Documentation from within an advertisitng company would constitute internal communications. Not working for one, if I had any, it'd probably be illegally and I wouldn't admit to it here. If you work for one, you should realize that, since they hold their ideas to be so dear. I have only my discussions with the couple I know and their word for it that they did it, and for how much.
As for whether anyone has done so, examine tobacco and alcohol ads, primarily in men's magazines between 1970 and 1990, after having brushed up on such books as "The Clam Plate Orgy". Many of them were extremely blatant.
And as for the advertising industry claiming that all such advertising was an urban myth, if I were them that's what I'd be saying by now in those places where it's criticized. In the board room where advertising is sold it might go differently. No offense, but we are discussing the advertising industry here, people who make their living saying what benefits them.
I recommend the Social Psychology Network at socialpsychology.org Their search engine turns up 847 results to "subliminal advertising". Some of that is commercial books and pop-psych articles, some is from the bios of researchers and their interests, but some is references to real research that's been done on the topic. I sincerely doubt that much research has been done on something that never happened. After all, when a social psychologist wants to make money, he goes into, or at least does research for, marketing.
Rarely and barely. Under very controlled conditions, with very careful measurement, a very slight effect which lasts a very short time can sometimes be found. However, most of the conditions under which people attempt to use it are so uncontrolled (ie. the entirety of whatever environment you're in is affecting you) that there'd be no way to detect the usually tiny effect. If anyone claims it has effect in such a situation, they have no clue how it works, and are probably trying to sell advertising to someone who is so desparate that they have even less of a clue.
The reality of the matter doesn't keep it from happening. Greed drives people to try things that would make even a habitual lottery ticket buyer snicker. For many years (and still, as far as I know) advertisers of tobacco and alcohol would have grotesque death images airbrushed into their magazine and billboard ads. This was based on the dual assumption that subliminals work, and Freud's theory that there was a ubiquitous "death wish", and it was stronger and more prone to manipulation in people who used these substances.
We've dispresnsed with the first, given that magazines and billboards are hardly "controlled" environments. Freud dispensed with the second before he died, years before this was ever attempted.
Despite overwhelming odds against it, advertisers still paid to have these images inserted into their ads. I know of one couple who worked at a commercial art house in New York who made $125,000 together in 1978 doing nothing but these. Large corporations will gamble large amounts way out of proportion for any real return just to grab a tenth of a per cent from competitors. John Sculley's biography about his Pepsi days talks about this greed effect (though not subliminals).
The very first "attempt at subliminals" (the "popcorn and Coke" experiment in a movie theater) was a hoax. Like all such material, it is properly filed on snopes.com, along with the rest of the story. http://www.snopes.com/business/hidden/popcorn.asp
While searching a bit torrent site for old episodes of La Femme Nikita, I was regaled by an ad which read: "Can't find La Femme? Buy it on eBay!"
Really. Just a rental as per usual, or an all out purchase? Can I take it for a test drive? The shipping would probably be horrendous. I'll bet they sell them "pick up only". Which is, after all, the usual way. So who needs eBay?
Stop assuming there is a generalized behavior due to group inclusion, and conversely that there is a counter behavior to be directed towards it.
There are individuals, acting independently, interacting with each other. Discern the individual behaviors exhibited by the individuals which create a problem in interacting with them, and talk to them about it, one on one. Or one on one one one... until all are included in purposefully interacting with the intent of improving the communication and relationships. You've all get faces. Use them. Face them at each other and talk.
Leaving it as a group effect leaves it in the abstract, where lots of social psychology gets conducted, but few real problems get solved.
"All we really need to do it keep talking." -- Stephen Hawking doing vocals on Pink Floyd's "Talk To Me"
Google up what you can find on the old Usenet Death Penalty. Get the affected ISP's admins, and who ever is sympathetic to their cause, and black hole * from Comcast. Don't just do it, tell them you're doing it, and tell the press. When the press gets word that an ISP is being shunned as a bad neighbor, they climb all over it.
It took a dozen people issuing cancels for all messages originating from UUNet, and 3 people talking to the press about it, 4 days to force Worldcom to change their corporate policy with regards to their downstream customers' behavior. I'll always treasure the 10 minute fabulously obscene rant I got from John Sidgemore over it. Nor will I forget his VP and cheif scientist literally crying on the phone asking us to lift it. Sidgemore must have been a bitch to work for.
That was a 4.5 G$ US company. They live on their profit and loss statements, and how those affect their stock prices. Those stock prices are extremely sensitive to loud blasts of bad news.
NIH and the National Library of Medicine has been working for years to make information available to the public. Grateful Med/PubMed has been online for at least 10 years that I know of. Yes, it consists primarily of abstracts. But abstracts tell you most of what you need to know. Ask a scientist to tell you honestly how many of the papers they reference in their work they actually read, or only read the abstract.
For the last several years NIH/NLM been making full articles to some publications available via a link on the abstract.
And, the idea of making all the research they oversee/fund available to the public? The head of NIH asked for this a year and a half ago: http://www.nih.gov/news/pr/feb2005/od-03.htm
As for material that the general public isn't able to understand, NIH translates and publishes an enormous amount of public oriented material on paper and on their web sites. They even have teams of people who go to large public gatherings (fairs, pow wows, etc.) and have vendor booths where they hand this stuff out.
NIH has already been pushing for more and faster release of information, and they already put out more useful information for the public than some entire departments. It'd be nice to have a law to make them all do it, I'm just saying they already have a good model to follow.
Pardon me, I'm only a college professor. I'm under the impression that federal grants for low income students are for undergraduate study -- Pell grants. In my experience, schools give Biology degrees, not degrees in subfields of biology. At most, they say "such-and-such focus". The student gets the grant for being enrolled in an approved/accredited degree track program. The classes they study are irrelevant. If this were not so, many many students would have deductions taken from their grants for studying things irrelevant to the degree -- those things we MAKE them study by putting empty slots in their study plans that say "electives". If they can take some of anything they want, they can take some of something that's relevant but not on the list.
And if there are cases where an undergraduate can obtain a degree specifically in evolutionary biology (someone point me at that college's catalog, please), and the goobermint wants to nix it, then they just get a degree that says "biology". When they go to grad school or to get a job, the necessary people can read the transcript and see what they studied. That is, after all, how they already do it. They don't ask to see your diploma, they ask to see your transcripts.
There has always been good reason why college professors get lumped in with all sorts of other "liberals". It's because, fuck 'em, we'll work around 'em.
I signed on with a company to do in the operating room what I usually do in the lab -- monitor and analyze nerve signals in the body and brain. They wanted me to sign such a clause. I told them that as a scientist I had ideas in all stages of development, from ready to patent to pie-in-the-sky the-technology-doesn't-exist-yet. I also told them that some of my work involved other people, and was on going, and that some of those people had ideas or parts thereof. There was no way as a working, collaborating scientist I could give them a list of everything in my head that might apply, much less those things that might be partially in the heads of those I work with. I'd also asked for a list of all the techniques and technologies they used or were planning to use, and when they balked, explained that that was what they were asking of me. When they provided that, I started giving them some write ups of some of the more off-the-wall but plausible ideas without the pertinent details which definitely were outside their field. They were satisfied to accept that NDA clause amended to specify anything that I came up with which came directly from working with them and pertained directly to the work being done. That left it up to me to keep anything to myself which I'd already thought of that might apply, or else contribute it if I wished. It helped that I had publications to point to which contained novel ideas (patentable, but written up as science and allowed to propogate as such) which proved I was capable of coming up with stuff. They were willing to gamble I'd do that for them and let them have them. I would have too. I came up with one while in training, but decided that starting at 4 A.M. and standing in the O.R. for anywhere from 4 to 16 hours, and being on call constantly, was a job for younger people. So I forgot the idea and left. There's always more ideas.
...this result depends on this particular substance. There's no mention of what good this substance is either in general or in the configuration they made it form. So, other than finding yet another of thousands, and like most, good for nothing but a pretty picture, example of physically mediated self-organization, they've found nothing useful, nor proposed any use for it, but got it into Science anyway.
Enderandrew (866215) sez: "How many times have I read in the past 5 years that no one agrees on what causes red shifts, in space is finite, whether dark matter or dark energy exist, how old the planet is, how old the universe is, or whether or not we have 8, 9, 10, or 11 planets in the solar system?"
That, my friend, is science in progress. It is the outcome of the results from the various space science projects. The fact that they have not arrived at complete and final answers does not invalidate it. In fact it validates it as scientific progress. We have more and better answers now than we did before. In the future, we will have answers that are better yet.
If it can't be questioned, and potentially invalidated by disproof of the hypothesis, it's not science. You're just seeing them going at each other trying to disprove. By this method we trim away the false and get closer to the true. Even the rare, on target, and often accidental, accurate discoveries go through this process. This is also why even those things which we know well get changed (ref. recent story about the atomic force being found to be a millionth of a per cent different than thought). It's why we call things that are well supported such as relativity to be theories. We're not down to the final answer yet. And the philosophers of science make a good point (primarily by extending from history) that we may never arrive at final answers, because we'll find theories that invalidate the old ones, which are themselves starting points closer to the truth, and continue the process from there.
{humor} Besides, if it weren't for this continual process of refinement, we'd arrive at final truths, and all of us working scientists would be out of a job. {/humor}
> We've thrown tens of billions of dollars on a pride issue, > and what have we gotten in return?
NASA has a technology transfer system set up specifically to give the things it invents away. See http://www.nal.usda.gov/ttic/guide.htm#NASA It doesn't actually give away its patents and such for free. It is allowed to sell them for the cost of operating the technology transfer system.
If NASA were allowed to profit from its inventions, then on the developments it made in just 4 areas, microelectronics, cryogenics, medical telemetry and systems analysis software, it would have made $4.50 in the twenty years following Apollo for every dollar spent up to the end of Apollo. We know how much NASA would have made, because we know who picked up those balls and ran with them, and how much they made. And that's just 4 areas. NASA has contributed tens of thousands of inventions, developments and patents of all kinds, and someone has made something off of most of them. That's contributed far more to the economy than the taxes taken out to fund the program in the first place. As for you personally, I'd bet an inventory of your home would show a number of things that either wouldn't be there, wouldn't be as good, or would cost a lot more, if it weren't for the contributions of NASA. And when it comes to number of lives saved by the various technologies that NASA contributed to, we're well beyond talking about profit and loss.
> How much more do we know about the universe?
Aw geez, seriously? Don't you read any science news? We know tons more about the universe because of NASA programs and their participation with other programs. The Science and Discovery Channels are always running that stuff.
> I'm no expert but two of my best friends are a physicist and a > mechanical engineer. Both follow the space program and both say > that money and politics have firmly grounded NASA in 1960's > science with little to no possibility to explore new options.
In large part your friends are correct. NASA has become a corporate welfare system for the aerospace industry. There have been many, many tried and proven technologies and even space transportation systems that were started by NASA, R&D funded by NASA to the aerospace companies, and cancelled when enough people had made enough money. There were also many spaceworthy systems developed by others that were far cheaper than what NASA had the aerospace companies crank out, and those never saw the inside of a hangar. It is only the large number of recently very rich people willing to gamble on space that have created visibility for the private space business upstarts. There have been many in the past that died on the vine. Read up on Robert Truax for example. People were so convinved he'd be the first person into space without a government program behind him that they even made a TV show based on him (Salvage I).
NASA and the aerospace industry it exists in symbiosis with (they live off NASA, but NASA lives off the money it gets to give them) do not stand to gain from the sort of massive forward movement such as we saw from 1960 to 1970. They stand to gain more by the same stepwise, incremental improvement such as has been happening in the consumer computer/electronics industry for years. This definitely slows the pace of progress, but not the amount of R&D done by NASA which gets passed into the US economy. That remains.
When engineers ran the space program, we got "Failure is not an option." (Apollo 13) When bureaucrats ran the space program, we got "My God, Thiokol, what do you want me to do, wait until April to launch?" (Challenger)
Frankly, regardless of the success or failure or sheer bullheaded political wrangling or welfare status of NASA and its corporate children, I'd throw in with the likes of Burt Rutan, and anyone else who tackles the job without any help from NASA. Those
TFA is baseless supposition, almost certainly intended as PR for the supposed expert.
People interact with their computers in the way that they're taught, either explicitly by another person or instructions, or implicitly through learning the functions and their built in descriptions (or lack thereof). Oh, and let's not forget advice, which typcally provides 5 "answers" in 4 posts, followed by arguments trailing off topic further and further.
People interact with other people by evolving behaviors based on the personalities of all involved, the situation(s) they find themselves in, and the social constraints of those environments/relationships.
Or, they act that way for completely unrelated reasons. I keep my inbox cleaned out because I started out using an Apple II, 25 years ago when 140K floppies cost $25 for ten, and I had to be frugal with storage (as well as message length, running at 300 baud). I developed that habit then, and never changed. 80GB at my disposal, and I have 2 messages in my inbox and six saved as reminders to write back later. The difference between the state of my onbox and the state of my desk is astounding.
"His conclusion was right but his premises were false. Apple made computers as well as or better than IBM. They just weren't as prescient on the business side. They failed to get a clue once they introduced the Macintosh, when it was time for both sides to lay down their chips."
Half of Apple had good business sense extending from his engineering expertise. Unfortunately that half got disenchanted with arguing with the other half, got in a plane wreck that injured him significantly and made him rethink his life, and backed out. The other half of Apple made poor business decisions, frequently based strictly on the intention to carry through ideas that the first half said were bad. This is why the second and only remaining half of Apple lost his job for 10 years.
The Apple 16 bit machine kept functional pace with the Mac and PC despite "poorer" specs into the 90's. It would have remained a contender had not Jobs seen his chance to finish pushing Woz out by shutting down the Apple line.
"Under Project Orion, NASA would launch crews of four astronauts aboard Orion capsules, first to Earth orbit and the International Space Station and then later to the Moon."
Expected progress:
Corporations compete for project. Government pays both for development, picks one. The corproation subcontracts the other, adding overhead. They both subcontract out as much as possible to others, adding more overhead. Development proceeds. Government pays. Expected (ie. written into the contract) cost overruns occur. Government pays. Unexpected cost overruns occur. Government pays. Testing shows design to be faulty. Corporation(s) gets new government contract. The above sequence repeats once. After much C-SPAN posturing, congress pulls pre-election PR stunt of cancelling project "saving billions in wasted taxpayer money". In the interim, the corporations are fat and happy on the corporate welfare of "billions in wasted taxpayer money". Now the corporations wait for another administration to make bold statements and start the entire cycle again.
And it stays this way unless an administration comes along that has the balls to take NASA away from the adminimonsters and bureaucraps who live to crate cash flow for each other and put it back in the hands of the engineers who won't put up with this silly shit.
When engineers ran NASA: "Failure is not an option." (Apollo 13) When managers ran NASA: "My God, Thiokol, when do you want me to launch, next April?" (Challenger)
Stress is the body's reaction to environmental pressure. It causes various physiological responses. In and of themselves, these are neutral. The mind interperates those responses, particularly if it is primed to react a certain way. If it interperates them negatively, you end up in distress. If, instead, you interperate the response as a motivating factor, ie. a positive force, that's called eustress. Most people never learn they have a measure of control over how they experience stress. Doing so can not only solve/prevent the sort of experience you had, but can provide you with a way to handle things even better than your usual competent fashion.
The guy who came up with the idea of stress -> eustress/distess is Hans Selye. Look him up on Wiki and such. He wrote a whole book about it, but like many such concepts it's doesn't take a book's worth of information to grasp it.
I know about this stuff because I'm a psychologist. I know it works because I have generalized anxiety disorder, and have frequent panic attacks. When I don't have anything to aim it at, I have to take anxiolytic meds. When I can aim it something, I can do lots of stuff really, really well, and quickly.
Learning how to do this requires (1) learning early detection of oncoming stress, and (2) practice interperating it as a motivator (ie. excietment, focus, flow, etc.). The former depends on you learning what your specific reactions are. The latter takes practice at imposing your will on your thinking; imagery and actively focusing your attention on that imagery are key.
Besides all that stuff, there's also a fact that few people ever learn: how you feel and how you're doing are not the same thing. Most people go through life gauging how they're doing by how they feel, and act accordingly. When you understand that you can feel like shit and still do well, then you can learn to do well despite how you may feel at the time. This is all just a matter of taking responsibility for how you feel and act. A lot of people don't care for that level of responsibility. They'd rather blame external factors. Hey, it's a choice.
The first human stem cell clinical trials were done in the early 80's on the "frozen addicts", who got instant Parkinson's from a bad batch of home made fentanyl (see "The Frozen Addicts" by Palfreman and Langston). The first and worst case was mostly cured in a matter of weeks.
To respond to an early reply re: "smart pills". The first one was patented so long ago the patent has expired. It was invented by Albert Hoffman. He's remembered for inventing LSD, but he deserves a Nobel for inventing nootropics.
Speaking of Nobels, Eric Kandel (who got it for his work on dopamine) has started a company intending to invent the world's first smart drugs. How can this be, if it's already been done? Same excuse for the inaccuracy about the first stem cell trials: the originals weren't done in the US.
The stem cell stuff, that's sheer US arrogance and ignorance. The smart drug stuff has an even worse excuse. The patent was wholly owned by Sandoz of Switzerland, and no US pharma company could make or sell it, so the FDA wouldn't approve it despite the fact that it was one of the safest (ie. no interactions, side effects generally beneficial such as regulating high blood pressure) drugs invented.
> the possibility that we can predict the evolution of a species, given > environmental factors.
That it will occur: definitely, and in most cases too trvial to mention.
That the species will successfully adapt to a specific new and controlled environment, and survive: You can get good odds on it, until the "OOPS, we turned up the heat too much for that strain" happens.
That a given species will survive environmental changes when those changes are unpredictable in themselves: Not just no, but HELL no.
The article proves that an experiment with appropriate controls can be carried out to its intended conclusion. As Bohr said, it tells us something about the experiment; it does not tell us anything about nature.
When I was looking for a job, I searched under "science".
Just because pharmaceutical companies do some science doesn't mean pharmaceutical sales is a science job.
Just because biomedical sounds scientific doesn't mean a visiting nurses company with "biomedical" in its name has any jobs in science.
I can't help but wonder whether the jobs that show up in too many inappropriate categories are actually paid advertisements. They smell an awful lot like some of the goofy GoooooooGle ads that get generated on various web sites (like the eBay ad for Nobel Prizes that got generated on the IgNoble Prize web site).
All that brain wave stuff is complete crap. It was started by the Monroe Institute and is based on sending sine waves at different frequencies to each ear, with the difference between them forming a "beat pattern" and supposedly inducing EEG at the frequency of the beat pattern.
The problem is, this is all based on measuring EEG (essentially a microvoltmeter) while wearing headphones. What's happening is the electrical signal from the headphones is being picked up by the EEG electrodes.
When you use air-conduction earphones, so that there are no electromagnets vibrating near the microvoltmeter electrodes, there's no effect.
It took me 10 years to get the chance to prove that the crap published in OMNI and elsewhere about the Monroe Institute and similar EEG induction schemes was bogus, but I finally got to do it. We gave it to a couple of Jim Horton's students to do, but it was my idea.
Stone, C., Thomas, P., McClain-Furmanski, D., & Horton, J. (October 2002). EEG Oscillations and Binaural Beat as Compared with Electromagnetic Headphones and Air-conduction Headphones. Presented at Society of Psychophysiological Research, Washington DC.
It takes purposeful ignorance to assume a cause-effect relationship is reversable. Closing your eyes causes alpha waves. Causing alpha waves doesn't make you close your eyes. That extends to all sources of synchronized EEG signals.
Complaining about dupes accomplishes only one thing: it generates far more duplicate traffic in the form of repetetive dupe complaints than the dupe articles themselves.
The job overall has to make up for the unpleasant tasks.
Don't do, be. Become a professional. That is, profess yourself to be that kind of person, rather than being a person that happens to perform a function. The latter is a machine.
You don't have to have the same profession your whole life.
As for kids, Montessori has it down. Kids want to learn. Provide them the opportunity and whatever they need, and they'll learn more than any teacher could teach them in the same amount of time. My daughter did 8 years of Montessori. Then she did one required math course on her own over a summer, and the next fall was in college, never having touched high school.
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Documentation from within an advertisitng company would constitute internal communications. Not working for one, if I had any, it'd probably be illegally and I wouldn't admit to it here. If you work for one, you should realize that, since they hold their ideas to be so dear. I have only my discussions with the couple I know and their word for it that they did it, and for how much.
As for whether anyone has done so, examine tobacco and alcohol ads, primarily in men's magazines between 1970 and 1990, after having brushed up on such books as "The Clam Plate Orgy". Many of them were extremely blatant.
And as for the advertising industry claiming that all such advertising was an urban myth, if I were them that's what I'd be saying by now in those places where it's criticized. In the board room where advertising is sold it might go differently. No offense, but we are discussing the advertising industry here, people who make their living saying what benefits them.
I recommend the Social Psychology Network at socialpsychology.org
Their search engine turns up 847 results to "subliminal advertising". Some of that is commercial books and pop-psych articles, some is from the bios of researchers and their interests, but some is references to real research that's been done on the topic. I sincerely doubt that much research has been done on something that never happened. After all, when a social psychologist wants to make money, he goes into, or at least does research for, marketing.
> Does it work?
Rarely and barely. Under very controlled conditions, with very careful measurement, a very slight effect which lasts a very short time can sometimes be found. However, most of the conditions under which people attempt to use it are so uncontrolled (ie. the entirety of whatever environment you're in is affecting you) that there'd be no way to detect the usually tiny effect. If anyone claims it has effect in such a situation, they have no clue how it works, and are probably trying to sell advertising to someone who is so desparate that they have even less of a clue.
The reality of the matter doesn't keep it from happening. Greed drives people to try things that would make even a habitual lottery ticket buyer snicker. For many years (and still, as far as I know) advertisers of tobacco and alcohol would have grotesque death images airbrushed into their magazine and billboard ads. This was based on the dual assumption that subliminals work, and Freud's theory that there was a ubiquitous "death wish", and it was stronger and more prone to manipulation in people who used these substances.
We've dispresnsed with the first, given that magazines and billboards are hardly "controlled" environments. Freud dispensed with the second before he died, years before this was ever attempted.
Despite overwhelming odds against it, advertisers still paid to have these images inserted into their ads. I know of one couple who worked at a commercial art house in New York who made $125,000 together in 1978 doing nothing but these. Large corporations will gamble large amounts way out of proportion for any real return just to grab a tenth of a per cent from competitors. John Sculley's biography about his Pepsi days talks about this greed effect (though not subliminals).
The very first "attempt at subliminals" (the "popcorn and Coke" experiment in a movie theater) was a hoax. Like all such material, it is properly filed on snopes.com, along with the rest of the story. http://www.snopes.com/business/hidden/popcorn.asp
While searching a bit torrent site for old episodes of La Femme Nikita, I was regaled by an ad which read:
"Can't find La Femme? Buy it on eBay!"
Really. Just a rental as per usual, or an all out purchase?
Can I take it for a test drive?
The shipping would probably be horrendous. I'll bet they sell them "pick up only". Which is, after all, the usual way. So who needs eBay?
Stop assuming there is a generalized behavior due to group inclusion, and conversely that there is a counter behavior to be directed towards it.
There are individuals, acting independently, interacting with each other. Discern the individual behaviors exhibited by the individuals which create a problem in interacting with them, and talk to them about it, one on one. Or one on one one one... until all are included in purposefully interacting with the intent of improving the communication and relationships. You've all get faces. Use them. Face them at each other and talk.
Leaving it as a group effect leaves it in the abstract, where lots of social psychology gets conducted, but few real problems get solved.
"All we really need to do it keep talking." -- Stephen Hawking doing vocals on Pink Floyd's "Talk To Me"
Google up what you can find on the old Usenet Death Penalty.
Get the affected ISP's admins, and who ever is sympathetic to their cause, and black hole * from Comcast.
Don't just do it, tell them you're doing it, and tell the press. When the press gets word that an ISP is being shunned as a bad neighbor, they climb all over it.
It took a dozen people issuing cancels for all messages originating from UUNet, and 3 people talking to the press about it, 4 days to force Worldcom to change their corporate policy with regards to their downstream customers' behavior. I'll always treasure the 10 minute fabulously obscene rant I got from John Sidgemore over it. Nor will I forget his VP and cheif scientist literally crying on the phone asking us to lift it. Sidgemore must have been a bitch to work for.
That was a 4.5 G$ US company. They live on their profit and loss statements, and how those affect their stock prices. Those stock prices are extremely sensitive to loud blasts of bad news.
NIH and the National Library of Medicine has been working for years to make information available to the public. Grateful Med/PubMed has been online for at least 10 years that I know of. Yes, it consists primarily of abstracts. But abstracts tell you most of what you need to know. Ask a scientist to tell you honestly how many of the papers they reference in their work they actually read, or only read the abstract.
For the last several years NIH/NLM been making full articles to some publications available via a link on the abstract.
And, the idea of making all the research they oversee/fund available to the public? The head of NIH asked for this a year and a half ago: http://www.nih.gov/news/pr/feb2005/od-03.htm
As for material that the general public isn't able to understand, NIH translates and publishes an enormous amount of public oriented material on paper and on their web sites. They even have teams of people who go to large public gatherings (fairs, pow wows, etc.) and have vendor booths where they hand this stuff out.
NIH has already been pushing for more and faster release of information, and they already put out more useful information for the public than some entire departments. It'd be nice to have a law to make them all do it, I'm just saying they already have a good model to follow.
Pardon me, I'm only a college professor. I'm under the impression that federal grants for low income students are for undergraduate study -- Pell grants. In my experience, schools give Biology degrees, not degrees in subfields of biology. At most, they say "such-and-such focus". The student gets the grant for being enrolled in an approved/accredited degree track program. The classes they study are irrelevant. If this were not so, many many students would have deductions taken from their grants for studying things irrelevant to the degree -- those things we MAKE them study by putting empty slots in their study plans that say "electives". If they can take some of anything they want, they can take some of something that's relevant but not on the list.
And if there are cases where an undergraduate can obtain a degree specifically in evolutionary biology (someone point me at that college's catalog, please), and the goobermint wants to nix it, then they just get a degree that says "biology". When they go to grad school or to get a job, the necessary people can read the transcript and see what they studied. That is, after all, how they already do it. They don't ask to see your diploma, they ask to see your transcripts.
There has always been good reason why college professors get lumped in with all sorts of other "liberals". It's because, fuck 'em, we'll work around 'em.
I signed on with a company to do in the operating room what I usually do in the lab -- monitor and analyze nerve signals in the body and brain. They wanted me to sign such a clause. I told them that as a scientist I had ideas in all stages of development, from ready to patent to pie-in-the-sky the-technology-doesn't-exist-yet. I also told them that some of my work involved other people, and was on going, and that some of those people had ideas or parts thereof. There was no way as a working, collaborating scientist I could give them a list of everything in my head that might apply, much less those things that might be partially in the heads of those I work with. I'd also asked for a list of all the techniques and technologies they used or were planning to use, and when they balked, explained that that was what they were asking of me. When they provided that, I started giving them some write ups of some of the more off-the-wall but plausible ideas without the pertinent details which definitely were outside their field. They were satisfied to accept that NDA clause amended to specify anything that I came up with which came directly from working with them and pertained directly to the work being done. That left it up to me to keep anything to myself which I'd already thought of that might apply, or else contribute it if I wished. It helped that I had publications to point to which contained novel ideas (patentable, but written up as science and allowed to propogate as such) which proved I was capable of coming up with stuff. They were willing to gamble I'd do that for them and let them have them. I would have too. I came up with one while in training, but decided that starting at 4 A.M. and standing in the O.R. for anywhere from 4 to 16 hours, and being on call constantly, was a job for younger people. So I forgot the idea and left. There's always more ideas.
...this result depends on this particular substance. There's no mention of what good this substance is either in general or in the configuration they made it form. So, other than finding yet another of thousands, and like most, good for nothing but a pretty picture, example of physically mediated self-organization, they've found nothing useful, nor proposed any use for it, but got it into Science anyway.
Seven commas. I win.
Enderandrew (866215) sez: "How many times have I read in the past 5 years that no one agrees on what causes red shifts, in space is finite, whether dark matter or dark energy exist, how old the planet is, how old the universe is, or whether or not we have 8, 9, 10, or 11 planets in the solar system?"
That, my friend, is science in progress. It is the outcome of the results from the various space science projects. The fact that they have not arrived at complete and final answers does not invalidate it. In fact it validates it as scientific progress. We have more and better answers now than we did before. In the future, we will have answers that are better yet.
If it can't be questioned, and potentially invalidated by disproof of the hypothesis, it's not science. You're just seeing them going at each other trying to disprove. By this method we trim away the false and get closer to the true. Even the rare, on target, and often accidental, accurate discoveries go through this process. This is also why even those things which we know well get changed (ref. recent story about the atomic force being found to be a millionth of a per cent different than thought). It's why we call things that are well supported such as relativity to be theories. We're not down to the final answer yet. And the philosophers of science make a good point (primarily by extending from history) that we may never arrive at final answers, because we'll find theories that invalidate the old ones, which are themselves starting points closer to the truth, and continue the process from there.
{humor} Besides, if it weren't for this continual process of refinement, we'd arrive at final truths, and all of us working scientists would be out of a job. {/humor}
Enderandrew (866215) sez (out of order):
> We've thrown tens of billions of dollars on a pride issue,
> and what have we gotten in return?
NASA has a technology transfer system set up specifically to give the things it invents away.
See http://www.nal.usda.gov/ttic/guide.htm#NASA
It doesn't actually give away its patents and such for free. It is allowed to sell them for the cost of operating the technology transfer system.
If NASA were allowed to profit from its inventions, then on the developments it made in just 4 areas, microelectronics, cryogenics, medical telemetry and systems analysis software, it would have made $4.50 in the twenty years following Apollo for every dollar spent up to the end of Apollo. We know how much NASA would have made, because we know who picked up those balls and ran with them, and how much they made. And that's just 4 areas. NASA has contributed tens of thousands of inventions, developments and patents of all kinds, and someone has made something off of most of them. That's contributed far more to the economy than the taxes taken out to fund the program in the first place. As for you personally, I'd bet an inventory of your home would show a number of things that either wouldn't be there, wouldn't be as good, or would cost a lot more, if it weren't for the contributions of NASA. And when it comes to number of lives saved by the various technologies that NASA contributed to, we're well beyond talking about profit and loss.
> How much more do we know about the universe?
Aw geez, seriously? Don't you read any science news? We know tons more about the universe because of NASA programs and their participation with other programs. The Science and Discovery Channels are always running that stuff.
> I'm no expert but two of my best friends are a physicist and a
> mechanical engineer. Both follow the space program and both say
> that money and politics have firmly grounded NASA in 1960's
> science with little to no possibility to explore new options.
In large part your friends are correct. NASA has become a corporate welfare system for the aerospace industry. There have been many, many tried and proven technologies and even space transportation systems that were started by NASA, R&D funded by NASA to the aerospace companies, and cancelled when enough people had made enough money. There were also many spaceworthy systems developed by others that were far cheaper than what NASA had the aerospace companies crank out, and those never saw the inside of a hangar. It is only the large number of recently very rich people willing to gamble on space that have created visibility for the private space business upstarts. There have been many in the past that died on the vine. Read up on Robert Truax for example. People were so convinved he'd be the first person into space without a government program behind him that they even made a TV show based on him (Salvage I).
NASA and the aerospace industry it exists in symbiosis with (they live off NASA, but NASA lives off the money it gets to give them) do not stand to gain from the sort of massive forward movement such as we saw from 1960 to 1970. They stand to gain more by the same stepwise, incremental improvement such as has been happening in the consumer computer/electronics industry for years. This definitely slows the pace of progress, but not the amount of R&D done by NASA which gets passed into the US economy. That remains.
When engineers ran the space program, we got "Failure is not an option." (Apollo 13)
When bureaucrats ran the space program, we got "My God, Thiokol, what do you want me to do, wait until April to launch?" (Challenger)
Frankly, regardless of the success or failure or sheer bullheaded political wrangling or welfare status of NASA and its corporate children, I'd throw in with the likes of Burt Rutan, and anyone else who tackles the job without any help from NASA. Those
TFA is baseless supposition, almost certainly intended as PR for the supposed expert.
People interact with their computers in the way that they're taught, either explicitly by another person or instructions, or implicitly through learning the functions and their built in descriptions (or lack thereof). Oh, and let's not forget advice, which typcally provides 5 "answers" in 4 posts, followed by arguments trailing off topic further and further.
People interact with other people by evolving behaviors based on the personalities of all involved, the situation(s) they find themselves in, and the social constraints of those environments/relationships.
Or, they act that way for completely unrelated reasons. I keep my inbox cleaned out because I started out using an Apple II, 25 years ago when 140K floppies cost $25 for ten, and I had to be frugal with storage (as well as message length, running at 300 baud). I developed that habit then, and never changed. 80GB at my disposal, and I have 2 messages in my inbox and six saved as reminders to write back later. The difference between the state of my onbox and the state of my desk is astounding.
"His conclusion was right but his premises were false. Apple made computers as well as or better than IBM. They just weren't as prescient on the business side. They failed to get a clue once they introduced the Macintosh, when it was time for both sides to lay down their chips."
Half of Apple had good business sense extending from his engineering expertise. Unfortunately that half got disenchanted with arguing with the other half, got in a plane wreck that injured him significantly and made him rethink his life, and backed out. The other half of Apple made poor business decisions, frequently based strictly on the intention to carry through ideas that the first half said were bad. This is why the second and only remaining half of Apple lost his job for 10 years.
The Apple 16 bit machine kept functional pace with the Mac and PC despite "poorer" specs into the 90's. It would have remained a contender had not Jobs seen his chance to finish pushing Woz out by shutting down the Apple line.
packeteer sez: "You forgot to mention that your not a lawyer. Doing pro bono work does not mean your doing it for free."
I am not a doctor, but I know the need for an anal craniotomy when I see it.
I am not a lawyer, and I don't need to say so if I feel like talking about facts regarding the legal system.
Pro bono DOES mean "for free". Perhaps it's the "facts" part that escapes you.
Stated plans:
"Under Project Orion, NASA would launch crews of four astronauts aboard Orion capsules, first to Earth orbit and the International Space Station and then later to the Moon."
Expected progress:
Corporations compete for project.
Government pays both for development, picks one.
The corproation subcontracts the other, adding overhead.
They both subcontract out as much as possible to others, adding more overhead.
Development proceeds. Government pays.
Expected (ie. written into the contract) cost overruns occur. Government pays.
Unexpected cost overruns occur. Government pays.
Testing shows design to be faulty. Corporation(s) gets new government contract.
The above sequence repeats once.
After much C-SPAN posturing, congress pulls pre-election PR stunt of cancelling project "saving billions in wasted taxpayer money".
In the interim, the corporations are fat and happy on the corporate welfare of "billions in wasted taxpayer money".
Now the corporations wait for another administration to make bold statements and start the entire cycle again.
And it stays this way unless an administration comes along that has the balls to take NASA away from the adminimonsters and bureaucraps who live to crate cash flow for each other and put it back in the hands of the engineers who won't put up with this silly shit.
When engineers ran NASA: "Failure is not an option." (Apollo 13)
When managers ran NASA: "My God, Thiokol, when do you want me to launch, next April?" (Challenger)
Ah, but I was so much older then.
I'm younger than that now.
- Bob Dylan
I expect to live longer. And if not, at least the quality is better.
Stress is the body's reaction to environmental pressure. It causes various physiological responses. In and of themselves, these are neutral. The mind interperates those responses, particularly if it is primed to react a certain way. If it interperates them negatively, you end up in distress. If, instead, you interperate the response as a motivating factor, ie. a positive force, that's called eustress. Most people never learn they have a measure of control over how they experience stress. Doing so can not only solve/prevent the sort of experience you had, but can provide you with a way to handle things even better than your usual competent fashion.
The guy who came up with the idea of stress -> eustress/distess is Hans Selye. Look him up on Wiki and such. He wrote a whole book about it, but like many such concepts it's doesn't take a book's worth of information to grasp it.
I know about this stuff because I'm a psychologist. I know it works because I have generalized anxiety disorder, and have frequent panic attacks. When I don't have anything to aim it at, I have to take anxiolytic meds. When I can aim it something, I can do lots of stuff really, really well, and quickly.
Learning how to do this requires (1) learning early detection of oncoming stress, and (2) practice interperating it as a motivator (ie. excietment, focus, flow, etc.). The former depends on you learning what your specific reactions are. The latter takes practice at imposing your will on your thinking; imagery and actively focusing your attention on that imagery are key.
Besides all that stuff, there's also a fact that few people ever learn: how you feel and how you're doing are not the same thing. Most people go through life gauging how they're doing by how they feel, and act accordingly. When you understand that you can feel like shit and still do well, then you can learn to do well despite how you may feel at the time. This is all just a matter of taking responsibility for how you feel and act. A lot of people don't care for that level of responsibility. They'd rather blame external factors. Hey, it's a choice.
The first human stem cell clinical trials were done in the early 80's on the "frozen addicts", who got instant Parkinson's from a bad batch of home made fentanyl (see "The Frozen Addicts" by Palfreman and Langston). The first and worst case was mostly cured in a matter of weeks.
To respond to an early reply re: "smart pills". The first one was patented so long ago the patent has expired. It was invented by Albert Hoffman. He's remembered for inventing LSD, but he deserves a Nobel for inventing nootropics.
Speaking of Nobels, Eric Kandel (who got it for his work on dopamine) has started a company intending to invent the world's first smart drugs. How can this be, if it's already been done? Same excuse for the inaccuracy about the first stem cell trials: the originals weren't done in the US.
The stem cell stuff, that's sheer US arrogance and ignorance. The smart drug stuff has an even worse excuse. The patent was wholly owned by Sandoz of Switzerland, and no US pharma company could make or sell it, so the FDA wouldn't approve it despite the fact that it was one of the safest (ie. no interactions, side effects generally beneficial such as regulating high blood pressure) drugs invented.
> the possibility that we can predict the evolution of a species, given
> environmental factors.
That it will occur: definitely, and in most cases too trvial to mention.
That the species will successfully adapt to a specific new and controlled environment, and survive: You can get good odds on it, until the "OOPS, we turned up the heat too much for that strain" happens.
That a given species will survive environmental changes when those changes are unpredictable in themselves: Not just no, but HELL no.
The article proves that an experiment with appropriate controls can be carried out to its intended conclusion. As Bohr said, it tells us something about the experiment; it does not tell us anything about nature.
Joel Lubar at U.Tenn.
http://psychology.utk.edu/people/lubar.html
It's hardly unusual for NASA to be involved in "breakthrough" science that they had no idea already existed.
When I was looking for a job, I searched under "science".
Just because pharmaceutical companies do some science doesn't mean pharmaceutical sales is a science job.
Just because biomedical sounds scientific doesn't mean a visiting nurses company with "biomedical" in its name has any jobs in science.
I can't help but wonder whether the jobs that show up in too many inappropriate categories are actually paid advertisements. They smell an awful lot like some of the goofy GoooooooGle ads that get generated on various web sites (like the eBay ad for Nobel Prizes that got generated on the IgNoble Prize web site).
All that brain wave stuff is complete crap. It was started by the Monroe Institute and is based on sending sine waves at different frequencies to each ear, with the difference between them forming a "beat pattern" and supposedly inducing EEG at the frequency of the beat pattern.
The problem is, this is all based on measuring EEG (essentially a microvoltmeter) while wearing headphones. What's happening is the electrical signal from the headphones is being picked up by the EEG electrodes.
When you use air-conduction earphones, so that there are no electromagnets vibrating near the microvoltmeter electrodes, there's no effect.
It took me 10 years to get the chance to prove that the crap published in OMNI and elsewhere about the Monroe Institute and similar EEG induction schemes was bogus, but I finally got to do it. We gave it to a couple of Jim Horton's students to do, but it was my idea.
Stone, C., Thomas, P., McClain-Furmanski, D., & Horton, J. (October 2002). EEG Oscillations and Binaural Beat as Compared with Electromagnetic Headphones and Air-conduction Headphones. Presented at Society of Psychophysiological Research, Washington DC.
It takes purposeful ignorance to assume a cause-effect relationship is reversable. Closing your eyes causes alpha waves. Causing alpha waves doesn't make you close your eyes. That extends to all sources of synchronized EEG signals.
Complaining about dupes accomplishes only one thing: it generates far more duplicate traffic in the form of repetetive dupe complaints than the dupe articles themselves.
Dupe complaints are hypocrisy.
1948. Paul "Cordwainer Smith" Linebarger. "Psychological Warfare".
I dare you to read it and then watch the news, and not continually come to the conclusion that you're being "handled".
Of COURSE you think your government doesn't engage in this sort of stuff at home. They MAKE you think that. The book tells you how to do that.
..... you're doing it wrong.
If it's never fun, you shouldn't be doing it.
The job overall has to make up for the unpleasant tasks.
Don't do, be. Become a professional. That is, profess yourself to be that kind of person, rather than being a person that happens to perform a function. The latter is a machine.
You don't have to have the same profession your whole life.
As for kids, Montessori has it down. Kids want to learn. Provide them the opportunity and whatever they need, and they'll learn more than any teacher could teach them in the same amount of time. My daughter did 8 years of Montessori. Then she did one required math course on her own over a summer, and the next fall was in college, never having touched high school.