So what is wrong?? Is the list of needed fixes incomplete?
My guess is yes, it is. One theory of aging is that we are carrying around many genes which are harmful, but have a serious effect later in life. Such genes were never selected against when expected lifetimes were 35 years or less. Now that we have cured many things that prevented people from getting to 30 or 40, we are seeing new problems that prevent people from getting to 100 or 150. But who's to say that there are not even more aging effects that will only become apparent after 150 or 200 years? It seems shortsighted to assume that the aging processes that are a problem now are the only things we need to overcome in order to live thousands of years.
I also think that a lot of the items on his list amount to replacement of body parts, whether whole organs or DNA. That isn't really reversing aging... That's just repair work which is likely to be needed more and more frequently as the person gets older. It also doesn't address the non-replaceable parts like the brain. Neurons continually die off during a person's adult life, and you don't grow new ones... that's going to be significant after a few hundred years.
If ageing is really to be solved, I think it will be done from the inside, by understanding and altering the functions of harmful genes. That's a long ways in the future, though.
I would guess that it's a matter of (a) percentages - few planes crash compared to the total number that fly - and (b) necessity - travel between cities has always been a part of life, but travelling to the moon has no ulterior purpose. I bet that as soon as there is a good reason for people to go to them moon (other than just to say you've done it), companies will be tripping over each other to get there.
Of course, lots of pilots were killed in the early days of airplanes... Part of the squeamishness about deaths in the space program right now comes from the perception - mostly correct, I think - that they are not serving any greater purpose. If we're sending people into space just because we can, and they die, it feels like a waste, whereas if we were really pushing the exploration of space it would be more understandable.
Many instances of depression are due to social injustice, apathy, the slow pace at which society reforms itself.
That may be true. However, I think it is still possible to distinguish between the depression which is a normal response to a poor environment, and pathological depression that needs treatment. It's like many other psychological responses that probably evolved because they were useful and healthy in certain situations, but can become unhealthy when the effect is disproportionate to the cause.
Depression, for example, might have evolved as a way for animals to deal with conflict. If a wolf loses a battle for dominance it becomes withdrawn temporarily - a kind of depression. In this case it is better for the animal to withdraw and live than continue to challenge and be killed. But if depression continues to the point where someone takes his own life, it's a natural response gone off the rails.
I've also read that people who are depressed are often more realistic when it comes to assessing their environment - people who aren't depressed tend to be overly optimistic. But I don't think there is really much danger in prescribing anti-depressants. If anything, if you want social change, a populace that is worn down and apathetic is least likely to put in the effort required. So I think it works both ways.
There's a map showing the dramatic REforestation here in the united States. Enviromentalists tend to 'overlook' these sorts of images.
Doubtful... Results like that are what enviromentalists are working for. If no one draws attention to environmental problems, there are not going to be any solutions.
I'm sure there are many satellite images of remote areas that haven't changed in the last 30 years, but that doesn't mean that looking at the changes (good or bad) isn't important.
I very much respect your commitment as a parent to raise a child with Down Syndrome - but please do not be so arrogant as to assume you know what is best for every parent and every child facing similar circumstances.
Down's is by far not the most devastating genetic disease out there, and I think it is entirely reasonable for a parent to weigh their child's potential quality of life against their own needs and their other responsibilities.
I grew up with a severely disabled sibling (with Rett Syndrome, another genetic disorder, which affects only girls). She can't walk, talk, or even feed herself. When she was born, the genetic tests to find Rett Syndrome did not exist; if one is developed by the time I have a family, I will definitely want to have it done. I can't bear the thought of bringing into the world a child who will never develop beyond mental infancy, and whose needs would overwhelm those of the rest of my family. Before the specific gene was discovered, even my mother, who has cared for my sister at home her whole life, told me I should never risk having a girl.
I don't believe in the slippery slope argument. There IS a quantifiable difference between minor imperfections and major disabilities. Sure, there may be a grey area in-between, but that doesn't mean one can't make any distinction at all - it only means that if a line is to be drawn, it should ultimately be a personal decision, moderated by one's own beliefs and circumstances.
I do honestly wish you all the best with your daughter. I have known several great kids with Down's Syndrome. But I suspect that thirty years from now, when your daughter is an adult who still requires full time care, you may be more receptive to other people's point of view.
I use the word confuzzled all the time... Mostly in reference to my cats, though, since they're often puzzled or confused, and always fuzzy - hence "confuzzled".
That's what amazed me too! I've been looking forward to today ever since I first read about the Cassini mission in ~1992. People knew that there was the possibility of liquid hydrocarbons on the surface, but who knew whether it would be flat and featureless or have an active weather system? The system of runoff channels on the surface is beyond cool.:)
I have to wonder if the "river channels" are still active, or whether they are just a remenant from some older, warmer era on Titan, as similar features are on Mars... Hopefully the answers will be in the full data, once it's analysed.
I also wonder if an active weather/circulation system would increase or decrease the probability of finding simple life? Maybe it is an indication that Titan still has reserves of internal heat?
I don't think it is gravity alone which accounts for the size difference, but mainly weathering and erosion, for which you need an atmosphere. Earth has this in abundance, Mars relatively little, and Iapetus probably none at all. Gravity has nothing to do if there is no wind or rainfall to knock loose stones to begin with. (Of course, the gravity of the planet is a factor in whether it can retain an atmosphere to begin with...)
It seems like there are two separate possible problems here: people are coming into a company without the writing skills they need, and/or employees are not treating email communication with the same professionalism as other company documents.
For the first problem, either a) don't hire people who can't write, or b) provide on-the job training to bring writing skills up to an acceptable level.
For the second, I think the company needs to make a clear set of standards for both internal and external communication, and enforce them. External communication - to customers, etc. - is particularly important. Anything as badly written as those examples would be deleted from my inbox before I got to the end of the first sentence.
I used to work as a technical writer for a large company, and they kept us busy. It's fine to hire engineers who are good at what they do, even if they don't have great writing skills - as log as you also hire someone to decipher and rewrite everything that comes out of the engineering dept.
PS. I respectfully submit that the headline should read either "The illegibility of email" or "The illiteracy of corporate america"... I might try to make my email literary, but not literate (and my slashdot posts are probably neither...):)
The US is pretty egalitarian in our education system, compared to your typical poor country.
The US is more egalitarian than many other first-world countries, also, and I'm not convinced it's an entirely good thing. Not all students are created equal. Vocational programs, for example, have been cut back in high schools, in favour of purely academic subjects.
In the high school I went to, enrolment had fallen from 3000 in the 70s to ~1000 in the 90s. (It was a rural English-language high-school in a part of Quebec that is now mostly Francophone.) By the time I got there, they had closed the entire vocational wing of the building. And I knew a lot of people who would have been better off in a mechanics class than in history, for example.
Obviously this is not to say that everyone shouldn't have equal opportunities for a pre-university high school education, but just that "equal" doesn't have to mean "the same". Many countries have different educational streams that split students into different types of high schools. I think "integration" of students of different abilities into the same class is a well-meaning but misguided approach. When you stream students, you can give specialized attention to the faster learners as well as the slower ones.
One caveat, though, is to make sure that higher academics don't become too exclusive. I had a friend in Finland (the top-scoring country in this survey) who didn't make it into medical school despite brilliant grades. It is insanely competitive there, because space for advanced programs is so limited. I would prefer some system that could strike a reasonable compromise...
I'm skeptical... First of all, as far as I know, the quantum entanglement of particles only allows you to measure the state of one, and instantly know the state of the other - this is rather different than changing the state of one, and observing a change of state in the other. Also, even though you can instantly know the state of a particle at an arbitrary distance, it isn't clear that "information" is in any sense travelling faster than the speed of light. After all, the only way you can know that you have learned something about the second particle is to compare measurements, and you can only compare your measurements transmitting data from both points to a single place - a transmission which is slower than the speed of light.
A more important point might be that there is a very very large number of primary particles in the human body. Supposing two electrons in two people were enangled, what are the chances that they would both be in the same kind of molecule, in the same place in the body? You could argue that maybe that is not a prerequisite, but I have a hard time imagining how the idea would work otherwise.
I do think that quantum effects might be very important when it comes to understanding how the brain works, I just don't believe this particular theory. I think ESP experiences are much more easily explained by intuition and probabilities. For example, I almost always know who's calling when the phone rings, but that doesn't mean I'm telepathic. It just means that I know who is likely to call at what hour of the day. Mothers/daughters and twins are going to have a very intimate knowledge of one another, so it doesn't surprise me that they are even more sensitive - maybe even subconciously - to very small clues that they get from the other person.
I don't think so. The tidal foces would probably tear the star apart before it could collapse. But you might be able to get a binary system with a star and a stellar-mass black hole if it started out as a two-star system, and one star went supernova.
Straightforward calculations, starting from equations of gas pressure and gravtational attraction, show that any overdense region in a gas cloud, larger than a certain critical mass (called the Jeans mass), will collapse in on itself. It is true that the simplest calculation of the Jeans mass gives 10^5 solar masses, much larger than any star; but if you take into account that a cloud will fragment as it collapses, the Jeans mass becomes much smaller. For typical conditions, the critical mass is ~1/3 the mass of the sun.
Supernova shocks might help start the process of gravitational collapse, but there is no reason to think 20 or more are necessary.
A prescient quote from The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood:
"There is more than one kind of freedom...Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it."
Quite true... However, by "unbiased", I didn't mean "completely without any editorial slant whatsoever", since obviously every piece of writing has some bias, even if it's only in which facts were chosen to put in and which to leave out.
By "unbiased" in this context, I meant that respectable newspapers avoid the strong kind of bias of editorializing their stories, ignoring the inescapable sutble biases. News outlets have an obligation to at least report all sides of the story, and not use those stories to support an explicit or implicit political or social agenda. When it comes to blogging, no such responsibility is implied, but some people may mistakenly expect it...
Blogs may become more popular, but I don't think they will completely supplant the traditional media. When you buy a newspaper, for example, part of what you pay for is the assumption that the stories are timely, accurate, unbiased, and fact-checked. With blogs, it's up to the reader to be discriminating.
So while some people may be happy reading all the information available to them and coming to their own conclusions, I think there will always be people who are willing to pay a traditional news service to separate the wheat from the chaff. There will probably also (unfortunately) be people who get all their "news" from blogs, but don't make the distinction between trustworthy and non-trustworthy sources. Since I would expect this to the majority of casual internet-readers, I worry that a lot of people will come away misinformed.
I think blogging does have a role to play as a check on the integrity of the traditional media, but I don't think it is anywhere near time for it to take over completely.
Commercial silk comes not from spiders, but from the silk moth (spiders are hard to coral).
And spider silk doesn't come from spiders either - Nexia used transgenic goats (which secreted the silk proteins in their milk) and this group is using transgenic caterpillar cells. I just think this is an interesting story in the context of the recent stories on genetic chimeras. Now if they could create a transgenic animal that would actually spin the spider silk, they's be all set!
Unless people with the disease have more children than people without it (i.e. if the "disease" is in some sense beneficial in a fitness sense) their reproduction will not contribute to an overall increase in disease frequency.
Not true. All that is required for a given gene to increase in frequency is that it not be harmful enough to impair reproduction (which given medical treatment, is becoming true for diseases like diabaetes). If a genetic mutation is fatal, the incidence will be whatever the spontaeous mutation rate is. But if medicine can increase survival, the affected person will pass the mutated gene on to 50% of his or her children, and so on. Eventually the frequency of the mutation will reach a steady state, but it will be at much higher frequency than it would have been before.
Why not classify entities (living and non-living) along the lines of cognitive ability, or moral agency? In those scenarios it would be pretty accurate to assume that humans aren't animals.
For one thing, it's a lot harder to quantify cognitive ability or moral agency. We don't even have universal definitions of those qualities, much less an accurate way to measure them for every type of species. (Never mind that trying to classify organisms this way would basically be redifining what we mean by "animal" - so while it could be an additional charactarization, as a direct substitution it would be meaningless.)
On the other hand, anatomy is easily observable, and establishes evolutionary relationships among species. DNA classification might someday be better for that, but until we have mapped the genome of every animal, the physical appearence is a better way of infering genetic relationships than intellect.
What I'm saying is that logically, because the result cannot immediately be verified against a trustable source, you have to assume that the computer's result is wrong and will need recounting against paper receipts in all cases.
I think this is the crux of the disagreement. I was assuming in my post that voting machings could be considered approximately as trustworthy as people counting by hand, in which case recounts would only be requested under the same kind of circumstances that they are with paper ballot systems.
Now, if you are going to claim that voting machines are inherently untrustworthy, then indeed they are useless. But I believe it is possible to build a system that is at least as accurate and trustworthy as hand-counting. I also think that the testing and monitoring of such a system could still save money in the long run, when you consider the number of people-hours required to count and recount ballots.
If reliable, accurate voting machines can be implemented, I think that hand counts could be reduced to spot-auditing and requested recounts (as in close races, or disagreement with the exit polls, or based on statistical analysis such as the paper in this story). In addition I think that electronic voting machines could reduce the number of spoiled ballots (by printing out a clear human- and machine-readable ballot to be voter-verified before being put in the box).
But back to the issue of trust... as someone else posted, it will be hard to get around this as long as the government is contracting out the work to companies. Giving the task to research universities, and requiring open code, complete published documentation, and testing, would be a better way to go, in my opinion.
I think having an ID tied to both you and your vote is a bad idea in general. It opens up possibilites of people being bribed or strong-armed for their vote.
Without an identifying number, someone can tell you how to vote, but there's no way for them to verify if you voted for who you said you did. If there were a voter ID, someone could conceivably force you to give them your number and password, and then go check that you voted the way they wanted you to.
Even if they asked for government-issued ID at the audit, someone who is a registered voter could get in and then pull up someone else's record. You could get around that by having a poll worker bring up your record after you give your ID, but that would mean your vote is directly tied to your name, which would completely undermine the secret ballot... I just don't see how it could work.
Having two separate manufacturers for the two stages seems like a good idea, but I think it makes getting an accurate count from either machine more difficult. For example, machine 1 prints a receipt and counts it, but the voter fails to put the paper into machine 2. Or machine 1 prints a receipt, the voter annuls it and starts over, but doesn't destroy the first paper, then feeds both ballots into machine 2. Or machine 1 prints a receipt, which the voter alters before feeding into machine 2, etc.
If you have a machine which doesn't record the vote until a single paper has been verified and returned (perhaps including a serial number on the ballot to make sure the paper can't be switched) you avoid that type of problem. Perhaps a compromise could be made by having the touchscreen/printer part of the machine and the optical scanner part be made by different companies. Or you could let the machines keep an independent tally, but have them talk to each other (with the printing machine sending the serial number and vote, and scanning machine sending a verified/not verified message back).
I agree completely. An unverified paper trail is no better than none at all.
My own idea of the ideal voting machine would be this: The voter selects a candidate on the screen. The machine prints a receipt with the selection. If the selection matches what the voter intended her or she feeds it back into the machine where it it saved. If the printout is wrong, the voter tears it up and has the option to go back to the first step. No vote is counted until a verified receipt is scanned back in.
That is of course wrong; there is no way to say whether the electronic vote is questionable or not.
I have to disagree. Isn't the point of this story that there are ways to identify suspect vote counts? Just because you don't have any a priori way of knowing what the outcome will be doesn't mean you can't look for anomalies by comparing the results from different regions against each other. (And that applies to all methods of voting, including pen and paper.)
The losing candidate can always question the vote, no matter what the original counting method was. But I don't think that's a mark against electronic voting. There are a few obvious circumstances which would make it reasonable to ask for a recount, such as a very close result, a vote count that is different from the number of registered voters, or an outcome that is suspiciously different from other similar areas. This isn't any different than it was before voting machines came along.
Even for all the controversy, I think e-voting machines (with paper trails) have the potential to offer the best of both worlds - a quick first count and a reliable way to get a recount. Ideally, with the paper trail machine printed and voter-verified, there would also be far fewer spoiled ballots.
Slashdot Mirror
So what is wrong?? Is the list of needed fixes incomplete?
My guess is yes, it is. One theory of aging is that we are carrying around many genes which are harmful, but have a serious effect later in life. Such genes were never selected against when expected lifetimes were 35 years or less. Now that we have cured many things that prevented people from getting to 30 or 40, we are seeing new problems that prevent people from getting to 100 or 150. But who's to say that there are not even more aging effects that will only become apparent after 150 or 200 years? It seems shortsighted to assume that the aging processes that are a problem now are the only things we need to overcome in order to live thousands of years.
I also think that a lot of the items on his list amount to replacement of body parts, whether whole organs or DNA. That isn't really reversing aging... That's just repair work which is likely to be needed more and more frequently as the person gets older. It also doesn't address the non-replaceable parts like the brain. Neurons continually die off during a person's adult life, and you don't grow new ones... that's going to be significant after a few hundred years.
If ageing is really to be solved, I think it will be done from the inside, by understanding and altering the functions of harmful genes. That's a long ways in the future, though.
I would guess that it's a matter of (a) percentages - few planes crash compared to the total number that fly - and (b) necessity - travel between cities has always been a part of life, but travelling to the moon has no ulterior purpose. I bet that as soon as there is a good reason for people to go to them moon (other than just to say you've done it), companies will be tripping over each other to get there.
Of course, lots of pilots were killed in the early days of airplanes... Part of the squeamishness about deaths in the space program right now comes from the perception - mostly correct, I think - that they are not serving any greater purpose. If we're sending people into space just because we can, and they die, it feels like a waste, whereas if we were really pushing the exploration of space it would be more understandable.
Many instances of depression are due to social injustice, apathy, the slow pace at which society reforms itself.
That may be true. However, I think it is still possible to distinguish between the depression which is a normal response to a poor environment, and pathological depression that needs treatment. It's like many other psychological responses that probably evolved because they were useful and healthy in certain situations, but can become unhealthy when the effect is disproportionate to the cause.
Depression, for example, might have evolved as a way for animals to deal with conflict. If a wolf loses a battle for dominance it becomes withdrawn temporarily - a kind of depression. In this case it is better for the animal to withdraw and live than continue to challenge and be killed. But if depression continues to the point where someone takes his own life, it's a natural response gone off the rails.
I've also read that people who are depressed are often more realistic when it comes to assessing their environment - people who aren't depressed tend to be overly optimistic. But I don't think there is really much danger in prescribing anti-depressants. If anything, if you want social change, a populace that is worn down and apathetic is least likely to put in the effort required. So I think it works both ways.
There's a map showing the dramatic REforestation here in the united States. Enviromentalists tend to 'overlook' these sorts of images.
Doubtful... Results like that are what enviromentalists are working for. If no one draws attention to environmental problems, there are not going to be any solutions.
I'm sure there are many satellite images of remote areas that haven't changed in the last 30 years, but that doesn't mean that looking at the changes (good or bad) isn't important.
I very much respect your commitment as a parent to raise a child with Down Syndrome - but please do not be so arrogant as to assume you know what is best for every parent and every child facing similar circumstances.
Down's is by far not the most devastating genetic disease out there, and I think it is entirely reasonable for a parent to weigh their child's potential quality of life against their own needs and their other responsibilities.
I grew up with a severely disabled sibling (with Rett Syndrome, another genetic disorder, which affects only girls). She can't walk, talk, or even feed herself. When she was born, the genetic tests to find Rett Syndrome did not exist; if one is developed by the time I have a family, I will definitely want to have it done. I can't bear the thought of bringing into the world a child who will never develop beyond mental infancy, and whose needs would overwhelm those of the rest of my family. Before the specific gene was discovered, even my mother, who has cared for my sister at home her whole life, told me I should never risk having a girl.
I don't believe in the slippery slope argument. There IS a quantifiable difference between minor imperfections and major disabilities. Sure, there may be a grey area in-between, but that doesn't mean one can't make any distinction at all - it only means that if a line is to be drawn, it should ultimately be a personal decision, moderated by one's own beliefs and circumstances.
I do honestly wish you all the best with your daughter. I have known several great kids with Down's Syndrome. But I suspect that thirty years from now, when your daughter is an adult who still requires full time care, you may be more receptive to other people's point of view.
I use the word confuzzled all the time... Mostly in reference to my cats, though, since they're often puzzled or confused, and always fuzzy - hence "confuzzled".
That's what amazed me too! I've been looking forward to today ever since I first read about the Cassini mission in ~1992. People knew that there was the possibility of liquid hydrocarbons on the surface, but who knew whether it would be flat and featureless or have an active weather system? The system of runoff channels on the surface is beyond cool. :)
I have to wonder if the "river channels" are still active, or whether they are just a remenant from some older, warmer era on Titan, as similar features are on Mars... Hopefully the answers will be in the full data, once it's analysed.
I also wonder if an active weather/circulation system would increase or decrease the probability of finding simple life? Maybe it is an indication that Titan still has reserves of internal heat?
I don't think it is gravity alone which accounts for the size difference, but mainly weathering and erosion, for which you need an atmosphere. Earth has this in abundance, Mars relatively little, and Iapetus probably none at all. Gravity has nothing to do if there is no wind or rainfall to knock loose stones to begin with. (Of course, the gravity of the planet is a factor in whether it can retain an atmosphere to begin with...)
It seems like there are two separate possible problems here: people are coming into a company without the writing skills they need, and/or employees are not treating email communication with the same professionalism as other company documents.
:)
For the first problem, either a) don't hire people who can't write, or b) provide on-the job training to bring writing skills up to an acceptable level.
For the second, I think the company needs to make a clear set of standards for both internal and external communication, and enforce them. External communication - to customers, etc. - is particularly important. Anything as badly written as those examples would be deleted from my inbox before I got to the end of the first sentence.
I used to work as a technical writer for a large company, and they kept us busy. It's fine to hire engineers who are good at what they do, even if they don't have great writing skills - as log as you also hire someone to decipher and rewrite everything that comes out of the engineering dept.
PS. I respectfully submit that the headline should read either "The illegibility of email" or "The illiteracy of corporate america"... I might try to make my email literary, but not literate (and my slashdot posts are probably neither...)
The US is pretty egalitarian in our education system, compared to your typical poor country.
The US is more egalitarian than many other first-world countries, also, and I'm not convinced it's an entirely good thing. Not all students are created equal. Vocational programs, for example, have been cut back in high schools, in favour of purely academic subjects.
In the high school I went to, enrolment had fallen from 3000 in the 70s to ~1000 in the 90s. (It was a rural English-language high-school in a part of Quebec that is now mostly Francophone.) By the time I got there, they had closed the entire vocational wing of the building. And I knew a lot of people who would have been better off in a mechanics class than in history, for example.
Obviously this is not to say that everyone shouldn't have equal opportunities for a pre-university high school education, but just that "equal" doesn't have to mean "the same". Many countries have different educational streams that split students into different types of high schools. I think "integration" of students of different abilities into the same class is a well-meaning but misguided approach. When you stream students, you can give specialized attention to the faster learners as well as the slower ones.
One caveat, though, is to make sure that higher academics don't become too exclusive. I had a friend in Finland (the top-scoring country in this survey) who didn't make it into medical school despite brilliant grades. It is insanely competitive there, because space for advanced programs is so limited. I would prefer some system that could strike a reasonable compromise...
I'm skeptical... First of all, as far as I know, the quantum entanglement of particles only allows you to measure the state of one, and instantly know the state of the other - this is rather different than changing the state of one, and observing a change of state in the other. Also, even though you can instantly know the state of a particle at an arbitrary distance, it isn't clear that "information" is in any sense travelling faster than the speed of light. After all, the only way you can know that you have learned something about the second particle is to compare measurements, and you can only compare your measurements transmitting data from both points to a single place - a transmission which is slower than the speed of light.
A more important point might be that there is a very very large number of primary particles in the human body. Supposing two electrons in two people were enangled, what are the chances that they would both be in the same kind of molecule, in the same place in the body? You could argue that maybe that is not a prerequisite, but I have a hard time imagining how the idea would work otherwise.
I do think that quantum effects might be very important when it comes to understanding how the brain works, I just don't believe this particular theory. I think ESP experiences are much more easily explained by intuition and probabilities. For example, I almost always know who's calling when the phone rings, but that doesn't mean I'm telepathic. It just means that I know who is likely to call at what hour of the day. Mothers/daughters and twins are going to have a very intimate knowledge of one another, so it doesn't surprise me that they are even more sensitive - maybe even subconciously - to very small clues that they get from the other person.
I don't think so. The tidal foces would probably tear the star apart before it could collapse. But you might be able to get a binary system with a star and a stellar-mass black hole if it started out as a two-star system, and one star went supernova.
This is nonsense.
Straightforward calculations, starting from equations of gas pressure and gravtational attraction, show that any overdense region in a gas cloud, larger than a certain critical mass (called the Jeans mass), will collapse in on itself. It is true that the simplest calculation of the Jeans mass gives 10^5 solar masses, much larger than any star; but if you take into account that a cloud will fragment as it collapses, the Jeans mass becomes much smaller. For typical conditions, the critical mass is ~1/3 the mass of the sun.
Supernova shocks might help start the process of gravitational collapse, but there is no reason to think 20 or more are necessary.
Quite true... However, by "unbiased", I didn't mean "completely without any editorial slant whatsoever", since obviously every piece of writing has some bias, even if it's only in which facts were chosen to put in and which to leave out.
By "unbiased" in this context, I meant that respectable newspapers avoid the strong kind of bias of editorializing their stories, ignoring the inescapable sutble biases. News outlets have an obligation to at least report all sides of the story, and not use those stories to support an explicit or implicit political or social agenda. When it comes to blogging, no such responsibility is implied, but some people may mistakenly expect it...
Hope that clarifies.
Blogs may become more popular, but I don't think they will completely supplant the traditional media. When you buy a newspaper, for example, part of what you pay for is the assumption that the stories are timely, accurate, unbiased, and fact-checked. With blogs, it's up to the reader to be discriminating.
So while some people may be happy reading all the information available to them and coming to their own conclusions, I think there will always be people who are willing to pay a traditional news service to separate the wheat from the chaff. There will probably also (unfortunately) be people who get all their "news" from blogs, but don't make the distinction between trustworthy and non-trustworthy sources. Since I would expect this to the majority of casual internet-readers, I worry that a lot of people will come away misinformed.
I think blogging does have a role to play as a check on the integrity of the traditional media, but I don't think it is anywhere near time for it to take over completely.
Commercial silk comes not from spiders, but from the silk moth (spiders are hard to coral).
And spider silk doesn't come from spiders either - Nexia used transgenic goats (which secreted the silk proteins in their milk) and this group is using transgenic caterpillar cells. I just think this is an interesting story in the context of the recent stories on genetic chimeras. Now if they could create a transgenic animal that would actually spin the spider silk, they's be all set!
Unless people with the disease have more children than people without it (i.e. if the "disease" is in some sense beneficial in a fitness sense) their reproduction will not contribute to an overall increase in disease frequency.
Not true. All that is required for a given gene to increase in frequency is that it not be harmful enough to impair reproduction (which given medical treatment, is becoming true for diseases like diabaetes). If a genetic mutation is fatal, the incidence will be whatever the spontaeous mutation rate is. But if medicine can increase survival, the affected person will pass the mutated gene on to 50% of his or her children, and so on. Eventually the frequency of the mutation will reach a steady state, but it will be at much higher frequency than it would have been before.
Why not classify entities (living and non-living) along the lines of cognitive ability, or moral agency? In those scenarios it would be pretty accurate to assume that humans aren't animals.
For one thing, it's a lot harder to quantify cognitive ability or moral agency. We don't even have universal definitions of those qualities, much less an accurate way to measure them for every type of species. (Never mind that trying to classify organisms this way would basically be redifining what we mean by "animal" - so while it could be an additional charactarization, as a direct substitution it would be meaningless.)
On the other hand, anatomy is easily observable, and establishes evolutionary relationships among species. DNA classification might someday be better for that, but until we have mapped the genome of every animal, the physical appearence is a better way of infering genetic relationships than intellect.
What I'm saying is that logically, because the result cannot immediately be verified against a trustable source, you have to assume that the computer's result is wrong and will need recounting against paper receipts in all cases.
I think this is the crux of the disagreement. I was assuming in my post that voting machings could be considered approximately as trustworthy as people counting by hand, in which case recounts would only be requested under the same kind of circumstances that they are with paper ballot systems.
Now, if you are going to claim that voting machines are inherently untrustworthy, then indeed they are useless. But I believe it is possible to build a system that is at least as accurate and trustworthy as hand-counting. I also think that the testing and monitoring of such a system could still save money in the long run, when you consider the number of people-hours required to count and recount ballots.
If reliable, accurate voting machines can be implemented, I think that hand counts could be reduced to spot-auditing and requested recounts (as in close races, or disagreement with the exit polls, or based on statistical analysis such as the paper in this story). In addition I think that electronic voting machines could reduce the number of spoiled ballots (by printing out a clear human- and machine-readable ballot to be voter-verified before being put in the box).
But back to the issue of trust... as someone else posted, it will be hard to get around this as long as the government is contracting out the work to companies. Giving the task to research universities, and requiring open code, complete published documentation, and testing, would be a better way to go, in my opinion.
Excellent idea. This would also keep people from altering ballots after they're printed but before they put them in the box.
I think having an ID tied to both you and your vote is a bad idea in general. It opens up possibilites of people being bribed or strong-armed for their vote.
Without an identifying number, someone can tell you how to vote, but there's no way for them to verify if you voted for who you said you did. If there were a voter ID, someone could conceivably force you to give them your number and password, and then go check that you voted the way they wanted you to.
Even if they asked for government-issued ID at the audit, someone who is a registered voter could get in and then pull up someone else's record. You could get around that by having a poll worker bring up your record after you give your ID, but that would mean your vote is directly tied to your name, which would completely undermine the secret ballot... I just don't see how it could work.
Having two separate manufacturers for the two stages seems like a good idea, but I think it makes getting an accurate count from either machine more difficult. For example, machine 1 prints a receipt and counts it, but the voter fails to put the paper into machine 2. Or machine 1 prints a receipt, the voter annuls it and starts over, but doesn't destroy the first paper, then feeds both ballots into machine 2. Or machine 1 prints a receipt, which the voter alters before feeding into machine 2, etc.
If you have a machine which doesn't record the vote until a single paper has been verified and returned (perhaps including a serial number on the ballot to make sure the paper can't be switched) you avoid that type of problem. Perhaps a compromise could be made by having the touchscreen/printer part of the machine and the optical scanner part be made by different companies. Or you could let the machines keep an independent tally, but have them talk to each other (with the printing machine sending the serial number and vote, and scanning machine sending a verified/not verified message back).
I agree completely. An unverified paper trail is no better than none at all.
My own idea of the ideal voting machine would be this: The voter selects a candidate on the screen. The machine prints a receipt with the selection. If the selection matches what the voter intended her or she feeds it back into the machine where it it saved. If the printout is wrong, the voter tears it up and has the option to go back to the first step. No vote is counted until a verified receipt is scanned back in.
That is of course wrong; there is no way to say whether the electronic vote is questionable or not.
I have to disagree. Isn't the point of this story that there are ways to identify suspect vote counts? Just because you don't have any a priori way of knowing what the outcome will be doesn't mean you can't look for anomalies by comparing the results from different regions against each other. (And that applies to all methods of voting, including pen and paper.)
The losing candidate can always question the vote, no matter what the original counting method was. But I don't think that's a mark against electronic voting. There are a few obvious circumstances which would make it reasonable to ask for a recount, such as a very close result, a vote count that is different from the number of registered voters, or an outcome that is suspiciously different from other similar areas. This isn't any different than it was before voting machines came along.
Even for all the controversy, I think e-voting machines (with paper trails) have the potential to offer the best of both worlds - a quick first count and a reliable way to get a recount. Ideally, with the paper trail machine printed and voter-verified, there would also be far fewer spoiled ballots.