That phrase sums up the concept of persistence on a behavior, h3ther correct or incorrect. To change something that's grossly overlearned to the point of being automated you have to start to learn a new way, then unlearn the old before the old and new can merge (unlearning being an active process, more than forgetting). The changes of success without some rather extensive practice is very small. And this is apparently for the sake of 'awkwardness'?
I met a journalist from Canada who typed with two index fingers at 100+ WPM. Looked awkward as hell. Looked like he'd gotten over that.
So you don't type the same as everyone else. If you wanted to type better than you do now, it'd be far easier to type the way you do but better than to learn another way. Adaptation is far easier than un-and-relearning. If you just want to stop feeling awkward, get some videos of the Grateful Dead in concert, and look for closeups up Jerry Garcia's guitar playing. He was missing a finger and managed to not look awkward. And he had far more reason to be concerned about what people thought about him, since he was a public performer that depended on his hands. Nobody but you cares about you. That seems the easiest to fix to my mind.
When something so off the wall starts getting put together, the irrationalities and contradictions inherent in it make it obvious the problems are severe if not fatal, and it gets shut down. Unfortunately we're talking California where it's weird's job to outdo itself. So how are they going to handle:
Cruel killing -- we can't have Dr. Kevorkian's assisted suicide for creatures with the ability to make up their own minds and say so, so who's going to speak up for the creatures unable to speak for themselves and protect them from the Death Vet?
Unbreaking the circle -- my cultural heritage places a high value on maximal participation in the Circle of Life. This means using as much of every animal as possible. I eat meat and wear leather and fur for this reason and expect to have these things available. So when an anti-fur PETA vegan acts to make these less available to me, can I level charges of racism? Better yet, will I be able to use this law to have the activists prosecuted for direct violation for attempting to prevent said creatures from achieving their full potential by being prevented from riding the Circle of Life all the way around?
Even in California people tend to fall into classifications of 'animal, vegetable, or mineral'. We can talk about getting a rock protection law in bit (igneous is no excuse) but for now, since my kids are definitely animal (in this life at least) if they get abused, will I be able to get the prep listed on this? Likewise, if I catch a dog abusing a cat or a person, can I get them listed? After all if we're going to give them the rights they deserve, shouldn't we also get ours and make sure others get theirs?
How come I can't manage to post under my own name and instead have it posted as anonymous coward?
No need to answer, it was a rhetorical question. One of the best things I did while in school as spending a year in Rhetoria learning the language so I could ask these questions without accidentally getting an answer.
"NASA can put humanoids on the Moon in just 1000 days. They would be controlled by scientists on Earth using motion capture suits, giving them the feeling of being on the lunar surface. If they can achieve this for real, the results for science research of our satellite could be amazing."
Why so fast? "Because we can" is not sufficient for budgetary planning.
Why so many? About the only reason I can foresee is construction. A good reason, but needs specified. All of them? Might there not be other worthy projects? Not every surface of interest is lunar.
Motion capture would provide transmission of behaviors. It would not provide 'feeling as if'. That could be done, and likely should, but that costs too.
We can worry about the ethics when we get reasonably close.
Thank you, Dr. Oppenhiemer.
We just might want to consider the ethics before developing the technology this time. It might prevent that whole "I AM BECOME DEATH" thingy if we prepare ourselves first. We don't do well with large releases of energy if we're not ready to deal with it.
The surface shows small jets of water open to atmosphere. There are also closed regions with a higher temperature, possibly due to endothermic reactions.
Enceladus is showing signs of having been colonized by a fairly sedentary life form symbiotic with large populations of other species incapable of manipulating their own environment adequately: Enceladus appears to be breaking out in sewage treatment plants.
" people don't put as much weight on facts as they do their own belief "
Facts don't require weight, they come with their own. Beliefs, having no solid anchor in reality, require the appearance of a basis in reality to remain believable.
Facts derive from data, they just 'are', beliefs are constructed a priori and adjusted as needed, the open ends of which are labeled and relabeled as needed as 'evidence' that supports the belief. The a priori belief is necessary so we can classify an observation, something far more necessary than getting it right the first time.
Put this in Idle, not in Tech where I expect actual news.
That's very brave of you, admitting in front of God and everybody that if you happen to read a summary and tags that indicate that the post is intended to be funny, if it happens to be posted with a heading that normally means the subject matter is news, that you have such poor control over your own behavior that you have to read the whole thing in case it has some real news embedded in it somewhere. Most people who exhibit such compulsions are too ashamed to admit it much less insist others adapt their behavior so as to minimize the resulting pressured behavior.
Given: the summary is correct. Why might Google do this? The tone of the summary seems to accuse them of doing so, and that this is bad, with 'proof' being statements taken out of context and placed within the context which is being implied. But you can't get from thesis to QED without some logical connections more than "we say so".
The Chinese (gov't.; from the ministry of defense offices) have been attacking private (initially US and UK based Falun Gong and Free Tibet sites) and government web sites and other systems for 10 years now. If they wanted to get away with it, rather than it being known they could and would do so, that's plenty of time to learn to do so. That's also plenty of time for the US et al. to make and/or cut a deal with China for it to stop. But they/we haven't been able to.
Google has more investment in seeing this outcome than the US government, and has more resources on the ground in China that can be bargained with in order to make it happen.
Google can make happen what the US can't. And they're trying to. Google is outperforming the US government in terms of dealing with China in the context of the net. And yet people insist on seeing this as Google's continued wrong doing. But why?
Censorship? Here comes a clue. Catch: Most of the people in China want it. Nobody outside that nation has a right to tell it how to operate. And if those outside that country are dedicated to democracy as they claim, they wouldn't want to over ride the wishes of those people or their government. You can not like the fact that censorship is the choice of that country, and that's about all you can do, or you can prove yourselves hypocrites by supporting what amounts to subversion of the government of the world's largest nation.
As a business, Google doesn't pretend to such principles. They can exercise their options over the full range of possible behaviors. They can, in this fashion, accomplish what the US and others have been claiming they want to see happen -- an end to China's computer based hostilities. So, would you rather Google accomplish what people have been claiming they want to see China do -- stop the attacks -- or would you rather Google adhere to a set of principles that were someone attempting to do so upon you and yours, you'd consider and even worse attack? And should you see being forced into this choice as a kind of blackmail, welcome to global politics as practiced by most nations, according to the game rules set down and practiced by the US and allies. And last we looked, China was an ally no less than Israel (just as an example, not as a specific point to make), who doesn't engage in computer warfare with the US, but does engage in good old fashioned espionage against us.
Whether can't or won't, the US isn't stopping China and can't let itself cut the kind of deal Google can.
The only real positive reconfiguration of the space program would be as a stair-step program, each step dependent on those before. As some criticisms of Obama's plans state, this would take quite a while to accomplish. But as time goes on, the program design becomes more necessary to maintain and it's continued future more assured. Twenty to thirty years is a long time? Only to those unfamiliar with planning for the future of the species in the context of the universe. Even for them, a comparison of 40 years is constructive, and that's the amount of time since people walked on the moon.
Sadly, nobody has even mentioned the possibility of planning for such a program, much less taking advantage of this opportunity to setting it up. Even when it is mentioned, such 'plans' are often ruses with no inherent intentions of carrying it out. So this rebuilding of the future is, while still possible, not yet being seriously considered.
When I was with their dept of psychiatry at the med school, they had terrible problems with constantly infected and reinfecting machines, both theirs and customers'. They had good admins, but couldn't keep up. With email farmed out, perhaps they can tackle the problem now.
Dividing by 4300 gives us 302 (rounded to whole number) people annually suffering an injury from battery boomage while on an airplane. The question of 'acceptable collateral damage' aside, that's 25 chances per month for an inflight laptop flameout. Not studied was how likely one of these is to cause an accident, with or without fatalities.
So much for governmental oversight agency produced 'reassuring' statistics.
Get a book from your library (or interlibrary loan if yours is too small) that's suitable for your students as readers and as users of the equipment. Find something that's good enough that they could do it themselves. Then let them. Oh, you'd darn sure better be there, but if you want them to learn, let them learn to do.
BTW, everything having to do with learning to use the scope itself can be (and is best done) done inside during the day. Let them learn how first, then choose/plan what to look at, then go looking.
I'm wondering of these wizards of AI have any words of wisdom they can pass along regarding the definition of intelligence. If machines are going to surpass humans as thy all agree will happen sooner or later, certainly they have some objective definition or measurement of the construct besides mere emulation.
Me, I'm just a neuroscientist with a background in cognitive psychology. Like nearly every one of my colleagues on either the practical or theoretical sides of the table, I have opinions on the subject but would never state I or anyone else in our fields can claim to have such a definition acceptable to us with respect to humans, much less a superset of entities capable of exhibiting this phenomenon. These experts much have one, or they couldn't actually answer a question regarding it, either in the absolute (ie. is actually intelligent rather than emulates) or in comparison (X is more or less intelligent than Y).
Or perhaps they weren't aware of the need to know what it is they're talking about in order to speak on things such as developmental milestones with comparisons to human capability. Considering the fact that they still think the fatally flawed Turing test to be an adequate test of intelligence or what looks like intelligence (can they even tell the difference?) when at best it's a test of human fallibility, or if you prefer, natural stupidity rather than artificial anything. After all, all the judges are human; no program is asked to tell the difference between another program and a human. Yes, fatally flawed; human reactions become biased when they know they're being tested, and it is them being tested, not the programs. No program wins, one is simply found to be the one operating when the most humans lose by failing to differentiate.
Most mystifying is the fact that none of the experts bothered to note that a far more worthy goal of machine development is to become better at what they do, rather than wasting time trying to act like us. But hey, what do I know, besides the theoretical and practical background material on human intelligence what ever that is. These experts obviously have a handle on things where I apparently can barely employ opposible thumbs without tripping over them.
And when they're done creating the Ubermindmachine, perhaps they can turn their considerable expertise to explaining to Edsger Dijkstra how to tell whether a submarine is in fact swimming. Somehow, I believe they'd answer that in the affirmative despite not being able to tell whether the screen door goes on the port or starboard side. If and when, I expect to see these and other superb works of soaring intellect among the pages of h+ magazine, the scientific journal published for the 'd00d, do you think shrooms make you, like, you know, smarter?' crowd.
PS: When a program is shown to run better when it knows its being watched, then we can start to talk about intelligence. It's called social facilitation. Cockroaches have enough 'intelligence' to show the effect. If a program is going to be smarter than a person, should it not be able to prove itself at least as smart as a cockroach?
"...while strong emotions like grief are usually associated with the syndrome, stress or a migraine can also trigger such heart attacks."
Could someone please educate the author, and if necessary the researchers (though I doubt it necessary) that strong emotions like grief are stressors, as are physiological disorders like migraines? Stress is the set, grief a subset. TFA seems to imply otherwise.
Any pressures to the system are stressors, and the system requires stress in order to function. Problems are due to poor handling of stress, which is called dis-stress. Turning stress to motivation is called eustress. Too much of the former (or too poor a job at handling it) can cause damage.
The best solution is to make a deal with a professor to promise to pay close attention to what they say if they'll give you a copy of their notes later.
I favor spider notes myself as they develop the webs of association more like what the brain does. Right after class write the main topic in the center of a page. Around it write the main subtopics, drawing lines connecting them to the center and each other if appropriate. Around each of those write small notes giving details and such, again drawing connecting lines. Get a few friends to do this, and when you get together to compare, compile a best-fit spider note from all of them.
For most thorough coverage: during lecture, listen, draw diagrams and tape record the lecture. Later, listen to the recording and write notes in your best working style around the diagrams. Before my second year in grad school (of ten) was over, I gave up on the 'afterwards' part, being content with listening to the recordings and looking at the diagrams for any and all studying.
After all, a full 70% of the top ten mysteries of the mind (according to them) actually had to do with the mind.
In this little missive of theirs they make clear that we've all been mistaken thinking drills were for digging holes into materials like teeth, when all along they were intended for killing germs by digging holes into them.
As for "creating highly reactive molecules that can break down the bacteria's defenses", you can buy a quart bottle of dental drills for a dollar or less. These drills go by the name "hydrogen peroxide".
Minor nitpick, Pluto's seasons are primarily driven by its highly elliptical orbit.
TFA credits both eccentricity and obliquity equally. I don't claim to know enough to say which is more accurate, but I do claim to be able to correctly use these alternate terms which the writer of TFA would probably scratch their head and dictionary pages over. Now that's not to blow my own horn over it, since many others know those terms also, but the following is intended as such a toot: I can name a musical piece that uses those and others correctly and explicitly enough to serve as an educational device as well as a damn fine listen. Check it out....
I don't know any of this surprises you. Media outlets are very Businesslike. Like businesses, they are driven to be Profitlike. You make profit by maximising your income (none, or maybe banner clicks) while minimising your expenses (lights, power, reporters' salaries).
Thus, we have "no truth in advertising - nor in news media."
Surpised, no. If I were I wouldn't have provided my take on the origin and nature of the problem. Not surprised at all, because I've seen far too much of it for too long. Just to pissed to keep letting it go by.
I don't just throw a tantrum here over them. I write the author, editor or other suitable recipient at the source. And I don't intend to just leave it at that. I'm also reading up on science journalism so I can compete in that marketplace for positions where the journalism could actually be appreciated and make a difference.
"Researchers have now confirmed that people indeed move faster if they are reacting, rather than acting first."
I have no doubt they have. It couldn't have been too difficult since the fact that behavior practised to the point of automatic response produces behaviors that are faster than novel behaviors that require cognitive effort in planning and execution and in monitoring the behavior in progess has been well understood for decades, and practised in sports and warfare for centuries.
What's next from this golly-gee-whiz path of scienterrific discovery? Why, I'll bet they're going to try to tell us that such automated behaviors are carried out via processing in that wrinkly bit of brain way in back on the bottom. Yeah, that one that we know for certain is the radiator for our blood so we can keep our bodies from overheating.
It's obvious why this is called research. Because once it's discovered examined and understood, anybody can re-search for it, looking for it again and again, every time being more and more certain to be right. Us scientists call it replication, or at least testing a principle in another context. But writers who don't have to get it right or apologize for being wrong can call any result An Amazing Discovery. Is it just to sell the piece or because they're just ignorant of the subject? Probably plenty of both.
"...more in common with Earth than we would have ever imagined."
If this is going to be along the lines of the the "Earthlike" exoplanets, it means something like Pluto has a surface, and probably some elements.
Why is it every planet that's not obviously entirely unlike Earth is "Earthlike"? Are we really that desperate for a refuge should we ruin this planet completely?
Hell no. Most people with even a slight interest and modest education know better, and don't try to make a point anything like that. No, these asinine statements are almost invariably made by 'science journalists' which are rapidly becoming less and less of both of those. They know they can't keep your interest recounting the bare facts so they have to come up with some bullshit that they're probably not even aware how bag of hammers stoopid it sounds. Pluto has an axial tilt, therefore it has seasons... like Earth. Sure, seasons with an average summer of 60 degrees Kelvin and winters at 30 Kelvin. How very Earthlike.
See, there's a downside to all these magazines and other media making stuff available on the net. Since they're making it available for free, they're not making anything directly from them, so they have nothing to lose by making them crap. Then they can get you to subscribe for the better stuff. In theory. Rather than paying some real and knowledgeable science journalists, or even specialists in that field, to write better material, they go the cheap route and use the same mediocre hacks for their print versions as for their e-versions.
So, naturally Pluto is Earthlike. It's because the source is Sciencelike. Sure, and those writers' and editors' asses are Hatlike.
Sorry, officer, I don't have my registration with me.
That's alright, we can look it up through the Department of Machine Verification database.
[mumble mumble radio static squelch mumble]
I'll have to ask you top step out from behind the keyboard.
What's the matter officer?
This operating system license is for an obsolete OS and you're driving the latest model. Either you have a forged license or you're driving stolen software.
But office, I...
Keep your hands where I can see them! Get off that chair and get on the ground! ON THE GROUND. HANDS BEHIND YOUR HEAD.
[A bit over dramatic perhaps, but it's the only real reason to have a 'license'. After all, that is the name of the certificate with the serial number that's on the wrapper. It's yet another level of Genuine Admonishment.]
We recently had an article on just this subject, using MEG. Comparing the time frame of an fMRI scan and the duration of the response it's supposed to be looking at, it is quite likely the fMRI is catching many more neural processes even within the same region than the response related to the stimulus.
In fact, I'm thinking it's likely BBC made an error (or worse). TFA starts out with the same phrase as the MEG article, "a new brain scan technique". Then it specifies fMRI and says it was used because it "shows brain activity in real time", which it most certainly does not.
"...ban glorifying terrorism or urging people to commit terrorist acts."
Then since the material at http://www.2020tech.com/thanks/temp.html describes a group of people who committed multiple acts of terrorism, it would have to go, along with any of the more sanitized versions such as are presented as childrens' plays all over the US yearly, since these romanticized versions 'glorify' their actions. How ironic that the descendants of these terrorists would pass a law banning their ancestors' story.
=== snippedy snip ===
1. The Puritans were not just simple religious conservatives persecuted by the King and the Church of England for their unorthodox beliefs. They were political revolutionaries who not only intended to overthrow the government of England, but who actually did so in 1649.
2. The Puritan "Pilgrims" who came to New England were not simply refugees who decided to "put their fate in God's hands" in the "empty wilderness" of North America, as a generation of Hollywood movies taught us. In any culture at any time, settlers on a frontier are most often outcasts and fugitives who, in some way or other, do not fit into the mainstream of their society. This is not to imply that people who settle on frontiers have no redeeming qualities such as bravery, etc., but that the images of nobility that we associate with the Puritans are at least in part the good "P.R." efforts of later writers who have romanticized them.(1) It is also very plausible that this unnaturally noble image of the Puritans is all wrapped up with the mythology of "Noble Civilization" vs. "Savagery."(2) At any rate, mainstream Englishmen considered the Pilgrims to be deliberate religious dropouts who intended to found a new nation completely independent from non-Puritan England. In 1643 the Puritan/Pilgrims declared themselves an independent confederacy, one hundred and forty-three years before the American Revolution. They believed in the imminent occurrence of Armegeddon in Europe and hoped to establish here in the new world the "Kingdom of God" foretold in the book of Revelation. They diverged from their Puritan brethren who remained in England only in that they held little real hope of ever being able to successfully overthrow the King and Parliament and, thereby, impose their "Rule of Saints" (yestrict Puritan orthodoxy) on the rest of the British people. So they came to America not just in one ship (the Mayflower) but in a hundred others as well, with every intention of taking the land away from its native people to build their prophesied "Holy Kingdom."(3)
3. The Pilgrims were not just innocent refugees from religious persecution. They were victims of bigotry in England, but some of them were themselves religious bigots by our modern standards. The Puritans and the Pilgrims saw themselves as the "Chosen Elect" mentioned in the book of Revelation. They strove to "purify" first themselves and then everyone else of everything they did not accept in their own interpretation of scripture. Later New England Puritans used any means, including deceptions, treachery, torture, war, and genocide to achieve that end.(4) They saw themselves as fighting a holy war against Satan, and everyone who disagreed with them was the enemy. This rigid fundamentalism was transmitted to America by the Plymouth colonists, and it sheds a very different light on the "Pilgrim" image we have of them. This is best illustrated in the written text of the Thanksgiving sermon delivered at Plymouth in 1623 by "Mather the Elder." In it, Mather the Elder gave special thanks to God for the devastating plague of smallpox which wiped out the majority of the Wampanoag Indians who had been their benefactors. He praised God for destroying "chiefly young men and children, the very seeds of increase, thus clearing the forests to ma
"What readers take away from it is up to them." Quite so.
Taken away by a neuroscientist whose work covered both cognitive and physiological aspects of language acquisition, comprehension and production: 'Verbing weirds language.'
Slashdot Mirror
That phrase sums up the concept of persistence on a behavior, h3ther correct or incorrect. To change something that's grossly overlearned to the point of being automated you have to start to learn a new way, then unlearn the old before the old and new can merge (unlearning being an active process, more than forgetting). The changes of success without some rather extensive practice is very small. And this is apparently for the sake of 'awkwardness'?
I met a journalist from Canada who typed with two index fingers at 100+ WPM. Looked awkward as hell. Looked like he'd gotten over that.
So you don't type the same as everyone else. If you wanted to type better than you do now, it'd be far easier to type the way you do but better than to learn another way. Adaptation is far easier than un-and-relearning. If you just want to stop feeling awkward, get some videos of the Grateful Dead in concert, and look for closeups up Jerry Garcia's guitar playing. He was missing a finger and managed to not look awkward. And he had far more reason to be concerned about what people thought about him, since he was a public performer that depended on his hands. Nobody but you cares about you. That seems the easiest to fix to my mind.
When something so off the wall starts getting put together, the irrationalities and contradictions inherent in it make it obvious the problems are severe if not fatal, and it gets shut down. Unfortunately we're talking California where it's weird's job to outdo itself. So how are they going to handle:
Cruel killing -- we can't have Dr. Kevorkian's assisted suicide for creatures with the ability to make up their own minds and say so, so who's going to speak up for the creatures unable to speak for themselves and protect them from the Death Vet?
Unbreaking the circle -- my cultural heritage places a high value on maximal participation in the Circle of Life. This means using as much of every animal as possible. I eat meat and wear leather and fur for this reason and expect to have these things available. So when an anti-fur PETA vegan acts to make these less available to me, can I level charges of racism? Better yet, will I be able to use this law to have the activists prosecuted for direct violation for attempting to prevent said creatures from achieving their full potential by being prevented from riding the Circle of Life all the way around?
Even in California people tend to fall into classifications of 'animal, vegetable, or mineral'. We can talk about getting a rock protection law in bit (igneous is no excuse) but for now, since my kids are definitely animal (in this life at least) if they get abused, will I be able to get the prep listed on this? Likewise, if I catch a dog abusing a cat or a person, can I get them listed? After all if we're going to give them the rights they deserve, shouldn't we also get ours and make sure others get theirs?
How come I can't manage to post under my own name and instead have it posted as anonymous coward?
No need to answer, it was a rhetorical question. One of the best things I did while in school as spending a year in Rhetoria learning the language so I could ask these questions without accidentally getting an answer.
"NASA can put humanoids on the Moon in just 1000 days. They would be controlled by scientists on Earth using motion capture suits, giving them the feeling of being on the lunar surface. If they can achieve this for real, the results for science research of our satellite could be amazing."
Why so fast? "Because we can" is not sufficient for budgetary planning.
Why so many? About the only reason I can foresee is construction. A good reason, but needs specified. All of them? Might there not be other worthy projects? Not every surface of interest is lunar.
Motion capture would provide transmission of behaviors. It would not provide 'feeling as if'. That could be done, and likely should, but that costs too.
We can worry about the ethics when we get reasonably close.
Thank you, Dr. Oppenhiemer.
We just might want to consider the ethics before developing the technology this time. It might prevent that whole "I AM BECOME DEATH" thingy if we prepare ourselves first. We don't do well with large releases of energy if we're not ready to deal with it.
The surface shows small jets of water open to atmosphere. There are also closed regions with a higher temperature, possibly due to endothermic reactions.
Enceladus is showing signs of having been colonized by a fairly sedentary life form symbiotic with large populations of other species incapable of manipulating their own environment adequately: Enceladus appears to be breaking out in sewage treatment plants.
" people don't put as much weight on facts as they do their own belief "
Facts don't require weight, they come with their own. Beliefs, having no solid anchor in reality, require the appearance of a basis in reality to remain believable.
Facts derive from data, they just 'are', beliefs are constructed a priori and adjusted as needed, the open ends of which are labeled and relabeled as needed as 'evidence' that supports the belief. The a priori belief is necessary so we can classify an observation, something far more necessary than getting it right the first time.
Put this in Idle, not in Tech where I expect actual news.
That's very brave of you, admitting in front of God and everybody that if you happen to read a summary and tags that indicate that the post is intended to be funny, if it happens to be posted with a heading that normally means the subject matter is news, that you have such poor control over your own behavior that you have to read the whole thing in case it has some real news embedded in it somewhere. Most people who exhibit such compulsions are too ashamed to admit it much less insist others adapt their behavior so as to minimize the resulting pressured behavior.
Given: the summary is correct. Why might Google do this? The tone of the summary seems to accuse them of doing so, and that this is bad, with 'proof' being statements taken out of context and placed within the context which is being implied. But you can't get from thesis to QED without some logical connections more than "we say so".
The Chinese (gov't.; from the ministry of defense offices) have been attacking private (initially US and UK based Falun Gong and Free Tibet sites) and government web sites and other systems for 10 years now. If they wanted to get away with it, rather than it being known they could and would do so, that's plenty of time to learn to do so. That's also plenty of time for the US et al. to make and/or cut a deal with China for it to stop. But they/we haven't been able to.
Google has more investment in seeing this outcome than the US government, and has more resources on the ground in China that can be bargained with in order to make it happen.
Google can make happen what the US can't. And they're trying to. Google is outperforming the US government in terms of dealing with China in the context of the net. And yet people insist on seeing this as Google's continued wrong doing. But why?
Censorship? Here comes a clue. Catch: Most of the people in China want it. Nobody outside that nation has a right to tell it how to operate. And if those outside that country are dedicated to democracy as they claim, they wouldn't want to over ride the wishes of those people or their government. You can not like the fact that censorship is the choice of that country, and that's about all you can do, or you can prove yourselves hypocrites by supporting what amounts to subversion of the government of the world's largest nation.
As a business, Google doesn't pretend to such principles. They can exercise their options over the full range of possible behaviors. They can, in this fashion, accomplish what the US and others have been claiming they want to see happen -- an end to China's computer based hostilities. So, would you rather Google accomplish what people have been claiming they want to see China do -- stop the attacks -- or would you rather Google adhere to a set of principles that were someone attempting to do so upon you and yours, you'd consider and even worse attack? And should you see being forced into this choice as a kind of blackmail, welcome to global politics as practiced by most nations, according to the game rules set down and practiced by the US and allies. And last we looked, China was an ally no less than Israel (just as an example, not as a specific point to make), who doesn't engage in computer warfare with the US, but does engage in good old fashioned espionage against us.
Whether can't or won't, the US isn't stopping China and can't let itself cut the kind of deal Google can.
The only real positive reconfiguration of the space program would be as a stair-step program, each step dependent on those before. As some criticisms of Obama's plans state, this would take quite a while to accomplish. But as time goes on, the program design becomes more necessary to maintain and it's continued future more assured. Twenty to thirty years is a long time? Only to those unfamiliar with planning for the future of the species in the context of the universe. Even for them, a comparison of 40 years is constructive, and that's the amount of time since people walked on the moon.
Sadly, nobody has even mentioned the possibility of planning for such a program, much less taking advantage of this opportunity to setting it up. Even when it is mentioned, such 'plans' are often ruses with no inherent intentions of carrying it out. So this rebuilding of the future is, while still possible, not yet being seriously considered.
When I was with their dept of psychiatry at the med school, they had terrible problems with constantly infected and reinfecting machines, both theirs and customers'. They had good admins, but couldn't keep up. With email farmed out, perhaps they can tackle the problem now.
"Getting killed in a car accident, by contrast, is 4,300 times more likely."
Then by all means, let us not mix our metaphors.
According to the latest WHO report on preventable deaths world wide http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/08/avoidable-deaths-worldwide-scope-of.html 1.3 million people die annually from car accidents.
Dividing by 4300 gives us 302 (rounded to whole number) people annually suffering an injury from battery boomage while on an airplane. The question of 'acceptable collateral damage' aside, that's 25 chances per month for an inflight laptop flameout. Not studied was how likely one of these is to cause an accident, with or without fatalities.
So much for governmental oversight agency produced 'reassuring' statistics.
Get a book from your library (or interlibrary loan if yours is too small) that's suitable for your students as readers and as users of the equipment. Find something that's good enough that they could do it themselves. Then let them. Oh, you'd darn sure better be there, but if you want them to learn, let them learn to do.
BTW, everything having to do with learning to use the scope itself can be (and is best done) done inside during the day. Let them learn how first, then choose/plan what to look at, then go looking.
I'm wondering of these wizards of AI have any words of wisdom they can pass along regarding the definition of intelligence. If machines are going to surpass humans as thy all agree will happen sooner or later, certainly they have some objective definition or measurement of the construct besides mere emulation.
Me, I'm just a neuroscientist with a background in cognitive psychology. Like nearly every one of my colleagues on either the practical or theoretical sides of the table, I have opinions on the subject but would never state I or anyone else in our fields can claim to have such a definition acceptable to us with respect to humans, much less a superset of entities capable of exhibiting this phenomenon. These experts much have one, or they couldn't actually answer a question regarding it, either in the absolute (ie. is actually intelligent rather than emulates) or in comparison (X is more or less intelligent than Y).
Or perhaps they weren't aware of the need to know what it is they're talking about in order to speak on things such as developmental milestones with comparisons to human capability. Considering the fact that they still think the fatally flawed Turing test to be an adequate test of intelligence or what looks like intelligence (can they even tell the difference?) when at best it's a test of human fallibility, or if you prefer, natural stupidity rather than artificial anything. After all, all the judges are human; no program is asked to tell the difference between another program and a human. Yes, fatally flawed; human reactions become biased when they know they're being tested, and it is them being tested, not the programs. No program wins, one is simply found to be the one operating when the most humans lose by failing to differentiate.
Most mystifying is the fact that none of the experts bothered to note that a far more worthy goal of machine development is to become better at what they do, rather than wasting time trying to act like us. But hey, what do I know, besides the theoretical and practical background material on human intelligence what ever that is. These experts obviously have a handle on things where I apparently can barely employ opposible thumbs without tripping over them.
And when they're done creating the Ubermindmachine, perhaps they can turn their considerable expertise to explaining to Edsger Dijkstra how to tell whether a submarine is in fact swimming. Somehow, I believe they'd answer that in the affirmative despite not being able to tell whether the screen door goes on the port or starboard side. If and when, I expect to see these and other superb works of soaring intellect among the pages of h+ magazine, the scientific journal published for the 'd00d, do you think shrooms make you, like, you know, smarter?' crowd.
PS: When a program is shown to run better when it knows its being watched, then we can start to talk about intelligence. It's called social facilitation. Cockroaches have enough 'intelligence' to show the effect. If a program is going to be smarter than a person, should it not be able to prove itself at least as smart as a cockroach?
"...while strong emotions like grief are usually associated with the syndrome, stress or a migraine can also trigger such heart attacks."
Could someone please educate the author, and if necessary the researchers (though I doubt it necessary) that strong emotions like grief are stressors, as are physiological disorders like migraines? Stress is the set, grief a subset. TFA seems to imply otherwise.
Any pressures to the system are stressors, and the system requires stress in order to function. Problems are due to poor handling of stress, which is called dis-stress. Turning stress to motivation is called eustress. Too much of the former (or too poor a job at handling it) can cause damage.
The best solution is to make a deal with a professor to promise to pay close attention to what they say if they'll give you a copy of their notes later.
Otherwise, what works best for you is best for you. Try different note taking techniques http://www.cui.edu/studentservices/learningservices/index.aspx?id=2416 and see how they work out.
I favor spider notes myself as they develop the webs of association more like what the brain does. Right after class write the main topic in the center of a page. Around it write the main subtopics, drawing lines connecting them to the center and each other if appropriate. Around each of those write small notes giving details and such, again drawing connecting lines. Get a few friends to do this, and when you get together to compare, compile a best-fit spider note from all of them.
For most thorough coverage: during lecture, listen, draw diagrams and tape record the lecture. Later, listen to the recording and write notes in your best working style around the diagrams. Before my second year in grad school (of ten) was over, I gave up on the 'afterwards' part, being content with listening to the recordings and looking at the diagrams for any and all studying.
After all, a full 70% of the top ten mysteries of the mind (according to them) actually had to do with the mind.
In this little missive of theirs they make clear that we've all been mistaken thinking drills were for digging holes into materials like teeth, when all along they were intended for killing germs by digging holes into them.
As for "creating highly reactive molecules that can break down the bacteria's defenses", you can buy a quart bottle of dental drills for a dollar or less. These drills go by the name "hydrogen peroxide".
Minor nitpick, Pluto's seasons are primarily driven by its highly elliptical orbit.
TFA credits both eccentricity and obliquity equally. I don't claim to know enough to say which is more accurate, but I do claim to be able to correctly use these alternate terms which the writer of TFA would probably scratch their head and dictionary pages over. Now that's not to blow my own horn over it, since many others know those terms also, but the following is intended as such a toot: I can name a musical piece that uses those and others correctly and explicitly enough to serve as an educational device as well as a damn fine listen. Check it out....
=== spoiler alert, answer below, reversed ===
eltit gnos dna mubla htob 93.0 odeblA ,silegnaV
I don't know any of this surprises you. Media outlets are very Businesslike. Like businesses, they are driven to be Profitlike. You make profit by maximising your income (none, or maybe banner clicks) while minimising your expenses (lights, power, reporters' salaries).
Thus, we have "no truth in advertising - nor in news media."
Surpised, no. If I were I wouldn't have provided my take on the origin and nature of the problem. Not surprised at all, because I've seen far too much of it for too long. Just to pissed to keep letting it go by.
I don't just throw a tantrum here over them. I write the author, editor or other suitable recipient at the source. And I don't intend to just leave it at that. I'm also reading up on science journalism so I can compete in that marketplace for positions where the journalism could actually be appreciated and make a difference.
"Researchers have now confirmed that people indeed move faster if they are reacting, rather than acting first."
I have no doubt they have. It couldn't have been too difficult since the fact that behavior practised to the point of automatic response produces behaviors that are faster than novel behaviors that require cognitive effort in planning and execution and in monitoring the behavior in progess has been well understood for decades, and practised in sports and warfare for centuries.
What's next from this golly-gee-whiz path of scienterrific discovery? Why, I'll bet they're going to try to tell us that such automated behaviors are carried out via processing in that wrinkly bit of brain way in back on the bottom. Yeah, that one that we know for certain is the radiator for our blood so we can keep our bodies from overheating.
It's obvious why this is called research. Because once it's discovered examined and understood, anybody can re-search for it, looking for it again and again, every time being more and more certain to be right. Us scientists call it replication, or at least testing a principle in another context. But writers who don't have to get it right or apologize for being wrong can call any result An Amazing Discovery. Is it just to sell the piece or because they're just ignorant of the subject? Probably plenty of both.
"...more in common with Earth than we would have ever imagined."
If this is going to be along the lines of the the "Earthlike" exoplanets, it means something like Pluto has a surface, and probably some elements.
Why is it every planet that's not obviously entirely unlike Earth is "Earthlike"? Are we really that desperate for a refuge should we ruin this planet completely?
Hell no. Most people with even a slight interest and modest education know better, and don't try to make a point anything like that. No, these asinine statements are almost invariably made by 'science journalists' which are rapidly becoming less and less of both of those. They know they can't keep your interest recounting the bare facts so they have to come up with some bullshit that they're probably not even aware how bag of hammers stoopid it sounds. Pluto has an axial tilt, therefore it has seasons... like Earth. Sure, seasons with an average summer of 60 degrees Kelvin and winters at 30 Kelvin. How very Earthlike.
See, there's a downside to all these magazines and other media making stuff available on the net. Since they're making it available for free, they're not making anything directly from them, so they have nothing to lose by making them crap. Then they can get you to subscribe for the better stuff. In theory. Rather than paying some real and knowledgeable science journalists, or even specialists in that field, to write better material, they go the cheap route and use the same mediocre hacks for their print versions as for their e-versions.
So, naturally Pluto is Earthlike. It's because the source is Sciencelike. Sure, and those writers' and editors' asses are Hatlike.
Sorry, officer, I don't have my registration with me.
That's alright, we can look it up through the Department of Machine Verification database.
[mumble mumble radio static squelch mumble]
I'll have to ask you top step out from behind the keyboard.
What's the matter officer?
This operating system license is for an obsolete OS and you're driving the latest model. Either you have a forged license or you're driving stolen software.
But office, I...
Keep your hands where I can see them! Get off that chair and get on the ground! ON THE GROUND. HANDS BEHIND YOUR HEAD.
[A bit over dramatic perhaps, but it's the only real reason to have a 'license'. After all, that is the name of the certificate with the serial number that's on the wrapper. It's yet another level of Genuine Admonishment.]
We recently had an article on just this subject, using MEG. Comparing the time frame of an fMRI scan and the duration of the response it's supposed to be looking at, it is quite likely the fMRI is catching many more neural processes even within the same region than the response related to the stimulus.
In fact, I'm thinking it's likely BBC made an error (or worse). TFA starts out with the same phrase as the MEG article, "a new brain scan technique". Then it specifies fMRI and says it was used because it "shows brain activity in real time", which it most certainly does not.
"...ban glorifying terrorism or urging people to commit terrorist acts."
Then since the material at http://www.2020tech.com/thanks/temp.html describes a group of people who committed multiple acts of terrorism, it would have to go, along with any of the more sanitized versions such as are presented as childrens' plays all over the US yearly, since these romanticized versions 'glorify' their actions. How ironic that the descendants of these terrorists would pass a law banning their ancestors' story.
=== snippedy snip ===
1. The Puritans were not just simple religious
conservatives persecuted by the King and the Church of
England for their unorthodox beliefs. They were
political revolutionaries who not only intended to
overthrow the government of England, but who actually
did so in 1649.
2. The Puritan "Pilgrims" who came to New England were not
simply refugees who decided to "put their fate in God's
hands" in the "empty wilderness" of North America, as a
generation of Hollywood movies taught us. In any culture
at any time, settlers on a frontier are most often
outcasts and fugitives who, in some way or other, do not
fit into the mainstream of their society. This is not to
imply that people who settle on frontiers have no
redeeming qualities such as bravery, etc., but that the
images of nobility that we associate with the Puritans
are at least in part the good "P.R." efforts of later
writers who have romanticized them.(1) It is also very
plausible that this unnaturally noble image of the
Puritans is all wrapped up with the mythology of "Noble
Civilization" vs. "Savagery."(2) At any rate, mainstream
Englishmen considered the Pilgrims to be deliberate
religious dropouts who intended to found a new nation
completely independent from non-Puritan England. In 1643
the Puritan/Pilgrims declared themselves an independent
confederacy, one hundred and forty-three years before
the American Revolution. They believed in the imminent
occurrence of Armegeddon in Europe and hoped to
establish here in the new world the "Kingdom of God"
foretold in the book of Revelation. They diverged from
their Puritan brethren who remained in England only in
that they held little real hope of ever being able to
successfully overthrow the King and Parliament and,
thereby, impose their "Rule of Saints" (yestrict Puritan
orthodoxy) on the rest of the British people. So they
came to America not just in one ship (the Mayflower) but
in a hundred others as well, with every intention of
taking the land away from its native people to build
their prophesied "Holy Kingdom."(3)
3. The Pilgrims were not just innocent refugees from
religious persecution. They were victims of bigotry in
England, but some of them were themselves religious
bigots by our modern standards. The Puritans and the
Pilgrims saw themselves as the "Chosen Elect" mentioned
in the book of Revelation. They strove to "purify" first
themselves and then everyone else of everything they did
not accept in their own interpretation of scripture.
Later New England Puritans used any means, including
deceptions, treachery, torture, war, and genocide to
achieve that end.(4) They saw themselves as fighting a
holy war against Satan, and everyone who disagreed with
them was the enemy. This rigid fundamentalism was
transmitted to America by the Plymouth colonists, and it
sheds a very different light on the "Pilgrim" image we
have of them. This is best illustrated in the written
text of the Thanksgiving sermon delivered at Plymouth in
1623 by "Mather the Elder." In it, Mather the Elder gave
special thanks to God for the devastating plague of
smallpox which wiped out the majority of the Wampanoag
Indians who had been their benefactors. He praised God
for destroying "chiefly young men and children, the very
seeds of increase, thus clearing the forests to ma
"What readers take away from it is up to them." Quite so.
Taken away by a neuroscientist whose work covered both cognitive and physiological aspects of language acquisition, comprehension and production: 'Verbing weirds language.'