There is a correlation between human IQ and brain size. It is weak. SO weak that it proves itself of little use to anyone.
The review articles I went over showed correlations between 0.3 and 0.4. What does that explain? The amount of variance accounted for in a correlation is found by squaring the correlation. Thus, the amount of variance account for by the IQ/size correlation is between 0.09 and 0.16.
In other words, the best we have in scientific examination of IQ and brain size leaves between 84% and 91% unexplained. Logic dictates that betting on less than a 50/50 chance is a losing proposition. Betting on 'IQ = brain size' is right about 6 to 1 against. Not quite lottery ticket odds, but not where you'd want to put your money.
As for anything having to do with intelligence, you can find correlations for those too. But my comment regarding definition of intelligence stands. While they obviously had to use some definition of intelligence and stated what they're using, that doesn't mean their, or any, definition of intelligence is objective, measurable, accurate, reliable, or generally acceptable to anyone, least of all cognitive psychologists who specialize in intelligence.
Brain size does not correlate with IQ. Brain size does not correlate with intelligence. IQ doesn't correlate with intelligence. Trying to force any of these into existence is equal in validity to telling someone's personality traits from the bumps on their head.
Anyone who wants to take issue with the statements above regarding intelligence would first need to provide a definition of intelligence with an objective and replicable measurement of it. They'd also have to justify using it despite the enormous of disparity of opinions from cognitive psychologists on what intelligence is. Most of them have an opinion on the matter. The ones that know the most will acknowledge it as an opinion and will acknowledge the disparity.
Now as to TFA and IQ, if such beings existed, it's no wonder they're extinct. IQ is a measure of how well one does on an IQ test. If these beings' claim to evolutionary fame is their IQ, one can envision them sitting around taking tests, making them easy targets for predators. One can also envision them getting eaten while other hominids with smaller brains (and one would assume from TFA lesser IQs) run away. One can then meditate on the meaning of intelligence with respect to IQ since sitting around getting eaten doesn't seem to be a very intelligent behavior. If IQ made them smart, they'd have recognized the fact that running away was working for the others and adopted the technique.
Some questions for thought with regards to the issues of rights and ownership. The readership here is big on rights. Where's consideration for these peoples' rights? Pretending the issue is between the public (ie. domain) and governmental control is overly simplistic. The rights of the owners get devalued in such discussions and the owners are relegated to the ping pong ball treatment. Try to read through and think on them before responding. This is not intended as flamebait, but as an opening of awareness to include a class of rights holders not as often considered here as others. So please do read through all the way to the bottom, there are important points there too.
So, reconsider this as "Whose Property Would You Have Taken Away Tomorrow"?
Why not contact some of the authors/owners for things that would have gone PD and ask them to sign their rights over to PD? Seems to me to be more fair to have the owners sign them over at a time of their choosing than forcing them to relinquish according to a calendar.
Why not require authors to include a 'convert to PD' statement in their new application for copyright, which gives them up to a mandated maximum, but for which they can specify a lesser amount?
For that matter, why not have every application for copyright have a question on it, asking the applicant for their opinion on future changes to the law, asking what time span would be fair to use as the maximum before requiring conversion to PD? Non-binding certainly, but at least it takes the opinions of those most affected into account.
While in force copyright acts much like other rights of ownership. How many other laws covering protection of owners' rights require the owner to give their property away after a certain period? No matter how rightly this is required, as has always been the intention of copyright laws, it still is a case of mandated relinquishing of ownership.
Turn it around and look at it. Let's say you buy a brand new house. In the deed is a statement that in let's say 50 years, it becomes property of the state and will be given over to the homeless, under control of the same agency that protects your ownership in the mean time. You can still live there, but so can anyone else. Oh, and selling the house doesn't change that date. Consider what that's going to do to your property value over time. If that was the law and you wanted a house, of course you'd have to go along. But as time went on the implications would start to matter more. Now imaging that the government comes along and says they're going to change all existing contracts saying 50 years to 75 years. Will you, as owner, have a problem with that? Theoretically the law also protected the homeless by providing them a place to live. They have rights too, and it's beneficial for society to have its members caring for each other rather than have one class left to go without since that causes all sorts of other problems like crime. Will you tell the government that you'd just as soon keep your 50 year limit and allow your ownership to expire? And you people in the market for a house that can't afford a new one but are willing to fix up and old one to maker it worth more, will you buy a used house? How old?
That's simply property. Copyright covers things that usually produce income for the owner, sometimes for an extended period. So let's change the above from owning a home to owning a business (owning, selling and speculation of copyrights are part of the business of authorship and publishing, after all). Will you start a business if you know that after 50 years it will be turned over to public trust and all income derived diverted to public funds? What will you do as the time approaches? Will you stick to your original contract or will you accept the government's extension?
Society needs responsible and stable owners of both homes and businesses to maintain what they own for the duration of their ownership. The alternative is their neglect as the value to them draws down. The result would be that t
All I've ever wanted from brain-interface computing is the ability to 'think' music into some format where I can play it back again. Are we getting close to that yet?
In what sense? Single note control of a virtual synthesizer (external control of a real synth, like MIDI) is possible using the technique here applied to motor control of a finger. Multiple notes easily done after once cross-channel signal interference is eliminated (the fingers talk to each other in the cortex). Add another channel, and you can control a bank of instrument selection, again like MIDI. But all you've done is replace your hands with hardware. This is a damn expensive process as well as requiring some surgery.
If you want to go from, say, remembered music ie. "playing a song in your head" to some output, you have to find the far more complex signals relating to the memories, figure out how to find as many of the pieces of memory as possible, eliminate false positives and inaccurate memories of this, figure out how to put the pieces together properly, figure out how to take that pretty-good-but-not-complete collection of memory derived signals and re-create the piece using something capable of filling in the many blanks (memories are full of holes but we only need parts to 'recall' them). We don't know how to decode memories, because they're far more complex than the mere spikes of cells firing which direct small collections of muscle cells to work. And the process above will require a great deal of feedback to test the signal being re-created for accuracy against memory at several steps. The computational power necessary for the steps may be orders of magnitude greater than what's available, and then to keep pace with it in the feedback/correction process, greater still.
Getting a match to memory has been done and this technique should improve on that. Extracting the memory itself from neural signal is way beyond us, and reconstruction of the memory contents farther still.
Most implant approaches use electrodes shoved in from the outside intending them to work immediately. That invasive technique leaves the person open to infection, and the neurons contacted tend to die fairly quickly, requiring yet another round of more of the same. This approach takes a long time, but eliminates the chance of infection (after the obviously necessary implantation) and lets neurons grow into and around the electrodes, so none of them producing signal are likely to die off soon, allowing long term contact and communication.
I'm sure there will be improvements on this, but this looks to me to be the first really viable direct neural signal collection technique.
"Five years ago, when the volunteer was 21 years old, the scientists implanted an electrode near the boundary between the speech-related premotor and primary motor cortex (specifically, the left ventral premotor cortex). Neurites began growing into the electrode and, in three or four months, the neurites produced signaling patterns on the electrode wires that have been maintained indefinitely.
Three years after implantation, the researchers began testing the brain-machine interface for real-time synthetic speech production. The system is “telemetric” - it requires no wires or connectors passing through the skin, eliminating the risk of infection. Instead, the electrode amplifies and converts neural signals into frequency modulated (FM) radio signals. These signals are wirelessly transmitted across the scalp to two coils, which are attached to the volunteer’s head using a water-soluble paste. The coils act as receiving antenna for the RF signals. The implanted electrode is powered by an induction power supply via a power coil, which is also attached to the head."
Rather than risking killing off speech center neurons in the implant process, they instead implant them in the pathway through which the speech center communicates outbound. Previous attempts by others went directly for the primary processing centers. This small change shows remarkable thinking foresight. I'd call this the first true hack in neural interfacing.
The only point of clarification I'd add is to say "through the scalp" instead of "across"; the latter more often implies a lateral vector. And the only point I'd request is, if only the scalp needs to be traversed, is the transmitter between the skull and scalp? It appears so but isn't stated s such in the paper (the PLoS article's URL is at the bottom of TFA). In any case, the FM transmission through the scalp does away with all the permanent jacks and sockets that SF and Hollywood have always used to signify brain/machine interfacing. With this one implementation, the future image of neural interfacing becomes something like a hair net with buttons sewn into it (we already have EEGs like this). Someone call Larry Niven. Wireheads will be buttonheads.
A future hack will almost certainly be to collect the signal wires running from the scalp to a second transmitter operating between the person and the machine. This will eliminate the direct connection and allow movement, including ambulatory data collection and processing. That not only makes possible testing in realistic situations, but also neural control of machine mediated locomotion for the paralyzed, without being restricted to the length of a cable. An obvious inclusion here would be a transmitter at the machine with receiver on the person, running the signals into the relevant muscle groups. This will also take some power induction that may be greater than the FM systems being used can handle. And are we not on the verge of getting wireless power induction for operating such devices, the same technology intended to refresh batteries and even run laptops?
A bit farther in the future will be to switch from spike analysis of neural firing to time/frequency analysis of synchronized activity such as EEGs examine. The former require computation that's commonly available. The latter require continuous wavelet analysis that s
They keep referring to the patient in the test as a 'volunteer' but also state that he was "paralyzed except for slow vertical movement of the eyes." So he what? Signed the release forms by slowly looking up and down? I am guessing they mean volunteer as in 'his guardian(s) "volunteered" him'.
[irony] Why those bastards! And to think, they could have preserved the poor guy's rights and left him in his locked-in state, unable to communicate. That's the way God obviously intended him to be, and they had no right to play God for him. No doubt the poor guy's first 'words', since he would have recognized his rights were violated, would be "unplug me". [/irony]
I am calling this neuroscience because it has nothing to do with how the nervous system operates. In this sense I am following the lead of WIRED and/or Dunbar, who can't tell a neuro from a social. From TFA: "Kevin Dunbar is a researcher who studies how scientists study things". OK, he studies things called scientists. scientists are people. The study of people and how they behave is psychology. Science is a social activity. Investigations of social activities are sociology when taken as a whole, or social psychology when considered in terms of the activities of individuals operating within a social group. Dunbar studied social psychology, not neuroscience. There's not a speck of neuroscience cereal in it anywhere. There's very little if any actual social psychology, and psychology, or any science at all. There's talking about science, there's talking to scientists about doing science, and there's watching them do science. There's watching and talking about getting good results and not getting good results, and what people do in the matter case. If Dunbar thinks he's doing neuroscience, I suspect he's not even very clear on science itself, much less the various branches. And it does say he's "a researcher in", not that he's a scientist. I do research in curry recipes from different countries and cultures. I'm a researcher, but not a cultural curriology scientist.
In fact I'll go s far as to say he's a researcher because he knows precious little and is trying to find out basic things, not as is the case with most scientists, someone who knows a fair amount and is trying to build on that with new knowledge. He is apparently not clear on the difference between 'screwing up' and not getting good and/or clean results. This may well be because he was unclear himself as to what it was he was looking at and talking about, and he thought he was just not getting good or clean results, when actually, guess what?
He doesn't let loose any secrets. Anyone can talk to scientists and as what happens if and when things don't turn out as expected. If you get an honest (ie. less concerned with appearances than truth) scientist, anyone would get the same answers. Or one could simply read work from real social psychologists and others who study science and scientists and learn the same things. I myself always recommend Collin's & Pinch's "The Golem" as an illuminating, instructive and entertaining starting point.
And a technical point on methodology: a study that does not find a difference between groups, treatments, whatever, 'fails to reject the null hypothesis' (the assertion that there is no observable difference). It does not prove there is no difference, it merely fails to find one. It fails, but only to find a difference, not to produce a result. It can't say there is no difference, it can only say that it couldn't find one. And, it fails to find a difference, no matter how nicely or hapazardly the data come out. The only studies that "fail" produce no data. Scientists may further fail to find an interpretation, but there's no limitation on trying to figure this out, and it applies to both 'results' (reject null hypothesis) and 'no results' (fail to reject null). Studies that produce data that 'makes no sense' produce data that fails to reject the null. The 'making no sense' is a post hoc evaluation of the data based on an incomplete understanding of the design, collection, analysis or interpretation. Such evaluations are done in science, but they are not part of the scientific process. Therefore when this occurs, it is not a "scientific" result and cannot be taken to reflect in the nature or quality of the work done. If you can't figure what it means, you can't figure out. You cannot say that since you cannot figure it out, then you figure out that it fails. If you think you can take something that 'doesn't make sense' and then say that it makes sense in that it represents a failure, then you've contradicted the assertion that it makes no sense. All you can say is that you don't understand it, and since you d
Science fiction is sometimes written on the basis of "if this goes on" or "taken to the extreme". Guardian writes theirs by taking things like offhand comments made on a radio show about someone should do something like this because it'd be a good idea, and changed it to committing a country's space program to actually doing so.
Guardian has published similar articles before and invariably doesn't even bother to cover its tracks. If plans were actually being made to carry out such a program, it is highly unlikely that a target would have been selected. And if one had been selected, it would probably have been one of the dozens of known NEOs with greater cumulative impact probabilities than Apophis. And/or rather than risk failure when success was required, would have first conducted a test mission on a rock where neither failure nor accidental retargeting would result in Earth impact, and with a small enough mass that a smaller project could have a chance of succeding. And in any case, if any actual plans were being made within the Russian space agency, its head would know more about the details such as actual perigee dates.
And just in case readers can't concentrate on science alone for the length of the article, or might not understand it if not placed in a more familiar context, Guardian manages to insert three different science fiction references. Slashdotters who do so rarely insert more than one, even when the length of their post is greater than the ~650 words of TFA.
At least by making themselves out to be irresponsible, they can avoid being expected to print retraction, corrections and/or apologies. At the rate they generate cause for such, if they were to be taken seriously, at least one full issue per year would consist solely of these.
Getting matching shirts with the department mark on them is awesome. You get singled out as being special, and everybody will know all of them by name, by face, and by reputation. It's not just a shirt, it'a freaking badge, of the professional ism you mention. If one department gets them, I bet some others will want to also.
FREE CLOTHES d00d. So what if they match. They don't come out of your paycheck.
TFA is only about north. South is moving also, but not nearly as much. Two magnetic poles are not a rigid dipole. Maybe in the core, but at the surface they're fairly independent. Given this, it's quite possible that past geomagnetic events were not 'reversals' with north and south sliding past each other and popping out the other side. Rather north and south might wander far enough out of opposite that the Earth's external magnetic field is far off center, and/or very strong over some parts but weak over others. Conceivably they could 'collapse' by becoming too close. The magnetic field would appear to go away although the generator (and whatever drives it) is still operating. I think this makes more sense than the direct reversal in that it assumes the generator to stop operating, which I find unlikely, and start again of its own accord, which smacks of a planetary "and then a miracle occurs". The data does support this hypothesis as being at lest possible. In 2005 magnetic north of 500 miles from true north, while magnetic south was 1750 miles from true south. Either the dipole is off center, which contradicts the generator idea, or the dipole is bent.
It's 'critic', not 'critics'. And picking on a bunch of scientists and engineers for not being talking heads is just too straw man for me. You've got pencil pushers pushing penciled in numbers. Aren't the numbers enough? Well, for some things, no. So maybe they shouldn't try to cover everything.
NASA is constantly battling itself over budget. How are they supposed to hire on-air personalities without someone having to decry having their mission scrubbed?
Maybe if they had a decent following they could get some talent, as well as get regular news coverage. But the US lost its love affair with space while Walter Cronkite was still sitting at that folding table inland from pad 39. If memory serves, it was only Apollo 13 (pre-explosion) when the US TV networks started neglecting the NASA feed in favor of scheduled programming.
On the other hand there have been some decent NASA programs in the past. One of the Firesign Theatre guys at the Voyager Neptune fly by for instance. Even then he was pressed into service after having been given a ticket into JPL by one of the mission operators.
If and when, if and when..... should NASA ever find it in their pockets to hire on air talent (which would by necessity require writing and editing), only one possibility comes to mind, complete with connections to James Oberg and other space pros and amateurs of note: Alan Boyle. He could not only cover the space stuff, but other relevant science stuff, and he has a lot of people to draw on to fill slots with.
When one does research one seeks to eliminate bias to the greatest extent possible. When one has a vested interest in the subject, it is even more important, as one's reputation rides on it.
Sessions is not incapable when it comes to business IT and complexity. Unfortunately he is more capable in those areas than in methodology. Although his approach is laudable, his exclusion of bias sources appears approximately nil. TFA clearly states that he makes certain assumptions. That can't be helped. But to make the result reflect real world rather than producing a paper to boost self-importance (even inadvertantly) those assumptions should have been better questioned at the outset. Better late than never:
His primary source is the World Technology and Services Alliance. They want to appear important to others. Thus they will emphasize data that won't get counted the same way by an outsider. A neutral source would have provided data less likely to be considered biased. The CIA Factbook for instance.
Rather than assuming a percentage of GDP as primary expendature (the same IT percentage for the US as for Republic of Congo - per capita GDP = US$300), go to a source that has calculated the total (with references so they can be checked or argued). Gartner, not unbiased but industrious towards that end, says "Worldwide IT spending is on pace to total $3.2 trillion in 2009, a 6 percent decline from 2008 spending of $3.4 trillion". And now we're on track for twice as much failure as spending, indicating a problem greater than simple math.
He lumps all communications technology in with IT. Not what most would do, but at least he says what he's doing. But is he being relevant to IT, from CIO down to help desk answer-droid by making them appear responsible for the cost of a high bandwidth geosynch satellite?
"66% of all Federal IT dollars are invested in projects that are “at risk”". Federal expendatures (in this case, purchases) are well known to have their importance padded so as not to lose funding next cycle. Without a varifiable basis for using this claim, it should simply be dropped. Instead he attempts to estimate failure rate from it. This begs the question, if the purchase was based on at risk, and it was made, did that risk go away? If not, there will be some risk assessment criteria coming down with the next round of budget cuts. Without the white paper, I can't say, but I'm guessing the risk includes new tech to thwart intrusion and so forth, not technology at risk of melting down.
Finally, he makes the statement that these are estimates and the numbers aren't important, but their sheer magnitude it. Magnitude relates to numbers. You can't justify a statement of magnitude without using some. His result is twice the estimated 2009 spending. Might he have a problem with magnitude? Definitely. Orders of magnitude, probably. Over 20 years ago health care spending passed defense spending as the greatest bite of the US GDP. In 2007, US health care spending was US$2.26 trillion. He claims worldwide IT failure is 2.7 times that. It would seem we don't have a health care crisis, we have an IT crisis that is draining revenue from everything at a rate up to or even greater than the funding that fuels it. We would do better without IT. (This is reduction to absurdity, lest anyone take that seriously).
A point that may rescue his work somewhat, is the fact that a failure/loss is not a cost. It gets called that if the failure impinges directly on a profit margin. Even then, that's not necessarily accurate. A loss or failure that's replaced with something purchased counts as a cost. Something thrown away, left broken, used in a crippled state, operating at less than capacity/effectiveness or otherwise not giving what was paid for is not a cost. It was a cost when first purchased. It can't cost again because it doesn't act right (unless replaced, as noted, and then the cost is the new one, not the old). When a company has to account for its failures and losses, if these can be made to
"If there were weekly launches of a rocket, there would be many * DOLLARS * for new ideas to be tried out..."
Nope, sorry, it'll never get off the ground Orville.
These things cost money. Frequently too much, but even the best deals cost. Launching rockets costs a lot. It does not generate money. You can't buy squat with "opportunities", and can buy far less of you're punching holes in the sky based on a schedule of launches instead of a schedule of available payloads.
Exactly how is a score of 2, 1 for the post and 1 for an earned karma bonus, over rated?
Just some dipshit that'd rather see all Facebook and games articles modding down everything else without cause or a rational relation to mod points, I suppose.
"If there were weekly launches of a rocket, there would be many * DOLLARS * for new ideas to be tried out..."
Nope, sorry, it'll never get off the ground Orville.
These things cost money. Frequently too much, but even the best deals cost. Launching rockets costs a lot. It does not generate money. You can't buy squat with "opportunities", and can buy far less of you're punching holes in the sky based on a schedule of launches instead of a schedule of available payloads.
Let's just start with part of the headline material:
" 'The same neurostim device that uses electric impulses from a brain implant to treat people with Parkinson's Disease can be tweaked by a few millimeters and pulse rates to make cocaine addicts feel like they are high all the time..."
This (and TFA) is from "James Kent is the former publisher of Psychedelic Illuminations and Trip Magazine. He currently edits DoseNation.com, a drug blog featuring news, humor and commentary."
Hardly your neuroscience expert, or even much of an educated amateur. Educated enough to be dangerous to his own reputation perhaps. We can hope.
Where Mr. Kent goes wrong is in thinking the stimulator used for Parky's can stimulate other parts of the same structure (within a "few millimeters), the Substantia Nigra, which produced dopamine which is also released in cocaine use, and that this is the reward center, so that doing so makes one feel high.
The common misconception is based on the "reward" aspect, and confusion of cause and effect with respect to drug use. The reward system operates in the manner of conditioning or learning, in that its output helps to produce the association between a behavior and a reinforcer. Let's just assume for maximum illustration that the reinforcer here is a cocaine high. We have the drug taking behavior, and we have the cocaine high resulting. The dopamine system puts on the brakes with respect to ongoing seeking/investigating and lets the organism maintain focused attention on the object that produced the positive feeling -- it makes reinforcement possible. Note that it does not cause the high, the reinforcer does that. There are many reinforcers that can make learning occur, and most of them do not cause any sort of high. Just because cocaine causes a release of dopamine does not mean this is the source of the high. No, this is the source of the powerful reinforcement that causes addiction to start. Dopamine does not act as a "reward", it allows a reinforcer to do so effectively regardless of any psychotropic effects. It is the cascade of various neurotransmitters that causes the high. Evidence of this is found in the effect of pramipexole (Mirapex) on people. It is a selective dopaminergic and does not cause any high. But it does (at a high enough dosage) cause obsessive/compulsive use and behaviors much as an addiction and related activities.
Moving a Parky's stimulator will not produce a high, but it might produce the problems related to addiction.
I've previously pointed out the lack of facts in h+ articles, and the preponderance of fiction. This article starts out with the latter. Check the rest of it for yourself to see if there are any reliable facts actually taken from known science, or whether they are other common misconceptions put to service to fill white space.
As for cognitive enhancing drugs, amphetamines and such are behavior boosters, not capable of producing long term cognitive enhancement, unless by enhancement one means seeking more of the same. Cognitive enhancing drugs (nootropics) have been around for over 50 years. The first, hydergine, is the red headed step child of the man who called LSD "My Problem Child", Albert Hoffman. There are many such drugs in use throughout the world except for the US where they are allowed only in the cases where they will not help -- severe progressive dementia. In contract with the very lucrative drugs typically used as congitive enhancers, nootropics have very little side effects or interactions.
In the cases where cognitiion enhancement is possible, anything related to intoxication is contraindicated and counterproductive. Confusing "reward" with getting high, when it is intended only to related to learning reinforcement is key to understanding this. It is also key to determining whether the source is intent on getting smart or getting high, because the latter refuse to give up on the misconception.
Mods: this is a neutral discussion about peoples' reactions to certain things. It is not intended as the insulting(to some) material being talked about. No valuation is placed on any concept from any viewpoint.
You're absolutely right. This failure is one of language. But that too has roots. Specifically one of lack of understanding of the concept of honor as used. For example, sports teams using the names of indigenous groups sometimes claim that doing so "honors" them. That shows at least an complete lack of understanding of what they're talking about, and at worst a fossilized attitude generated in times past and attached so deeply to this concept that the association is the 'object'. Colbert's example is equally powerful, with the emotional content being so much stronger that the association with anything, a rational combination or not, and the thing is suddenly evil. For instance, put one on a public toilet door, and very few jews will use it after that.
There's been at least one long standing battle in the US over much the same problem: people taking an image, name and/or conceptual equivalent, and using it in such a way as to... dishonor is frequently used here, but not many understand the it from the injured parties' standing.... insult is closer but too weak... we'll just say: to promote a commercial product, the juxtaposition of the appropriated image and the product being contrary to the known statements of the party imaged and/or the descendants.
The product in this case is Crazy Horse malt liquor. Crazy Horse spoke out against alcohol many times, specifically claiming its use was destroying his people. His descendants have been trying to get the brewer to stop using the name. No, they didn;t attempt to acquire copy right or trademark protection, because they didn't think they'd need it. In their culture, such protection is automatic and seated deeply in the cultural mores.
I don't believe Spielberg was ever admitted to USC.
Quite right, I sit reclined and slouching, corrected. He applied three times and it was a C average that prevented his acceptance, not his continuance. That makes the honorary a bit frivolous.
O'Bannon not only wrote Dark Star, he plays Sgt. Pinback in the movie.
Co-wrote. With John Carpenter.
O'Bannon also was film editor. And production designer. And supervisor of visual special effects, for which he got a first place award in 1975 from the forerunner of the Saturn Awards.
Looks like a lot of work for one person, and perhaps it was. But keep in mind this was two guys working on a 45 minute student project up until someone paid them US$60k to expand it out to feature length. And as far as I can tell (and I'm another who watches this movie yearly or so) the difference between the original feature length and the much later 'dirctor's cut' is Doolittle's little musical bottle recital.
The focus of the student version was on the 'beach ball' alien sequence, which was comedic. Changing the theme of it to horror for the feature length without losing the impact showed a great deal of talent in both writers. A fellow USC grad's student film helped launch is career also, the final escape sequence of George Lucas's THX 1138. And just to help differentiate between success and academic success, Stephen Spielberg was also a USC grad school student, but didn't finish there due to a C average. (In fact he didn't finish until 2002 at California State University, Long Beach, having received an honorary degree from USC in 1994 and becoming a trustee there in 1996).
Just guessing based on the preponderance of SF work in O'Bannon's IMDB entry, I suspect he rather than Carpenter was the one who adapted Ray Bradbury's short story Kaleidoscope from The Illustrated Man as the ending sequence, with one astronaut carried off by some semi-mystical asteroids, the other ending in a firey re-entry. That adaptation is referenced in the Dark Star Wikipedia entry. Not mentioned anywhere but of too great similarity to ignore are Bomb 20's final act, having determined that he is alone in the universe to exclaim "Let there be light" (vs. Asimov's "The Last Question") and the post-mortem consciousness of the commander afforded by his cryogenic preservation (vs. Larry Niven's "Wait It Out"). I also used to think Talby's obsession with staying in the observation chair wasn't a phobia having to do with the commander's death, but was taken from another story which included mental changes verging on madness if one watched too much empty space, but I can't recall which one, and there's an awful lot of those.
BTW, Benson Arizona MP3 and lyrics are available at SF author Robert Sawyer's web site.
“The decision is not going to make anyone gasp,” said one source in the White House,....
Then we can rule out any significant breakthrough or giant step change, such as a million + pound payload, two stage/two motor with extremely simplified internals, with initial cost per pound to LEO about 25% (at best, possibly as little as 10% of this estimate; 2.5% that of Ares-H) of that of the best optimistic estimate that the Ares heavy would approach after 12 launches. Some of the technical details that were far less complex and more reliable than any in use or planned were panned a 'not interesting' and used as cause to dismiss the design, although some of those same details made it into later designs that flew.
The design was done for Aerojet in 1962 by Robert Truax http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/searagon.htm The revolutionary sea launch aspect was the one portion actually tested in an earlier model. The simplicity of the design would make it possible to take from paper to LEO in 5 years. This is just one such design that could be retrieved from history where it was buried in favor of corporate welfare. This is one of the few actually done by a documented and well respected pioneer of rocketry http://neverworld.net/truax/ .
Rusty Schweickart is not, in this instance, an ex-astronaut, he is the CEO of B612 Foundation, dedicated to promoting their gravity tractor design for asteroid deflection. This design solves the 'problems' which are here hung around the necks of politicians. B612 has been 'solving' these same problems in the same way for over 20 years now. The situations where this design fails are still the same also, most notably short notice. This is no objective analysis of solutions to social and other problems that might arise --- this is a sales job for one of several designs that would need to be developed in order to meet the many possible problems. Yet this and the other designs with potential business backing, do not present themselves are inadequate alone, a social problem itself, in that these 'experts' are not pounding home the truth that no one an tell ahead of time which of these would be needed and/or would work if tried, so several different esigns would be required to be available. Also, these are large scale interplanetary programs, with a good chance of technical failure preventing successful completion, thus making it necessary to have more than one of each design available. Figure the odds of getting funding for more than one copy of one design. Yeah, until the impact table comes out with our names on it.
The Soviet military lacked a consistent record keeping system. A supply unit created one using the Russian Apple II clone and AppleWorks 1.2. It worked so well that AppleWorks 1/3 was hacked to support the Cyrillic font in the clone. Eventully the Sovient military became the #1 pirate of AppleWorks world wide.
The Soviets had thousands of thermonuclear weapons as did the US. Had one side used them, the other would also. The combined megatonnage could have sterilized the Earth's crust over a meter down. All higher life would have perished either immediately or in a cascade of die-offs.
This post is a direct challanger to the summary post for being both true in substance and best use of hyperbole and non-use of tense in order to put together a marginally interesting article with an absolutely untrue title to draw people in, and dumpt them nearly flat out after providing a tiny bit of information.
The folks at Harvard-Smithsonian and IOTA did some fine work. It could have been reported as they presented it and been very interesting science. When it gets filtered through a fake science reporting agent like Science Daily, and rewritten by one of said agent's fiction writers with only enough relevant background to make them capable of finding FUDish material that wouldn't be entirely inapplicable, the result is something that should have been rejected by the only places to which it should have been submitted: Hollywood movie producers.
The sun is a nearly a dwarf star. It will undergo a very mild death compared to larger stars. They will nova or supernova, but the sun will placidly swell to a red giant, pulse as it burns out, then shrink to white dwarf. Only true dwarf stars will undergo a milder demise, skipping the red giant phase. No amount of mediocre Hollywood scifi horrification and awfulism will change the fact that our mild mannered stellar companion has no evil supervillian alter ego waiting to take over at its end of days. Adding such extraneous comic book (as opposed to the more respectable graphic fiction) "reporting" is only done by a writer, or at the behest of an editor or publisher, who have no confidence in the science itself or their reportage of it being sufficiently interesting. rather than risk being factual for a readership interested in such things, they attempt to draw in a greater audience with an interest and education in science equal to that of the author's writing style, with the assumption that by adding the pseudo-scientific car wreck material they can get that larger audience to slow down and rubber neck at the bloody mess of hyperbole spray painted over the facts.
SD is as useful and accurate a source for science as The Economist, which has also been quoted here for similarly poor reasons. Slashdotters are for the most part sophisticated enough to be able to appreciate the facts without having to viddy the horrorshow while sipping a bit of the moloko plus (obSFref, Clockwork Orange). Th remainder, while not so inclined to factualism in science, are still so invariably capable when it comes to traditional/. reply banter that an article consisting of raw data would likely end up in a verbal tsunami repleat with references to Microsoft, Google and MafIAA (blaming them for the stellar death no doubt) and welcoming our Red Giant Overlords and their Soviet Russian Beowulf Clusters.
The very worst part of this example of poor writing in lieu of science journalism is being kept separate because it has nothing to do with science. Something that is happening now (or being observed now, relatively speaking) does not and can not mimic something that will happen in the future, whether that be in 5 billion years, or next week when you accept a job writing equally badly for an outlet equally unwilling to risk actual factual journalism. Unless, of course, one an say that one's present insufficient income from writing such trash mimics the income one will receive in the future when one continues of a career path of writing badly for outlets intentionally presenting said trash. All the more reason to stay in school, kids, and if you quit, go back.
Now, I don't expect/. readers to follow Astrophysical Journal and the like in order to get unadulterated science to report on here. But I would hope that the submitters and editors would at least acknowledge the quality of the sources by presenting them such as "With their typical crunchy coating of fiction, fact mangling and FUD surrounding a center of creamy scientific nougat still untouched by science journalists' hands, Science Daily reassures us that it is 'an excellent driver' while setting fire to and waving madly an interesting article" dot dot dot.
The mathematicians (or boffins, I'm not sure which) have made a mistake of omission for something that their extensive experiences has caused them to neglect: is there an odd or even number of pieces? Cutting it into an odd number with the points near the center can be done while adhering to the definition give. It can also be done if the cuts go all the way across but the crossover is at the edge.
As for 'who will get more?' the answer in my case is simple: me. I spent too many years as a starving grad student. I developed the reflexes necessary to grab the first piece, and lost every bit of self-respect I ever had that would prevent me from taking the last. And if I can get my hands on the little rolling cutting wheel pizza cutter, do NOT reach for a piece without letting me know what you're doing because I get very protective of any pizzas in my vicinity.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a correlation between human IQ and brain size. It is weak. SO weak that it proves itself of little use to anyone.
The review articles I went over showed correlations between 0.3 and 0.4. What does that explain? The amount of variance accounted for in a correlation is found by squaring the correlation. Thus, the amount of variance account for by the IQ/size correlation is between 0.09 and 0.16.
In other words, the best we have in scientific examination of IQ and brain size leaves between 84% and 91% unexplained. Logic dictates that betting on less than a 50/50 chance is a losing proposition. Betting on 'IQ = brain size' is right about 6 to 1 against. Not quite lottery ticket odds, but not where you'd want to put your money.
As for anything having to do with intelligence, you can find correlations for those too. But my comment regarding definition of intelligence stands. While they obviously had to use some definition of intelligence and stated what they're using, that doesn't mean their, or any, definition of intelligence is objective, measurable, accurate, reliable, or generally acceptable to anyone, least of all cognitive psychologists who specialize in intelligence.
Brain size does not correlate with IQ.
Brain size does not correlate with intelligence.
IQ doesn't correlate with intelligence.
Trying to force any of these into existence is equal in validity to telling someone's personality traits from the bumps on their head.
Anyone who wants to take issue with the statements above regarding intelligence would first need to provide a definition of intelligence with an objective and replicable measurement of it. They'd also have to justify using it despite the enormous of disparity of opinions from cognitive psychologists on what intelligence is. Most of them have an opinion on the matter. The ones that know the most will acknowledge it as an opinion and will acknowledge the disparity.
Now as to TFA and IQ, if such beings existed, it's no wonder they're extinct. IQ is a measure of how well one does on an IQ test. If these beings' claim to evolutionary fame is their IQ, one can envision them sitting around taking tests, making them easy targets for predators. One can also envision them getting eaten while other hominids with smaller brains (and one would assume from TFA lesser IQs) run away. One can then meditate on the meaning of intelligence with respect to IQ since sitting around getting eaten doesn't seem to be a very intelligent behavior. If IQ made them smart, they'd have recognized the fact that running away was working for the others and adopted the technique.
Some questions for thought with regards to the issues of rights and ownership. The readership here is big on rights. Where's consideration for these peoples' rights? Pretending the issue is between the public (ie. domain) and governmental control is overly simplistic. The rights of the owners get devalued in such discussions and the owners are relegated to the ping pong ball treatment. Try to read through and think on them before responding. This is not intended as flamebait, but as an opening of awareness to include a class of rights holders not as often considered here as others. So please do read through all the way to the bottom, there are important points there too.
So, reconsider this as "Whose Property Would You Have Taken Away Tomorrow"?
Why not contact some of the authors/owners for things that would have gone PD and ask them to sign their rights over to PD? Seems to me to be more fair to have the owners sign them over at a time of their choosing than forcing them to relinquish according to a calendar.
Why not require authors to include a 'convert to PD' statement in their new application for copyright, which gives them up to a mandated maximum, but for which they can specify a lesser amount?
For that matter, why not have every application for copyright have a question on it, asking the applicant for their opinion on future changes to the law, asking what time span would be fair to use as the maximum before requiring conversion to PD? Non-binding certainly, but at least it takes the opinions of those most affected into account.
While in force copyright acts much like other rights of ownership. How many other laws covering protection of owners' rights require the owner to give their property away after a certain period? No matter how rightly this is required, as has always been the intention of copyright laws, it still is a case of mandated relinquishing of ownership.
Turn it around and look at it. Let's say you buy a brand new house. In the deed is a statement that in let's say 50 years, it becomes property of the state and will be given over to the homeless, under control of the same agency that protects your ownership in the mean time. You can still live there, but so can anyone else. Oh, and selling the house doesn't change that date. Consider what that's going to do to your property value over time. If that was the law and you wanted a house, of course you'd have to go along. But as time went on the implications would start to matter more. Now imaging that the government comes along and says they're going to change all existing contracts saying 50 years to 75 years. Will you, as owner, have a problem with that? Theoretically the law also protected the homeless by providing them a place to live. They have rights too, and it's beneficial for society to have its members caring for each other rather than have one class left to go without since that causes all sorts of other problems like crime. Will you tell the government that you'd just as soon keep your 50 year limit and allow your ownership to expire? And you people in the market for a house that can't afford a new one but are willing to fix up and old one to maker it worth more, will you buy a used house? How old?
That's simply property. Copyright covers things that usually produce income for the owner, sometimes for an extended period. So let's change the above from owning a home to owning a business (owning, selling and speculation of copyrights are part of the business of authorship and publishing, after all). Will you start a business if you know that after 50 years it will be turned over to public trust and all income derived diverted to public funds? What will you do as the time approaches? Will you stick to your original contract or will you accept the government's extension?
Society needs responsible and stable owners of both homes and businesses to maintain what they own for the duration of their ownership. The alternative is their neglect as the value to them draws down. The result would be that t
All I've ever wanted from brain-interface computing is the ability to 'think' music into some format where I can play it back again. Are we getting close to that yet?
In what sense? Single note control of a virtual synthesizer (external control of a real synth, like MIDI) is possible using the technique here applied to motor control of a finger. Multiple notes easily done after once cross-channel signal interference is eliminated (the fingers talk to each other in the cortex). Add another channel, and you can control a bank of instrument selection, again like MIDI. But all you've done is replace your hands with hardware. This is a damn expensive process as well as requiring some surgery.
If you want to go from, say, remembered music ie. "playing a song in your head" to some output, you have to find the far more complex signals relating to the memories, figure out how to find as many of the pieces of memory as possible, eliminate false positives and inaccurate memories of this, figure out how to put the pieces together properly, figure out how to take that pretty-good-but-not-complete collection of memory derived signals and re-create the piece using something capable of filling in the many blanks (memories are full of holes but we only need parts to 'recall' them). We don't know how to decode memories, because they're far more complex than the mere spikes of cells firing which direct small collections of muscle cells to work. And the process above will require a great deal of feedback to test the signal being re-created for accuracy against memory at several steps. The computational power necessary for the steps may be orders of magnitude greater than what's available, and then to keep pace with it in the feedback/correction process, greater still.
Getting a match to memory has been done and this technique should improve on that. Extracting the memory itself from neural signal is way beyond us, and reconstruction of the memory contents farther still.
Most implant approaches use electrodes shoved in from the outside intending them to work immediately. That invasive technique leaves the person open to infection, and the neurons contacted tend to die fairly quickly, requiring yet another round of more of the same. This approach takes a long time, but eliminates the chance of infection (after the obviously necessary implantation) and lets neurons grow into and around the electrodes, so none of them producing signal are likely to die off soon, allowing long term contact and communication.
I'm sure there will be improvements on this, but this looks to me to be the first really viable direct neural signal collection technique.
"Five years ago, when the volunteer was 21 years old, the scientists implanted an electrode near the boundary between the speech-related premotor and primary motor cortex (specifically, the left ventral premotor cortex). Neurites began growing into the electrode and, in three or four months, the neurites produced signaling patterns on the electrode wires that have been maintained indefinitely.
Three years after implantation, the researchers began testing the brain-machine interface for real-time synthetic speech production. The system is “telemetric” - it requires no wires or connectors passing through the skin, eliminating the risk of infection. Instead, the electrode amplifies and converts neural signals into frequency modulated (FM) radio signals. These signals are wirelessly transmitted across the scalp to two coils, which are attached to the volunteer’s head using a water-soluble paste. The coils act as receiving antenna for the RF signals. The implanted electrode is powered by an induction power supply via a power coil, which is also attached to the head."
Rather than risking killing off speech center neurons in the implant process, they instead implant them in the pathway through which the speech center communicates outbound. Previous attempts by others went directly for the primary processing centers. This small change shows remarkable thinking foresight. I'd call this the first true hack in neural interfacing.
The only point of clarification I'd add is to say "through the scalp" instead of "across"; the latter more often implies a lateral vector. And the only point I'd request is, if only the scalp needs to be traversed, is the transmitter between the skull and scalp? It appears so but isn't stated s such in the paper (the PLoS article's URL is at the bottom of TFA). In any case, the FM transmission through the scalp does away with all the permanent jacks and sockets that SF and Hollywood have always used to signify brain/machine interfacing. With this one implementation, the future image of neural interfacing becomes something like a hair net with buttons sewn into it (we already have EEGs like this). Someone call Larry Niven. Wireheads will be buttonheads.
A future hack will almost certainly be to collect the signal wires running from the scalp to a second transmitter operating between the person and the machine. This will eliminate the direct connection and allow movement, including ambulatory data collection and processing. That not only makes possible testing in realistic situations, but also neural control of machine mediated locomotion for the paralyzed, without being restricted to the length of a cable. An obvious inclusion here would be a transmitter at the machine with receiver on the person, running the signals into the relevant muscle groups. This will also take some power induction that may be greater than the FM systems being used can handle. And are we not on the verge of getting wireless power induction for operating such devices, the same technology intended to refresh batteries and even run laptops?
A bit farther in the future will be to switch from spike analysis of neural firing to time/frequency analysis of synchronized activity such as EEGs examine. The former require computation that's commonly available. The latter require continuous wavelet analysis that s
They keep referring to the patient in the test as a 'volunteer' but also state that he was "paralyzed except for slow vertical movement of the eyes." So he what? Signed the release forms by slowly looking up and down? I am guessing they mean volunteer as in 'his guardian(s) "volunteered" him'.
[irony]
Why those bastards! And to think, they could have preserved the poor guy's rights and left him in his locked-in state, unable to communicate. That's the way God obviously intended him to be, and they had no right to play God for him. No doubt the poor guy's first 'words', since he would have recognized his rights were violated, would be "unplug me".
[/irony]
I am calling this neuroscience because it has nothing to do with how the nervous system operates. In this sense I am following the lead of WIRED and/or Dunbar, who can't tell a neuro from a social. From TFA: "Kevin Dunbar is a researcher who studies how scientists study things". OK, he studies things called scientists. scientists are people. The study of people and how they behave is psychology. Science is a social activity. Investigations of social activities are sociology when taken as a whole, or social psychology when considered in terms of the activities of individuals operating within a social group. Dunbar studied social psychology, not neuroscience. There's not a speck of neuroscience cereal in it anywhere. There's very little if any actual social psychology, and psychology, or any science at all. There's talking about science, there's talking to scientists about doing science, and there's watching them do science. There's watching and talking about getting good results and not getting good results, and what people do in the matter case. If Dunbar thinks he's doing neuroscience, I suspect he's not even very clear on science itself, much less the various branches. And it does say he's "a researcher in", not that he's a scientist. I do research in curry recipes from different countries and cultures. I'm a researcher, but not a cultural curriology scientist.
In fact I'll go s far as to say he's a researcher because he knows precious little and is trying to find out basic things, not as is the case with most scientists, someone who knows a fair amount and is trying to build on that with new knowledge. He is apparently not clear on the difference between 'screwing up' and not getting good and/or clean results. This may well be because he was unclear himself as to what it was he was looking at and talking about, and he thought he was just not getting good or clean results, when actually, guess what?
He doesn't let loose any secrets. Anyone can talk to scientists and as what happens if and when things don't turn out as expected. If you get an honest (ie. less concerned with appearances than truth) scientist, anyone would get the same answers. Or one could simply read work from real social psychologists and others who study science and scientists and learn the same things. I myself always recommend Collin's & Pinch's "The Golem" as an illuminating, instructive and entertaining starting point.
And a technical point on methodology: a study that does not find a difference between groups, treatments, whatever, 'fails to reject the null hypothesis' (the assertion that there is no observable difference). It does not prove there is no difference, it merely fails to find one. It fails, but only to find a difference, not to produce a result. It can't say there is no difference, it can only say that it couldn't find one. And, it fails to find a difference, no matter how nicely or hapazardly the data come out. The only studies that "fail" produce no data. Scientists may further fail to find an interpretation, but there's no limitation on trying to figure this out, and it applies to both 'results' (reject null hypothesis) and 'no results' (fail to reject null). Studies that produce data that 'makes no sense' produce data that fails to reject the null. The 'making no sense' is a post hoc evaluation of the data based on an incomplete understanding of the design, collection, analysis or interpretation. Such evaluations are done in science, but they are not part of the scientific process. Therefore when this occurs, it is not a "scientific" result and cannot be taken to reflect in the nature or quality of the work done. If you can't figure what it means, you can't figure out. You cannot say that since you cannot figure it out, then you figure out that it fails. If you think you can take something that 'doesn't make sense' and then say that it makes sense in that it represents a failure, then you've contradicted the assertion that it makes no sense. All you can say is that you don't understand it, and since you d
Science fiction is sometimes written on the basis of "if this goes on" or "taken to the extreme". Guardian writes theirs by taking things like offhand comments made on a radio show about someone should do something like this because it'd be a good idea, and changed it to committing a country's space program to actually doing so.
Guardian has published similar articles before and invariably doesn't even bother to cover its tracks. If plans were actually being made to carry out such a program, it is highly unlikely that a target would have been selected. And if one had been selected, it would probably have been one of the dozens of known NEOs with greater cumulative impact probabilities than Apophis. And/or rather than risk failure when success was required, would have first conducted a test mission on a rock where neither failure nor accidental retargeting would result in Earth impact, and with a small enough mass that a smaller project could have a chance of succeding. And in any case, if any actual plans were being made within the Russian space agency, its head would know more about the details such as actual perigee dates.
And just in case readers can't concentrate on science alone for the length of the article, or might not understand it if not placed in a more familiar context, Guardian manages to insert three different science fiction references. Slashdotters who do so rarely insert more than one, even when the length of their post is greater than the ~650 words of TFA.
At least by making themselves out to be irresponsible, they can avoid being expected to print retraction, corrections and/or apologies. At the rate they generate cause for such, if they were to be taken seriously, at least one full issue per year would consist solely of these.
Getting matching shirts with the department mark on them is awesome. You get singled out as being special, and everybody will know all of them by name, by face, and by reputation. It's not just a shirt, it'a freaking badge, of the professional ism you mention. If one department gets them, I bet some others will want to also.
FREE CLOTHES d00d. So what if they match. They don't come out of your paycheck.
TFA is only about north. South is moving also, but not nearly as much. Two magnetic poles are not a rigid dipole. Maybe in the core, but at the surface they're fairly independent. Given this, it's quite possible that past geomagnetic events were not 'reversals' with north and south sliding past each other and popping out the other side. Rather north and south might wander far enough out of opposite that the Earth's external magnetic field is far off center, and/or very strong over some parts but weak over others. Conceivably they could 'collapse' by becoming too close. The magnetic field would appear to go away although the generator (and whatever drives it) is still operating. I think this makes more sense than the direct reversal in that it assumes the generator to stop operating, which I find unlikely, and start again of its own accord, which smacks of a planetary "and then a miracle occurs". The data does support this hypothesis as being at lest possible. In 2005 magnetic north of 500 miles from true north, while magnetic south was 1750 miles from true south. Either the dipole is off center, which contradicts the generator idea, or the dipole is bent.
It's 'critic', not 'critics'. And picking on a bunch of scientists and engineers for not being talking heads is just too straw man for me. You've got pencil pushers pushing penciled in numbers. Aren't the numbers enough? Well, for some things, no. So maybe they shouldn't try to cover everything.
NASA is constantly battling itself over budget. How are they supposed to hire on-air personalities without someone having to decry having their mission scrubbed?
Maybe if they had a decent following they could get some talent, as well as get regular news coverage. But the US lost its love affair with space while Walter Cronkite was still sitting at that folding table inland from pad 39. If memory serves, it was only Apollo 13 (pre-explosion) when the US TV networks started neglecting the NASA feed in favor of scheduled programming.
On the other hand there have been some decent NASA programs in the past. One of the Firesign Theatre guys at the Voyager Neptune fly by for instance. Even then he was pressed into service after having been given a ticket into JPL by one of the mission operators.
If and when, if and when..... should NASA ever find it in their pockets to hire on air talent (which would by necessity require writing and editing), only one possibility comes to mind, complete with connections to James Oberg and other space pros and amateurs of note: Alan Boyle. He could not only cover the space stuff, but other relevant science stuff, and he has a lot of people to draw on to fill slots with.
When one does research one seeks to eliminate bias to the greatest extent possible. When one has a vested interest in the subject, it is even more important, as one's reputation rides on it.
Sessions is not incapable when it comes to business IT and complexity. Unfortunately he is more capable in those areas than in methodology. Although his approach is laudable, his exclusion of bias sources appears approximately nil. TFA clearly states that he makes certain assumptions. That can't be helped. But to make the result reflect real world rather than producing a paper to boost self-importance (even inadvertantly) those assumptions should have been better questioned at the outset. Better late than never:
His primary source is the World Technology and Services Alliance. They want to appear important to others. Thus they will emphasize data that won't get counted the same way by an outsider. A neutral source would have provided data less likely to be considered biased. The CIA Factbook for instance.
Rather than assuming a percentage of GDP as primary expendature (the same IT percentage for the US as for Republic of Congo - per capita GDP = US$300), go to a source that has calculated the total (with references so they can be checked or argued). Gartner, not unbiased but industrious towards that end, says "Worldwide IT spending is on pace to total $3.2 trillion in 2009, a 6 percent decline from 2008 spending of $3.4 trillion". And now we're on track for twice as much failure as spending, indicating a problem greater than simple math.
He lumps all communications technology in with IT. Not what most would do, but at least he says what he's doing. But is he being relevant to IT, from CIO down to help desk answer-droid by making them appear responsible for the cost of a high bandwidth geosynch satellite?
"66% of all Federal IT dollars are invested in projects that are “at risk”". Federal expendatures (in this case, purchases) are well known to have their importance padded so as not to lose funding next cycle. Without a varifiable basis for using this claim, it should simply be dropped. Instead he attempts to estimate failure rate from it. This begs the question, if the purchase was based on at risk, and it was made, did that risk go away? If not, there will be some risk assessment criteria coming down with the next round of budget cuts. Without the white paper, I can't say, but I'm guessing the risk includes new tech to thwart intrusion and so forth, not technology at risk of melting down.
Finally, he makes the statement that these are estimates and the numbers aren't important, but their sheer magnitude it. Magnitude relates to numbers. You can't justify a statement of magnitude without using some. His result is twice the estimated 2009 spending. Might he have a problem with magnitude? Definitely. Orders of magnitude, probably. Over 20 years ago health care spending passed defense spending as the greatest bite of the US GDP. In 2007, US health care spending was US$2.26 trillion. He claims worldwide IT failure is 2.7 times that. It would seem we don't have a health care crisis, we have an IT crisis that is draining revenue from everything at a rate up to or even greater than the funding that fuels it. We would do better without IT. (This is reduction to absurdity, lest anyone take that seriously).
A point that may rescue his work somewhat, is the fact that a failure/loss is not a cost. It gets called that if the failure impinges directly on a profit margin. Even then, that's not necessarily accurate. A loss or failure that's replaced with something purchased counts as a cost. Something thrown away, left broken, used in a crippled state, operating at less than capacity/effectiveness or otherwise not giving what was paid for is not a cost. It was a cost when first purchased. It can't cost again because it doesn't act right (unless replaced, as noted, and then the cost is the new one, not the old). When a company has to account for its failures and losses, if these can be made to
"If there were weekly launches of a rocket, there would be many * DOLLARS * for new ideas to be tried out..."
Nope, sorry, it'll never get off the ground Orville.
These things cost money. Frequently too much, but even the best deals cost. Launching rockets costs a lot. It does not generate money. You can't buy squat with "opportunities", and can buy far less of you're punching holes in the sky based on a schedule of launches instead of a schedule of available payloads.
Exactly how is a score of 2, 1 for the post and 1 for an earned karma bonus, over rated?
Just some dipshit that'd rather see all Facebook and games articles modding down everything else without cause or a rational relation to mod points, I suppose.
"If there were weekly launches of a rocket, there would be many * DOLLARS * for new ideas to be tried out..."
Nope, sorry, it'll never get off the ground Orville.
These things cost money. Frequently too much, but even the best deals cost. Launching rockets costs a lot. It does not generate money. You can't buy squat with "opportunities", and can buy far less of you're punching holes in the sky based on a schedule of launches instead of a schedule of available payloads.
Let's just start with part of the headline material:
" 'The same neurostim device that uses electric impulses from a brain implant to treat people with Parkinson's Disease can be tweaked by a few millimeters and pulse rates to make cocaine addicts feel like they are high all the time..."
This (and TFA) is from "James Kent is the former publisher of Psychedelic Illuminations and Trip Magazine. He currently edits DoseNation.com, a drug blog featuring news, humor and commentary."
Hardly your neuroscience expert, or even much of an educated amateur. Educated enough to be dangerous to his own reputation perhaps. We can hope.
Where Mr. Kent goes wrong is in thinking the stimulator used for Parky's can stimulate other parts of the same structure (within a "few millimeters), the Substantia Nigra, which produced dopamine which is also released in cocaine use, and that this is the reward center, so that doing so makes one feel high.
The common misconception is based on the "reward" aspect, and confusion of cause and effect with respect to drug use. The reward system operates in the manner of conditioning or learning, in that its output helps to produce the association between a behavior and a reinforcer. Let's just assume for maximum illustration that the reinforcer here is a cocaine high. We have the drug taking behavior, and we have the cocaine high resulting. The dopamine system puts on the brakes with respect to ongoing seeking/investigating and lets the organism maintain focused attention on the object that produced the positive feeling -- it makes reinforcement possible. Note that it does not cause the high, the reinforcer does that. There are many reinforcers that can make learning occur, and most of them do not cause any sort of high. Just because cocaine causes a release of dopamine does not mean this is the source of the high. No, this is the source of the powerful reinforcement that causes addiction to start. Dopamine does not act as a "reward", it allows a reinforcer to do so effectively regardless of any psychotropic effects. It is the cascade of various neurotransmitters that causes the high. Evidence of this is found in the effect of pramipexole (Mirapex) on people. It is a selective dopaminergic and does not cause any high. But it does (at a high enough dosage) cause obsessive/compulsive use and behaviors much as an addiction and related activities.
Moving a Parky's stimulator will not produce a high, but it might produce the problems related to addiction.
I've previously pointed out the lack of facts in h+ articles, and the preponderance of fiction. This article starts out with the latter. Check the rest of it for yourself to see if there are any reliable facts actually taken from known science, or whether they are other common misconceptions put to service to fill white space.
As for cognitive enhancing drugs, amphetamines and such are behavior boosters, not capable of producing long term cognitive enhancement, unless by enhancement one means seeking more of the same. Cognitive enhancing drugs (nootropics) have been around for over 50 years. The first, hydergine, is the red headed step child of the man who called LSD "My Problem Child", Albert Hoffman. There are many such drugs in use throughout the world except for the US where they are allowed only in the cases where they will not help -- severe progressive dementia. In contract with the very lucrative drugs typically used as congitive enhancers, nootropics have very little side effects or interactions.
In the cases where cognitiion enhancement is possible, anything related to intoxication is contraindicated and counterproductive. Confusing "reward" with getting high, when it is intended only to related to learning reinforcement is key to understanding this. It is also key to determining whether the source is intent on getting smart or getting high, because the latter refuse to give up on the misconception.
Mods: this is a neutral discussion about peoples' reactions to certain things. It is not intended as the insulting(to some) material being talked about. No valuation is placed on any concept from any viewpoint.
You're absolutely right. This failure is one of language. But that too has roots. Specifically one of lack of understanding of the concept of honor as used. For example, sports teams using the names of indigenous groups sometimes claim that doing so "honors" them. That shows at least an complete lack of understanding of what they're talking about, and at worst a fossilized attitude generated in times past and attached so deeply to this concept that the association is the 'object'. Colbert's example is equally powerful, with the emotional content being so much stronger that the association with anything, a rational combination or not, and the thing is suddenly evil. For instance, put one on a public toilet door, and very few jews will use it after that.
There's been at least one long standing battle in the US over much the same problem: people taking an image, name and/or conceptual equivalent, and using it in such a way as to ... dishonor is frequently used here, but not many understand the it from the injured parties' standing.... insult is closer but too weak ... we'll just say: to promote a commercial product, the juxtaposition of the appropriated image and the product being contrary to the known statements of the party imaged and/or the descendants.
The product in this case is Crazy Horse malt liquor. Crazy Horse spoke out against alcohol many times, specifically claiming its use was destroying his people. His descendants have been trying to get the brewer to stop using the name. No, they didn;t attempt to acquire copy right or trademark protection, because they didn't think they'd need it. In their culture, such protection is automatic and seated deeply in the cultural mores.
I don't believe Spielberg was ever admitted to USC.
Quite right, I sit reclined and slouching, corrected. He applied three times and it was a C average that prevented his acceptance, not his continuance. That makes the honorary a bit frivolous.
O'Bannon not only wrote Dark Star, he plays Sgt. Pinback in the movie.
Co-wrote. With John Carpenter.
O'Bannon also was film editor. And production designer. And supervisor of visual special effects, for which he got a first place award in 1975 from the forerunner of the Saturn Awards.
Looks like a lot of work for one person, and perhaps it was. But keep in mind this was two guys working on a 45 minute student project up until someone paid them US$60k to expand it out to feature length. And as far as I can tell (and I'm another who watches this movie yearly or so) the difference between the original feature length and the much later 'dirctor's cut' is Doolittle's little musical bottle recital.
The focus of the student version was on the 'beach ball' alien sequence, which was comedic. Changing the theme of it to horror for the feature length without losing the impact showed a great deal of talent in both writers. A fellow USC grad's student film helped launch is career also, the final escape sequence of George Lucas's THX 1138. And just to help differentiate between success and academic success, Stephen Spielberg was also a USC grad school student, but didn't finish there due to a C average. (In fact he didn't finish until 2002 at California State University, Long Beach, having received an honorary degree from USC in 1994 and becoming a trustee there in 1996).
Just guessing based on the preponderance of SF work in O'Bannon's IMDB entry, I suspect he rather than Carpenter was the one who adapted Ray Bradbury's short story Kaleidoscope from The Illustrated Man as the ending sequence, with one astronaut carried off by some semi-mystical asteroids, the other ending in a firey re-entry. That adaptation is referenced in the Dark Star Wikipedia entry. Not mentioned anywhere but of too great similarity to ignore are Bomb 20's final act, having determined that he is alone in the universe to exclaim "Let there be light" (vs. Asimov's "The Last Question") and the post-mortem consciousness of the commander afforded by his cryogenic preservation (vs. Larry Niven's "Wait It Out"). I also used to think Talby's obsession with staying in the observation chair wasn't a phobia having to do with the commander's death, but was taken from another story which included mental changes verging on madness if one watched too much empty space, but I can't recall which one, and there's an awful lot of those.
BTW, Benson Arizona MP3 and lyrics are available at SF author Robert Sawyer's web site.
“The decision is not going to make anyone gasp,” said one source in the White House,....
Then we can rule out any significant breakthrough or giant step change, such as a million + pound payload, two stage/two motor with extremely simplified internals, with initial cost per pound to LEO about 25% (at best, possibly as little as 10% of this estimate; 2.5% that of Ares-H) of that of the best optimistic estimate that the Ares heavy would approach after 12 launches. Some of the technical details that were far less complex and more reliable than any in use or planned were panned a 'not interesting' and used as cause to dismiss the design, although some of those same details made it into later designs that flew.
The design was done for Aerojet in 1962 by Robert Truax http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/searagon.htm The revolutionary sea launch aspect was the one portion actually tested in an earlier model. The simplicity of the design would make it possible to take from paper to LEO in 5 years. This is just one such design that could be retrieved from history where it was buried in favor of corporate welfare. This is one of the few actually done by a documented and well respected pioneer of rocketry http://neverworld.net/truax/ .
No gasps, no Salvage 1.
Rusty Schweickart is not, in this instance, an ex-astronaut, he is the CEO of B612 Foundation, dedicated to promoting their gravity tractor design for asteroid deflection. This design solves the 'problems' which are here hung around the necks of politicians. B612 has been 'solving' these same problems in the same way for over 20 years now. The situations where this design fails are still the same also, most notably short notice. This is no objective analysis of solutions to social and other problems that might arise --- this is a sales job for one of several designs that would need to be developed in order to meet the many possible problems. Yet this and the other designs with potential business backing, do not present themselves are inadequate alone, a social problem itself, in that these 'experts' are not pounding home the truth that no one an tell ahead of time which of these would be needed and/or would work if tried, so several different esigns would be required to be available. Also, these are large scale interplanetary programs, with a good chance of technical failure preventing successful completion, thus making it necessary to have more than one of each design available. Figure the odds of getting funding for more than one copy of one design. Yeah, until the impact table comes out with our names on it.
The Soviet military lacked a consistent record keeping system. A supply unit created one using the Russian Apple II clone and AppleWorks 1.2. It worked so well that AppleWorks 1/3 was hacked to support the Cyrillic font in the clone. Eventully the Sovient military became the #1 pirate of AppleWorks world wide.
The Soviets had thousands of thermonuclear weapons as did the US. Had one side used them, the other would also. The combined megatonnage could have sterilized the Earth's crust over a meter down. All higher life would have perished either immediately or in a cascade of die-offs.
This post is a direct challanger to the summary post for being both true in substance and best use of hyperbole and non-use of tense in order to put together a marginally interesting article with an absolutely untrue title to draw people in, and dumpt them nearly flat out after providing a tiny bit of information.
The folks at Harvard-Smithsonian and IOTA did some fine work. It could have been reported as they presented it and been very interesting science. When it gets filtered through a fake science reporting agent like Science Daily, and rewritten by one of said agent's fiction writers with only enough relevant background to make them capable of finding FUDish material that wouldn't be entirely inapplicable, the result is something that should have been rejected by the only places to which it should have been submitted: Hollywood movie producers.
The sun is a nearly a dwarf star. It will undergo a very mild death compared to larger stars. They will nova or supernova, but the sun will placidly swell to a red giant, pulse as it burns out, then shrink to white dwarf. Only true dwarf stars will undergo a milder demise, skipping the red giant phase. No amount of mediocre Hollywood scifi horrification and awfulism will change the fact that our mild mannered stellar companion has no evil supervillian alter ego waiting to take over at its end of days. Adding such extraneous comic book (as opposed to the more respectable graphic fiction) "reporting" is only done by a writer, or at the behest of an editor or publisher, who have no confidence in the science itself or their reportage of it being sufficiently interesting. rather than risk being factual for a readership interested in such things, they attempt to draw in a greater audience with an interest and education in science equal to that of the author's writing style, with the assumption that by adding the pseudo-scientific car wreck material they can get that larger audience to slow down and rubber neck at the bloody mess of hyperbole spray painted over the facts.
SD is as useful and accurate a source for science as The Economist, which has also been quoted here for similarly poor reasons. Slashdotters are for the most part sophisticated enough to be able to appreciate the facts without having to viddy the horrorshow while sipping a bit of the moloko plus (obSFref, Clockwork Orange). Th remainder, while not so inclined to factualism in science, are still so invariably capable when it comes to traditional /. reply banter that an article consisting of raw data would likely end up in a verbal tsunami repleat with references to Microsoft, Google and MafIAA (blaming them for the stellar death no doubt) and welcoming our Red Giant Overlords and their Soviet Russian Beowulf Clusters.
The very worst part of this example of poor writing in lieu of science journalism is being kept separate because it has nothing to do with science. Something that is happening now (or being observed now, relatively speaking) does not and can not mimic something that will happen in the future, whether that be in 5 billion years, or next week when you accept a job writing equally badly for an outlet equally unwilling to risk actual factual journalism. Unless, of course, one an say that one's present insufficient income from writing such trash mimics the income one will receive in the future when one continues of a career path of writing badly for outlets intentionally presenting said trash. All the more reason to stay in school, kids, and if you quit, go back.
Now, I don't expect /. readers to follow Astrophysical Journal and the like in order to get unadulterated science to report on here. But I would hope that the submitters and editors would at least acknowledge the quality of the sources by presenting them such as "With their typical crunchy coating of fiction, fact mangling and FUD surrounding a center of creamy scientific nougat still untouched by science journalists' hands, Science Daily reassures us that it is 'an excellent driver' while setting fire to and waving madly an interesting article" dot dot dot.
I like my pizza cut in 8 nice triangular slices. My wife likes squares. I actually cut half in slices, and half in squares.
I like triangles, but I cut it into 6 instead. I can't eat 8 pieces.
The mathematicians (or boffins, I'm not sure which) have made a mistake of omission for something that their extensive experiences has caused them to neglect: is there an odd or even number of pieces? Cutting it into an odd number with the points near the center can be done while adhering to the definition give. It can also be done if the cuts go all the way across but the crossover is at the edge.
As for 'who will get more?' the answer in my case is simple: me. I spent too many years as a starving grad student. I developed the reflexes necessary to grab the first piece, and lost every bit of self-respect I ever had that would prevent me from taking the last. And if I can get my hands on the little rolling cutting wheel pizza cutter, do NOT reach for a piece without letting me know what you're doing because I get very protective of any pizzas in my vicinity.