Retired Mobil Oil exec Louis Allstadt recently said that fracking can't be done safely with current technology. "Making fracking safe is simply not possible, not with the current technology, or with the inadequate regulations being proposed," said Allstadt, retired executive vice president of Mobil.
http://www.timesunion.com/busi...
This is similar to the situation with arctic drilling, but for somewhat different reasons. To do it right would require too much equipment and too many safety procedures to be cost effective. They would need to do the work quick and dirty to make a good profit. That is precisely what is happening with fracking, where gas companies have been exempted from the clean water act and other environmental protections. If they were required to comply, they couldn't afford to extract the gas. That explains the rush to frack, before the sweetheart deal is over.
You will never find the person with a crude approximation of their face, which of course is subject to all sorts of modifications and changes throughout life. You would end up bringing all sorts of innocent people in for questioning because their face looked a little bit like the reconstruction. This is no way to solve a crime.You solve crimes other ways than putting up a wanted poster with a face that may or may not look like the person in question.
would it be necessary to come up with an approximate facial image? If you have the DNA sample, that is far more definitive than the approximated face. I don't understand how this is useful. It might be interesting, but I don't see any practical use in forensics.
It has nothing to do with processing speed, or parallel processing. Brains in general, human brains included, do not process information. They generate consciousness. They do this in ways that neuroscientists still don't understand. As a neuroscientist I can say this without hesitation. Silicon chips are not alive, and will never generate consciousness as we now understand it. But they can process information much faster than the human brain.
Absolutely, but so far nothing even close has happened. Arthur C Clark thought we would have intelligent, conversational computers by 2001, and here we are 13 years later with nothing of the sort. As a neuroscientist I just wish those involved in computer intelligence would take a look at some of the newer images of the connectivity in the human brain as shown by methods like diffusion tensor imaging. The complexity is mind boggling. See here:
http://www.humanconnectomeproj...
will be able to mimic the human brain in the next several decades. Neuroscientists know that the human brain is far more complex than any foreseeable microprocessor-based computer system, and that the functions of the brain are not going to be easy to implement in silicon hardware. If newer methods of making computers that are more organic are developed, then you will have a means to start mimicking the human brain, but with silicon, you may never get there.
spent their money on improving Windows, one of their major income sources. If they had spent some of that money making an upgrade utility to let Windows XP users upgrade to Windows 7 or (ugh) 8.1, they would have done their existing customers a great service. Many people don't upgrade because they don't know how, or don't want to have to start from scratch. If MS had made Windows more reliable and easier to install and update drivers, that would have been a big help to their existing customers. Every time MS goes into hardware (with the possible exception of the Xbox) they fail. I think they would have had a lot of money left over from the 7.2 billion dollars if they had put their efforts into their main product, rather than trying to get into the smartphone business. It's not like Windows is perfect, and doesn't need any work, especially Windows 8.
This effort will probably never result in anything like true de-extinction. It will result in hybrids at best because to bring back an extinct species, you need a living egg from a closely related species. For mammoths they will use elephant eggs, and replace the genetic material in the nucleus with gene sequences from mammoths. But part of what it means to be a species resides in the egg cytoplasm, rather than in the egg nucleus. The genetic material is like a tape recording, and the egg is like a tape player. You need both to hear what is on the tape.
So we will have hybrids with nuclear mammoth genes, but cytoplasmic elephant genes (for example, mitochondria have their own DNA, and that will come from the elephant egg donor). So the resultant mammoths will be better than 90% mammoth (if they get all the sequences right from frozen mammoths), but the other small percentage will be true elephant in character. There is no getting around this because there are no viable mammoth eggs left on earth.
This is another in a series of basically poor quality epidemiological studies attempting to link cannabis use to various psychoses such as schizophrenia. There is no link, and this study is not a scientific investigation into any such link. This is simply an epidemiological study (attempts to correlate environmental or other factors to various disease states in a population).
Psychoses such as schizophrenia are not caused by drug use, and the authors clearly know this. Schizophrenia, which is the most common cause of “psychotic episodes”, is a neurodevelopmental disorder that as far as neuroscience can tell is a disorder which people are born predisposed to both genetically and probably during very early development (long before any cannabis use occurs).
Cannabis works on a brain neurotransmitter system known as the endocannabinoid system for which there is a major neurotransmitter in the brain known as anandamide. It is involved in various brain functions ranging from hunger induction to anxiety to pain sensitivity. Activation of this system results in increased hunger and decreased anxiety and pain sensitivity. So there are very clear reasons why some people use cannabis other than just to relax. The science of the endocannabinoid system is still being worked out, but clearly cannabis is one of the least harmful drugs known to mankind. Compared with the clear and present dangers associate with alcohol and tobacco use and addiction, it is a wonder that these types of studies get so much attention in the press.
If you read the article, they aren't scanning the bones. They used mass spectroscopy to scan pigment traces in the rocks surrounding the outlines of the soft tissues, so they are actually looking at the chemical remnants of pigments in the rock. They were able to detect eumelanin, which is a dark pigment found in skin and hair. They did not see any eumelanin traces in other parts of the fossil-bearing rocks except right around the fossils.
Absolutely, this is the most absurd spin on the story I can think of. It really doesn't matter if they didn't assist the NSA. And it doesn't reassure that they say they will work hard to prevent all hacking. If this has been going on as reported, then Apple did not do a very good job of "staying ahead of malicious hackers and defend our customers from security attacks." Obviously Apple didn't do any worse than any of the companies mentioned in the Der Spiegel article, but they didn't do any better either.
How many wars that the US has started since WWII were necessary with the possible exception of the first Gulf War? As General Smedley Butler famously claimed, war is a racket. The US often goes to war now in order to project geopolitical power, not to defend the US. Plus there is a great profit incentive for defense contractors. Sending young people, often from families of meager means, to kill other people of meager means overseas can not be done morally. The vast number of soldiers returning with PTSD prove that war is damaging to both the side that loses, and the side that wins.
It is kind of sad that people spend so much time thinking about the moral and ethical ways to wage war and kill other people, whether robots are involved or not. Maybe a step back to think about the impossibility of moral or ethical war and killing is where we should be focusing. Then the question of whether robots can be trusted to kill morally doesn't come up.
Science is being monetized like everything else, and in all cases this is bad news, not good. There are still many scientists who work hard to generate fundamental rather than translational data, but unfortunately, too many scientists have been diverted by money and the constant need to obtain it to keep the research going. That is the curse of capitalism. It stops being about the ends, and becomes all about the means.
More researchers in the biological sciences are using other more rigorous methods now than the Student's t-test and a p value of 0.05. ANOVA, ANCOVA and ranking methodologies are commonplace. Many scientific findings are based on a P value below 0.01. The problem with bad science certainly involves some bad statistics, but more often it just involves bad methodology, and poor attention to the previous literature (and thus attempting to reinvent the wheel). If your findings are robust and reproducible, then the statistics work out just fine.
The good news is that science is self correcting, even if sometimes the corrections seem tardy.
That the NSA is not specifically looking for terrorists, although that is the convenient excuse. They are looking for all sorts of things, and that is why they are collecting everything. They are listening in on foreign diplomats to see what they are up to, they are eavesdropping on foreign corporations to give US companies an advantage in trade deals, they are digging up dirt on political enemies and protesters, and they are checking up on reporters to help keep them in line, and they are especially looking for whistle blowers who might throw some light on what they are doing with our tax dollars. All of these activities have been reported, so it doesn't take much imagination to realize they are collecting everything they can on purpose and for numerous reasons, most of which are not to the benefit of the American people.
If the intention was to help the American people, they would be putting all that computing power into bioinformatics to cure cancer and other diseases that kill half a million Americans a year.
I can't imagine spending $37 billion dollars of taxpayers money on anything better for the the taxpayers than some more naval vessels. Why waste it on schools, or roads or infrastructure, when you can have... um, well, some nice new ships for the Navy to sail around in?
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Retired Mobil Oil exec Louis Allstadt recently said that fracking can't be done safely with current technology. "Making fracking safe is simply not possible, not with the current technology, or with the inadequate regulations being proposed," said Allstadt, retired executive vice president of Mobil. http://www.timesunion.com/busi... This is similar to the situation with arctic drilling, but for somewhat different reasons. To do it right would require too much equipment and too many safety procedures to be cost effective. They would need to do the work quick and dirty to make a good profit. That is precisely what is happening with fracking, where gas companies have been exempted from the clean water act and other environmental protections. If they were required to comply, they couldn't afford to extract the gas. That explains the rush to frack, before the sweetheart deal is over.
You will never find the person with a crude approximation of their face, which of course is subject to all sorts of modifications and changes throughout life. You would end up bringing all sorts of innocent people in for questioning because their face looked a little bit like the reconstruction. This is no way to solve a crime.You solve crimes other ways than putting up a wanted poster with a face that may or may not look like the person in question.
would it be necessary to come up with an approximate facial image? If you have the DNA sample, that is far more definitive than the approximated face. I don't understand how this is useful. It might be interesting, but I don't see any practical use in forensics.
So what if 70% goes back to the patrons? Isn't that what casinos do every day?
It has nothing to do with processing speed, or parallel processing. Brains in general, human brains included, do not process information. They generate consciousness. They do this in ways that neuroscientists still don't understand. As a neuroscientist I can say this without hesitation. Silicon chips are not alive, and will never generate consciousness as we now understand it. But they can process information much faster than the human brain.
Absolutely, but so far nothing even close has happened. Arthur C Clark thought we would have intelligent, conversational computers by 2001, and here we are 13 years later with nothing of the sort. As a neuroscientist I just wish those involved in computer intelligence would take a look at some of the newer images of the connectivity in the human brain as shown by methods like diffusion tensor imaging. The complexity is mind boggling. See here: http://www.humanconnectomeproj...
will be able to mimic the human brain in the next several decades. Neuroscientists know that the human brain is far more complex than any foreseeable microprocessor-based computer system, and that the functions of the brain are not going to be easy to implement in silicon hardware. If newer methods of making computers that are more organic are developed, then you will have a means to start mimicking the human brain, but with silicon, you may never get there.
spent their money on improving Windows, one of their major income sources. If they had spent some of that money making an upgrade utility to let Windows XP users upgrade to Windows 7 or (ugh) 8.1, they would have done their existing customers a great service. Many people don't upgrade because they don't know how, or don't want to have to start from scratch. If MS had made Windows more reliable and easier to install and update drivers, that would have been a big help to their existing customers. Every time MS goes into hardware (with the possible exception of the Xbox) they fail. I think they would have had a lot of money left over from the 7.2 billion dollars if they had put their efforts into their main product, rather than trying to get into the smartphone business. It's not like Windows is perfect, and doesn't need any work, especially Windows 8.
This effort will probably never result in anything like true de-extinction. It will result in hybrids at best because to bring back an extinct species, you need a living egg from a closely related species. For mammoths they will use elephant eggs, and replace the genetic material in the nucleus with gene sequences from mammoths. But part of what it means to be a species resides in the egg cytoplasm, rather than in the egg nucleus. The genetic material is like a tape recording, and the egg is like a tape player. You need both to hear what is on the tape. So we will have hybrids with nuclear mammoth genes, but cytoplasmic elephant genes (for example, mitochondria have their own DNA, and that will come from the elephant egg donor). So the resultant mammoths will be better than 90% mammoth (if they get all the sequences right from frozen mammoths), but the other small percentage will be true elephant in character. There is no getting around this because there are no viable mammoth eggs left on earth.
"Mr. President, we must not allow a mine shaft gap!"
This is another in a series of basically poor quality epidemiological studies attempting to link cannabis use to various psychoses such as schizophrenia. There is no link, and this study is not a scientific investigation into any such link. This is simply an epidemiological study (attempts to correlate environmental or other factors to various disease states in a population). Psychoses such as schizophrenia are not caused by drug use, and the authors clearly know this. Schizophrenia, which is the most common cause of “psychotic episodes”, is a neurodevelopmental disorder that as far as neuroscience can tell is a disorder which people are born predisposed to both genetically and probably during very early development (long before any cannabis use occurs). Cannabis works on a brain neurotransmitter system known as the endocannabinoid system for which there is a major neurotransmitter in the brain known as anandamide. It is involved in various brain functions ranging from hunger induction to anxiety to pain sensitivity. Activation of this system results in increased hunger and decreased anxiety and pain sensitivity. So there are very clear reasons why some people use cannabis other than just to relax. The science of the endocannabinoid system is still being worked out, but clearly cannabis is one of the least harmful drugs known to mankind. Compared with the clear and present dangers associate with alcohol and tobacco use and addiction, it is a wonder that these types of studies get so much attention in the press.
If you read the article, they aren't scanning the bones. They used mass spectroscopy to scan pigment traces in the rocks surrounding the outlines of the soft tissues, so they are actually looking at the chemical remnants of pigments in the rock. They were able to detect eumelanin, which is a dark pigment found in skin and hair. They did not see any eumelanin traces in other parts of the fossil-bearing rocks except right around the fossils.
Absolutely, this is the most absurd spin on the story I can think of. It really doesn't matter if they didn't assist the NSA. And it doesn't reassure that they say they will work hard to prevent all hacking. If this has been going on as reported, then Apple did not do a very good job of "staying ahead of malicious hackers and defend our customers from security attacks." Obviously Apple didn't do any worse than any of the companies mentioned in the Der Spiegel article, but they didn't do any better either.
How many wars that the US has started since WWII were necessary with the possible exception of the first Gulf War? As General Smedley Butler famously claimed, war is a racket. The US often goes to war now in order to project geopolitical power, not to defend the US. Plus there is a great profit incentive for defense contractors. Sending young people, often from families of meager means, to kill other people of meager means overseas can not be done morally. The vast number of soldiers returning with PTSD prove that war is damaging to both the side that loses, and the side that wins.
It is kind of sad that people spend so much time thinking about the moral and ethical ways to wage war and kill other people, whether robots are involved or not. Maybe a step back to think about the impossibility of moral or ethical war and killing is where we should be focusing. Then the question of whether robots can be trusted to kill morally doesn't come up.
Science is being monetized like everything else, and in all cases this is bad news, not good. There are still many scientists who work hard to generate fundamental rather than translational data, but unfortunately, too many scientists have been diverted by money and the constant need to obtain it to keep the research going. That is the curse of capitalism. It stops being about the ends, and becomes all about the means.
More researchers in the biological sciences are using other more rigorous methods now than the Student's t-test and a p value of 0.05. ANOVA, ANCOVA and ranking methodologies are commonplace. Many scientific findings are based on a P value below 0.01. The problem with bad science certainly involves some bad statistics, but more often it just involves bad methodology, and poor attention to the previous literature (and thus attempting to reinvent the wheel). If your findings are robust and reproducible, then the statistics work out just fine. The good news is that science is self correcting, even if sometimes the corrections seem tardy.
That the NSA is not specifically looking for terrorists, although that is the convenient excuse. They are looking for all sorts of things, and that is why they are collecting everything. They are listening in on foreign diplomats to see what they are up to, they are eavesdropping on foreign corporations to give US companies an advantage in trade deals, they are digging up dirt on political enemies and protesters, and they are checking up on reporters to help keep them in line, and they are especially looking for whistle blowers who might throw some light on what they are doing with our tax dollars. All of these activities have been reported, so it doesn't take much imagination to realize they are collecting everything they can on purpose and for numerous reasons, most of which are not to the benefit of the American people. If the intention was to help the American people, they would be putting all that computing power into bioinformatics to cure cancer and other diseases that kill half a million Americans a year.
I can't imagine spending $37 billion dollars of taxpayers money on anything better for the the taxpayers than some more naval vessels. Why waste it on schools, or roads or infrastructure, when you can have... um, well, some nice new ships for the Navy to sail around in?