The primary study quoted supposedly shows less brain activity (in reality it shows less oxy/CO2 swapping, which is frequently mistaken for a measure of brain activity) when some memories are suppressed. Then they quote Anderson (U. of Oregon) who more properly identifies such suppression as active inhibition. Active inhibition is a form of activity. It should show up as a "lighting up" on the fMRI scan. In light of this, what the primary study shows is nothing. It's a failure to find active inhibition. Some results are notable by their absence. Saying your results show something when they in fact fail to is entirely different.
"Recall" itself is a misleading term. We don't recall anything. We reconstruct. All memories are in some part false because they're generally fast-as-possible good-enough guesses by the brain. Keeping that in mind helps one understand that the creation of memories requires both active agglomeration of relevant components and active inhibition of the irrelevant. Once you grasp that, then you can try to figure out how the hell that lump of meat knows what's relevant and what's irrelevant when it's trying to put together what we perceive as memories before we get to perceive them, and you can then be as woefully ignorant about what's really going on as the people in the article as well as myself.
Fatal flaw: the study told the subjects how to act. They were confronted explicitly with the privacy "device" developed by the researcher. They knew what was being measured and allowed to behave freely. In such circumstances subjects consciously or otherwise will attempt to conform to the implied expectations of the researcher.
MSNBC has an article on the same subject (http://redtape.msnbc.com/2007/06/price_of_privac. html#posts). Their poll is flawed for the same reason (it ends up measuring what people say they'll do or show others they'll do, not what they really do) but the article has some good observations.
The point that energy (ie. information; negentropy) was transmitted has been adequately made.
The difference between that and transporting matter is a little problem in conversion. Luckily, we have the math.
Take one red-shirted Ensign Fodder at 75 kg (~165 lbs). Take it in grams: 75000.
Convert him to energy, which is measured in ergs. How many ergs? To get this, multiply the mass times the speed of light in a vacuum, in centimeters per second (29,979,245,800) squared (~9 x 10^20).
75000 x (9*10^20) = 6.75 * 10^25 ergs. That's hard to chew. One erg is about the amount of energy expended by an ant doing a push up (http://www.astronomybuff.com/an-erg-is-an-ant-pus hup/).
Convert that to something that seems a more reasonable to our minds. One megaton = 4.22 * 10^22 ergs. Thus, one Ensign Fodder converted to energy == 1600 megatons suddenly happening in the transporter room. Even in the best of circumstances, that 100% of said ergwise Ensign Fodder being moved to the landing coordinates before the energy gets released, and you have just transported between 80 and 160 Tunguska events, and your landing coordinates have just become a ground zero to rival the worst imaginings of any multiple MIRV targeted site in the minds of even the most hardened cold war strategic arms general.
Where do you get this megatonnage? One assumes anti-matter conversion. At 43 megatons per kilogram on antimatter (plus matter, of course, but that's trivial), you're burning up 2 to 4 kg of antimatter just to use one Ensign Fodder to create a crater 4 to 8 times the size of the Arizona meteor crater (http://www.psrd.hawaii.edu/Dec97/impactBlast.html ) in the planet's surface. One would assume one would need to be pretty pissed at said planetary body (not to mention said Ensign) to blow a hole in it in this way. That antimatter represents a good piece of Enterprise's fuel. Keep in mind that 'burning' it in a controlled manner is going to require a piece of the output to keep it contained, and so the go-value of the fuel won't be near what the boom-value is when burned uncontrolled.
The next time the Independent or any other media blurble plays pseudo-geek and insists on cramming in a sci-fi reference despite the fact that the people interviewed pretty much denied the comparison, ask them how big a hole in the ground was left by the test. If there isn't one, there was no matter conversion and so none transported.
Which begs the question, how would we know if anyone ever managed to do this, unless someone were left to measure the crater? "Really big catastrophes don't leave anyone behind to tell the story." (Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon The Deep).
I remember the cold war, as does Putin, from the inside. Back then missiles had precoded targeting. What they have now can be targeted within 3 minutes. What he said amounts to absolutely nothing except a red cape for those with more bull than brains. Does anyone seriously think he'd take retargetable weapons and hard code them for specific targets, and so lose the flexibility gained? He doesn't. They've always had targeting data available, just as we have, and either could use them on very short notice to target or retarget. Think about it for a second: he says they'll target specific sites in response to our missile defense technology. That doesn't even make sense. If he were serious he have said nothing about it.
When you can't figure out why these erstwhile adults say and do things like this, just shrink them down to about the size of an 8 year old, and see if their behavior makes sense now. In a world of petulant children, politicians are among the most petulant and most childish. He's pitching a hissy fit. He lost his cool. He's mad because we ran them broke with Star Wars, and afterwards proceeded to keep working on it until at least part of it could be taken to testing. Bad testing with bad results, sure, but we're still working on it, and they're still broke.
"What's the difference between listening to a song so you can guess at the tablature and publishing that and Reading a book so you can publish a review (with spoilers and character names)?"
The former is a derivative use. That's specifically covered in rights protection. The latter is a referential use. It's specifically protected as free speech.
The difference is in purporting to "be" something, at least to the person's best ability to make it so (and tabs generally overtly attempt to do this) and to be "about" something. This has not prevented people from trying to claim something "about" was derivative and in that way prevent its publication (usually done if it's negative with respect to the person and/or work in question). They've tried this. They've lost, when it went to completion. They've won when they were able to scare the defendant off with the prospect of high legal fees.
> "I just got pre-approved to buy some gutted property in New Orleans.... > If you had a blank canvas to start with, what would you do?"
Loosen the house from its foundation. Wire up a NOAA/NWS emergency notification receiver to trigger on any report of local flooding. Have the trigger set off a set of gas canisters that inflate a flotation collar on the house. You have the option of using anchors and cables to keep the house near its original location the next time the Bad Water comes, or just ride the house out into the Gulf along side your deceased neighbors.
There is access via the web to some sources of information which exist independently and so are fairly spoof proof. For instance, someone wanting to research me could look for publications with my name on them in PubMed. Sources like that would be valid, web or no.
But as long as the web remains a place where anyone can say anything, rightly or not, anyone who relies on it for supposedly objective information that they can use to measure a person's reputation is coming in dead last in the old "Arguing on the internet" poster (http://www.argaste.com/img/arguing_on_the_interne t.jpg).
And that's exactly what should happen. The web *should* remain open to anyone for anything. An individual has no better defense against boneheads that would take whatever they find on the web seriously than to prove their faith in all things computerish as truthful misplaced by pointing out absurdities in what's available. In my last position a colleague came to me with the breathless warning that someone in the department had found some less than flattering stuff about me on the net. I responded by posting a picture of me from the net on my office door (not the same as http://www.subgenius.com/bigfist/fun/devivals/X-Da y98/POST-X-DAY/X-DayPhotos/portraitsTN/_dynasoar.h tml but from the same stage show). I never heard another word from them.
That being said, as long as anyone can post anything, a person's best defense against misinformation is disinformation. The latter invalidates the former in any rational mind. If someone still can't see the joke, that's not someone whose opinion matters to me anyway, even if it's a potential employer. I want to know when they're so informationally inbred so as to take this garbage seriously, as I want to steer clear of them. These are the same people, in spirit if not in truth, that would believe anything they read on paper if it was green and white lined line printer paper printed with dot matrix, since it obviously "came from a computer" and so must be right.
There's a real world, and the web does not reflect it any more than what's printed on that green and white lined paper.
> If you are in the US you probably don't own the mineral rights to the land underneath your property.
I do. I just leased the petroleum rights to a drilling and extraction company, as did most of my neighborhood. But then I'm in Texas, where you'd expect this to be the case.
I edited an Apple II user's zine, and we printed an article comparing similar things between an Apple IIe and a Mac Plus. The Apple won the more technical tests (nothing more technical than search-and-replace lots of times, though). The Mac people complained these tests were unfair due to an 8 bit processor vs. 16 bit with bit mapped video. Fewer bits takes fewer ops.
But our bottom line was the same: no difference in productivity. So, you can extend the conclusion here back another generation of machine.
Appoint everyone getting these as "recruiter evaluation specialists".
When they answer a call, they thank the recruiter for calling to use your service and get contact info. Then they say that they'll listen to the recruiter's pitch, uhhh, "presentation", evaluate it for efficacy, and send a report to the recruiter so they can see how well they're doing. The invoice for $500 will be sent to the contact info previously provided. To agree to these terms, just continue.
If they do, then they'll need to get an evaluation along with the invoice. But in my experience in doing this with telemarketers, there will be no takers. If their greed plugs up their ears and they continue anyway, and then don't pay, turn them over to a collection agency. Don't expect to see anything from it, but at least you know they'll be getting lots of calls themselves. It could also do a job on their credit rating.
As an alternative, build in throttling, such as appointing one person to do this and forwarding all such calls to them. If there are too many for that one person to handle, great, just don't let them work too fast.
At the very least, put together a honeypot phone mail hell, and immediately forward all such calls to it. As you collect phone numbers from the few who make it through the eleventy-seven layers to the voice mail recorder, use those same phone numbers in later recorded messages to provide to them as the proper numbers to call. This will get them calling each other.
I can't say as I agree with the "perfectly legal" part. Read the TCPA (http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/tcpa.html) and see if you can get them this way. Note that the TCPA is written so that an individual can protect themselves by going through small claims court. Figure the odds that any of these people would show up to defend themselves, and you'd get summary judgement (unless you settle out instead). If you win and they don't pay, jump back up to the part on collection agencies.
Content owners/providers have been inching towards pay-per-view everything for some time now. Anything that gets in their way will get stepped on. My money says Mozilla just assured that Democracy will be among the first to get sued. Doesn't matter what for, as long as it makes them have to burn up more than $100K.
I want payment from everyone, based on my mineral rights extending to the center of the Earth under my property, for my contribution to gravity. Anyone not paying up will have theirs revoked.
Or, I could be a bit more discerning. How about payment from AIROS (American Indian Radio On Satellite) for being bombarded by their signal, unwanted?
Human face recognition is run by a several hardwired circuits operating in parallel (ie. fast, with little control) with the results put together after by some heuristics -- a good enough guess. What humans need to get from facial recognition, and what their ancestors required and so developed through evolution, is nowhere near the same thing facial recognition software is after. Humans need to recognize quickly that there is a face and what information it's displaying far more than they need to differentiate one from another. Facial recognition software does just the opposite. Also, the software does the complete job every time. Humans only process as much as they need to in any given instance.
If "better" is based on the standards of humans (fastest good enough guess) rather than machines (as correct as possible, complete & in depth), humans win.
1. The "reward" center is not the feel-good center. Reward is used in the behavioral sense -- reinforcement. Feel-good often happens at the same time. That is not due to the reward system. They both activate in parallel. Thus "enjoy" as used in the article is incorrect.
2. The origin of the reward system is the substantia nigra. It is indeed in a primitive part of the brain. As mentioned in the article (re: Damasio et al) in humans, during testing on morality/altruism/etc. it acts on the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. This is the most recently developed part of the brain. Questions of morality, or even just confusing morality with brain science, requires this recent development.
3. When part of the brain "activates" on a scan (both metabolic PET and hemodynamic MRI), that does not mean the system results activity. The scanner cannot differentiate between excitatory and inhibitory activations. In fact, "activation" is less interesting. 85% of the brain is excitatory and is spontaneously driven. The interesting stuff happens when spontaneous activity is inhibited.
4. The dopamine "reward" system is in fact inhibitory. It inhibits random or undirected activity, and "sculpts out" desired activity from the possibilities. When it is activated, the dopamine system "lights up", but as it does it stops activity elsewhere.
The WP isn't alone. I've seen actual research articles published -- meaning got peer reviewed and accepted -- that confuse scan activation with excitatory activity.
> Is the zoo-like Minority Report world in which children are growing up in today doing more harm than good?
It's definitely harmful to them to have to read such hysterical FUD as that sentence. For that reason, they should not be allowed to read/. articles. If that were in a reply, at least it could be modded as flamebait, if not troll.
Children are, for the most part, smart enough to know what to ignore. It's adults playing power games who use children in their arguments for reasons that really have nothing to do with children, and everything to do with not having faith in their ability to make their point without appeal to emotion.
The Navajo (Dine) people of the southwest US are directly related to the Dene of Canada. It's already been shown that it took the former over 20,000 years to migrate physically and linguistically. It's trivial to show the latter (in Canada, ground zero for the object in question) still exist.
The Hopi (Anasazi or "Ancient Ones" in Dine) can confirm that the Dine/Dene were here over 20,000 years ago. They met these descendents of the Tungusk coming across the Bering Land Bridge. Since this means the Hopi were here before the Bridge, it doesn't get taken seriously. Likewise, the Dine's name for the Hopi is that of another group that supposedly went extinct, indicating they didn't, is another fact that gets actively ignored.
Conducting archeology without conducting anthropology on people that still exist is like studying the history of New York by studying the subway maps and ignoring the people on the platforms and the streets above.
One terabyte with backup redundancy = US$800 as two plug ready 1T hard drives
One terabyte with backup redundancy = $36,000 for two drives plus $720 for 4 disks and unknown integration solutions/programs/drivers.
$800 from a company with in-place support, warranty replacement and such, or $36,720 for gizmoidal coolidity.
The lifetime of each of the kinds of disks remains to be seen, though I'm betting the hard drives are up to par with what's already available, and except for hard use, these last about as long as an optical drive.
It'd definitely be different. But "better" depends on what you look at.
The thawing of the Siberian and Canadian tundras could more than double the amount of arable land, providing more food than we could possible use, as well as provide land for trees which could halt the process. Done with some intelligence, we could "tune" the climate and the planet, and turn problems into solutions.
On the other hand, by the 2080's, the summer high temperatures in the southeastern US would average around 115. The energy use for the increased air conditioning could accelerate the process.
The simple solution is to move everyone from Flordia to Canada and and Siberia to become farmers. They'll have to go somewhere, because Florida will be almost entirely under water.
I'll forego my rant about their complete refusal to incorporate attentional focusing and much of the rest of cogntive psychology's research on block reading, their extremely selective choices of interpretation of brain imaging research, their failure to study other written formats (left vs. right, horiztonal vs. vertical, alpha/syllabalic vs pictographic), and the decades of similar conclusions preceeding their "discovery". That would be too easy and too tedious.
Instead, I'll note that TFA is in approximately 60 column block text, and the "printer ready" version is in at least 80 column block text. The latter proves their point by being harder to read, so one wonders why it was done. What's more, the parent article's title says "Scientists Offers". The author and editor should both be soundly spanked for a grammatical error in the title of an article about reading and writing.
However, this does raise the question as to how their software is going to parse and reformat the inevitable errors in human writing.
First off, I've not only read the article, I've read a lot of what NASA has cranked out on the subject ever since they started making excuses for not accepting the Mercury 13 into training. It's been almost 50 years now, and they haven't changed their lines one bit. Their conclusions are mere final sentences in long chains of rationalizations that start and end with the QED. The evidence they base their conclusions on -- the same conclusions that people parrot after not reading anything more than those conclusions -- is precisely zero. Their conclusions are their starting assumptions. Excuse the hell out of me for insisting on maintaining my position as an empirical scientist, but there's nothing NASA has published on the matter that shows anything like objective evidence. They keep hold to these issues in large part because as a highly visible publicly funded agency, the administrators are cowards when it comes to leading a human endeavor into the future. And rightly so. The congresscritters that write their checks are beholden to their constituents. Many of those would scream outrage at any hint of hanky panky or shenanigans and demand withdrawal of funds and recall of any astronauts, administrators and congresscritters who even appear to engage in (the logical flaw of) encouraging by not forbidding. Some of the tax payers, particularly the very vocal who are practised at pretending moral outrage in order to make up for the lack of true morals due to overabundance of prescribed beliefs, would make major media noise. the afrementioned administrators would feel it only just and proper to defend themselves (and their funding) in such a position. And they want to defend themselves less than anything. I'm almost certain there are internal NASA studies that provide realistic and rational conclusions and recommendations. They can't possibly have psychologists working for them on subjects like this only to have them be seen marching to the party's music. It's the complete lack of public release of such information that bothers me and leads me to these conclusions.
I also don't buy the monastic monk model. The European colonists who developed the US, particularly everything west of the Appalachians, were completely human men and women who coupled in and under their Conestoga wagons, had whole families as a result, and colonized a continent in the biological sense. People have contended with their human natures in public and private, including lack of the latter, and so far have managed to thrive. Yes, they have had "problems" like jealousy, and arrangements gone sour leading to hard feelings. It's the perservering in the face of such adversity that's the hallmark of those who can truly be the sort of pioneers we need to make the proposed missions successful.
I espcially don't buy the pregnancy issue. We can reverse tubal ligations and vasectomies that weren't intended to be reversed, so there's no doubt in my mind that we can devise such surgeries that are intended to be reversed. Of course pharmaceutical interventions are much easier, but 99.4% effective means 0.6% make it through, and I have one offspring who's a 0.6%
I still find it incredibly telling that NASA flaunts its toilets but engages in ostrich activity when it comes to allowing its people to be whole and complete people. Maybe that's just me, but just me is a psychologist as well as someone who's worked for years at making sure that if I don't get off this planet for good, someone will.
The ethical considerations of death and dying, that too is far less of an issue than these occasional media blurbs make it out to be. Figure: NASA is supposedly able to find the best and the brightest and train them to be the first and foremost. Why not let these supposedly well adjusted individuals then make their own decisions? The US military has been dealing with precisely these same issues for years (inclusion of women in most jobs and situations is now decades old), and they take pretty much anyone who'll sign up. NASA doesn't trust its own work in this respect? Fine. Give space exploration to the military. They can and do deal with these problems and more.
Healthy men and women don't have a problem dealing with it. NASA seems to be the one with the problem. Let the healthy young men and women radio down "Houston, you have a problem down there. Deal with it. Now mind your own fucking business," and then shut off the cameras. Jesus H Christ on a pogo stick, NASA proudly shows off every new version of the zero G toilet, and they expect people to shit in it with nothing but a paper thin wall and a few inches between them and the rest of the crew, but the very thought of those same people fucking sends them into a tizzy. That's some sick and twisted thinking. I wouldn't trust them to tell me what I should do about my sex life. How the hell can these people talk about colonizing planets but have so much trouble with people making babies, or at least practising at it?
> There is also a serious scientific issue in using closed-source software for > data analysis or theoretical calculations. [etc.]
I do science in the real world. I can safely say that's a patently ridiculous assertion. We rely on any software we can get to work. Often that's commercial software, because people who develop good software in science frequently take it commercial.
It's our results that need to be replicated, not our methods. Anyone can do the same thing and get the same result. Doing it by a different method and getting the same result is a much more rigorous validation. As long as it's a different box, it doesn't matter if one or both are black.
It's also to our benefit to use commercial software because it's cheaper to buy it, including (re)licensing fees and support, because it's cheaper than paying salary to a code hacker to keep things running. Maybe some have the spare time to hack their own code. I wish I did. But I've got more important things to do.
I've worked in a lab that at first had a EE doctoral student doing Matlab code, and then started using some hardware that required doing analysis in Code Warrior. We needed to get someone else. Not good for the first guy, and expensive in either case for us. I also started collaborating with a lab that used the only open source analysis software in our field (only one other lab used it; the one the lab director came from). I could do by myself what took them 3 people to do, and get it done faster. The collaboration didn't last long.
The accepted procedure in carrying out and publishing research is to reference the software manufacturers in the text and/or references section. If anyone wants to check the results by getting the same things and doing the samr things with them to check validity, they're welcome to. But they don't. They use what they have and compare results. If they really want to check the validity of results, they can get copies of the validity testing done on the software. Any decent software maker will have already done all the validity testing necessary and is glad to make that data available.
> Answer: they're usually the height of mediocrity. The best and brightest, > if they're there, are often ignored.
IT at big companies are kept busy just trying to keep the base OS and necessary apps puttering along, and resurrecting users' workstations that have melted down or upchucked. Their mediocrity is enforced by the needs and whims of the big suits and PHBs. Corporate budgeting for IT is on a need-to-go basis. If IT has any money left at the end of a fiscal year, rather than letting them put it to security and be good neighbors on the net, corporate bosses tend to do the corporate thing: take the money and put it towards TV commercials saying what good neighbors they are. The job is mostly never-ending thanklessness punctuated by blame. The best and the brightest are usually not given the time or resources to be that. If they try, they end up pointing out flaws for which their cohorts are either responsible for creating or at least for fixing. In corporate IT, as in Japan, "the nail that sticks out gets pounded down". I've watched several freinds and acquaintances go from being very good at IT to being either disillusioned and bitter medicore IT drones, or giving the appearance to be that at work and saving their expertise for their own projects. Those are often unpaying, but at least they get due thanks and/or a sense of accomplishment.
I nominate the headline on the parent for second best/. headline ever, right behind "Germs' drummer arrested for carrying soap". Especially when they're taken together.
Slashdot Mirror
The primary study quoted supposedly shows less brain activity (in reality it shows less oxy/CO2 swapping, which is frequently mistaken for a measure of brain activity) when some memories are suppressed. Then they quote Anderson (U. of Oregon) who more properly identifies such suppression as active inhibition. Active inhibition is a form of activity. It should show up as a "lighting up" on the fMRI scan. In light of this, what the primary study shows is nothing. It's a failure to find active inhibition. Some results are notable by their absence. Saying your results show something when they in fact fail to is entirely different.
"Recall" itself is a misleading term. We don't recall anything. We reconstruct. All memories are in some part false because they're generally fast-as-possible good-enough guesses by the brain. Keeping that in mind helps one understand that the creation of memories requires both active agglomeration of relevant components and active inhibition of the irrelevant. Once you grasp that, then you can try to figure out how the hell that lump of meat knows what's relevant and what's irrelevant when it's trying to put together what we perceive as memories before we get to perceive them, and you can then be as woefully ignorant about what's really going on as the people in the article as well as myself.
Fatal flaw: the study told the subjects how to act. They were confronted explicitly with the privacy "device" developed by the researcher. They knew what was being measured and allowed to behave freely. In such circumstances subjects consciously or otherwise will attempt to conform to the implied expectations of the researcher.
. html#posts). Their poll is flawed for the same reason (it ends up measuring what people say they'll do or show others they'll do, not what they really do) but the article has some good observations.
MSNBC has an article on the same subject (http://redtape.msnbc.com/2007/06/price_of_privac
The point that energy (ie. information; negentropy) was transmitted has been adequately made.
s hup/).
l ) in the planet's surface. One would assume one would need to be pretty pissed at said planetary body (not to mention said Ensign) to blow a hole in it in this way. That antimatter represents a good piece of Enterprise's fuel. Keep in mind that 'burning' it in a controlled manner is going to require a piece of the output to keep it contained, and so the go-value of the fuel won't be near what the boom-value is when burned uncontrolled.
The difference between that and transporting matter is a little problem in conversion. Luckily, we have the math.
Take one red-shirted Ensign Fodder at 75 kg (~165 lbs). Take it in grams: 75000.
Convert him to energy, which is measured in ergs. How many ergs? To get this, multiply the mass times the speed of light in a vacuum, in centimeters per second (29,979,245,800) squared (~9 x 10^20).
75000 x (9*10^20) = 6.75 * 10^25 ergs. That's hard to chew. One erg is about the amount of energy expended by an ant doing a push up (http://www.astronomybuff.com/an-erg-is-an-ant-pu
Convert that to something that seems a more reasonable to our minds. One megaton = 4.22 * 10^22 ergs. Thus, one Ensign Fodder converted to energy == 1600 megatons suddenly happening in the transporter room. Even in the best of circumstances, that 100% of said ergwise Ensign Fodder being moved to the landing coordinates before the energy gets released, and you have just transported between 80 and 160 Tunguska events, and your landing coordinates have just become a ground zero to rival the worst imaginings of any multiple MIRV targeted site in the minds of even the most hardened cold war strategic arms general.
Where do you get this megatonnage? One assumes anti-matter conversion. At 43 megatons per kilogram on antimatter (plus matter, of course, but that's trivial), you're burning up 2 to 4 kg of antimatter just to use one Ensign Fodder to create a crater 4 to 8 times the size of the Arizona meteor crater (http://www.psrd.hawaii.edu/Dec97/impactBlast.htm
The next time the Independent or any other media blurble plays pseudo-geek and insists on cramming in a sci-fi reference despite the fact that the people interviewed pretty much denied the comparison, ask them how big a hole in the ground was left by the test. If there isn't one, there was no matter conversion and so none transported.
Which begs the question, how would we know if anyone ever managed to do this, unless someone were left to measure the crater? "Really big catastrophes don't leave anyone behind to tell the story." (Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon The Deep).
I remember the cold war, as does Putin, from the inside. Back then missiles had precoded targeting. What they have now can be targeted within 3 minutes. What he said amounts to absolutely nothing except a red cape for those with more bull than brains. Does anyone seriously think he'd take retargetable weapons and hard code them for specific targets, and so lose the flexibility gained? He doesn't. They've always had targeting data available, just as we have, and either could use them on very short notice to target or retarget. Think about it for a second: he says they'll target specific sites in response to our missile defense technology. That doesn't even make sense. If he were serious he have said nothing about it.
When you can't figure out why these erstwhile adults say and do things like this, just shrink them down to about the size of an 8 year old, and see if their behavior makes sense now. In a world of petulant children, politicians are among the most petulant and most childish. He's pitching a hissy fit. He lost his cool. He's mad because we ran them broke with Star Wars, and afterwards proceeded to keep working on it until at least part of it could be taken to testing. Bad testing with bad results, sure, but we're still working on it, and they're still broke.
"What's the difference between listening to a song so you can guess at the tablature and publishing that
and
Reading a book so you can publish a review (with spoilers and character names)?"
The former is a derivative use. That's specifically covered in rights protection. The latter is a referential use. It's specifically protected as free speech.
The difference is in purporting to "be" something, at least to the person's best ability to make it so (and tabs generally overtly attempt to do this) and to be "about" something. This has not prevented people from trying to claim something "about" was derivative and in that way prevent its publication (usually done if it's negative with respect to the person and/or work in question). They've tried this. They've lost, when it went to completion. They've won when they were able to scare the defendant off with the prospect of high legal fees.
> "I just got pre-approved to buy some gutted property in New Orleans....
> If you had a blank canvas to start with, what would you do?"
Loosen the house from its foundation. Wire up a NOAA/NWS emergency notification receiver to trigger on any report of local flooding. Have the trigger set off a set of gas canisters that inflate a flotation collar on the house. You have the option of using anchors and cables to keep the house near its original location the next time the Bad Water comes, or just ride the house out into the Gulf along side your deceased neighbors.
There is access via the web to some sources of information which exist independently and so are fairly spoof proof. For instance, someone wanting to research me could look for publications with my name on them in PubMed. Sources like that would be valid, web or no.
e t.jpg).
a y98/POST-X-DAY/X-DayPhotos/portraitsTN/_dynasoar.h tml but from the same stage show). I never heard another word from them.
But as long as the web remains a place where anyone can say anything, rightly or not, anyone who relies on it for supposedly objective information that they can use to measure a person's reputation is coming in dead last in the old "Arguing on the internet" poster (http://www.argaste.com/img/arguing_on_the_intern
And that's exactly what should happen. The web *should* remain open to anyone for anything. An individual has no better defense against boneheads that would take whatever they find on the web seriously than to prove their faith in all things computerish as truthful misplaced by pointing out absurdities in what's available. In my last position a colleague came to me with the breathless warning that someone in the department had found some less than flattering stuff about me on the net. I responded by posting a picture of me from the net on my office door (not the same as http://www.subgenius.com/bigfist/fun/devivals/X-D
That being said, as long as anyone can post anything, a person's best defense against misinformation is disinformation. The latter invalidates the former in any rational mind. If someone still can't see the joke, that's not someone whose opinion matters to me anyway, even if it's a potential employer. I want to know when they're so informationally inbred so as to take this garbage seriously, as I want to steer clear of them. These are the same people, in spirit if not in truth, that would believe anything they read on paper if it was green and white lined line printer paper printed with dot matrix, since it obviously "came from a computer" and so must be right.
There's a real world, and the web does not reflect it any more than what's printed on that green and white lined paper.
A.C. sez:
> If you are in the US you probably don't own the mineral rights to the land underneath your property.
I do. I just leased the petroleum rights to a drilling and extraction company, as did most of my neighborhood. But then I'm in Texas, where you'd expect this to be the case.
I edited an Apple II user's zine, and we printed an article comparing similar things between an Apple IIe and a Mac Plus. The Apple won the more technical tests (nothing more technical than search-and-replace lots of times, though). The Mac people complained these tests were unfair due to an 8 bit processor vs. 16 bit with bit mapped video. Fewer bits takes fewer ops.
But our bottom line was the same: no difference in productivity. So, you can extend the conclusion here back another generation of machine.
Appoint everyone getting these as "recruiter evaluation specialists".
When they answer a call, they thank the recruiter for calling to use your service and get contact info. Then they say that they'll listen to the recruiter's pitch, uhhh, "presentation", evaluate it for efficacy, and send a report to the recruiter so they can see how well they're doing. The invoice for $500 will be sent to the contact info previously provided. To agree to these terms, just continue.
If they do, then they'll need to get an evaluation along with the invoice. But in my experience in doing this with telemarketers, there will be no takers. If their greed plugs up their ears and they continue anyway, and then don't pay, turn them over to a collection agency. Don't expect to see anything from it, but at least you know they'll be getting lots of calls themselves. It could also do a job on their credit rating.
As an alternative, build in throttling, such as appointing one person to do this and forwarding all such calls to them. If there are too many for that one person to handle, great, just don't let them work too fast.
At the very least, put together a honeypot phone mail hell, and immediately forward all such calls to it. As you collect phone numbers from the few who make it through the eleventy-seven layers to the voice mail recorder, use those same phone numbers in later recorded messages to provide to them as the proper numbers to call. This will get them calling each other.
I can't say as I agree with the "perfectly legal" part. Read the TCPA (http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/tcpa.html) and see if you can get them this way. Note that the TCPA is written so that an individual can protect themselves by going through small claims court. Figure the odds that any of these people would show up to defend themselves, and you'd get summary judgement (unless you settle out instead). If you win and they don't pay, jump back up to the part on collection agencies.
Content owners/providers have been inching towards pay-per-view everything for some time now. Anything that gets in their way will get stepped on. My money says Mozilla just assured that Democracy will be among the first to get sued. Doesn't matter what for, as long as it makes them have to burn up more than $100K.
I want payment from everyone, based on my mineral rights extending to the center of the Earth under my property, for my contribution to gravity. Anyone not paying up will have theirs revoked.
Or, I could be a bit more discerning. How about payment from AIROS (American Indian Radio On Satellite) for being bombarded by their signal, unwanted?
Human face recognition is run by a several hardwired circuits operating in parallel (ie. fast, with little control) with the results put together after by some heuristics -- a good enough guess. What humans need to get from facial recognition, and what their ancestors required and so developed through evolution, is nowhere near the same thing facial recognition software is after. Humans need to recognize quickly that there is a face and what information it's displaying far more than they need to differentiate one from another. Facial recognition software does just the opposite. Also, the software does the complete job every time. Humans only process as much as they need to in any given instance.
If "better" is based on the standards of humans (fastest good enough guess) rather than machines (as correct as possible, complete & in depth), humans win.
1. The "reward" center is not the feel-good center. Reward is used in the behavioral sense -- reinforcement. Feel-good often happens at the same time. That is not due to the reward system. They both activate in parallel. Thus "enjoy" as used in the article is incorrect.
2. The origin of the reward system is the substantia nigra. It is indeed in a primitive part of the brain. As mentioned in the article (re: Damasio et al) in humans, during testing on morality/altruism/etc. it acts on the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. This is the most recently developed part of the brain. Questions of morality, or even just confusing morality with brain science, requires this recent development.
3. When part of the brain "activates" on a scan (both metabolic PET and hemodynamic MRI), that does not mean the system results activity. The scanner cannot differentiate between excitatory and inhibitory activations. In fact, "activation" is less interesting. 85% of the brain is excitatory and is spontaneously driven. The interesting stuff happens when spontaneous activity is inhibited.
4. The dopamine "reward" system is in fact inhibitory. It inhibits random or undirected activity, and "sculpts out" desired activity from the possibilities. When it is activated, the dopamine system "lights up", but as it does it stops activity elsewhere.
The WP isn't alone. I've seen actual research articles published -- meaning got peer reviewed and accepted -- that confuse scan activation with excitatory activity.
> Is the zoo-like Minority Report world in which children are growing up in today doing more harm than good?
/. articles. If that were in a reply, at least it could be modded as flamebait, if not troll.
It's definitely harmful to them to have to read such hysterical FUD as that sentence. For that reason, they should not be allowed to read
Children are, for the most part, smart enough to know what to ignore. It's adults playing power games who use children in their arguments for reasons that really have nothing to do with children, and everything to do with not having faith in their ability to make their point without appeal to emotion.
The Navajo (Dine) people of the southwest US are directly related to the Dene of Canada. It's already been shown that it took the former over 20,000 years to migrate physically and linguistically. It's trivial to show the latter (in Canada, ground zero for the object in question) still exist.
The Hopi (Anasazi or "Ancient Ones" in Dine) can confirm that the Dine/Dene were here over 20,000 years ago. They met these descendents of the Tungusk coming across the Bering Land Bridge. Since this means the Hopi were here before the Bridge, it doesn't get taken seriously. Likewise, the Dine's name for the Hopi is that of another group that supposedly went extinct, indicating they didn't, is another fact that gets actively ignored.
Conducting archeology without conducting anthropology on people that still exist is like studying the history of New York by studying the subway maps and ignoring the people on the platforms and the streets above.
Ernie explained it quite clearly:
Rubber duckie you're the one,
you make bath time lots of fun
rubber duckie I'm awfully fond of you
A rub a dub dubbie.
Had you paid attention at the time you'd have no trouble telling a duckie from a pengy.
And yes, a zebra is prettier than a pony. Don't try to ride the zebra.
One terabyte with backup redundancy = US$800 as two plug ready 1T hard drives
One terabyte with backup redundancy = $36,000 for two drives plus $720 for 4 disks and unknown integration solutions/programs/drivers.
$800 from a company with in-place support, warranty replacement and such,
or $36,720 for gizmoidal coolidity.
The lifetime of each of the kinds of disks remains to be seen, though I'm betting the hard drives are up to par with what's already available, and except for hard use, these last about as long as an optical drive.
It'd definitely be different. But "better" depends on what you look at.
The thawing of the Siberian and Canadian tundras could more than double the amount of arable land, providing more food than we could possible use, as well as provide land for trees which could halt the process. Done with some intelligence, we could "tune" the climate and the planet, and turn problems into solutions.
On the other hand, by the 2080's, the summer high temperatures in the southeastern US would average around 115. The energy use for the increased air conditioning could accelerate the process.
The simple solution is to move everyone from Flordia to Canada and and Siberia to become farmers. They'll have to go somewhere, because Florida will be almost entirely under water.
I'll forego my rant about their complete refusal to incorporate attentional focusing and much of the rest of cogntive psychology's research on block reading, their extremely selective choices of interpretation of brain imaging research, their failure to study other written formats (left vs. right, horiztonal vs. vertical, alpha/syllabalic vs pictographic), and the decades of similar conclusions preceeding their "discovery". That would be too easy and too tedious.
Instead, I'll note that TFA is in approximately 60 column block text, and the "printer ready" version is in at least 80 column block text. The latter proves their point by being harder to read, so one wonders why it was done. What's more, the parent article's title says "Scientists Offers". The author and editor should both be soundly spanked for a grammatical error in the title of an article about reading and writing.
However, this does raise the question as to how their software is going to parse and reformat the inevitable errors in human writing.
First off, I've not only read the article, I've read a lot of what NASA has cranked out on the subject ever since they started making excuses for not accepting the Mercury 13 into training. It's been almost 50 years now, and they haven't changed their lines one bit. Their conclusions are mere final sentences in long chains of rationalizations that start and end with the QED. The evidence they base their conclusions on -- the same conclusions that people parrot after not reading anything more than those conclusions -- is precisely zero. Their conclusions are their starting assumptions. Excuse the hell out of me for insisting on maintaining my position as an empirical scientist, but there's nothing NASA has published on the matter that shows anything like objective evidence. They keep hold to these issues in large part because as a highly visible publicly funded agency, the administrators are cowards when it comes to leading a human endeavor into the future. And rightly so. The congresscritters that write their checks are beholden to their constituents. Many of those would scream outrage at any hint of hanky panky or shenanigans and demand withdrawal of funds and recall of any astronauts, administrators and congresscritters who even appear to engage in (the logical flaw of) encouraging by not forbidding. Some of the tax payers, particularly the very vocal who are practised at pretending moral outrage in order to make up for the lack of true morals due to overabundance of prescribed beliefs, would make major media noise. the afrementioned administrators would feel it only just and proper to defend themselves (and their funding) in such a position. And they want to defend themselves less than anything. I'm almost certain there are internal NASA studies that provide realistic and rational conclusions and recommendations. They can't possibly have psychologists working for them on subjects like this only to have them be seen marching to the party's music. It's the complete lack of public release of such information that bothers me and leads me to these conclusions.
I also don't buy the monastic monk model. The European colonists who developed the US, particularly everything west of the Appalachians, were completely human men and women who coupled in and under their Conestoga wagons, had whole families as a result, and colonized a continent in the biological sense. People have contended with their human natures in public and private, including lack of the latter, and so far have managed to thrive. Yes, they have had "problems" like jealousy, and arrangements gone sour leading to hard feelings. It's the perservering in the face of such adversity that's the hallmark of those who can truly be the sort of pioneers we need to make the proposed missions successful.
I espcially don't buy the pregnancy issue. We can reverse tubal ligations and vasectomies that weren't intended to be reversed, so there's no doubt in my mind that we can devise such surgeries that are intended to be reversed. Of course pharmaceutical interventions are much easier, but 99.4% effective means 0.6% make it through, and I have one offspring who's a 0.6%
I still find it incredibly telling that NASA flaunts its toilets but engages in ostrich activity when it comes to allowing its people to be whole and complete people. Maybe that's just me, but just me is a psychologist as well as someone who's worked for years at making sure that if I don't get off this planet for good, someone will.
The ethical considerations of death and dying, that too is far less of an issue than these occasional media blurbs make it out to be. Figure: NASA is supposedly able to find the best and the brightest and train them to be the first and foremost. Why not let these supposedly well adjusted individuals then make their own decisions? The US military has been dealing with precisely these same issues for years (inclusion of women in most jobs and situations is now decades old), and they take pretty much anyone who'll sign up. NASA doesn't trust its own work in this respect? Fine. Give space exploration to the military. They can and do deal with these problems and more.
Healthy men and women don't have a problem dealing with it. NASA seems to be the one with the problem. Let the healthy young men and women radio down "Houston, you have a problem down there. Deal with it. Now mind your own fucking business," and then shut off the cameras. Jesus H Christ on a pogo stick, NASA proudly shows off every new version of the zero G toilet, and they expect people to shit in it with nothing but a paper thin wall and a few inches between them and the rest of the crew, but the very thought of those same people fucking sends them into a tizzy. That's some sick and twisted thinking. I wouldn't trust them to tell me what I should do about my sex life. How the hell can these people talk about colonizing planets but have so much trouble with people making babies, or at least practising at it?
> There is also a serious scientific issue in using closed-source software for
> data analysis or theoretical calculations. [etc.]
I do science in the real world. I can safely say that's a patently ridiculous assertion. We rely on any software we can get to work. Often that's commercial software, because people who develop good software in science frequently take it commercial.
It's our results that need to be replicated, not our methods. Anyone can do the same thing and get the same result. Doing it by a different method and getting the same result is a much more rigorous validation. As long as it's a different box, it doesn't matter if one or both are black.
It's also to our benefit to use commercial software because it's cheaper to buy it, including (re)licensing fees and support, because it's cheaper than paying salary to a code hacker to keep things running. Maybe some have the spare time to hack their own code. I wish I did. But I've got more important things to do.
I've worked in a lab that at first had a EE doctoral student doing Matlab code, and then started using some hardware that required doing analysis in Code Warrior. We needed to get someone else. Not good for the first guy, and expensive in either case for us. I also started collaborating with a lab that used the only open source analysis software in our field (only one other lab used it; the one the lab director came from). I could do by myself what took them 3 people to do, and get it done faster. The collaboration didn't last long.
The accepted procedure in carrying out and publishing research is to reference the software manufacturers in the text and/or references section. If anyone wants to check the results by getting the same things and doing the samr things with them to check validity, they're welcome to. But they don't. They use what they have and compare results. If they really want to check the validity of results, they can get copies of the validity testing done on the software. Any decent software maker will have already done all the validity testing necessary and is glad to make that data available.
> Answer: they're usually the height of mediocrity. The best and brightest,
> if they're there, are often ignored.
IT at big companies are kept busy just trying to keep the base OS and necessary apps puttering along, and resurrecting users' workstations that have melted down or upchucked. Their mediocrity is enforced by the needs and whims of the big suits and PHBs. Corporate budgeting for IT is on a need-to-go basis. If IT has any money left at the end of a fiscal year, rather than letting them put it to security and be good neighbors on the net, corporate bosses tend to do the corporate thing: take the money and put it towards TV commercials saying what good neighbors they are. The job is mostly never-ending thanklessness punctuated by blame. The best and the brightest are usually not given the time or resources to be that. If they try, they end up pointing out flaws for which their cohorts are either responsible for creating or at least for fixing. In corporate IT, as in Japan, "the nail that sticks out gets pounded down". I've watched several freinds and acquaintances go from being very good at IT to being either disillusioned and bitter medicore IT drones, or giving the appearance to be that at work and saving their expertise for their own projects. Those are often unpaying, but at least they get due thanks and/or a sense of accomplishment.
I nominate the headline on the parent for second best /. headline ever, right behind "Germs' drummer arrested for carrying soap". Especially when they're taken together.