As far as I can see, Scaled Composites and Xcor are the only tenants at Mojave using nitrous. SC in the HTPB hybrid from SpaceDev http://www.astronautix.com/engines/spaybrid.htm , and Xcor in its 15 and 50 Lbf motors http://www.xcor.com/products/engines/2P1_N2O_ethan e_rocket_engine.html . The latter wouldn't need a truck load of the stuff. SpaceDev is working on a lot more hybrid projects than just SC's, but their test own stand is at Capistrano. SC is both secretive about its running projects and notoriously bad about updating it web sites about what it does announce, but by now they should be ramping up for testing the motor for SS2.
This certainly throws a wrench into the "hybrids are so much safer" works. Very bad for the two dead and four hurt, I'm just hoping Rutan wasn't among them.
We're running on a technology that at its base depends on encoding, transmitting and decoding copies of digital information. Based on that:
When we use it on them, information wants to be free, it's not stealing since the original remains, and they knew this is how it worked when they started using it.
When they use it on us, it's wiretapping, invasion of privacy, and they'll use it to control what we can do (and charge us, monetarily or legally, accordingly).
You can have it both ways. You can *only* have it both ways, because the untenable alternative is to drop its use after it's been adopted. So it goes with all technology. It's neutral. Its uses aren't because they're based on specific intentions, and those are based on subjective opinions. I don't expect that to change, I just expect the inherent contradictions to be made visible as the pros and cons constantly switch places.
Golly, you must be. Who could have guessed my name, since I've used the same nick for 14 years, was about as secretive about it as a person can be who wears a pink tutu and chartruse fishnets to play at the end of the world concert, and got a handful of degrees studying branes Branes BRANES. Most people couldn't tell me from Richard Bullis any more than they could tell the difference between OS/2 and NT 3.
You been having the same kind of moderation problems elsewhere?
> A computer program that learns to decode sounds from different languages... is not the same as learning "talk". Talk is to sounds as molecules are to atoms. You can't predict the behavior of the former just from knowing the individual behaviors of the latter.
> in the same way that a baby does
McClelland's program only models it. The map is not the terrain. I haven't read his PNAS paper, but I'm definitely going to. I doubt it makes the kind of claims Reuters does.
True to dot.com refuse-to-learn-from-history hubris, one company (TriSenx) is planning to release a stinking computer peripheral, priced variously according to different sources as $269 to $369 US. One source claims it's available now http://www.buzzle.com/articles/day-smelly-computer -has-arrived.html .
It was supposed to be a joke when it was in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. It still is. Unfortunately an iSmell may eventually exist. Start petitioning now for the killing of a cubicle mate for using one of these to be considered self-defense.
Headline: "Malaysia Uses..." Article: "The Malaysian government may..." TF(BBC)A: "The Malaysian government has warned that it could..."
When I had to listen to it on shortwave, BBC was a great alternative to the then already groupthink polluted US media. Now it's Fox News with British accents. Despite their Reynolds Wrap hard hats, some people think this happens on purpose, forced by some shadowy puppet governments or government puppets. This example shows how it happens due only to inattention to detail, and desire to make a point, even here on/.
EB was being corrected by others long before Wiki existed. A 9 year old corrected their statement that Mercury was the hottest planet. He correctly notified them that Venus was.
Wiki is now operating at the level of a 9 year old.
OTOH, perhaps Wiki will have an article on how often/. posts are wrong.
Let's leave aside the issues of life, like infant mortality, life expectancy and disease morbidity and focus on the relevant issues:
Less than 60% of Africans are literate. 20% of Africans don't have electricity and that number is increasing by almost 10% per year. That is, they're losing it, not getting it. Less than 1% of Africans have land line phones. Less than 10% have cell phones, and coverage is spotty, unreliable and low rate.
Africa is waiting for the web like dolphins are waiting for a subway.
The people who think Africa really needs the web are mostly the people who stand to profit from selling it to them. Much of what did get sold would never be put to use -- it'd get resold or just sit and rot, the money gone to the corrupt governments, agencies and companies that were supposed to provide it to people the majority of whom couldn't afford it anyway.
> Parallel evolution, in the way biologists use the term, does not result in a unified species. E.g., you can say that bats' and birds' wings are the result of parallel evolution, but a bat isn't a bird and a bird isn't a bat.
I realized I was using the term in a non-standard way. I do believe, however, that a species can differentiate although not speciate due to strong genetic pressure to develop in a certain way, and they do so despite different niches. Consider what we call races as being what we call breeds in other animals, and some of these differentiate due to locale and not directed breeding. They are not speciated because they can still interbreed.
> Cite?
[re: petroglyphs] I can't find the web site. It was about tracing various "missing" cultures such as Mississipian by their glyphs back through the Hopi to the Anasazi and beyond. There were pictures of some that were dated between 80ky and 95ky. It was pointed out to me by Chief Joe Chasing Horse (Lakota). He was producing a "speaking book" (audio recording of stories, supplimented by graphics in a paper book) on prehistoric astronomy under a NASA grant. I don't know the state of that project. I'm thinking the Hopi cultural preservation program would have it.
> What's your field and specialty?
My field is cognitive science, primarily neurophysiology and neurochemistry. The line in "Thank You For Smoking" that said "Why they've just found that smoking can offset Parkinson's disease," referred to a project I worked on. The chemistry people found the substance, and I proved it was working in peoples' brains.
My specialty is methodology, designing experiments and/or data analysis techniques examining time series data. This has led me to contribute to work in ecology, paleontology, solar physics, transonic aerodynamic turbulence, and so forth. I've developed nonlinear and fractional dimension statistical techniques and contributed to work in the philosophy of science being extended by complex dynamic systems theory. For fun, I'm a rocket scientist, but then you don't have to be a brain scientist to be a rocket scientist.
My "training" in the history of ancient peoples on this continent is cultural, but I've always sought evidence to support it. There seems to be a pattern of selective attention paid to physical evidence as to whether it supports the few favorite theories developed by people with no training in the history. There's far more evidence than there are theories to fit it into, and more valid theories with support than there are taught to students in the field.
Citing US articles is not a measure of how good they are, it's a measure of who's citing: US researchers and those non-US researchers who want their work to find its way into US journals.
The 'flattening' has been going on for 20 years now, and it's due primarily to enormous cost increases. Many US journals are pricing themselves out of existence because even major university libraries can't afford to keep all of them. Plus, access to electronic versions of articles makes subscribing to the entire journal a waste.
There is an up side -- non-US journals will cover topics that US journals won't. The research is every bit as good, and is productive (leads to further research) and useful (leads to technology). US journals and researchers ignore things like botanical pharmecutics because it seems like 'alternative' medicine, when the truth is most pharmaceuticals started out as plant product derivatives. So more power to the other researchers -- they'll end up with a productive piece of a pie that US researchers turn down, and they'll finally catch up in research scientifically and financially.
... I propose that nobody replicate the stated methods and compare their results with those from the article. An empirical test with hard data would make it impossible for everyone to prove their point by stating they never noticed what they didn't objectively test for, as well as making everyone who thinks the author is an idiot look like an idiot. Any such test would almost certainly prove the author to be as wrong as a football bat, but no matter how easily done it might be, it's far easier and lots more fun to throw more FUD at assumed FUD.
The pseudo-legal claims are, of course, symptomatic of recto-cranial inversion, but you can only argue with numbers if you have better numbers.
fred fleenblat (463628) sez: "Jet engines require oxygen, of which there is very little in the Martian atmosphere."
John Wickman of Wickman Spacecraft and Propulsion has designed, built and tested a jet engine specifically for use on Mars. The fuel is magnesium. The 'oxidizer' is carbon dioxide, which is the major constituent of the Martian atmosphere. http://www.space-rockets.com/marsjet.html
If used as a retro-jet, it'd be more effective at high speed. Most of the deceleration would be taken care of. It's the last bit, where speed drops below that necessary to run the jet, that then becomes the problem. At least it'd get down to more like 15 seconds of terror. A rocket for landing and for taking it back up to jet engine speed, could be very much smaller.
Still, the fuel itself is a problem. Bringing a craft down from orbital speed would take a large amount of energy, hence a large amount (both weight and volume) of magnesium. But using this as a mid-stage, between the aero-braking and the final landing rocket, would solve some of the problems of aero-braking alone.
Many peoples insist they originated in their native location. There are genetic groupings that indicate some of them were isolated human populations for quite some time. Evolution includes parallel evolution for disparate species, but more so for evolution of a single species at different locations., Something originated in Africa. Humans have a single ancestral line.
It is worth considering a hypothesis that not humans, but the forerunners of humans, were those who migrated from a African origin, and evolved in parallel at different locations. Petroglyphs in North America appear to predate the African diaspora of 80ky ago. Neanderthals made cave markings. Proto-humans on this continent would probably have done the same.
On the other hand, the oldest existing historical mythology in North America, that of the Hopi, specifically state separating from the Africans (and Asians) prior to their move to this continent. This was accomplished > 35ky ago, prior to the Bering Land Bridge. As a scientist I rely on evidence, and logic when evidence is not forthcoming. But as someone with ancestors that have lived here a lot longer than 500 years, I don't dishonor their word and do consider that it might be at least as valid as the evidence and logic.
Frank Zappa produced an album done by Wild Man Fisher. He was originally a street performer and would write a unique sing for anyone for a dollar. Several instances of him doing just that were on the album, along with some studio work with Zappa backing him up. Superbly weird. Your own song for a buck (with a Zappa stamp of approval) is better than a morphed song no matter how much.
Nor is it unique. Around 5 years ago TurboTax suddenly started "requiring" IE. It check and if it wasn't installed, it installed it with the program and made it the default browser. It "needed" it because the instructions were in HTML. Any browser would would. And in fact it did. We did the install and changed the default browser back again (Opera, at the time) and it worked fine. This, after TurboTax tech support swore down and down (there was no up to their "help") that it absolutely required IE.
The same thing happened with Dragon Naturally Speaking, in the last version before MS bought it and built it into Word. Same checking and forced install, same rationale, same story from tech support, except we finally got one guy to admit it would work with another browser after we told him we'd already done it.
We had Adelphia for telecom at the time. They also force installed IE with their software. We just didn't install their software since it was nothing but IE, some help files, some self-promotion, and AOL and Earthlink install programs. The important stuff, ports and s4erver names and whatnot, were in the instructions, and Opera read those off the CD just dandy. Whenever we called for tech support they asked if we had IE. We said no, we had Opera. They said they didn't support that. We said we weren't asking them to support the browser, we wanted them to fix the problem with the line or network, and in fact I forbid them to attempt to provide "support" for anything from the wall plug in because I didn't trust them to leave my system in the state I wanted it.
Kickbacks. That's what it comes down to. Probably not direct monetary kickbacks, but something like reduced support charges for their own Windows Server software as long as they standardized their network by having everyone use one "standard" browser. Then again, this was Adelphia, so it might well have been payola.
According to TFA, we apparently need privacy for stalking and for running away from our mistakes. This is not just the problem of a scientist from one field (here, CS) making statements relating to another (biology) but rather that the analogies are not valid. The first (stalking, as in prey) is not just privacy, it's secrecy. The second (moving far away to start over) is not just privacy, it's avoiding responsibility and making amends for mistakes made.
I agree with the premise but these examples are about hiding, not privacy. The latter is necessary but not sufficient for the former. In the first example, one is also hiding their intention to commit an act against another, and privacy does not require one to be planning anything. In the second, there is also the information regarding prior problematic behaviors that one has committed that one seeks to avoid.
If there is a biological imperative for privacy in humans, I would consider it to be a need to reduce the stress level (a physiological response) of having to act in certain ways due to social contact and expectations. Although these make civilization possible they also cause cognitive dissonance when one's behavioral preferences are not congruent with them. One still performs those acts but seeks privacy in order to reduce the dissonance and stress created unless and until one changes the incongruent beliefs or preferences. Not having privacy to do so causes over-stimulation and stress related illness. Not all people would require physical privacy to do so either. Some can achieve it in their head. Thus, the biological imperative would also be responsible for the apparent wide disparity in peoples opinions on it as being according to their own coping mechanisms.
> When I do some things (own property, buy goods) I have to pay the government some money, and it's called a tax. > When I do other things (drive, operate a radio) I have to pay the goverment some money, and it's called a license.
A license shows competence in a field and grants the holder the right to do that thing. Not all licenses are granted by government agencies. Some, as from some professional organizations, grant the license and get the money. These may or may not follow rules as set out by a government agency. In either case the fees for the license go to the granting agency in order to maintain the granting process.
Taxes go to the government and get reallocated as they see fit. They have nothing to do with proving competence or practicing in a certain field.
Yes, both have to do with doing some things, and in both cases you pay money. If that's a problem, I recommend telling the bartender that your beer should be free since some of the price goes to pay for the bar's liquor license.
You don't need a license to own property, but you have to pay property tax. You don't need a license to buy things, but you have to pay sales tax.
You need a license to drive, but as long as it's not your car you don't have to pay taxes on it. You need a license to operate a ham radio, but you don't pay any more taxes than if you didn't.
> For somebody who's posted no credentials of your own, your ridicule of Shannon is hollow.
I'm a cognitive neuroscientist. I've studied under Karl Pribram, and through his lab worked with David Bohm's parter Basil Hiley, and two physicists from Japan, Jibu and Yasue. I contributed to Pribram's work by applying tensor calculus extending his use of Gabor's math to describe brain processes and electrical fields as being similar to holography. I've discussed theories of consciousness Roger Penrose and contributed to that work through his partner Stuart Hammeroff. I've studied at the Santa Fe Institute twice. I regularly work with physicists and electrical engineers to apply signal processing concepts such as wavelet transform to brain imaging. You can look for my other postings about my work with a Parkinson's prevention. I'm very much an experimentalist and methodologist, but with a heavy background in cognitive science theories. I've worked at NIH/NIDCD (Deafness and Communication Disorders) and the Department of Psychiatry at Yale Medical School. As such I'm well qualified to critique Shannon's application of "compression" to language and the validity of its extension to the use in the article. I design psychology experiments based on concepts like Shannon's theory. Shannon's experimental design is sadly lacking in cognitive psychological considerations, particular that relating to language comprehension, and the conclusions drawn are therefore flawed. I specified the particular problems in the posting you replied to. The comment about Turing was an offhand comment, but is just as valid for the same reasons as those regarding Shannon, as well as being on topic, as the claim in the parent article was regarding AI.
Do you perhaps have credentials to validate your critique of my comments, or were you just blowing smoke out your ass?
> Is there a way to respond to this argument that would really register with people in the general public?
Yes. "I don't care if it's your rights and your privacy, you should do what I say with them because it's what I'd do."
If it's their privacy and it's based on their right to it, then they have the right to do with it as they will. Anything else is an attempt to infringe on their rights. Arguments over what someone wants to do vs. what someone else thinks they should do, using the implied excuse that their decision will affect how yours is treated, are at the base of the intractable-as-presented arguments over gun control, stem cell/cloning research and abortion. As much as I agree with the pro-privacy position, which is a protection of individual liberties, I'm even more for letting others make their own choices about their rights, which is what individual liberties means. If you can't protect your own rights without infringing on others' you don't deserve them.
> Very interested in this. Do you have a reference, link, etc where this can be found, or is this too in the book "Frozen Addicts"?
I don't know if it's in the book, I never read it. I saw it first in an episode of a documentary series ("Brain"?) shown in a physiological psychology class. This one very nuts and bolts story is what made me go into this field (I can't abide most of the rest of psychology -- too mushy). NOVA also had an episode about the transplants (and a discussion of the ethics of stem cell research) as a follow up to an episode about the frozen addicts. I also discussed the case with Neal Castagnoli, the Virginia Tech chemistry prof that did the anti-Parkinson research that my dissertation followed. He knew Langston (the guy who figured it out, and the book's author) personally even before the incident.
From T(second)FA: "Shannon (1950) estimated the entropy of written English to be between 0.6 and 1.3 bits per character (bpc), based on the ability of human subjects to guess successive characters in text."
What about reading not just whole words but several words at a time (Miller's magic 7+/- 2 item "chunking")? What about guessing the rest of a sentence from the first one or two such chunks? What about guessing the rest of a paragraph or statement from the first couple sentences and/or context? All these are functions of the brain's heuristic processing and "compress" language. If language compression is going to be a metric for AI based on the estimated brain processes it's competing with, then all the processes involved should be measured and accounted for.
Why anyone would cripple a perfectly good computer by forcing it to pretend to be a very different device that operates on very different principles is beyond me. But then Shannon was an engineer, not a cognitive psychologist. For that matter, neither was Turing.
The separate story referred to on the lead article is not about nicotine, it's about smoking. My dissertation was based on showing that at least one substance that prevented Parkinson's was active in the brains of smokers despite 8+ hours of abstinence (reduction of plasma nicotine levels to less than 1% of usual). I tested smokers abstaining and after smoking either a normal cigarette or one made from denicotinized tobacco and found no difference between conditions or groups. Nicotine or lack thereof had nothing to do with the EEG signature of chronic increased dopamine levels compared to non-smokers (which was the study I did prior to my diss). This work, and that of the folks in the chemistry department that isolated and synthesized the hypothesized active component, was what was referred to in "Thank You For Smoking". And to preempt any conclusion jumping, this doesn't mean you should smoke. Knowing what the substance is (trimethyl naphthoquinone) and how it works (dopamine releaser and reuptake blocker as well as MAO inhibitor) means it or something that does the same thing can be developed and used without needing tobacco in the process.
The carbon monoxide effect has some merit too. CO in the blood scavenges excess hyperoxides, a source of oxidative stress which is a known cause of Parkinson's and other apparent autoimmune problems. As above, you don't need to smoke to get the effect and can obviously find other things to do the same job. They're called anti-oxidants.
Nicotine may well also have some other protective effect, but it doesn't prevent mitochondrial MPTP from turning into MPP+, a very potent neurotoxin that causes Parkinsonian apoptosis. To read up on the mechanism, look up the "frozen addicts". As an interesting aside, at least one of them was all but completely cured in weeks using injected stem cells before the fundies got ahold of the concept and strangled it.
Slashdot Mirror
As far as I can see, Scaled Composites and Xcor are the only tenants at Mojave using nitrous. SC in the HTPB hybrid from SpaceDev http://www.astronautix.com/engines/spaybrid.htm , and Xcor in its 15 and 50 Lbf motors http://www.xcor.com/products/engines/2P1_N2O_ethan e_rocket_engine.html . The latter wouldn't need a truck load of the stuff. SpaceDev is working on a lot more hybrid projects than just SC's, but their test own stand is at Capistrano. SC is both secretive about its running projects and notoriously bad about updating it web sites about what it does announce, but by now they should be ramping up for testing the motor for SS2.
This certainly throws a wrench into the "hybrids are so much safer" works. Very bad for the two dead and four hurt, I'm just hoping Rutan wasn't among them.
We're running on a technology that at its base depends on encoding, transmitting and decoding copies of digital information. Based on that:
When we use it on them, information wants to be free, it's not stealing since the original remains, and they knew this is how it worked when they started using it.
When they use it on us, it's wiretapping, invasion of privacy, and they'll use it to control what we can do (and charge us, monetarily or legally, accordingly).
You can have it both ways. You can *only* have it both ways, because the untenable alternative is to drop its use after it's been adopted. So it goes with all technology. It's neutral. Its uses aren't because they're based on specific intentions, and those are based on subjective opinions. I don't expect that to change, I just expect the inherent contradictions to be made visible as the pros and cons constantly switch places.
> Yes I can. I'm psychic... Dennis.
Golly, you must be. Who could have guessed my name, since I've used the same nick for 14 years, was about as secretive about it as a person can be who wears a pink tutu and chartruse fishnets to play at the end of the world concert, and got a handful of degrees studying branes Branes BRANES. Most people couldn't tell me from Richard Bullis any more than they could tell the difference between OS/2 and NT 3.
You been having the same kind of moderation problems elsewhere?
cha cha cha.
U.IV.(ret.)
> A computer program that learns to decode sounds from different languages ... is not the same as learning "talk". Talk is to sounds as molecules are to atoms. You can't predict the behavior of the former just from knowing the individual behaviors of the latter.
> in the same way that a baby does
McClelland's program only models it. The map is not the terrain. I haven't read his PNAS paper, but I'm definitely going to. I doubt it makes the kind of claims Reuters does.
It dies and dies, but it people keep Frankensteining it.
r -has-arrived.html .
t -moments-in-dotcom-history-digiscents/ . It belatedly made PC World's Worst 25 Tech Products Of All Time http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,125772-page,8/ar ticle.html
The history of odor-enhanced experience is outlined at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smell-o-vision
True to dot.com refuse-to-learn-from-history hubris, one company (TriSenx) is planning to release a stinking computer peripheral, priced variously according to different sources as $269 to $369 US. One source claims it's available now http://www.buzzle.com/articles/day-smelly-compute
Another (DigiScents) has been making claims they will do so for at least 7 years http://www.chaddickerson.com/blog/2006/05/26/grea
It was supposed to be a joke when it was in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. It still is. Unfortunately an iSmell may eventually exist. Start petitioning now for the killing of a cubicle mate for using one of these to be considered self-defense.
Headline: "Malaysia Uses..."
/.
Article: "The Malaysian government may..."
TF(BBC)A: "The Malaysian government has warned that it could..."
When I had to listen to it on shortwave, BBC was a great alternative to the then already groupthink polluted US media. Now it's Fox News with British accents. Despite their Reynolds Wrap hard hats, some people think this happens on purpose, forced by some shadowy puppet governments or government puppets. This example shows how it happens due only to inattention to detail, and desire to make a point, even here on
If you need a good way to stick a CD to your dashboard, sandwich it between Legos.
1 26468357EDN0000P1502L0M1.JPG
http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/gallery/all/2/n/001/2N
Do a blow up on the circular object on the panel, left and down from center.
I keep seeing a miniaturized, massively parallel array of Dr. Nims.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._NIM
EB was being corrected by others long before Wiki existed. A 9 year old corrected their statement that Mercury was the hottest planet. He correctly notified them that Venus was.
/. posts are wrong.
Wiki is now operating at the level of a 9 year old.
OTOH, perhaps Wiki will have an article on how often
Let's leave aside the issues of life, like infant mortality, life expectancy and disease morbidity and focus on the relevant issues:
Less than 60% of Africans are literate.
20% of Africans don't have electricity and that number is increasing by almost 10% per year. That is, they're losing it, not getting it.
Less than 1% of Africans have land line phones. Less than 10% have cell phones, and coverage is spotty, unreliable and low rate.
Africa is waiting for the web like dolphins are waiting for a subway.
The people who think Africa really needs the web are mostly the people who stand to profit from selling it to them. Much of what did get sold would never be put to use -- it'd get resold or just sit and rot, the money gone to the corrupt governments, agencies and companies that were supposed to provide it to people the majority of whom couldn't afford it anyway.
> Parallel evolution, in the way biologists use the term, does not result in a unified species. E.g., you can say that bats' and birds' wings are the result of parallel evolution, but a bat isn't a bird and a bird isn't a bat.
I realized I was using the term in a non-standard way. I do believe, however, that a species can differentiate although not speciate due to strong genetic pressure to develop in a certain way, and they do so despite different niches. Consider what we call races as being what we call breeds in other animals, and some of these differentiate due to locale and not directed breeding. They are not speciated because they can still interbreed.
> Cite?
[re: petroglyphs] I can't find the web site. It was about tracing various "missing" cultures such as Mississipian by their glyphs back through the Hopi to the Anasazi and beyond. There were pictures of some that were dated between 80ky and 95ky. It was pointed out to me by Chief Joe Chasing Horse (Lakota). He was producing a "speaking book" (audio recording of stories, supplimented by graphics in a paper book) on prehistoric astronomy under a NASA grant. I don't know the state of that project. I'm thinking the Hopi cultural preservation program would have it.
> What's your field and specialty?
My field is cognitive science, primarily neurophysiology and neurochemistry. The line in "Thank You For Smoking" that said "Why they've just found that smoking can offset Parkinson's disease," referred to a project I worked on. The chemistry people found the substance, and I proved it was working in peoples' brains.
My specialty is methodology, designing experiments and/or data analysis techniques examining time series data. This has led me to contribute to work in ecology, paleontology, solar physics, transonic aerodynamic turbulence, and so forth. I've developed nonlinear and fractional dimension statistical techniques and contributed to work in the philosophy of science being extended by complex dynamic systems theory. For fun, I'm a rocket scientist, but then you don't have to be a brain scientist to be a rocket scientist.
My "training" in the history of ancient peoples on this continent is cultural, but I've always sought evidence to support it. There seems to be a pattern of selective attention paid to physical evidence as to whether it supports the few favorite theories developed by people with no training in the history. There's far more evidence than there are theories to fit it into, and more valid theories with support than there are taught to students in the field.
Citing US articles is not a measure of how good they are, it's a measure of who's citing: US researchers and those non-US researchers who want their work to find its way into US journals.
The 'flattening' has been going on for 20 years now, and it's due primarily to enormous cost increases. Many US journals are pricing themselves out of existence because even major university libraries can't afford to keep all of them. Plus, access to electronic versions of articles makes subscribing to the entire journal a waste.
There is an up side -- non-US journals will cover topics that US journals won't. The research is every bit as good, and is productive (leads to further research) and useful (leads to technology). US journals and researchers ignore things like botanical pharmecutics because it seems like 'alternative' medicine, when the truth is most pharmaceuticals started out as plant product derivatives. So more power to the other researchers -- they'll end up with a productive piece of a pie that US researchers turn down, and they'll finally catch up in research scientifically and financially.
... I propose that nobody replicate the stated methods and compare their results with those from the article. An empirical test with hard data would make it impossible for everyone to prove their point by stating they never noticed what they didn't objectively test for, as well as making everyone who thinks the author is an idiot look like an idiot. Any such test would almost certainly prove the author to be as wrong as a football bat, but no matter how easily done it might be, it's far easier and lots more fun to throw more FUD at assumed FUD.
The pseudo-legal claims are, of course, symptomatic of recto-cranial inversion, but you can only argue with numbers if you have better numbers.
fred fleenblat (463628) sez: "Jet engines require oxygen, of which there is very little in the Martian atmosphere."
John Wickman of Wickman Spacecraft and Propulsion has designed, built and tested a jet engine specifically for use on Mars. The fuel is magnesium. The 'oxidizer' is carbon dioxide, which is the major constituent of the Martian atmosphere. http://www.space-rockets.com/marsjet.html
If used as a retro-jet, it'd be more effective at high speed. Most of the deceleration would be taken care of. It's the last bit, where speed drops below that necessary to run the jet, that then becomes the problem. At least it'd get down to more like 15 seconds of terror. A rocket for landing and for taking it back up to jet engine speed, could be very much smaller.
Still, the fuel itself is a problem. Bringing a craft down from orbital speed would take a large amount of energy, hence a large amount (both weight and volume) of magnesium. But using this as a mid-stage, between the aero-braking and the final landing rocket, would solve some of the problems of aero-braking alone.
Many peoples insist they originated in their native location.
There are genetic groupings that indicate some of them were isolated human populations for quite some time.
Evolution includes parallel evolution for disparate species, but more so for evolution of a single species at different locations.,
Something originated in Africa. Humans have a single ancestral line.
It is worth considering a hypothesis that not humans, but the forerunners of humans, were those who migrated from a African origin, and evolved in parallel at different locations. Petroglyphs in North America appear to predate the African diaspora of 80ky ago. Neanderthals made cave markings. Proto-humans on this continent would probably have done the same.
On the other hand, the oldest existing historical mythology in North America, that of the Hopi, specifically state separating from the Africans (and Asians) prior to their move to this continent. This was accomplished > 35ky ago, prior to the Bering Land Bridge. As a scientist I rely on evidence, and logic when evidence is not forthcoming. But as someone with ancestors that have lived here a lot longer than 500 years, I don't dishonor their word and do consider that it might be at least as valid as the evidence and logic.
Frank Zappa produced an album done by Wild Man Fisher. He was originally a street performer and would write a unique sing for anyone for a dollar. Several instances of him doing just that were on the album, along with some studio work with Zappa backing him up. Superbly weird. Your own song for a buck (with a Zappa stamp of approval) is better than a morphed song no matter how much.
Nor is it unique. Around 5 years ago TurboTax suddenly started "requiring" IE. It check and if it wasn't installed, it installed it with the program and made it the default browser. It "needed" it because the instructions were in HTML. Any browser would would. And in fact it did. We did the install and changed the default browser back again (Opera, at the time) and it worked fine. This, after TurboTax tech support swore down and down (there was no up to their "help") that it absolutely required IE.
The same thing happened with Dragon Naturally Speaking, in the last version before MS bought it and built it into Word. Same checking and forced install, same rationale, same story from tech support, except we finally got one guy to admit it would work with another browser after we told him we'd already done it.
We had Adelphia for telecom at the time. They also force installed IE with their software. We just didn't install their software since it was nothing but IE, some help files, some self-promotion, and AOL and Earthlink install programs. The important stuff, ports and s4erver names and whatnot, were in the instructions, and Opera read those off the CD just dandy. Whenever we called for tech support they asked if we had IE. We said no, we had Opera. They said they didn't support that. We said we weren't asking them to support the browser, we wanted them to fix the problem with the line or network, and in fact I forbid them to attempt to provide "support" for anything from the wall plug in because I didn't trust them to leave my system in the state I wanted it.
Kickbacks. That's what it comes down to. Probably not direct monetary kickbacks, but something like reduced support charges for their own Windows Server software as long as they standardized their network by having everyone use one "standard" browser. Then again, this was Adelphia, so it might well have been payola.
According to TFA, we apparently need privacy for stalking and for running away from our mistakes. This is not just the problem of a scientist from one field (here, CS) making statements relating to another (biology) but rather that the analogies are not valid. The first (stalking, as in prey) is not just privacy, it's secrecy. The second (moving far away to start over) is not just privacy, it's avoiding responsibility and making amends for mistakes made.
I agree with the premise but these examples are about hiding, not privacy. The latter is necessary but not sufficient for the former. In the first example, one is also hiding their intention to commit an act against another, and privacy does not require one to be planning anything. In the second, there is also the information regarding prior problematic behaviors that one has committed that one seeks to avoid.
If there is a biological imperative for privacy in humans, I would consider it to be a need to reduce the stress level (a physiological response) of having to act in certain ways due to social contact and expectations. Although these make civilization possible they also cause cognitive dissonance when one's behavioral preferences are not congruent with them. One still performs those acts but seeks privacy in order to reduce the dissonance and stress created unless and until one changes the incongruent beliefs or preferences. Not having privacy to do so causes over-stimulation and stress related illness. Not all people would require physical privacy to do so either. Some can achieve it in their head. Thus, the biological imperative would also be responsible for the apparent wide disparity in peoples opinions on it as being according to their own coping mechanisms.
Badfish sez:
> When I do some things (own property, buy goods) I have to pay the government some money, and it's called a tax.
> When I do other things (drive, operate a radio) I have to pay the goverment some money, and it's called a license.
A license shows competence in a field and grants the holder the right to do that thing. Not all licenses are granted by government agencies. Some, as from some professional organizations, grant the license and get the money. These may or may not follow rules as set out by a government agency. In either case the fees for the license go to the granting agency in order to maintain the granting process.
Taxes go to the government and get reallocated as they see fit. They have nothing to do with proving competence or practicing in a certain field.
Yes, both have to do with doing some things, and in both cases you pay money. If that's a problem, I recommend telling the bartender that your beer should be free since some of the price goes to pay for the bar's liquor license.
You don't need a license to own property, but you have to pay property tax.
You don't need a license to buy things, but you have to pay sales tax.
You need a license to drive, but as long as it's not your car you don't have to pay taxes on it.
You need a license to operate a ham radio, but you don't pay any more taxes than if you didn't.
> For somebody who's posted no credentials of your own, your ridicule of Shannon is hollow.
I'm a cognitive neuroscientist. I've studied under Karl Pribram, and through his lab worked with David Bohm's parter Basil Hiley, and two physicists from Japan, Jibu and Yasue. I contributed to Pribram's work by applying tensor calculus extending his use of Gabor's math to describe brain processes and electrical fields as being similar to holography. I've discussed theories of consciousness Roger Penrose and contributed to that work through his partner Stuart Hammeroff. I've studied at the Santa Fe Institute twice. I regularly work with physicists and electrical engineers to apply signal processing concepts such as wavelet transform to brain imaging. You can look for my other postings about my work with a Parkinson's prevention. I'm very much an experimentalist and methodologist, but with a heavy background in cognitive science theories. I've worked at NIH/NIDCD (Deafness and Communication Disorders) and the Department of Psychiatry at Yale Medical School. As such I'm well qualified to critique Shannon's application of "compression" to language and the validity of its extension to the use in the article. I design psychology experiments based on concepts like Shannon's theory. Shannon's experimental design is sadly lacking in cognitive psychological considerations, particular that relating to language comprehension, and the conclusions drawn are therefore flawed. I specified the particular problems in the posting you replied to. The comment about Turing was an offhand comment, but is just as valid for the same reasons as those regarding Shannon, as well as being on topic, as the claim in the parent article was regarding AI.
Do you perhaps have credentials to validate your critique of my comments, or were you just blowing smoke out your ass?
> Is there a way to respond to this argument that would really register with people in the general public?
Yes. "I don't care if it's your rights and your privacy, you should do what I say with them because it's what I'd do."
If it's their privacy and it's based on their right to it, then they have the right to do with it as they will. Anything else is an attempt to infringe on their rights. Arguments over what someone wants to do vs. what someone else thinks they should do, using the implied excuse that their decision will affect how yours is treated, are at the base of the intractable-as-presented arguments over gun control, stem cell/cloning research and abortion. As much as I agree with the pro-privacy position, which is a protection of individual liberties, I'm even more for letting others make their own choices about their rights, which is what individual liberties means. If you can't protect your own rights without infringing on others' you don't deserve them.
> Very interested in this. Do you have a reference, link, etc where this can be found, or is this too in the book "Frozen Addicts"?
I don't know if it's in the book, I never read it. I saw it first in an episode of a documentary series ("Brain"?) shown in a physiological psychology class. This one very nuts and bolts story is what made me go into this field (I can't abide most of the rest of psychology -- too mushy). NOVA also had an episode about the transplants (and a discussion of the ethics of stem cell research) as a follow up to an episode about the frozen addicts. I also discussed the case with Neal Castagnoli, the Virginia Tech chemistry prof that did the anti-Parkinson research that my dissertation followed. He knew Langston (the guy who figured it out, and the book's author) personally even before the incident.
Guess those successive characters, Shannon.
From T(second)FA: "Shannon (1950) estimated the entropy of written English to be between 0.6 and 1.3 bits per character (bpc), based on the ability of human subjects to guess successive characters in text."
What about reading not just whole words but several words at a time (Miller's magic 7+/- 2 item "chunking")? What about guessing the rest of a sentence from the first one or two such chunks? What about guessing the rest of a paragraph or statement from the first couple sentences and/or context? All these are functions of the brain's heuristic processing and "compress" language. If language compression is going to be a metric for AI based on the estimated brain processes it's competing with, then all the processes involved should be measured and accounted for.
Why anyone would cripple a perfectly good computer by forcing it to pretend to be a very different device that operates on very different principles is beyond me. But then Shannon was an engineer, not a cognitive psychologist. For that matter, neither was Turing.
The separate story referred to on the lead article is not about nicotine, it's about smoking. My dissertation was based on showing that at least one substance that prevented Parkinson's was active in the brains of smokers despite 8+ hours of abstinence (reduction of plasma nicotine levels to less than 1% of usual). I tested smokers abstaining and after smoking either a normal cigarette or one made from denicotinized tobacco and found no difference between conditions or groups. Nicotine or lack thereof had nothing to do with the EEG signature of chronic increased dopamine levels compared to non-smokers (which was the study I did prior to my diss). This work, and that of the folks in the chemistry department that isolated and synthesized the hypothesized active component, was what was referred to in "Thank You For Smoking". And to preempt any conclusion jumping, this doesn't mean you should smoke. Knowing what the substance is (trimethyl naphthoquinone) and how it works (dopamine releaser and reuptake blocker as well as MAO inhibitor) means it or something that does the same thing can be developed and used without needing tobacco in the process.
The carbon monoxide effect has some merit too. CO in the blood scavenges excess hyperoxides, a source of oxidative stress which is a known cause of Parkinson's and other apparent autoimmune problems. As above, you don't need to smoke to get the effect and can obviously find other things to do the same job. They're called anti-oxidants.
Nicotine may well also have some other protective effect, but it doesn't prevent mitochondrial MPTP from turning into MPP+, a very potent neurotoxin that causes Parkinsonian apoptosis. To read up on the mechanism, look up the "frozen addicts". As an interesting aside, at least one of them was all but completely cured in weeks using injected stem cells before the fundies got ahold of the concept and strangled it.