Ducks are pentachromats. They have 5 different receptors for color. That doesn't mean they see other colors than we do, but it does mean they have better color differentiation. I can think of no other explanation other than ducks evolved from artists.
Maybe we can put them to work testing monitors. Your garden variety graphics card and monitor are already capable of producing more colors (4.28 million or some such) than humans can differentiate (3 to 3.5 million).
> It would be all one long spectrum except for Computer Science, which makes > the connection (via AI) between the hard sciences and the soft sciences.
Neuroscience makes a connection between the hard science and soft sciences without even considering AI's existence. From the genetics of biochemical brain function through species specific behaviors to rational and irrational human cognition and behavior to social psychology. In fact, neuroscience differs from cognitive science specifically because it does ignore computer science, especially AI.
Philosophy should be in there. While not a science itself, philosophy is what defines science, and therefore what's hard and soft. It's supposed to be the reason for the Ph in PhD (though far fewer science PhDs these days require any sort of knowledge of the philosophy of science, especially in the US).
This map is far more a measure of cross-disciplinary referencing than anything else. The small size of theoretical physics is evidence of that.
They've done nothing but show that the "cocktail party" effect works for the visual system as well as the auditory. Intresting in itself, but not surprising nor indicative of any extra mechanism at work.
Say you're at a party. The noise is loud, yet you are paying attention to a person talking to you at a level far below the ambient sound. How do we do it? Modulating our attention. Suddenly someone else across the room calls your name. You hear it and respond, despite the fact your attention was focused on that one person. This happens because you take in and process irrelevant stimuli just in case it, such as in this instance, becomes relevant.
In this paper they worked far too hard (fMRI, monocular masking) to prove that the visual system works the same way. Not at all surprising considering that split attention, one focused the other operating on automatic (called para-attention) is driving the perceptual bus.
Subliminals don't work in auditory through this mechanism, so there's no reason to suspect they will in the visual. Being able to notice something you weren't previously giving conscious attention to is a far cry from that information you're not paying attention to making you behave in a way you wouldn't otherwise.
If sound propagated down a nerve by sound, it'd end there. There's no mechanism to produce sound when a neurotransmitter from the first nerve mated with a receptor on the next.
Also, we listen to brain waves with an EEG or MEG, which measure minute electrical or magnetic impulses. We do not use a microphone and amplifier. Plus, we induce currents with electricity and magnetism, not loudspeakers, and produce predictable results.
Sound waves of sufficient intensity to propagate the full length of a nerve would be so strong in the main trunk that they'd disrupt the transport mechanism carrying neurotransmitters down from the cell body. They'd isloate the nerve from participating in the local neural network.
A new theory should explain everything just as well as the old plus more. This one falls apart at the basics and can't handle some of the nuances.
If sound propagation were the key, all that sodium and potassium gating to change the local membrane charge would be useless, and nature hates that kind of waste.
There are analog processes involved in the brain. There are electrical fields around neurons that affect neurons that are not directly connected. The proposed device can't do these, or rather it could, but in such a device the result would be noise and error. In the brain the result is heuristic processing and global information storage.
Read "Brain and Perception" by Karl Pribram. It'd help to have a neuroscientist and a physicist available when you do so. It's not an easy read. I studied it under Karl, and sat in on sessions with him and two of the physicists who helped with the appendices, and it took me a year.
It's about some things we know, and most ignore, and so leads to the fact of how little we actually know of reality, substituting selective support for abstractions from psychology.
Simulators do remarkable things, often with fewer parts and processes than that which they model. However, they can only tell us things about the results from the abstracted model, and nothing about the thing being modeled.
Originally everyone who wanted a web site made one. Everyone had an HTML editor they could use. The.com surge created a job for people doing it for them, since they couldn't do squat except spend their seed money like crack addicts. The job still needs done for some people somewhat, so it survived the bust for a while. Now, with blogging so ubiquitous (blogging +is mostly just one-page web site creation, a practice we used to decry as poor form), it's obvious anyone can do it. Again. The webmaster was a mythical beast brought to life by the beliefs of those around them that needed to believe in them. As happens with gods who lose believers, they're fading away. The job is being absorbed as a part time project for one or more of the IT team. It doesn't take more than that, particularly when you can find people doing it by themselves as a damn hobby.
godz help the poor B grade CS/CStech bachelors students who were taught HTML as their "programming" language. They're obsolete from the get go.
> "Over 60% of 1,320 global executives... want face time with their employees, the study said.
Over 60% of global executives (I'd say probably 150% of 60%) don't get or even expect face time with the majority of their employees. They wouldn't even recognize most of them as employees.
They do, however, know how to understand what a question is asking and answer it in such a way as to present themselves in the best light, and darn sure don't want their employees to think they're hardly even known to their top level bosses. If you read TFA you find contradictory data which tends to make the answer to each question sound good, which is precisely what you get when ask questions rather than measure behaviors.
What most good executives understand is that most employees value appreciation over advancement, and provide that, which flies in the face of TFA, which flies in the face of previous data according to TFA. One wonders under what conditions one accumulates so many flies in one's face.
A person who telecommutes probably wants to, or at least comes to appreciate it, and wants to keep that position. Taking a different position, whether "advancement" or not, might mean not telecommuting anymore. Those don't don't like it will move out. Most do, and stay.
w33t sez: > I would seem that having two languages one's whole life would somehow affect a brain. > However, I think research shows that life-long bilinguals actually use the same region > of their brain when speaking either language. As shown by this article - google cache > - the real site barely worked. just google "bilingual brocas"
> Perhaps bilingualism gives the brain some kind of extra strength - or flexibility. > Maybe more than just the broca's area gets an extra workout, and that effort pays > off in the long marathon of dementia.
Broca's area is the brain motor used in the production of speech. It is not at all surprising that there is only one. To have two active motor areas for the same part of the body would tend to cause conflicts. Just to have two adjacent motor areas active at the same time can cause problems. Check it out: balance a stick of some kind on your finger. Time yourself over several trials. Then have someone give you some difficult to spell words, and spell them while balancing the stick. Time yourself some more. Have them give you some more words while you balance it, and try to spell those backwards, while timing yourself. As the speech production becomes more complex, it becomes harder to balance the stick because the two motor areas being used are directly adjacent to each other. A part of the cortex that does a certain thing will try to recruit nearby regions for hard work.
Actually, I use this test to show the difference in male and female brains. Females are far less specialized, or alternatively, far more integrated, than male brains. While they tend to not be able to balance the stick very well to begin with (guys tend do this sort of goofy stuff for no apparent reason more so than females), they don't get worse as the task gets harder. They don't have the conflicts caused by the overlap of recruited areas because the tasks are already spread out over more of the brain.
My boss at NIDCD/NIH was studying mono- and bi-linguals that had had strokes or other brain damage. Those blinguals that have damage to the other speech center, Wernicke's area, would often "lose" one language, but not the other. They could still produce the lost language if you gave them a recorded example to follow, showing that the motor area was working, but lost the ability to understand one of them, in both the hearing it and the understanding of what their own brain was producing. The evidence was that there is more than one Wernicke's "area" in bilinguals. I put it in quoted because Wernicke's is in the association cortex, the part of the brain that pulls together other parts to produce complex cognitive processing. The association cortex is much less generalized and hard-wired than other parts so that it can call on different areas for different tasks.
I know of one man who moved to the US from France when he was 5, and spoke nothing but English after arriving. He had a stroke at 70-something and lost his ability to use English. However, he not only retained his ability to speak French fluently, it had matured along with him despite not being used. He used it as an adult would, not as the 5 year old he was when he stopped using it. He could also talk in French about his technical career (he'd invented one process used in the production of steel) despite having only started on that career 20 years after he'd stopped using French.
It's an obviously frequent/. misconception that disclosing prior art invalidates a patent/application. The fact is that a similar prior art search and disclosure is a necessary part of the patent search and application process. It proves that one has done one's homework. What needs to be shown is that the patent applied for differs from prior art in a *significant enough* way as to validate the request. Discovery and disclosure by another party of prior art not covered in the disclosure AND of a nature that shows that the request is not unique enough to merit a patent CAN and SHOULD invalidate the request, but this is not always the case.
The Inventor's Handbook (http://web.mit.edu/invent/h-main.html) describes this and many other relevant points in a manner far more readable than the patent laws.
"In 2000 the Finnish demoscene musician Janne Suni (also known as 'Tempest') won the Oldskool Music Competition at the Assembly demoparty with his four-channel Amiga.MOD entitled 'Acid Jazzed Evening.' A Commodore 64 musician called 'grg' remade the song on the C64 (using the infamous SID soundchip); it is this that was stolen."
1. How is it that the latter was stolen, but the former wasn't?
2. How do we know the "evidence" wasn't fabricated? 2a. Are you sure I won't find something suspiciously similar in my obviously pre-2000 collection of MODs on my Apple IIgs? I still have it and them, and it still works.
3. According to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, "Givitaway givitaway givitaway givitaway now", so why do they still charge money for their albums and concert tickets? Word.
4. Can I get sued for #3? Hell yes. Will it have any merit? Depends on how good the attorneys they can afford to buy with their profits are. Two words. Sad to say, but true.
d00d, Bono didn't start giving it away until after he'd made such a pile that he could afford to, and even then he used what he made to get people to give him more so he could give that away. Therein lies his genius.
=Smidge= sez smore: > I would fully support such an experiemnt, especially if the people challanging > the theory of gravity are the test subjects. We would have to do a lot of testing, > though, to test the 50% claim - various ground conditions and body types, and > landing styles (head or feet first?)... Perhaps we can duct-tape cardboard fins > to them first to ensure consistent landing orientation?
As a high powered rocketry hobbyist, I can assure you that no amount of finnage promises aerodynamic stability. We count on that fact for a great deal of excitement and entertainment. Of course, that pertains mostly to the "up" phase. Fins seem to work a treat during the "down" phase, so you may be onto something there.
It wouldn't take a large number of measurements to prove the point as long as we used the "witch test" experimental design. After they land, we ask them if they believe in gravity. If they say "Ouch", we take that as a positive. If they don't answer, we take that as no data. Guaranteed 100% results.
> We didn't have the ability to gather up enough mass to see if gravity > could bend light back in 1919 either, but we still managed to test Einstein's > theory of general relativity.
Actually, no we didn't. The errors in Eddington's measurements were so great, and the number of measurements so small, that the data didn't support the conclusion. It took another 50 years before a direct test of relativity with positive results was accomplished. Read "The Golem" by Collins & Pinch for this and many other examples of science being hosed because it's conducted by people. On the other hand:
> You do not need to actively create an experiment to test a theory.
You don't even need to test a theory for it to be a theory. The basis of relativity was due as much to Einstein's "thought experiments" as to his speculative but logical math. Currently, string/M-brane theory carries the name despite the fact that the best we can do is imagine that someday we might be able to come up with ideas that make sense. If the logic flows, it's a theory.
Note though that a logical assumption is not the same as a logical flaw, such as "appeal to authority". This error is the reason some people mistakenly take the orthagonal concepts of theory and belief system and attempt to compare them.
Regardless of the amount of empirical evidence, every theory is "just" a theory. However, a belief system is "just" that.
We don't even really know what gravity is, but we definitely have a theory about it. If anyone wants to claim that it's "just" a theory, I invite them to test the hypothesis that a human being in a free fall from an altitude of 10 meters runs a 50% probability of being killed by the impact with the ground. 9.8m/sec^2 adds up to a lot of "just" in a very short time.
In the spirit of fairness, I'll offer the alternative hypothesis that since God created the Heavens AND the Earth, then regardless of the outcome of the above test, gravity is just God's way of "calling you home". Let's see them refuse that one.
> to give themselves their > own homework deadlines, they would > artificially restrict themselves to counter procrastination.
Leaving aside the begged question as to what is normal/natural restriction as opposed to "artificial" restriction, the observation is from a situation that is not representative of the general college student population, and so no generalization can or should be drawn from it.
I've taught at two different state level colleges which aren't much above community college level as far as academic rigor among the students. I didn't require attendance and rarely set a deadline other than the required planned exams. I rarely got anything until near the end of the semester, and even after. I finally had to start giving graded quizzes before the lecture to (a) force attendance and (b) force them to read the material before the lecture (a requirement of mine because I don't read the book to them, I add to it), or (c) accumulate evidence in the form of missed quizzes/homework/classes to drop them. Nothing motivates students to show up and to do their work in a timely manner like seeing one of their (ex-)classmates being told he doesn't need to be there ever again because he was dropped because he missed too much.
And it's a damn shame I had to do that. Both places had a large proportion of "non-traditional", that is, not right out of high school, usually older, have families, jobs and all the problems that come with these and other normal adult life. I'd set things up so those students could take the course, and never come to class at all, if they could learn enough on their own from the book to make the grades they needed on the exams. And I didn't want to make those changes -- I was ordered to because too many of my students were failing. Yeah, like I made them not do their work.
Online courses were the worst. Most (not some, not just the majority, but most) students would do absolutely nothing* until the day before the exam, and then spend 1 to 3 hours reading through the material. One third dropped out after the second of 4 exams because they couldn't possibly pass. One third were urged to do the same for the same reason, but neglected to even do that, and so failed. Of the one third that remained, 90% got A's because they had the necessary sense of responsibility and motivation to do the necessary work on their own.
rar42 (626382) sez: > I'm inclined to compare roads to shared medium Ethernet. As the > traffic builds up you get more 'collisions' and both systems > have collision detection built-in. With Ethernet, as the 'traffic' > builds to about 40% of the theoretical capacity, collisions > become the norm
You're pretty much completely wrong, and the last quoted line sums up why. Collisions are not the norm in traffic jams.
Traffic jams happen due to the ripple effect from cumulative reaction time delays in response to changes in traffic. The effect accumulates until there is so much loss of speed that people drive closer together. Then when they have to react, they react more abruptly, and that causes yet a stronger ripple effect.
Packets collide, cars don't. Cars change speed, packets don't. Well, OK, sometimes cars do collide. But it's not the collision itself that causes the traffic jam, it's the bottleneck in the right of way and/or the rubberneckers.
If people could and would simply maintain the 2 second following distance no matter what speed, when the fewer traffic jams did occur, they would resolve themselves much more quickly. But just try telling the person 500 cars back to just sit still for 10 minutes. They'd probably want to punch you, and they'll still insist on driving stopgostopgostogostopgo despite the fact that doing so means they'll be doing it for several times longer than just waiting.
90% of drivers think they're better than average. 90% of drivers are below average drivers. So I give free driving lessons. Like braking suddenly for tailgaters.
>> Not a chance man. If it was, the elephants would have >> eaten it already.
> No, that would be if it were peanut shaped.
> Monkeys would eat a banana shaped universe. And there > just may not be enough monkeys far enough back in time > when the universe was small for them to eat it.
Whether space-time is infinite, or finite but spheroidal (space-time circling back on itself), the effect is the same: any number of monkeys has the effect of an infinite number of monkeys. A banana shaped universe would be eaten by them, and not exist, but then they would not and so could not eat it. Paradox. Or so the traditional physical thinking would go. But you can't have the paradox occur until some time during the first go round. For the paradox to occur, as it must given the infinities, the first universe must exist. The infinite number of monkeys must even now be eating the universe. While doing so they are generating an enormous amount of waste in the form of metabolized entropy, which is information. I offer as evidence a Google search for "a" resulting in "about 6,560,000,000" hits, as well as the volume of/. article replies, including this one.
The counter argument that something must be informative to be information is obviously flawed, as the evidence shows that non-informative/. replies generate informative ones.
The counter argument that we are not monkeys, whether finite or infinite, is an argument regarding evolution, and is off topic here. It would be moderated out of existence, but the moderation would be generative information replacing it, supporting the first assertion against counter argument.
On the other hand, elephants eat bananas too.
On the gripping hand, turles eat neither bananas nor peanuts. This accomplishes in one sentence reference to two different science fiction entities, the geek value of which makes it appropriate to/. reply form. And coming from fiction, represents information generated from imaginary or false information, again supporting the first assertion.
You may all now resume typing. We have a long way to go. I'll start.
> Attorneys say recognition by a court -- whether in this or some future > litigation -- that Internet abuse is an uncontrollable addiction, and not > just a bad habit, could redefine the condition as a psychological > impairment worthy of protection under the Americans with Disabilities Act.'
An addiction has a biological definition, which includes re-regulation of the number of receptors based on the presence or absence of a substance that mimic or blocks neurotransmitters (or, technically, hormones, which are frequently the same chemicals as neurotransmitters, but outside the brain). The law can, and does, ignore such things as scientific definitions, such as when they instead use the entirely non-psychological term "instanity". Far be it from them to let people who know the field tell them anything.
> The condition could even make it into the next edition of the American > Psychiatric Association's DSM, making it a full-blown neurosis.
Neurosis is an out dated term. It's from Freudian theory, which has so far failed to have any experimental support. The DSM does not use the term, except perhaps in historical context.
> to directly target pain receptors in experimental animals.
Man, I've got to get me some of those. Here I've been using the traditional, evolved sort. I bet I could get lots better results from my experiments if my animals were experimental too. And then maybe some experimental humans.
$150,000 for a face recognition system. It ran for two years, seeded with all known local offenders. It never found one despite the fact that cops caught some in the areas of cameras. They shut it off after two years of failure.
from this condition has happened before. One case was a woman also with Parkinsons. She suffered a period of amnesia and her voice came back for no apparent reason.
infuse into every cell in your body and break down into a potent carcinogenic toxin (acetaldehyde)?
cause you to run your car off the road and into a crowd of people?
wash all the niacin out of your hippocampus and cause dementia?
when taken away, run the risk of convulsions, epilepsy and stroke, all three potentially fatal?
There's a difference between obsessive/compulsive behavior (disorder or not) and addiction. An addiction is synaptic reregulation to chonic exposure to a substance that mimics or replaces a neurotransmitter. It causes obsessive and compulsive behavior, and so does a lot of other things.
"Did you know they just showed smoking can offset Parkinson's disease?" -- Thank You For Smoking "Chronic exposure to the hypothesised MAO inhibiting substance (TMN) can prevent MTPT to MPP+ conversion, and thus prevent MPP+ mediated apoptosis in the substantia nigra." -- My dissertation
> It seems preposterous to me that rocketeers be permitted to > build uncontrolled ballistic systems, but (arguably safer) > guided systems are prohibited.
They're not. Many people and some web sites involved in rocketry make this claim, but none of the rules of the rocketry organizations and none of the laws from the various federal agencies say this. Many times, when this is pointed out to the individuals making this claim, the response is a "yeah but" excuse about the feds increasing their pressure if people were to do this. They're getting paranoid about the feds and "what they might do".
Fact is, one such system was not only flown at an NAR national meet, it was an entry in the R&D competition.
To be precise, guidance systems are safer as long as they fail safe. To be rational, any given visit to any organized launch will treat the viewer to various failures of rockets gone unstable, as well as catastrophic failures involving motor fuel and casing blow-outs. Given the frequency of these, the issue of guidance and guidance failures is moot.
... between ownership and censorship, or between your rights and your wants. It's this kind of ignorance that lets others get away with taking away your rights. How would you know?
The school owns the system. They get to say what it can and can't be used for. And no, the taxpayers do not own it (assuming not a private college). They forked over their money to the government to do with as they saw fit. The government spent it for their benefit, not for their ownership. They gave it to the school along with the right and responsibility to run it.
The point that M-theory (the string theories) has produced no testable hypotheses is negative speculation. Nobody has developed it enough to the point where it can be tested. It requires either development of the theory to the point where we can conduct tests based on current technology, or advances in technology to match with advances in the theory so that it can be tested at a finer level.
In any case, it's convincing because the math works. The same was said of solar neutrinos*. The search continued for 30 years because the theory made sense despite something more negative than lack of testable hypotheses -- consistent failure of tests to produce the results predicted. Here we had what amount to falsification, yet they persisted and finally got their answer. Lack of falsification is a far more positive starting point.
And although M-theory is so stratospheric that few undertsand more than part of it, it is starting to develop an elegance. Like it or not, that's a telling sign that there's something there.
> none of the numbers seem all that surprising, except that 55% of active members are women > (63% of all members were men).
"Members" are anyone who'se ever signed on for an account and not deleted it. They keep the numbers looking good by continuing to carry these. Not surprising, ISPs have done this for a long time. Men don't remain active members because they get so little response (ref. the original paper).
Women remain active more because they tend to keep coming back to the chat rooms, mostly with other women. They hang around just in case a guy comes along to try to chat with them. Then they'll all play hot chat with him, and afterwards fail to respond to him at about the same rate as in email.
I've been doing some research of my own. But I don't see anything surprising enough about it that makes it worth writing about. It's the same sort of behaviors I've seen since the time when BBSs started gaining general public members, prior to the spread of internet connection turning them into ISPs. I'm not surprised by the fact the article is new and the paper is 2 years old. I'm surprised that someone bothered to write a paper about something that's been going on for 15 years. On the other hand, it was a master's thesis. Very few academics care what master's students write about as long as the research is done halfway decent.
> I guess the problem is trying to strike the right balance between allowing good > students to take advantage of this resource, but discourage bad students from > staying at home all the time and watching all the lectures right before the exam.
Speaking as a college professor, who the hell do you think you are judging students as good or bad based on how they use the information made available to them? Studying the way someone thinks they should does not make them good students, and studying the way they choose to does not make them bad students.
We educators are supposed to concern ourselves with educating those who wish to be educated. If some students can stay home and watch the lectures just before the exam, and end up taking away from their academic career what they need to in order to prepare them for the future, good for them. If some do so, and pass the exams, and even get their degrees, and forget most everything they were exposed to, and so end up as degreed chumps, the truth will sooner or later make itself obvious, and there is no way but the passage of time to determine which will be which.
I only wish I could be around to see the moment when the past catches up with those who cheat themselves out of their education, and someone who learned more, by whatever means, gets the job/raise/praise/personal satisfaction.
Make everything available to everyone. Those who value knowledge are out there and will make good use of whatever they find useful to their learning. Those who want to misuse the chance, fuck them, let them. Just do your job and don't burden yourself with those boneheads who refuse to learn by trying to punish them for their insistance at boneheadedness. We SHOULD have our hands so full with those who wish to learn by any means that we don't have time to worry about those who refuse to learn by any means. If we have time to concern ourselves with that particular worry, we're wasting time and energy and not serving those who deserve it most.
Slashdot Mirror
Ducks are pentachromats. They have 5 different receptors for color. That doesn't mean they see other colors than we do, but it does mean they have better color differentiation. I can think of no other explanation other than ducks evolved from artists.
Maybe we can put them to work testing monitors. Your garden variety graphics card and monitor are already capable of producing more colors (4.28 million or some such) than humans can differentiate (3 to 3.5 million).
> It would be all one long spectrum except for Computer Science, which makes
> the connection (via AI) between the hard sciences and the soft sciences.
Neuroscience makes a connection between the hard science and soft sciences without even considering AI's existence. From the genetics of biochemical brain function through species specific behaviors to rational and irrational human cognition and behavior to social psychology. In fact, neuroscience differs from cognitive science specifically because it does ignore computer science, especially AI.
Philosophy should be in there. While not a science itself, philosophy is what defines science, and therefore what's hard and soft. It's supposed to be the reason for the Ph in PhD (though far fewer science PhDs these days require any sort of knowledge of the philosophy of science, especially in the US).
This map is far more a measure of cross-disciplinary referencing than anything else. The small size of theoretical physics is evidence of that.
They've done nothing but show that the "cocktail party" effect works for the visual system as well as the auditory. Intresting in itself, but not surprising nor indicative of any extra mechanism at work.
Say you're at a party. The noise is loud, yet you are paying attention to a person talking to you at a level far below the ambient sound. How do we do it? Modulating our attention. Suddenly someone else across the room calls your name. You hear it and respond, despite the fact your attention was focused on that one person. This happens because you take in and process irrelevant stimuli just in case it, such as in this instance, becomes relevant.
In this paper they worked far too hard (fMRI, monocular masking) to prove that the visual system works the same way. Not at all surprising considering that split attention, one focused the other operating on automatic (called para-attention) is driving the perceptual bus.
Subliminals don't work in auditory through this mechanism, so there's no reason to suspect they will in the visual. Being able to notice something you weren't previously giving conscious attention to is a far cry from that information you're not paying attention to making you behave in a way you wouldn't otherwise.
If sound propagated down a nerve by sound, it'd end there. There's no mechanism to produce sound when a neurotransmitter from the first nerve mated with a receptor on the next.
Also, we listen to brain waves with an EEG or MEG, which measure minute electrical or magnetic impulses. We do not use a microphone and amplifier. Plus, we induce currents with electricity and magnetism, not loudspeakers, and produce predictable results.
Sound waves of sufficient intensity to propagate the full length of a nerve would be so strong in the main trunk that they'd disrupt the transport mechanism carrying neurotransmitters down from the cell body. They'd isloate the nerve from participating in the local neural network.
A new theory should explain everything just as well as the old plus more. This one falls apart at the basics and can't handle some of the nuances.
If sound propagation were the key, all that sodium and potassium gating to change the local membrane charge would be useless, and nature hates that kind of waste.
and hardly a model.
There are analog processes involved in the brain. There are electrical fields around neurons that affect neurons that are not directly connected. The proposed device can't do these, or rather it could, but in such a device the result would be noise and error. In the brain the result is heuristic processing and global information storage.
Read "Brain and Perception" by Karl Pribram. It'd help to have a neuroscientist and a physicist available when you do so. It's not an easy read. I studied it under Karl, and sat in on sessions with him and two of the physicists who helped with the appendices, and it took me a year.
It's about some things we know, and most ignore, and so leads to the fact of how little we actually know of reality, substituting selective support for abstractions from psychology.
Simulators do remarkable things, often with fewer parts and processes than that which they model. However, they can only tell us things about the results from the abstracted model, and nothing about the thing being modeled.
Originally everyone who wanted a web site made one. Everyone had an HTML editor they could use. The .com surge created a job for people doing it for them, since they couldn't do squat except spend their seed money like crack addicts. The job still needs done for some people somewhat, so it survived the bust for a while. Now, with blogging so ubiquitous (blogging +is mostly just one-page web site creation, a practice we used to decry as poor form), it's obvious anyone can do it. Again. The webmaster was a mythical beast brought to life by the beliefs of those around them that needed to believe in them. As happens with gods who lose believers, they're fading away. The job is being absorbed as a part time project for one or more of the IT team. It doesn't take more than that, particularly when you can find people doing it by themselves as a damn hobby.
godz help the poor B grade CS/CStech bachelors students who were taught HTML as their "programming" language. They're obsolete from the get go.
> "Over 60% of 1,320 global executives ... want face time with their employees, the study said.
Over 60% of global executives (I'd say probably 150% of 60%) don't get or even expect face time with the majority of their employees. They wouldn't even recognize most of them as employees.
They do, however, know how to understand what a question is asking and answer it in such a way as to present themselves in the best light, and darn sure don't want their employees to think they're hardly even known to their top level bosses. If you read TFA you find contradictory data which tends to make the answer to each question sound good, which is precisely what you get when ask questions rather than measure behaviors.
What most good executives understand is that most employees value appreciation over advancement, and provide that, which flies in the face of TFA, which flies in the face of previous data according to TFA. One wonders under what conditions one accumulates so many flies in one's face.
A person who telecommutes probably wants to, or at least comes to appreciate it, and wants to keep that position. Taking a different position, whether "advancement" or not, might mean not telecommuting anymore. Those don't don't like it will move out. Most do, and stay.
w33t sez:
> I would seem that having two languages one's whole life would somehow affect a brain.
> However, I think research shows that life-long bilinguals actually use the same region
> of their brain when speaking either language. As shown by this article - google cache
> - the real site barely worked. just google "bilingual brocas"
> Perhaps bilingualism gives the brain some kind of extra strength - or flexibility.
> Maybe more than just the broca's area gets an extra workout, and that effort pays
> off in the long marathon of dementia.
Broca's area is the brain motor used in the production of speech. It is not at all surprising that there is only one. To have two active motor areas for the same part of the body would tend to cause conflicts. Just to have two adjacent motor areas active at the same time can cause problems. Check it out: balance a stick of some kind on your finger. Time yourself over several trials. Then have someone give you some difficult to spell words, and spell them while balancing the stick. Time yourself some more. Have them give you some more words while you balance it, and try to spell those backwards, while timing yourself. As the speech production becomes more complex, it becomes harder to balance the stick because the two motor areas being used are directly adjacent to each other. A part of the cortex that does a certain thing will try to recruit nearby regions for hard work.
Actually, I use this test to show the difference in male and female brains. Females are far less specialized, or alternatively, far more integrated, than male brains. While they tend to not be able to balance the stick very well to begin with (guys tend do this sort of goofy stuff for no apparent reason more so than females), they don't get worse as the task gets harder. They don't have the conflicts caused by the overlap of recruited areas because the tasks are already spread out over more of the brain.
My boss at NIDCD/NIH was studying mono- and bi-linguals that had had strokes or other brain damage. Those blinguals that have damage to the other speech center, Wernicke's area, would often "lose" one language, but not the other. They could still produce the lost language if you gave them a recorded example to follow, showing that the motor area was working, but lost the ability to understand one of them, in both the hearing it and the understanding of what their own brain was producing. The evidence was that there is more than one Wernicke's "area" in bilinguals. I put it in quoted because Wernicke's is in the association cortex, the part of the brain that pulls together other parts to produce complex cognitive processing. The association cortex is much less generalized and hard-wired than other parts so that it can call on different areas for different tasks.
I know of one man who moved to the US from France when he was 5, and spoke nothing but English after arriving. He had a stroke at 70-something and lost his ability to use English. However, he not only retained his ability to speak French fluently, it had matured along with him despite not being used. He used it as an adult would, not as the 5 year old he was when he stopped using it. He could also talk in French about his technical career (he'd invented one process used in the production of steel) despite having only started on that career 20 years after he'd stopped using French.
It's an obviously frequent /. misconception that disclosing prior art invalidates a patent/application. The fact is that a similar prior art search and disclosure is a necessary part of the patent search and application process. It proves that one has done one's homework. What needs to be shown is that the patent applied for differs from prior art in a *significant enough* way as to validate the request. Discovery and disclosure by another party of prior art not covered in the disclosure AND of a nature that shows that the request is not unique enough to merit a patent CAN and SHOULD invalidate the request, but this is not always the case.
The Inventor's Handbook (http://web.mit.edu/invent/h-main.html) describes this and many other relevant points in a manner far more readable than the patent laws.
"In 2000 the Finnish demoscene musician Janne Suni (also known as 'Tempest') won the Oldskool Music Competition at the Assembly demoparty with his four-channel Amiga .MOD entitled 'Acid Jazzed Evening.' A Commodore 64 musician called 'grg' remade the song on the C64 (using the infamous SID soundchip); it is this that was stolen."
1. How is it that the latter was stolen, but the former wasn't?
2. How do we know the "evidence" wasn't fabricated?
2a. Are you sure I won't find something suspiciously similar in my obviously pre-2000 collection of MODs on my Apple IIgs? I still have it and them, and it still works.
3. According to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, "Givitaway givitaway givitaway givitaway now", so why do they still charge money for their albums and concert tickets? Word.
4. Can I get sued for #3? Hell yes. Will it have any merit? Depends on how good the attorneys they can afford to buy with their profits are. Two words. Sad to say, but true.
d00d, Bono didn't start giving it away until after he'd made such a pile that he could afford to, and even then he used what he made to get people to give him more so he could give that away. Therein lies his genius.
=Smidge= sez smore:
> I would fully support such an experiemnt, especially if the people challanging
> the theory of gravity are the test subjects. We would have to do a lot of testing,
> though, to test the 50% claim - various ground conditions and body types, and
> landing styles (head or feet first?)... Perhaps we can duct-tape cardboard fins
> to them first to ensure consistent landing orientation?
As a high powered rocketry hobbyist, I can assure you that no amount of finnage promises aerodynamic stability. We count on that fact for a great deal of excitement and entertainment. Of course, that pertains mostly to the "up" phase. Fins seem to work a treat during the "down" phase, so you may be onto something there.
It wouldn't take a large number of measurements to prove the point as long as we used the "witch test" experimental design. After they land, we ask them if they believe in gravity. If they say "Ouch", we take that as a positive. If they don't answer, we take that as no data. Guaranteed 100% results.
Smidge204 (605297)sez:
> We didn't have the ability to gather up enough mass to see if gravity
> could bend light back in 1919 either, but we still managed to test Einstein's
> theory of general relativity.
Actually, no we didn't. The errors in Eddington's measurements were so great, and the number of measurements so small, that the data didn't support the conclusion. It took another 50 years before a direct test of relativity with positive results was accomplished. Read "The Golem" by Collins & Pinch for this and many other examples of science being hosed because it's conducted by people. On the other hand:
> You do not need to actively create an experiment to test a theory.
You don't even need to test a theory for it to be a theory. The basis of relativity was due as much to Einstein's "thought experiments" as to his speculative but logical math. Currently, string/M-brane theory carries the name despite the fact that the best we can do is imagine that someday we might be able to come up with ideas that make sense. If the logic flows, it's a theory.
Note though that a logical assumption is not the same as a logical flaw, such as "appeal to authority". This error is the reason some people mistakenly take the orthagonal concepts of theory and belief system and attempt to compare them.
Regardless of the amount of empirical evidence, every theory is "just" a theory. However, a belief system is "just" that.
We don't even really know what gravity is, but we definitely have a theory about it. If anyone wants to claim that it's "just" a theory, I invite them to test the hypothesis that a human being in a free fall from an altitude of 10 meters runs a 50% probability of being killed by the impact with the ground. 9.8m/sec^2 adds up to a lot of "just" in a very short time.
In the spirit of fairness, I'll offer the alternative hypothesis that since God created the Heavens AND the Earth, then regardless of the outcome of the above test, gravity is just God's way of "calling you home". Let's see them refuse that one.
> An MIT professor
Hint #1
> found that when he allowed his students
His MIT students. Hint #2.
> to give themselves their > own homework deadlines, they would
> artificially restrict themselves to counter procrastination.
Leaving aside the begged question as to what is normal/natural restriction
as opposed to "artificial" restriction, the observation is from a situation
that is not representative of the general college student population, and so
no generalization can or should be drawn from it.
I've taught at two different state level colleges which aren't much above
community college level as far as academic rigor among the students. I didn't
require attendance and rarely set a deadline other than the required planned
exams. I rarely got anything until near the end of the semester, and even after.
I finally had to start giving graded quizzes before the lecture to (a) force
attendance and (b) force them to read the material before the lecture (a
requirement of mine because I don't read the book to them, I add to it), or
(c) accumulate evidence in the form of missed quizzes/homework/classes to drop them.
Nothing motivates students to show up and to do their work in a timely manner
like seeing one of their (ex-)classmates being told he doesn't need to be there
ever again because he was dropped because he missed too much.
And it's a damn shame I had to do that. Both places had a large proportion of
"non-traditional", that is, not right out of high school, usually older, have
families, jobs and all the problems that come with these and other normal adult
life. I'd set things up so those students could take the course, and never come
to class at all, if they could learn enough on their own from the book to make the
grades they needed on the exams. And I didn't want to make those changes -- I was
ordered to because too many of my students were failing. Yeah, like I made them
not do their work.
Online courses were the worst. Most (not some, not just the majority, but most)
students would do absolutely nothing* until the day before the exam, and then
spend 1 to 3 hours reading through the material. One third dropped out after
the second of 4 exams because they couldn't possibly pass. One third were urged
to do the same for the same reason, but neglected to even do that, and so failed.
Of the one third that remained, 90% got A's because they had the necessary sense
of responsibility and motivation to do the necessary work on their own.
rar42 (626382) sez:
> I'm inclined to compare roads to shared medium Ethernet. As the
> traffic builds up you get more 'collisions' and both systems
> have collision detection built-in. With Ethernet, as the 'traffic'
> builds to about 40% of the theoretical capacity, collisions
> become the norm
You're pretty much completely wrong, and the last quoted line sums up why.
Collisions are not the norm in traffic jams.
Traffic jams happen due to the ripple effect from cumulative reaction time
delays in response to changes in traffic. The effect accumulates until there
is so much loss of speed that people drive closer together. Then when they
have to react, they react more abruptly, and that causes yet a stronger ripple
effect.
Packets collide, cars don't. Cars change speed, packets don't.
Well, OK, sometimes cars do collide. But it's not the collision itself that
causes the traffic jam, it's the bottleneck in the right of way and/or the
rubberneckers.
If people could and would simply maintain the 2 second following distance
no matter what speed, when the fewer traffic jams did occur, they would resolve
themselves much more quickly. But just try telling the person 500 cars back to
just sit still for 10 minutes. They'd probably want to punch you, and they'll
still insist on driving stopgostopgostogostopgo despite the fact that doing so
means they'll be doing it for several times longer than just waiting.
90% of drivers think they're better than average.
90% of drivers are below average drivers.
So I give free driving lessons.
Like braking suddenly for tailgaters.
>> Not a chance man. If it was, the elephants would have
/. article replies, including this one.
/. replies generate informative ones.
/. reply form. And coming from fiction, represents information generated from imaginary or false information, again supporting the first assertion.
>> eaten it already.
> No, that would be if it were peanut shaped.
> Monkeys would eat a banana shaped universe. And there
> just may not be enough monkeys far enough back in time
> when the universe was small for them to eat it.
Whether space-time is infinite, or finite but spheroidal (space-time circling back on itself), the effect is the same: any number of monkeys has the effect of an infinite number of monkeys. A banana shaped universe would be eaten by them, and not exist, but then they would not and so could not eat it. Paradox. Or so the traditional physical thinking would go. But you can't have the paradox occur until some time during the first go round. For the paradox to occur, as it must given the infinities, the first universe must exist. The infinite number of monkeys must even now be eating the universe. While doing so they are generating an enormous amount of waste in the form of metabolized entropy, which is information. I offer as evidence a Google search for "a" resulting in "about 6,560,000,000" hits, as well as the volume of
The counter argument that something must be informative to be information is obviously flawed, as the evidence shows that non-informative
The counter argument that we are not monkeys, whether finite or infinite, is an argument regarding evolution, and is off topic here. It would be moderated out of existence, but the moderation would be generative information replacing it, supporting the first assertion against counter argument.
On the other hand, elephants eat bananas too.
On the gripping hand, turles eat neither bananas nor peanuts. This accomplishes in one sentence reference to two different science fiction entities, the geek value of which makes it appropriate to
You may all now resume typing. We have a long way to go. I'll start.
"What a piece of work is Man,..."
> Attorneys say recognition by a court -- whether in this or some future
> litigation -- that Internet abuse is an uncontrollable addiction, and not
> just a bad habit, could redefine the condition as a psychological
> impairment worthy of protection under the Americans with Disabilities Act.'
An addiction has a biological definition, which includes re-regulation of the number of receptors based on the presence or absence of a substance that mimic or blocks neurotransmitters (or, technically, hormones, which are frequently the same chemicals as neurotransmitters, but outside the brain). The law can, and does, ignore such things as scientific definitions, such as when they instead use the entirely non-psychological term "instanity". Far be it from them to let people who know the field tell them anything.
> The condition could even make it into the next edition of the American
> Psychiatric Association's DSM, making it a full-blown neurosis.
Neurosis is an out dated term. It's from Freudian theory, which has so far failed to have any experimental support. The DSM does not use the term, except perhaps in historical context.
> to directly target pain receptors in experimental animals.
Man, I've got to get me some of those. Here I've been using the traditional, evolved sort. I bet I could get lots better results from my experiments if my animals were experimental too. And then maybe some experimental humans.
$150,000 for a face recognition system. It ran for two years, seeded with all known local offenders. It never found one despite the fact that cops caught some in the areas of cameras. They shut it off after two years of failure.
from this condition has happened before. One case was a woman also with Parkinsons. She suffered a period of amnesia and her voice came back for no apparent reason.
I got to see all kinds of similar improbabilities when I worked an NIDCD http://www.nidcd.nih.gov/
One of my favorites was bilingual people who'd had a stroke and lost one language but not the other. Completely mystifying.
Does the internet:
infuse into every cell in your body and break down into a potent carcinogenic toxin (acetaldehyde)?
cause you to run your car off the road and into a crowd of people?
wash all the niacin out of your hippocampus and cause dementia?
when taken away, run the risk of convulsions, epilepsy and stroke, all three potentially fatal?
There's a difference between obsessive/compulsive behavior (disorder or not) and addiction. An addiction is synaptic reregulation to chonic exposure to a substance that mimics or replaces a neurotransmitter. It causes obsessive and compulsive behavior, and so does a lot of other things.
"Did you know they just showed smoking can offset Parkinson's disease?" -- Thank You For Smoking
"Chronic exposure to the hypothesised MAO inhibiting substance (TMN) can prevent MTPT to MPP+ conversion, and thus prevent MPP+ mediated apoptosis in the substantia nigra." -- My dissertation
> It seems preposterous to me that rocketeers be permitted to
> build uncontrolled ballistic systems, but (arguably safer)
> guided systems are prohibited.
They're not. Many people and some web sites involved in rocketry make this claim, but none of the rules of the rocketry organizations and none of the laws from the various federal agencies say this. Many times, when this is pointed out to the individuals making this claim, the response is a "yeah but" excuse about the feds increasing their pressure if people were to do this. They're getting paranoid about the feds and "what they might do".
Fact is, one such system was not only flown at an NAR national meet, it was an entry in the R&D competition.
To be precise, guidance systems are safer as long as they fail safe. To be rational, any given visit to any organized launch will treat the viewer to various failures of rockets gone unstable, as well as catastrophic failures involving motor fuel and casing blow-outs. Given the frequency of these, the issue of guidance and guidance failures is moot.
... between ownership and censorship, or between your rights and your wants. It's this kind of ignorance that lets others get away with taking away your rights. How would you know?
The school owns the system. They get to say what it can and can't be used for. And no, the taxpayers do not own it (assuming not a private college). They forked over their money to the government to do with as they saw fit. The government spent it for their benefit, not for their ownership. They gave it to the school along with the right and responsibility to run it.
The point that M-theory (the string theories) has produced no testable hypotheses is negative speculation. Nobody has developed it enough to the point where it can be tested. It requires either development of the theory to the point where we can conduct tests based on current technology, or advances in technology to match with advances in the theory so that it can be tested at a finer level.
/ 41510/( under "Arguments against"; search the document for 'testable')
That said, there have been potentially testable hypotheses put forth, but they have not been able to be tested yet:
http://science-junkie.group.stumbleupon.com/forum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse_(science)
In any case, it's convincing because the math works. The same was said of solar neutrinos*. The search continued for 30 years because the theory made sense despite something more negative than lack of testable hypotheses -- consistent failure of tests to produce the results predicted. Here we had what amount to falsification, yet they persisted and finally got their answer. Lack of falsification is a far more positive starting point.
And although M-theory is so stratospheric that few undertsand more than part of it, it is starting to develop an elegance. Like it or not, that's a telling sign that there's something there.
*ref. "The Golem" by Collins and Pinch
> none of the numbers seem all that surprising, except that 55% of active members are women
> (63% of all members were men).
"Members" are anyone who'se ever signed on for an account and not deleted it. They keep the numbers looking good by continuing to carry these. Not surprising, ISPs have done this for a long time. Men don't remain active members because they get so little response (ref. the original paper).
Women remain active more because they tend to keep coming back to the chat rooms, mostly with other women. They hang around just in case a guy comes along to try to chat with them. Then they'll all play hot chat with him, and afterwards fail to respond to him at about the same rate as in email.
I've been doing some research of my own. But I don't see anything surprising enough about it that makes it worth writing about. It's the same sort of behaviors I've seen since the time when BBSs started gaining general public members, prior to the spread of internet connection turning them into ISPs. I'm not surprised by the fact the article is new and the paper is 2 years old. I'm surprised that someone bothered to write a paper about something that's been going on for 15 years. On the other hand, it was a master's thesis. Very few academics care what master's students write about as long as the research is done halfway decent.
> I guess the problem is trying to strike the right balance between allowing good
> students to take advantage of this resource, but discourage bad students from
> staying at home all the time and watching all the lectures right before the exam.
Speaking as a college professor, who the hell do you think you are judging students as good or bad based on how they use the information made available to them? Studying the way someone thinks they should does not make them good students, and studying the way they choose to does not make them bad students.
We educators are supposed to concern ourselves with educating those who wish to be educated. If some students can stay home and watch the lectures just before the exam, and end up taking away from their academic career what they need to in order to prepare them for the future, good for them. If some do so, and pass the exams, and even get their degrees, and forget most everything they were exposed to, and so end up as degreed chumps, the truth will sooner or later make itself obvious, and there is no way but the passage of time to determine which will be which.
I only wish I could be around to see the moment when the past catches up with those who cheat themselves out of their education, and someone who learned more, by whatever means, gets the job/raise/praise/personal satisfaction.
Make everything available to everyone. Those who value knowledge are out there and will make good use of whatever they find useful to their learning. Those who want to misuse the chance, fuck them, let them. Just do your job and don't burden yourself with those boneheads who refuse to learn by trying to punish them for their insistance at boneheadedness. We SHOULD have our hands so full with those who wish to learn by any means that we don't have time to worry about those who refuse to learn by any means. If we have time to concern ourselves with that particular worry, we're wasting time and energy and not serving those who deserve it most.