There was an interesting article in Nature about the 7 +/- 2 memory cache number. Their research indicates that the true number is more like 4 +/- 1. The kind of information also influenced how much can be stored (as you surmised). Which sounds closer to what the "brain cache" researchers found.
I worked as a temp technical writer in the early '90s for a large engineering firm (Unisys). They hired lots of temp tech writers, and they paid well - $35/hour, which was more than they paid staff writers.
They had this unusual policy of laying off ALL of their temporary staff at the end of the year as a way of forcing managers to rethink their hiring and their needs for the next year. So, how did I handle it in late November and early December, when I was told to wrap up my book projects and hand them off to permanent employees, training them in every last detail of how to handle my projects?
I worked my butt off, 50-60 hours per week, making sure that everything was correct, making sure everything worked, making sure that my projects were in good order for management, and for my friends (permanent employees) who would pick them up when I left.
Why? Because I knew they would need writers the following year, and because they paid well! And I got hired back on in early spring, as projects started to heat up.
But that's the old way. Find people who are competent here in the US, pay them well, and expect the best work from them.
"The QL is a monster to work with' he said..."It has no priorities, no real sense of needs or goals. It thinks, but it may not solve. Quantum logic can outline the center of a problem before it understands the principles and questions, and then, from our point of view, everything ends in confusion. More often than not, it comes up with a solution to a problem that is not stated. It does virtually everything but linear, time's arrow ratiocination."
In 1974, sf author Alfred Bester wrote The Computer Connection. One of the characters was Fee-5 Grauman's Chinese. The "5" was because she was born in the fifth row.
Any earlier reference to a number in a name in fiction? Not just the idea that your name could be replaced with a number, but a number in a name.
"Saying your tax dollars are supporting networks used for file sharing is preposterous."
Last time I checked, you don't pay for Comcast cable modems or ATT DSL in campus dorms (or in the many walk-up workstations elsewhere on campus); in fact, the only network available is the one provided by the University of Michigan, which is a publicly-supported institution last time I checked. So yes, my tax dollars certainly go to support illegal file sharing.
"As far as plagiarism in respect to file sharing, the two really have absolutely nothing in common, in respect to network enforcement or even mindsets involved."
Maybe not for lawyers, but I still don't see how you can say that it is okay for students to steal music that does not belong to them, and keep it and use it and transfer it to others, but it is not okay to steal the ideas and words and works of others, and use them and present them as one's own. And not all plagiarized material is in the public domain (just because it is on the Internet).
"Unfortunately you follow the all-to-common mindset that file sharing is innately wrong"
Actually, no. The Gutenberg project is a great example of how the Internet can be used to make the world's great intellectual works available to everyone - which is exactly the purpose of the original copyright acts, which set a limit on the length of copyright protection. Not to mention the legitimate sharing of files between researchers. That's taxpayer money well spent!
I respect your agreement with the U of M's public stance, which protects intellectual property, as it should. However, the way in which U of M workstations and networks are actually used is completely at variance with these policies, and I can't condone it. So let's end this thread and agree to disagree!
Fair enough. It is true, as you say, that scare tactics and law suits aren't doing much to stop the flow of copyrighted material. It is also true that getting students to sign a statement of responsibility about respect for intellectual property isn't doing much, either.
I was also intrigued by your reference to "poor students." Driving around the UM campus in the present day (as opposed to walking around in the 1960's), I am stunned at the number of students who drive very expensive cars - Lexus SUVs, BMWs, and Audi's. If you did a comparison, you would find that the current crop of UM students are, on average, from far wealthier familes than they were a generation ago.
I think there are a lot of students at the U of M who don't steal music over the Internet primarily because they don't have the money. They do it because it is easy and because it is more cool than buying it, and because you don't need to make a choice - you just take it all.
But, to get back to the topic, what if lawsuits like this one forced the U of M to close access to sites that are primarily used to exchange copyrighted material? or forced the U to institute policies that resulted in immediate fines for every offender? Then, maybe the networks that I support with my tax dollars would be used for some sort of useful educational purpose, rather than rewarding students who make poor moral choices.
I'm just saying that if the University chooses to make an issue of responsibility for intellectual property (essential for any academic institution), they need to enforce it. If the U winks at intellectual property theft in the form of stolen music, how can it penalize students for plagiarism - cutting and pasting material from the Internet and calling it their own work?
Very good, mrwonton, you've taken your first step to becoming a member of a large organization. You've stated the party line. I've worked at large organizations (including the UM) for most of my life, and I can tell you that you've got what it takes.
However, I live in Ann Arbor, and I spoke with a few (unnamed) students about the general subject of file sharing. They remember a long presentation on file sharing at student orientation (which will figure prominently in any lawsuit, I'm sure - that's what it's really for); most do not remember agreeing to anything or signing anything that limits their use of the network.
That said, they ALL use UM resources to download music files, movie files, you name it. Nobody buys CDs, nobody uses lame pay for tunes sites when you can get everything free! The only people who are seen as extreme sharers are people who actually operate servers out of their dorm rooms. I don't think the U has fined anyone.
Schoolkids Records, the store at which I bought my first vinyl LPs back in the day (1960's) finally went out of business in A2 in 2001 (I think). You can't stay in business when nobody buys what you're selling in a college town.
I don't think they care about the 8 students, or the fines - it's the University of Michigan they are after. If they can convince large lawsuit-averse institutions like the UM, with networks serving tens of thousands of students, faculty and staff, to outlaw music-sharing, then they will have achieved their end. More bang for the buck - know what I mean?
I was about to agree with the comments about his tech being better than his characters, but I remembered Heavy Weather, a novel about a group of storm chasers in the near future. The scientific premise of the book is that all of the extra energy available from global warming won't be delivered with a nice even one degree all around, but will result in monster storms.
The book was very well-written, and the characters were even more interesting than the tech.
I worked as a technical writer for a number of years and always thought it would be proof against offshoring. If you had the choice, you would always want a native speaker to write your documents (or news stories, etc.). People who have picked up a second language rarely speak it or write it as well as a native speaker, particularly with regard to the nuances that are important in establishing an authoritative voice in a document.
However, I worked with lots of Indians at my last job, and found that some of them were very good writers, even if their speech was often peppered with examples of what I used to call the "High Bombastic" style (what you get when you cross flowery Sanskrit literary forms with 19th century English literature). The writing quality in technical literature (specifications, project overviews, and so forth) was usually fine.
Unfortunately, the worst writing I saw at this particular job (a major US corporation) came from Americans. I've taught at the college level, and the writing quality was shockingly low. I gave up on essay questions on tests; out of thirty students, you might get 2 coherent essays.
New office game - walk up to someone, tap their communicator, say the name of the president of the company and walk away. You're it!
At least this is an ST technology that works. Once on the set of the original Trek in 1967, an executive for a tech company saw the automatic doors. You just walk up to them and *whoosh* they open. No big sensor doormat, no nothing. He offered a million dollars for the technology.
The "technology" turned out to be two stagehands who yanked them open JIT.
The open source article says "The language spoken by most Rwandans has no word for "computer"... the Rwandan [open source] developers created their own: "mudasobwa," which roughly means "something or someone that does not make mistakes."
Microsoft should have no problem localizing in Rwanda;)
You mean *once did* "200 million searches..."
on
In Google We Trust
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm not sure what to make of this statistic. Is this the number of searches that it returns for people who actually go to www.google.com? Or is it the number of all search results that are returned by Google, regardless of the intial URL?
Here's another way of looking at it. Last year, Google returned about 79% of all search results on the web - a very impressive number. That's because both Yahoo and Aol used Google search results.
However, now that Yahoo no longer uses Google, it is estimated that Google will only return about 50% of the search results on the web - Yahoo will now return about 43%. See the before and after pie diagrams and numbers at Danny Sullivan's SearchEngineWatch.com article.
For those of you who have been depending on traffic free from the boy scouts at Google, who have deliberately avoided lots of different ways to monetize their main asset, have you looked at how you rank on Yahoo lately? And have you checked out Yahoo's Site Match program, where you pay BOTH for inclusion in their index AND PER CLICK THRU if anyone happens to find your site?
Our neighborhood is being finished very slowly, at a rate of about one house per year. It's great cheap entertainment for me and my 8 year old son. Goes on for weeks and weeks.
This "House Printer" is kind of cool, but would you want to watch it? If you've ever seen stereolithography done "live", it's kind of boring.
And what's the resolution on that thing? If it can finish a one-story small house in a day, the resolution can't be all that great.
Right on, Golgotha007 - my personal best was 28 free T-shirts at Internet World 2000. I think I also snagged a laptop-carrying-backpack identical to those selling retail for $79 to carry them in.
That show was happening during the very week in March that the internet stock bubble burst for real. There were about 1000 vendors there, most were throwing pens and t-shirts with a sort of glazed look in their eyes...
I've taught courses on Computers in Health Care at UM (Flint), and have (since 1995) taught my students about how increasing online information about physicians and hospitals will change the health care system.
This is the first reference I've seen to a database for physician use about patients. However, you should know that physicians have long had a much more certain guide to difficult patients - namely, word-of-mouth from each other, and from the chart that follows every patient wherever they go.
I don't see an ethical problem for physicians who use it; the Hippocratic oath does not obligate physicians to serve every person who comes to them. Many hospitals reserve the right to refuse service under any of a number of conditions.
However, there are strict guidelines (Privacy Act of 1974 and HIPAA) for the use of databases in health care practice. Among the provisions is the right of patients to view their data and request revisions when appropriate. I looked at the DoctorsKnow.us website, and there doesn't seem to be a provision for a patient to look himself or herself up, see their information, and dispute/correct it. As a private company, they don't need to be HIPAA compliant, but this is a bad precedent.
One possible use for this thing mentioned on the microsoft site is being able to retrace your steps to find something you lost. People with real memory problems (as opposed to ordinary forgetfulness) could use it in the same way. Perhaps a person could rebuild a day or short period of days that were "lost" due to memory problems.
In Earth Made of Glass John Barnes writes about something called an emblok which was used to store all of a person's memories. Other people could also contribute their memories of a person. If you were killed, the memories could be replayed into the developing brain of a cloned spare. Over time, it would become you again.
In Methuselah's Children, the 1940's Robert Heinlein novel, the long-lived Lazarus Long worries about whether or not he'd be able to remember everything if he lived for a thousand years. I think the same topic comes up in The Computer Connection by Alfred Bester, also a novel about immortality.
Cool idea. William Gibson wrote about a similar idea, except that the recording was of the person's actual, first person experience. Not just pictures of what they saw; their internal experience of their lives.
In Gibson's take on it, lots of people forsook their own lives to partake in the more interesting lives of famous people! And paid handsomely for it.
Sorry, I should have been more clear about what I meant by "useful resources." Maybe I should have said "reliable resources that are usable with technology that we actually have."
It's true, the surface of the moon has lots of minerals, including interesting metal ores. (Keep in mind of course that our practical knowledge - actual samples - of the composition of the surface of the moon is largely derived from 6 short visits.) However, as far as I know, the moon did not have the same kind of "geological" history as the Earth (water flow, plate tectonics, vulcanism and many more) and therefore does not have the same kind of concentrated mineral deposits, where it is possible to extract minerals in a known, economical way. There is a lot of speculation about what lies under the surface, but we haven't spent enough time there to know for sure. We have a small number of surface samples that are promising, but again our samples are limited.
All of the proposals I've ever seen to extract these resources from the moon seem to involve creating an entirely new constellation of skills and technologies for every phase of metal and fuel production. And remember, all of this work and development must be done in a very harsh environment - low gravity, vacuum, very fine dust, temperature extremes from +100 to -170 Celsius. Not to mention doing all of this very far from home. And then you need to learn how to build every last component of your spacecraft in the same environment.
Personally, I'm all in favor of exploring, building and doing science and engineering on the moon. But if your goal is Mars, why spend the time building an industrialized society on the moon? Because that is what it would take to build spacecraft on the moon. And isn't Bush just fooling himself (and us) by implying that we just need to go to the moon, build a base, and then start shooting for Mars?
There is no reason to go to the Moon if your goal is Mars. The Moon has little in the way of useful resources; no metal for building spacecraft, no easily obtainable fuel. Why would you gather everything you need on Earth, lift it out of our gravity well, drop it into the Moon's gravity well, then lift it back out again?
The Bush proposal demonstrates that he (Bush) does everything for political value; Bush doesn't ask scientists about science policy (see the recent news story about this) just like he doesn't ask experts from all sides about economic policy. Especially if he might get a dissenting vote.
That's how he comes up with patent nonsense like using the Moon as a way to get to Mars. Finally, someone with some experience exposes this nonsensical fraud for what it is.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if the Church of Fools has worked out the theological implications of the fact that their priests and pastors are now avatars?
There was an interesting article in Nature about the 7 +/- 2 memory cache number. Their research indicates that the true number is more like 4 +/- 1. The kind of information also influenced how much can be stored (as you surmised). Which sounds closer to what the "brain cache" researchers found.
They had this unusual policy of laying off ALL of their temporary staff at the end of the year as a way of forcing managers to rethink their hiring and their needs for the next year. So, how did I handle it in late November and early December, when I was told to wrap up my book projects and hand them off to permanent employees, training them in every last detail of how to handle my projects?
I worked my butt off, 50-60 hours per week, making sure that everything was correct, making sure everything worked, making sure that my projects were in good order for management, and for my friends (permanent employees) who would pick them up when I left.
Why? Because I knew they would need writers the following year, and because they paid well! And I got hired back on in early spring, as projects started to heat up.
But that's the old way. Find people who are competent here in the US, pay them well, and expect the best work from them.
Any earlier reference to a number in a name in fiction? Not just the idea that your name could be replaced with a number, but a number in a name.
Last time I checked, you don't pay for Comcast cable modems or ATT DSL in campus dorms (or in the many walk-up workstations elsewhere on campus); in fact, the only network available is the one provided by the University of Michigan, which is a publicly-supported institution last time I checked. So yes, my tax dollars certainly go to support illegal file sharing.
"As far as plagiarism in respect to file sharing, the two really have absolutely nothing in common, in respect to network enforcement or even mindsets involved."
Maybe not for lawyers, but I still don't see how you can say that it is okay for students to steal music that does not belong to them, and keep it and use it and transfer it to others, but it is not okay to steal the ideas and words and works of others, and use them and present them as one's own. And not all plagiarized material is in the public domain (just because it is on the Internet).
"Unfortunately you follow the all-to-common mindset that file sharing is innately wrong"
Actually, no. The Gutenberg project is a great example of how the Internet can be used to make the world's great intellectual works available to everyone - which is exactly the purpose of the original copyright acts, which set a limit on the length of copyright protection. Not to mention the legitimate sharing of files between researchers. That's taxpayer money well spent!
I respect your agreement with the U of M's public stance, which protects intellectual property, as it should. However, the way in which U of M workstations and networks are actually used is completely at variance with these policies, and I can't condone it. So let's end this thread and agree to disagree!
I was also intrigued by your reference to "poor students." Driving around the UM campus in the present day (as opposed to walking around in the 1960's), I am stunned at the number of students who drive very expensive cars - Lexus SUVs, BMWs, and Audi's. If you did a comparison, you would find that the current crop of UM students are, on average, from far wealthier familes than they were a generation ago.
I think there are a lot of students at the U of M who don't steal music over the Internet primarily because they don't have the money. They do it because it is easy and because it is more cool than buying it, and because you don't need to make a choice - you just take it all.
But, to get back to the topic, what if lawsuits like this one forced the U of M to close access to sites that are primarily used to exchange copyrighted material? or forced the U to institute policies that resulted in immediate fines for every offender? Then, maybe the networks that I support with my tax dollars would be used for some sort of useful educational purpose, rather than rewarding students who make poor moral choices.
I'm just saying that if the University chooses to make an issue of responsibility for intellectual property (essential for any academic institution), they need to enforce it. If the U winks at intellectual property theft in the form of stolen music, how can it penalize students for plagiarism - cutting and pasting material from the Internet and calling it their own work?
However, I live in Ann Arbor, and I spoke with a few (unnamed) students about the general subject of file sharing. They remember a long presentation on file sharing at student orientation (which will figure prominently in any lawsuit, I'm sure - that's what it's really for); most do not remember agreeing to anything or signing anything that limits their use of the network.
That said, they ALL use UM resources to download music files, movie files, you name it. Nobody buys CDs, nobody uses lame pay for tunes sites when you can get everything free! The only people who are seen as extreme sharers are people who actually operate servers out of their dorm rooms. I don't think the U has fined anyone.
Schoolkids Records, the store at which I bought my first vinyl LPs back in the day (1960's) finally went out of business in A2 in 2001 (I think). You can't stay in business when nobody buys what you're selling in a college town.
I don't think they care about the 8 students, or the fines - it's the University of Michigan they are after. If they can convince large lawsuit-averse institutions like the UM, with networks serving tens of thousands of students, faculty and staff, to outlaw music-sharing, then they will have achieved their end. More bang for the buck - know what I mean?
The book was very well-written, and the characters were even more interesting than the tech.
William Gibson called custom computers sandbenders in his 1996 novel Idoru - so that makes it 7 years behind the time ;)
However, I worked with lots of Indians at my last job, and found that some of them were very good writers, even if their speech was often peppered with examples of what I used to call the "High Bombastic" style (what you get when you cross flowery Sanskrit literary forms with 19th century English literature). The writing quality in technical literature (specifications, project overviews, and so forth) was usually fine.
Unfortunately, the worst writing I saw at this particular job (a major US corporation) came from Americans. I've taught at the college level, and the writing quality was shockingly low. I gave up on essay questions on tests; out of thirty students, you might get 2 coherent essays.
At least this is an ST technology that works. Once on the set of the original Trek in 1967, an executive for a tech company saw the automatic doors. You just walk up to them and *whoosh* they open. No big sensor doormat, no nothing. He offered a million dollars for the technology.
The "technology" turned out to be two stagehands who yanked them open JIT.
Microsoft should have no problem localizing in Rwanda ;)
Here's another way of looking at it. Last year, Google returned about 79% of all search results on the web - a very impressive number. That's because both Yahoo and Aol used Google search results.
However, now that Yahoo no longer uses Google, it is estimated that Google will only return about 50% of the search results on the web - Yahoo will now return about 43%. See the before and after pie diagrams and numbers at Danny Sullivan's SearchEngineWatch.com article.
For those of you who have been depending on traffic free from the boy scouts at Google, who have deliberately avoided lots of different ways to monetize their main asset, have you looked at how you rank on Yahoo lately? And have you checked out Yahoo's Site Match program, where you pay BOTH for inclusion in their index AND PER CLICK THRU if anyone happens to find your site?
This "House Printer" is kind of cool, but would you want to watch it? If you've ever seen stereolithography done "live", it's kind of boring.
And what's the resolution on that thing? If it can finish a one-story small house in a day, the resolution can't be all that great.
Right on, Golgotha007 - my personal best was 28 free T-shirts at Internet World 2000. I think I also snagged a laptop-carrying-backpack identical to those selling retail for $79 to carry them in. That show was happening during the very week in March that the internet stock bubble burst for real. There were about 1000 vendors there, most were throwing pens and t-shirts with a sort of glazed look in their eyes...
This is the first reference I've seen to a database for physician use about patients. However, you should know that physicians have long had a much more certain guide to difficult patients - namely, word-of-mouth from each other, and from the chart that follows every patient wherever they go.
I don't see an ethical problem for physicians who use it; the Hippocratic oath does not obligate physicians to serve every person who comes to them. Many hospitals reserve the right to refuse service under any of a number of conditions.
However, there are strict guidelines (Privacy Act of 1974 and HIPAA) for the use of databases in health care practice. Among the provisions is the right of patients to view their data and request revisions when appropriate. I looked at the DoctorsKnow.us website, and there doesn't seem to be a provision for a patient to look himself or herself up, see their information, and dispute/correct it. As a private company, they don't need to be HIPAA compliant, but this is a bad precedent.
In Earth Made of Glass John Barnes writes about something called an emblok which was used to store all of a person's memories. Other people could also contribute their memories of a person. If you were killed, the memories could be replayed into the developing brain of a cloned spare. Over time, it would become you again.
In Methuselah's Children, the 1940's Robert Heinlein novel, the long-lived Lazarus Long worries about whether or not he'd be able to remember everything if he lived for a thousand years. I think the same topic comes up in The Computer Connection by Alfred Bester, also a novel about immortality.
In Gibson's take on it, lots of people forsook their own lives to partake in the more interesting lives of famous people! And paid handsomely for it.
It's true, the surface of the moon has lots of minerals, including interesting metal ores. (Keep in mind of course that our practical knowledge - actual samples - of the composition of the surface of the moon is largely derived from 6 short visits.) However, as far as I know, the moon did not have the same kind of "geological" history as the Earth (water flow, plate tectonics, vulcanism and many more) and therefore does not have the same kind of concentrated mineral deposits, where it is possible to extract minerals in a known, economical way. There is a lot of speculation about what lies under the surface, but we haven't spent enough time there to know for sure. We have a small number of surface samples that are promising, but again our samples are limited.
All of the proposals I've ever seen to extract these resources from the moon seem to involve creating an entirely new constellation of skills and technologies for every phase of metal and fuel production. And remember, all of this work and development must be done in a very harsh environment - low gravity, vacuum, very fine dust, temperature extremes from +100 to -170 Celsius. Not to mention doing all of this very far from home. And then you need to learn how to build every last component of your spacecraft in the same environment.
Personally, I'm all in favor of exploring, building and doing science and engineering on the moon. But if your goal is Mars, why spend the time building an industrialized society on the moon? Because that is what it would take to build spacecraft on the moon. And isn't Bush just fooling himself (and us) by implying that we just need to go to the moon, build a base, and then start shooting for Mars?
The Bush proposal demonstrates that he (Bush) does everything for political value; Bush doesn't ask scientists about science policy (see the recent news story about this) just like he doesn't ask experts from all sides about economic policy. Especially if he might get a dissenting vote.
That's how he comes up with patent nonsense like using the Moon as a way to get to Mars. Finally, someone with some experience exposes this nonsensical fraud for what it is.
See Frank Herbert's Oil Lens for more info and quotes from the book.