references in their articles, but not nearly to the extent of
And I do suspect it's the editorial policy. I've submitted many decent articles only to have the same material printed with a bunch of that sort of junk included.
But hey, that's the AAAS and the subject is about science publication and education, not ad supported web sites.
SciAm, Discover and Alan Boyle's Cosmic Log on MSNBC have all covered CERN's history and present project(s; there's two different Higgs experiments being built), and managed to do so without the silly-assed references to God particles, The Force and Star Wars. Is it too much to hope for that /. will someday stop putting out stuff written for adolescent mentalities and tastes? Probably so, since it's getting worse instead of better.
> wouldn't an international super power war pretty much immediately mean the downing of every satellite in orbit?
Not every one. There's too many. And many others are in too high an orbit. The sat USA 193 they just shot down was 130 miles up. Higher sat would be easier to hit because they orbit slower, but it's much harder to get the altitude.
I think it was William James, appx. 100 years ago, who said "If you believe something to be true, it will be true in its consequences." If you believe you see something, you will see it. It won't be there in reality, but you'll see it.
My first job, 42 years ago, was testing vacuum tubes scavenged from TV's. We sold the new ones and hauled away the old as a favor. Any good tubes got saved and used in other sets that needed them (with a discount for being used). Now days you can hardly find a tube tester, though they used to be in drug stores, supermarkets, etc.
Do I win the "old fart" award for this thread?
US Patent 4,877,027
Issue date: Oct 31, 1989
Inventor: Wayne B. Brunkan
Abstract
Sound is induced in the head of a person by radiating the head with microwaves in the range of 100 megahertz to 10,000 megahertz that are modulated with a particular waveform....
> I find it quaint, the notion that the real reason they have to shoot the satellite down is because it has a tank of hydrazine onboard
If the tank survives to low atmosphere or impacts the earth, the by then gaseous (boiling point 114 C) hydrazine would come flying out when the tank ruptured. It would be heated by the still hot tank shards and explode (flash point 37 C). A 1,000 lbs. cloud of gas burning a large volume of oxygen would leave behind a large vacuum and cause a major implosion. This is how a daisy cutter bomb works. Those are hardly quaint.
And if it didn't blow itself out with an implosion, it'd be a large 800 C fireball. It'd set an enormous fire, another non-quaint outcome. The land areas under the last orbits are southern Africa and mid Russia/Siberia. Lots of flammable land area. Either way the result would be much worse than a few pieces of radioactive material landing in small lumps, such as the Cosmos that crashed into Canada.
The headline and summary are almost worse than TFA in terms of being misleading junk. Almost.
TFA: > Using an algorithm, the creators discovered a set of brainwave patterns, to each pattern a pre-programmed behavior was assigned.
They *assigned* a pre-programmed behavior to an EEG pattern. The programmed behavior has nothing to do with what was actually going on in the mind.
They seem to entirely skip over the fact that EEG patterns can be identical to the point of high statistical significance and be cause by extremely different stimuli.
"Using an algorithm".... well, that makes it all scientifical and everything, so that's OK then. What a verbal turd.
> "Scientists at Stanford University have shown for the first time...
But only if you ignore the fields of evolutionary anthropology, sociocultural evolution and human sociobiology.
... but HELL no.
"Will this form of user-driven reporting (with which we are well acquainted) come to challenge or supplant traditional new broadcasting?"
This can be done for free. That doesn't sell advertising. CNN et al. would never let that happen. Instead they're encapsulating the user generated stuff within their own domain where they can use it to support their ad money generating bread and butter. Not embedding this stuff within their own output would be more of a threat.
And as a cognitive neuroscientist, I say he's off the mark entirely. As per Minsky, a fish swims under water; would you say a submarine swims?
What exactly is the "level of humans"? Passing the Turing test? (Fatally flawed because it's not double blind, btw.) Part of human intelligence includes affective input; are we to expect intelligence to be like human intelligence because it includes artificial emotions, or are we supposed to accept a new definition of intelligence without affective input? Surely they're not going to wave the "consciousness" flag. Well, Kurzweil might. Venter might follow that flag because he doesn't know better and he's as big a media hog as Kurzweil.
I think it's a silly pursuit. Why hobble a perfectly good computer by making it pretend to be something that runs on an entirely different basis? We should concentrate on making computers be the best computers and leave being human to the billions of us who do it without massive hardware.
The problem isn't the sat or pieces of it, it's the half ton of frozen hydrazine that could survive reentry and land in a lump. Nasty poison, that.
The solution is to to hit it with a Terrier-based SM-3 kinetic warhead (http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/stardsm3.htm). It hasn't hit a target yet, and those attempts were suborbital velocity and altitude ballistic missiles.
If the SM-3 warhead were replaced with the anti-sat equivalent of a shotgun shell, and it were launched to intercept from in front of the sat at say 1/2 orbital speed, it'd riddle the sat and hydrazine tank at 1.5 x orbital speed and the pellets would fall back in less than 1 orbit. The kinetic energy would help de-orbit the sat, but since it'd be full of holes, where ever that happened it'd come apart. It's a lot easier to hit a sat with at least some of a large number of smaller pellets than a single warhead.
Of course this is an old SDI idea (Smart Pebbles) which was never meant to be used, so it won't be.
> to allow them to deploy against and take out anti-satellite launch sites before the enemy can fire their missiles.
Which would require the device and/or operators to known it's going to happen so far ahead of time that not even the attacker knows for sure yet. Mach 6 would still take hours to get from the US to any major missile launching sites elsewhere. An anti-sat capable solid fueled platform could get from storage to flight in under an hour, far less if it's stored on its launcher.
The US anti-sat missile launcher was an F-15. Other countries could easily do something similar. Unless we could see underneath their planes, we'd need mind reading to know what they're planning. IIRC, the CIA shut down its remote viewing program, and I don't see it on the DARPA budget.
Perhaps the USAF is expecting anyone intending to launch an anti-sat will oblige us and use some cumbersome behemoth that requires construction and fueling for launch prep, as well as using a payload section that couldn't be mistaken for something else, like say a weather satellite or exatmospheric scientific sounding rocket.
The statements made in TFA were intended for mass consumption by sheeples who'd be impressed since they wouldn't know how long the spokesdroid's nose had gotten. The USAF knows better as do the other countries. But it sure sounds cool.
for any given job is the one the person given the job knows best. Just ask them.
Until they learn something better. Same thing.
We have drugs that prevent some of the effects of opiates, luckily including many of the dangerous ones.
We don't have a cocaine vaccine yet, but the cholera with cocaine spines looks like it might work.
I'd a great time to be sick. Um, well, that is......
I'm waiting for the day when they find out Rogaine makes you limp and Viagra makes you bald. The two major male ego weaknesses go to war.
sumd00dsez:
What is the point in advertising this thing? It is completely useless once it becomes public knowledge.
Psychological operations.They can't be sure we can't do it, so they have to assume any attempt is wasted. Regan ran the USSR into bankruptcy trying to keep up with out mostly theoretical and unworkable SDI.
As for a car full of crazies transporting open material they'll probably end up as a relatively minor hazmat job when they all bleed out and crash. This system can keep track of thst.
If, however, it's built into a casing with a arming device, they detectors won't see it, nor will anyone else until the wide spectrum EMP burst.
> "It's such lame and dishonest branding the marketing group should be ashamed."
The two subspecies that are parasitic on businesses, marketoids and attournasaurus, are able to function in large part because they *don't* feel shame. Their conscience has been eaten away by malignant greedanoma. The same could be said of many politicians, but politics and business are symbiotic with each other. They gang up to prey on the vast herds of sheeple that, contrary to nature's way, continually run *towards* the predators, and attract their attention by throwing money at them for any reason the predators invent.
Welcome to Earth. Loonie bin to the universe.