This is the same state that got previous Daily Show coverage for some row regarding licensing of nail technicians or hair dressers or some such. Of COURSE it's a money grab. Most licensing is. Government licensing without testing is how they make you pay the equivalent of union dues without offering the protection of a union.
I was a licensed TV and antenna tech in Indiana. We had to take a test or have something better already (like FCC class A license). Louisiana requires no testing. All they're doing is making sure they get a cut from the boneheads that'll be fixing Louisiana's computers, but don't know a transformer from a butt plug.
Old news indeed. I knew this to be the case in TVs when I worked for my father at his TV store in the 60s. It was especially prevalent in home stereo equipment in the 70s and 80s.
The major manufacturers create their own "competition" to flood the market with at the most popular price ranges, often selling under 4 or 5 labels simultaneously, and not all of them at the same price level, despite identical guts. Three major Japanese manufacturers accounted for 14 brands at a "super-store" I visited on a research jaunt, back when I sold the stuff.
Want an eye opener? Go find out who obtained the patents on VHS and Beta VCR systems. Not the current patent/license owners; the creator sold the license for one of them to a competitor, so that no matter which format "won" they'd still be making money.
Astronomers used to complain (pre-Hubble) that observational astronomy was like looking at the sky through a dirty basement window. Imagine if the window was also painted and bricked over. There's thousands of people down there, some of them having conversations, some groups singing, and lots of them just ranting away at random. There's also a bunch of radios and TVs playing, all on different stations. And your job is to eavesdrop on one conversation. You know what it's about but you don't know what language it's in. You think you know what part of the basement they're in, but for all you know they're speaking over cell phones (no pun intended) and someone has left theirs laying on a table with a speakerphone attached so you can pick it up, but in the wrong spot. Oh yeah, upstairs from this basement party is a 24 hour bowling alley, and it's next to some very busy railroad tracks.
This is what us electroecephalographers are faced with in just listening in on activity.
We've got groups of cells of unknown number and distribution performing a task, physically intermixed with many more cells doing different tasks, and some of the cells are engaged in both, or in other ongoing tasks. We don't know how many of the activities we see, single cell firing, timing changes in single cell firing, changes in variance of single cell firing, clusters of cells firing simultaneously (or not, which may be equally important), all the way out to constantly shifting electrical fields with details as small as a synapse and as large as the whole head or more, are the activities of interest in trying to pin down one simple perception, like a single "click".
One thing we've learned in the last 10 years is that our technology has been so poor compared to the nature of the activity, that we've been missing probably a majority of what's going on, meaning most of what we know is based on the little bit we've been able to hear so far.
And you want to blast some signal back into the brain to make something happen? You need it to hit the target with an accuracy described above (and as yet undetermined) and you have to do it by shouting back through the window, paint, bricks and over the din inside, and try to be understood and you still don't know which language to talk in. The only way through the wall is to shoot a gun through and (hopefully) hit a person involved in the conversation you're interested in, at which point you'll know it because their dying words will be recognizable as part of that conversation, but then they die and you have to start again. That's the problem with implanted electrodes. It's either that, or your signal gets blurred just as much going in as it would coming out.
Large scale stimulation such as transcranial magnetic stimulation (which I also use) would be akin to finding your conversation by setting off fire sirens at points in the basement and seeing who got drowned out. Chemicals have the same problem.
After 30 years of considering it and realizing how little we actually know, and how unlikely it is we'll be able to do this without many, many years of work for an unknown amount of success (possibly only confirmation we did it, and nothing of interest transmitted to a brain) I have to think: The brain is so good at what it does and so bad at being a computer, and the computer is so good at what it does and so bad at being a brain, why would you want to cripple the both of them by hooking them together?
Yeah, OK, so Mindball is cool. I can get behind cool. Don't expect much more than cool toys and occasional short term successes with limited or no application for a long time.
There's still the senate's subcommittee, the the congressional appropriations committee, then voting in both houses.
My money says it's a minor political move by the people on the house subcommittee, primarily to get votes from vets, since the bones were supposed to be thrown that way.
Speaking as someone who deals with the VA health care system from both sides of the desk, very rarely do such actions go all the way to a congressional vote, and we damn sure don't very often see any such money. The VA Healthcare System's motto might as well be: "We wish we could, but they don't give us enough money to _______"
I doubt they've only been saying that for the 15 years since I've started dealing with them.
"SCO is a corporation. Therefore, it is actually a group of people acting that way in public."
SCO is a single, artificial entity according to the law. That's what a corporation is. The decisions are made by a group of people, but the corporation exists to serve as the "person" responsible for its actions and (somewhat) protecting that group of people from being held responsible for them.
"...as far as the ELF format is concerned 'the Tool Interface Standard Committee (TISC) came up with a ELF 1.2 standard' and 'granted users a "non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license" to the stuff'. Oh, and of course 'both Novell and the old SCO - as well as Microsoft, IBM and Intel - were on the committee'."
The patient is suffering from paranoid delusions. His accustation of persecution ("theft") despite having previously personally approved of the situation represent a psychotic dissocation from reality and should be construed as a negative hallucination. As such, the patient should be provisionally diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenia, and should be admitted for stabilization and observation, lest he become dangerous to himself or others.
Seriously, if SCO were a person acting this way towards other people in public, by now it'd be better than even money they'd have been put in hospital.
I got the attitude from my mentor, Karl Pribram. I saw him interviewed twice for two different Discovery Channel documentaries. Both times they asked him questions obviously intended to lead him to answer as to what good the research in question would be. His response was along the lines of:
"FOR? What do you mean, 'what's it good for'? It's to figure things out! That's what's important!"
They didn't use either of the interviews in the shows.
... of the insurance company attempting to weasel out of a claim following an attack/invasion, by saying that the flaw/sploit was something you should have "reasonably" known about and should have already fixed.
Many lawyers pile up many billable hours based on determining "reasonable" in every different case, and you damn betcha an insurance company has better lawyers than most companies.
"I don't quite see the obession with finding life on Mars."
I do. But then I'm a scientist. I want to know stuff. I want to know as much as possible, and have other people in other fields find out as much as possible, because you never know what good things that can improve the quality of life can come of it. And actually, that last part is justification so that society will continue funding my research. Mostly, I just want to know stuff. It's why I became a scientist.
Also: because that's what humans do. They explore. They want to know their environment. I could probably come up with a decent hypothesis regarding cognitive dissonance driving humans' desire to decrease the number of unknowns in their environment in order to maximize their comfort level and probability of survival. But then that's the other thing I do as a scientist. Come up with hypotheses. Fact is, for whatever reason, or maybe no reason other than evolutionarily determined hard wiring in the brain, it's what people do.
Anyone not interested is free to focus their attention elsewhere. And dollars to donuts they themselves will have something like this that drives them that other people may not understand.
I'm sure you're right, that some people would use such a discovery as proof for and/or against some religious viewpoint. Hell, they did it with rock and roll music, and pretty much anything you can think of that they can use as leverage against each other in their power games. Good for them. Everyone needs a hobby, it gives them purpose in life, and it keeps them out of my hair.
They're right, it can cause problems. Mostly only people asking that same question, but it can be a pain. You can change your "official" name to Tim if you wish, simply by putting it on everything and using it consistently.
OTOH, figure how often people will look at the disparity and realize it's your obvious short form for your name, and *not* question it.
With me, it's my last name. It's hyphenated. I always use the long form on official documents, but when dealing with the people involved I tell them I usually just go by part of it, and they call me that.
"The biosensor system, registers the electrical activity in the brain - so called EGG."
Cripes, I've been doing it wrong all these years. I thought it was electroencephalogram (EEG). Now I find out that the brain runs on chicken embryos.
Makes sense though. Most people I know are either hard boiled, fried, or totally scrambled. I wonder if I can get a refund on my student loans and apply for chef's school instead.
The anti-drug TV ad was right: "THIS IS YOUR BRAIN....."
It was never meant to be a troll. It was meant to be humor, relevant becuase the words came directly from the mission transcript at http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11j.html and by relevant to/. by the inclusion of Slackware (and if you doubt the origins of the Slack in Slackware was the Church of the SubGenius, you don't know your history). Possibly it was a bit too in-joke for most to grasp -- I'll take the hit for that. As far as respect for space program history, check and see if AOL still maintains the text copies of the NASA books and documents originally stored at Marshall Space Flight Center's NASA BBS. As the online librarian for the National Space Society (dynasoar01), I hand converted all those docs from unix formatting to DOS formatting. I put in hundreds of hours where most put in an occasional word of support.
Yes, it's complex. Probably too complex to pull off with today's NASA. Back then engineers ran the show. They could make things go. Management style was engineering management style. It was not "My God, Thiokol, what do you want me to do, wait until April to launch?" and foom goes a shuttle management style.
Members of the model/amateur/experimental rocket community are holding a celebration of sorts online. Rocketers are invited to logon to The Rocketry Forum (http://rocketryforum.com) and be onine across the time point Tuesday, July 20, 10:56:15 PM EDT. This is 35 years to the second from Armstrong's "one small step". Many will be in chat, but the main point is to get as many people logged onto the board as possible during that time. Even if you've just a passing interest, drop by and check it out, and help out with the numbers just by being there. Or sign up (free) and hang around.
"He and his main collaborator (Roger Penrose) are [widely] regarded as ass holes (actually referred to as the twin ass holes) who capitalize greatly on other peoples work without doing much themselves in the cosmology community.
Posted AC to protect my fiancé (a cosmology PhD student), the source of most of my info on Hawking..."
And precisely how wide is your fiancé?
I've dealt with Penrose and find him to be quite the opposite of this assessment. I've dealt far more with a "competitor" of his, Basil Hiley, who I'm certain would say the same.
Granted, writing a book about everything Roger Penroseish as an irrelevant introduction to a severely misguided "theory" on "consciousness" was a failure in the scientific sense, it was at least entertaining to those interested in tiling problems and such.
As to his "consciousness" theory (in quotes because it has yet to be objectively defined) when asked just how the brain went about processing the stuff he proposed, he responded "I have no idea. I'm just a physicist. That's why I came to talk with you psychology people."
I know people from the extreme opposite camp from Penrose in the field of "consciousness" studies, and doubt I could find any who considered him to be an asshole without making themselves into one in the process.
"They attribute it to brain plasticity in infants. Yes, late blind people and musicians do have better hearing, but that is more from learning than anything else (Practice, like you said). This story is talking about actual physiological differences."
Infants and young children have more brain plasticity, but everybody has it to some degree. I've seen an 8 year old have a left hemispherectomy after a Wada test showed he language centers were on the left side, and she learned to speak with only a right hemisphere. I've seen a 30-some year old man who'd had his lower arm amputated, and the sensations of his hand mapped to an area on his face AND an area on his upper chest (for no apparent reason) with an accuracy that let his doctor map what positions on his face and chest caused sensations in a particular (missing) finger. In both cases the changes occured in less than 2 weeks, and occured in the absence of any training to make it happen. This is not practice effect.
Younger chaildren have more brain plasticity because they have far more synapses than they need, and undergo the process of "pruning" (weeding out the extras) mostly early on, but somewhat until age 5. Everyone has some plasticity because they have the ability to grown and ungrow synapses and complex connectivity with association areas (the cortex areas between major perceptual or cognitive processing centers) throughout life. And we now know we can also regrow neurons.
Showing no statistical difference from controls is not the same as showing a significant statistical similarity with controls. It doesn't mean they were the same, and it doesn't even mean they weren't different. It only means with the few they studied they couldn't say with an arbitrary level of reliability (probably 95%) that the late-blind and controls definitely represented two different groups.
Those who fail to learn statistics are doomed to repeat them poorly.
"What you're talking about is only a matter of degree."
I'm sure you're right. It's always been there, in every party to some extent. It just feels like the real Republicans are now a minority of their party, and it's by and large entirely "interests". Some is expected; that's grey politics. We've never been squeaky clean. But at some point it gets to be too much business and too little politics, and that point is well behind us.
Monkelectric (546685) sez: "Yesterday I was at a concert and had a really, disheartaning moment. Before the concert started the MC says, "Please rise for the pledge of allegiance." I haven't been in a situation where I've needed to say the pledge in almost 10 years. This sick feeling washes over me, like that feeling you get if you've ever backed out of cheating on a g/f or wife. This voice in my head says, "I cant do this..." and I realize how completely I've lost faith in our country. I hesitate, stand up, look around at the crowd and a lot of people are saying the pledge, but a lot aren't. They're eating their food, talking to their friends like nothing is going on, some stand defiantly saying nothing, and still others are shifting their eyes in guilt, like you try to avoid looking at a bum in Starbucks while you sip your 5$ frappuccino."
I had the same problem dancing at pow wow. We always open with a dance to honor the flag and the vets (whereas 3% of US citizens are vets 13% of native Americans are). But I had a hard time justifying dancing for a flag that represented the Trail of Tears and all the other atrocities.
My elder, Usti, told me "There is no dishonor in dancing before your enemy's flag. The dishonor is in dancing poorly."
The Pledge still means something good. The words are between you and the flag. I have a hard time saying it these days without adding "DAMMIT".
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This is the same state that got previous Daily Show coverage for some row regarding licensing of nail technicians or hair dressers or some such. Of COURSE it's a money grab. Most licensing is. Government licensing without testing is how they make you pay the equivalent of union dues without offering the protection of a union.
I was a licensed TV and antenna tech in Indiana. We had to take a test or have something better already (like FCC class A license). Louisiana requires no testing. All they're doing is making sure they get a cut from the boneheads that'll be fixing Louisiana's computers, but don't know a transformer from a butt plug.
I like that phrase. Concise. Apt.
Also true. Everything else is rationalization. Some of it's very good rationalization, but rationalization none the less.
Old news indeed. I knew this to be the case in TVs when I worked for my father at his TV store in the 60s. It was especially prevalent in home stereo equipment in the 70s and 80s.
The major manufacturers create their own "competition" to flood the market with at the most popular price ranges, often selling under 4 or 5 labels simultaneously, and not all of them at the same price level, despite identical guts. Three major Japanese manufacturers accounted for 14 brands at a "super-store" I visited on a research jaunt, back when I sold the stuff.
Want an eye opener? Go find out who obtained the patents on VHS and Beta VCR systems. Not the current patent/license owners; the creator sold the license for one of them to a competitor, so that no matter which format "won" they'd still be making money.
I started asking this question in 1975.
Astronomers used to complain (pre-Hubble) that observational astronomy was like looking at the sky through a dirty basement window. Imagine if the window was also painted and bricked over. There's thousands of people down there, some of them having conversations, some groups singing, and lots of them just ranting away at random. There's also a bunch of radios and TVs playing, all on different stations. And your job is to eavesdrop on one conversation. You know what it's about but you don't know what language it's in. You think you know what part of the basement they're in, but for all you know they're speaking over cell phones (no pun intended) and someone has left theirs laying on a table with a speakerphone attached so you can pick it up, but in the wrong spot. Oh yeah, upstairs from this basement party is a 24 hour bowling alley, and it's next to some very busy railroad tracks.
This is what us electroecephalographers are faced with in just listening in on activity.
We've got groups of cells of unknown number and distribution performing a task, physically intermixed with many more cells doing different tasks, and some of the cells are engaged in both, or in other ongoing tasks. We don't know how many of the activities we see, single cell firing, timing changes in single cell firing, changes in variance of single cell firing, clusters of cells firing simultaneously (or not, which may be equally important), all the way out to constantly shifting electrical fields with details as small as a synapse and as large as the whole head or more, are the activities of interest in trying to pin down one simple perception, like a single "click".
One thing we've learned in the last 10 years is that our technology has been so poor compared to the nature of the activity, that we've been missing probably a majority of what's going on, meaning most of what we know is based on the little bit we've been able to hear so far.
And you want to blast some signal back into the brain to make something happen? You need it to hit the target with an accuracy described above (and as yet undetermined) and you have to do it by shouting back through the window, paint, bricks and over the din inside, and try to be understood and you still don't know which language to talk in. The only way through the wall is to shoot a gun through and (hopefully) hit a person involved in the conversation you're interested in, at which point you'll know it because their dying words will be recognizable as part of that conversation, but then they die and you have to start again. That's the problem with implanted electrodes. It's either that, or your signal gets blurred just as much going in as it would coming out.
Large scale stimulation such as transcranial magnetic stimulation (which I also use) would be akin to finding your conversation by setting off fire sirens at points in the basement and seeing who got drowned out. Chemicals have the same problem.
After 30 years of considering it and realizing how little we actually know, and how unlikely it is we'll be able to do this without many, many years of work for an unknown amount of success (possibly only confirmation we did it, and nothing of interest transmitted to a brain) I have to think: The brain is so good at what it does and so bad at being a computer, and the computer is so good at what it does and so bad at being a brain, why would you want to cripple the both of them by hooking them together?
Yeah, OK, so Mindball is cool. I can get behind cool. Don't expect much more than cool toys and occasional short term successes with limited or no application for a long time.
There's still the senate's subcommittee, the the congressional appropriations committee, then voting in both houses.
My money says it's a minor political move by the people on the house subcommittee, primarily to get votes from vets, since the bones were supposed to be thrown that way.
Speaking as someone who deals with the VA health care system from both sides of the desk, very rarely do such actions go all the way to a congressional vote, and we damn sure don't very often see any such money. The VA Healthcare System's motto might as well be: "We wish we could, but they don't give us enough money to _______"
I doubt they've only been saying that for the 15 years since I've started dealing with them.
Sgt York sez: "Pribram? Kind of dating yourself there ;)"
Not really. I was among his last years' grad students at Radford, where he went after Stanford, where he went after Yale.
I *did* interview for a job at NIH with one of his prior grad students, who is ready to retire his own self.
Karl's over 80 now and just will NOT quit. Three times they retired him and it still won't take.
"SCO is a corporation. Therefore, it is actually a group of people acting that way in public."
SCO is a single, artificial entity according to the law. That's what a corporation is. The decisions are made by a group of people, but the corporation exists to serve as the "person" responsible for its actions and (somewhat) protecting that group of people from being held responsible for them.
"...as far as the ELF format is concerned 'the Tool Interface Standard Committee (TISC) came up with a ELF 1.2 standard' and 'granted users a "non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license" to the stuff'. Oh, and of course 'both Novell and the old SCO - as well as Microsoft, IBM and Intel - were on the committee'."
The patient is suffering from paranoid delusions. His accustation of persecution ("theft") despite having previously personally approved of the situation represent a psychotic dissocation from reality and should be construed as a negative hallucination. As such, the patient should be provisionally diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenia, and should be admitted for stabilization and observation, lest he become dangerous to himself or others.
Seriously, if SCO were a person acting this way towards other people in public, by now it'd be better than even money they'd have been put in hospital.
I got the attitude from my mentor, Karl Pribram. I saw him interviewed twice for two different Discovery Channel documentaries. Both times they asked him questions obviously intended to lead him to answer as to what good the research in question would be. His response was along the lines of:
"FOR? What do you mean, 'what's it good for'? It's to figure things out! That's what's important!"
They didn't use either of the interviews in the shows.
... of the insurance company attempting to weasel out of a claim following an attack/invasion, by saying that the flaw/sploit was something you should have "reasonably" known about and should have already fixed.
Many lawyers pile up many billable hours based on determining "reasonable" in every different case, and you damn betcha an insurance company has better lawyers than most companies.
"I don't quite see the obession with finding life on Mars."
I do. But then I'm a scientist. I want to know stuff. I want to know as much as possible, and have other people in other fields find out as much as possible, because you never know what good things that can improve the quality of life can come of it. And actually, that last part is justification so that society will continue funding my research. Mostly, I just want to know stuff. It's why I became a scientist.
Also: because that's what humans do. They explore. They want to know their environment. I could probably come up with a decent hypothesis regarding cognitive dissonance driving humans' desire to decrease the number of unknowns in their environment in order to maximize their comfort level and probability of survival. But then that's the other thing I do as a scientist. Come up with hypotheses. Fact is, for whatever reason, or maybe no reason other than evolutionarily determined hard wiring in the brain, it's what people do.
Anyone not interested is free to focus their attention elsewhere. And dollars to donuts they themselves will have something like this that drives them that other people may not understand.
I'm sure you're right, that some people would use such a discovery as proof for and/or against some religious viewpoint. Hell, they did it with rock and roll music, and pretty much anything you can think of that they can use as leverage against each other in their power games. Good for them. Everyone needs a hobby, it gives them purpose in life, and it keeps them out of my hair.
They're right, it can cause problems. Mostly only people asking that same question, but it can be a pain. You can change your "official" name to Tim if you wish, simply by putting it on everything and using it consistently.
OTOH, figure how often people will look at the disparity and realize it's your obvious short form for your name, and *not* question it.
With me, it's my last name. It's hyphenated. I always use the long form on official documents, but when dealing with the people involved I tell them I usually just go by part of it, and they call me that.
"The biosensor system, registers the electrical activity in the brain - so called EGG."
Cripes, I've been doing it wrong all these years. I thought it was electroencephalogram (EEG). Now I find out that the brain runs on chicken embryos.
Makes sense though. Most people I know are either hard boiled, fried, or totally scrambled. I wonder if I can get a refund on my student loans and apply for chef's school instead.
The anti-drug TV ad was right: "THIS IS YOUR BRAIN....."
"You are actually asking for a /.'ing?"
Not today. Tuesday, July 20, 10:56:15 PM EDT.
It was never meant to be a troll. It was meant to be humor, relevant becuase the words came directly from the mission transcript at http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11j.html and by relevant to /. by the inclusion of Slackware (and if you doubt the origins of the Slack in Slackware was the Church of the SubGenius, you don't know your history). Possibly it was a bit too in-joke for most to grasp -- I'll take the hit for that. As far as respect for space program history, check and see if AOL still maintains the text copies of the NASA books and documents originally stored at Marshall Space Flight Center's NASA BBS. As the online librarian for the National Space Society (dynasoar01), I hand converted all those docs from unix formatting to DOS formatting. I put in hundreds of hours where most put in an occasional word of support.
Yes, it's complex. Probably too complex to pull off with today's NASA. Back then engineers ran the show. They could make things go. Management style was engineering management style. It was not "My God, Thiokol, what do you want me to do, wait until April to launch?" and foom goes a shuttle management style.
...now that Osama bin Fischer has been caught.
Members of the model/amateur/experimental rocket community are holding a celebration of sorts online. Rocketers are invited to logon to The Rocketry Forum (http://rocketryforum.com) and be onine across the time point Tuesday, July 20, 10:56:15 PM EDT. This is 35 years to the second from Armstrong's "one small step". Many will be in chat, but the main point is to get as many people logged onto the board as possible during that time. Even if you've just a passing interest, drop by and check it out, and help out with the numbers just by being there. Or sign up (free) and hang around.
Were they running Slackware in the LEM, or was the crew just a couple of members of the Church of the SubGenius?:
"109:19:48 Armstrong: Okay. Need a little slack? (No answer; Long Pause) You need more slack, Buzz?
109:20:40 Aldrin: No. Hold it just a minute."
Buzz had enough Slack. You be the judge.
"He's due to make a formal announcement July 21."
And so he started typing in April.
"He and his main collaborator (Roger Penrose) are [widely] regarded as ass holes (actually referred to as the twin ass holes) who capitalize greatly on other peoples work without doing much themselves in the cosmology community.
Posted AC to protect my fiancé (a cosmology PhD student), the source of most of my info on Hawking..."
And precisely how wide is your fiancé?
I've dealt with Penrose and find him to be quite the opposite of this assessment. I've dealt far more with a "competitor" of his, Basil Hiley, who I'm certain would say the same.
Granted, writing a book about everything Roger Penroseish as an irrelevant introduction to a severely misguided "theory" on "consciousness" was a failure in the scientific sense, it was at least entertaining to those interested in tiling problems and such.
As to his "consciousness" theory (in quotes because it has yet to be objectively defined) when asked just how the brain went about processing the stuff he proposed, he responded "I have no idea. I'm just a physicist. That's why I came to talk with you psychology people."
I know people from the extreme opposite camp from Penrose in the field of "consciousness" studies, and doubt I could find any who considered him to be an asshole without making themselves into one in the process.
"They attribute it to brain plasticity in infants. Yes, late blind people and musicians do have better hearing, but that is more from learning than anything else (Practice, like you said). This story is talking about actual physiological differences."
Infants and young children have more brain plasticity, but everybody has it to some degree. I've seen an 8 year old have a left hemispherectomy after a Wada test showed he language centers were on the left side, and she learned to speak with only a right hemisphere. I've seen a 30-some year old man who'd had his lower arm amputated, and the sensations of his hand mapped to an area on his face AND an area on his upper chest (for no apparent reason) with an accuracy that let his doctor map what positions on his face and chest caused sensations in a particular (missing) finger. In both cases the changes occured in less than 2 weeks, and occured in the absence of any training to make it happen. This is not practice effect.
Younger chaildren have more brain plasticity because they have far more synapses than they need, and undergo the process of "pruning" (weeding out the extras) mostly early on, but somewhat until age 5. Everyone has some plasticity because they have the ability to grown and ungrow synapses and complex connectivity with association areas (the cortex areas between major perceptual or cognitive processing centers) throughout life. And we now know we can also regrow neurons.
Showing no statistical difference from controls is not the same as showing a significant statistical similarity with controls. It doesn't mean they were the same, and it doesn't even mean they weren't different. It only means with the few they studied they couldn't say with an arbitrary level of reliability (probably 95%) that the late-blind and controls definitely represented two different groups.
Those who fail to learn statistics are doomed to repeat them poorly.
Oh for crissakes, it's SARCASM, a form of HUMOR.
They will allow people to copy the DVDs they buy.
The Weather people will allow you to get wet in the rain.
It's an ANALOGY about INEVITABILITY.
"What you're talking about is only a matter of degree."
I'm sure you're right. It's always been there, in every party to some extent. It just feels like the real Republicans are now a minority of their party, and it's by and large entirely "interests". Some is expected; that's grey politics. We've never been squeaky clean. But at some point it gets to be too much business and too little politics, and that point is well behind us.
Monkelectric (546685) sez: "Yesterday I was at a concert and had a really, disheartaning moment. Before the concert started the MC says, "Please rise for the pledge of allegiance." I haven't been in a situation where I've needed to say the pledge in almost 10 years. This sick feeling washes over me, like that feeling you get if you've ever backed out of cheating on a g/f or wife. This voice in my head says, "I cant do this..." and I realize how completely I've lost faith in our country. I hesitate, stand up, look around at the crowd and a lot of people are saying the pledge, but a lot aren't. They're eating their food, talking to their friends like nothing is going on, some stand defiantly saying nothing, and still others are shifting their eyes in guilt, like you try to avoid looking at a bum in Starbucks while you sip your 5$ frappuccino."
I had the same problem dancing at pow wow. We always open with a dance to honor the flag and the vets (whereas 3% of US citizens are vets 13% of native Americans are). But I had a hard time justifying dancing for a flag that represented the Trail of Tears and all the other atrocities.
My elder, Usti, told me "There is no dishonor in dancing before your enemy's flag. The dishonor is in dancing poorly."
The Pledge still means something good. The words are between you and the flag. I have a hard time saying it these days without adding "DAMMIT".
The Weather Forecasters Union has decided it's OK if you get wet when you go out in the rain.