It's a wonderful example of "equal but not egalitarian". We're both bound by the same law, but if I break it they're the only ones with the millions of dollars needed to prosecute, and if they break it they're the only ones with the millions of dollars needed to defend.
That problem suggests its own solution: poison the well by pre-emptively polluting Facebook etc. with fake profiles carrying garbage (but non-specific, non-damaging) information. As an upside, it'd devalue the database for other data-mining efforts too.
Well, we can't give you a loan on your Slashdot karma, but if we just put down - this'll be our little secret, just you and me - that you've got 2 million reddit karma - it's okay, reddit karma doesn't mean anything, it's just an arbitrary thing we have to work around, you could get that karma for real easily enough - there, you're good to go for your eight trillion dollar home improvement loan to build a moonbase.
They may be insulated from the consequences of ignoring good data, but there sure as heck isn't any benefit to gathering bad data, which is the point I'm trying to make.
This isn't going to be particularly pleasant to hear, but ultimately these sorts of activities are all about finding indicators of your likeliness to default on your credit, in much the same way that indicators are used when providing insurance to evaluate someone's likelihood of needing to make a claim and price them accordingly. So having these extra indicators isn't by itself necessarily bad. It's not in the lender's interests to come up with bad indicators. To stay competitive, they have to strike a good balance between covering their ass and giving you a better rate than the next lender. So ultimately they're trying to find out something about your creditworthiness (as a probabilistic measure of default) that is more likely to be right than wrong.
The real philosophical issue is, if non-financial indicators are used to evaluate our creditworthiness, then are we being unfairly induced to make changes to our lifestyle to accomodate our need for credit?
By all accounts, it's a total shambles. There was an editorial in Nature a couple of weeks ago suggesting that its continued existence was a barrier to implementing a treaty that actually had some teeth.
maybe the rat's just afraid of what its cagemate will do if it eats all the food and then the trapped rat gets out.
That, in itself, would be an interesting result as it would require that the rat anticipate the other rat's reaction without prior experience of the situation. That's not believed to be a common ability in animals.
Nonhumans couldn't possibly have it; but they could exhibit a behavioral structure that is game-theoretically identical to empathy in operation, which would still be an interesting result...
Behavioralism, which is the paradigm under which this study has been performed, would seem to argue that a behavior identical to an emotional response is that emotional response.
The reason we know that animals are not just dumb, mindless beasts is because people have done research like this and confirmed experimentally that the presence of such emotions and other higher cognative abilities is real, and not just an anthropomorphising intepretation on the part of the observer. It's taught us a lot about where and how different behaviors arise, and led to all sorts of interesting questions. It's understood that not all animals have a "theory of mind", which is necessary to understand other creatures as having an equivalent perspective to their own. In what way does that influence their internal mental life? Are they natural solipsists? What would've happened if our branch of the evolutionary tree had never gained that ability?
How many times do we see these comments, only to look into and see that these IMBECILE commenters haven't read the article and wouldn't know good science if it bit them in the ass?
The new study distinguishes emotional contagion - literally feeling the pain of others, as this headline puts it - from empathy, which is defined as providing a supportive response to another's pain without exhibiting that same emotion. The former is well known in nonhuman animals, the latter not so much.
Hopefully, the effects they're looking to measure are larger than the anomaly from gravity.
Of course in the best case scenario, they'd just have a three-metre ball of molten sodium on the ISS, but I don't think NASA can afford to replace all the staff who would die of horror just contemplating the idea. Maybe they could send it up on the vomit comet, or just drop it from a great height? I'd watch a video of that.
Shut. Your. Ass. I'd read about proper, component-level emulation, but I had no idea people had actually done it on anything more sophisticated then a calculator. Incredible.
Apple already requires ratings for apps. They even include "content descriptors". I'm looking at Infinity Blade 2 right now and it says:
"Rated 9+ for the following: Infrequent/Mild Mature/Suggestive Themes, Frequent/Intense Cartoon or Fantasy Violence and Infrequent/Mild Realistic Violence."
Also there's a link to a EULA from the publisher, . What an odious development that is, given that you're already agreeing to Apple's EULA.
That news report is wrong. The seperate test in question evaluated the RF output of a laptop with its wifi switched off, but it did not measure sperm motility after exposure to that laptop:
"A separate test with a laptop that was on, but not wirelessly connected, found negligible EM radiation from the machine alone."
Here's the kicker - they ran the laptop with the wifi switched off, but only measured the RF output of the laptop in that state. They didn't perform - or performed, but didn't publish - the obvious control experiment.
Isn't the body of the laptop just a really big EMF shield anyway? So the one place where you wouldn't have exposure to the wifi signal is the underside?
Slashdot Mirror
It's a wonderful example of "equal but not egalitarian". We're both bound by the same law, but if I break it they're the only ones with the millions of dollars needed to prosecute, and if they break it they're the only ones with the millions of dollars needed to defend.
That problem suggests its own solution: poison the well by pre-emptively polluting Facebook etc. with fake profiles carrying garbage (but non-specific, non-damaging) information. As an upside, it'd devalue the database for other data-mining efforts too.
Well, we can't give you a loan on your Slashdot karma, but if we just put down - this'll be our little secret, just you and me - that you've got 2 million reddit karma - it's okay, reddit karma doesn't mean anything, it's just an arbitrary thing we have to work around, you could get that karma for real easily enough - there, you're good to go for your eight trillion dollar home improvement loan to build a moonbase.
They may be insulated from the consequences of ignoring good data, but there sure as heck isn't any benefit to gathering bad data, which is the point I'm trying to make.
This isn't going to be particularly pleasant to hear, but ultimately these sorts of activities are all about finding indicators of your likeliness to default on your credit, in much the same way that indicators are used when providing insurance to evaluate someone's likelihood of needing to make a claim and price them accordingly. So having these extra indicators isn't by itself necessarily bad. It's not in the lender's interests to come up with bad indicators. To stay competitive, they have to strike a good balance between covering their ass and giving you a better rate than the next lender. So ultimately they're trying to find out something about your creditworthiness (as a probabilistic measure of default) that is more likely to be right than wrong.
The real philosophical issue is, if non-financial indicators are used to evaluate our creditworthiness, then are we being unfairly induced to make changes to our lifestyle to accomodate our need for credit?
By all accounts, it's a total shambles. There was an editorial in Nature a couple of weeks ago suggesting that its continued existence was a barrier to implementing a treaty that actually had some teeth.
How does one make money with a mint-diverting banshee?
maybe the rat's just afraid of what its cagemate will do if it eats all the food and then the trapped rat gets out.
That, in itself, would be an interesting result as it would require that the rat anticipate the other rat's reaction without prior experience of the situation. That's not believed to be a common ability in animals.
Nonhumans couldn't possibly have it; but they could exhibit a behavioral structure that is game-theoretically identical to empathy in operation, which would still be an interesting result...
Behavioralism, which is the paradigm under which this study has been performed, would seem to argue that a behavior identical to an emotional response is that emotional response.
The reason we know that animals are not just dumb, mindless beasts is because people have done research like this and confirmed experimentally that the presence of such emotions and other higher cognative abilities is real, and not just an anthropomorphising intepretation on the part of the observer. It's taught us a lot about where and how different behaviors arise, and led to all sorts of interesting questions. It's understood that not all animals have a "theory of mind", which is necessary to understand other creatures as having an equivalent perspective to their own. In what way does that influence their internal mental life? Are they natural solipsists? What would've happened if our branch of the evolutionary tree had never gained that ability?
You don't need an experiment to figure it out, but you need an experiment to confirm it.
How many times do we see these comments, only to look into and see that these IMBECILE commenters haven't read the article and wouldn't know good science if it bit them in the ass?
The new study distinguishes emotional contagion - literally feeling the pain of others, as this headline puts it - from empathy, which is defined as providing a supportive response to another's pain without exhibiting that same emotion. The former is well known in nonhuman animals, the latter not so much.
I think there are more efficient ways of making magnetic fields using electrical power. An "electro-magnet", if you will.
Being able to answer that question, and not merely ask it, is why these people get to play with 3-metre balls of molten sodium for a living.
Hopefully, the effects they're looking to measure are larger than the anomaly from gravity.
Of course in the best case scenario, they'd just have a three-metre ball of molten sodium on the ISS, but I don't think NASA can afford to replace all the staff who would die of horror just contemplating the idea. Maybe they could send it up on the vomit comet, or just drop it from a great height? I'd watch a video of that.
Can someone appeal against an appeal? If that's the case, whose legal fund do you think will run out first?
Shift-Break.
BOOO-BOOP
Shut. Your. Ass. I'd read about proper, component-level emulation, but I had no idea people had actually done it on anything more sophisticated then a calculator. Incredible.
Apple already requires ratings for apps. They even include "content descriptors". I'm looking at Infinity Blade 2 right now and it says:
"Rated 9+ for the following: Infrequent/Mild Mature/Suggestive Themes, Frequent/Intense Cartoon or Fantasy Violence and Infrequent/Mild Realistic Violence."
Also there's a link to a EULA from the publisher, . What an odious development that is, given that you're already agreeing to Apple's EULA.
That news report is wrong. The seperate test in question evaluated the RF output of a laptop with its wifi switched off, but it did not measure sperm motility after exposure to that laptop:
"A separate test with a laptop that was on, but not wirelessly connected, found negligible EM radiation from the machine alone."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45469130/ns/health-mens_health/#.TtT0PlabUlT
Yes, but it also has more nuanced meanings, and there's one that is very pertinent to this field.
I'm not sure that the "same temperature" is really what they measured. All the abstract says is that they were incubated under the same conditions.
Here's the kicker - they ran the laptop with the wifi switched off, but only measured the RF output of the laptop in that state. They didn't perform - or performed, but didn't publish - the obvious control experiment.
Isn't the body of the laptop just a really big EMF shield anyway? So the one place where you wouldn't have exposure to the wifi signal is the underside?