To be honest, it wasn't all that good. I don't know why it got so many awards- there was no plot, it was difficult to believe that the story actually could have happened (and many people involved in real explosive disposal units in iraq/afghanistan said the same), and the characters were one-dimensional and uninspiring.
fMRI is a fairly arcane art- it's nowhere near the "thought detector" most laypeople think it is. The actual practice is rife with the chance to show confirmation bias, given the kind of data filtering that goes on during the process. Check out the link above- scientists were able to show the reaction that a fish had to watching pictures of pleasant situations (babies, puppies, flowers, etc). The fish was dead at the time of the test, however. So, if fMRI can be used to show that a dead salmon has feelings, I'm not likely to trust it for a "lie detector".
Some interesting statistics
on
Health Care Reform
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Here's the graph. Health Care expenditures, as a percentage of US GDP, have increased pretty significantly over the last 40 years. Keep in mind that health care costs are PART of GDP (so when WellPoint raises insurance rates, it actually shows up as an increase in GDP, which helps illustrate why GDP might not be the best indicator of our national economic health). That means that the expenditures in the health care sector have been growing much faster than those in most other sectors of the economy - if they were all growing equally, the portion of the GDP associated with health care would stay flat.
I have my own opinions about how to solve this mess, but I'm not in congress and I have trouble making my fish agree with me, let alone other people. So I won't talk about those, just about the facts of the situation.
It's built on top of Eclipse, so I imagine that there's a pretty straightforward way to switch back to the standard eclipse view. We'll see - I signed up for the beta.
These days, people only mine Thorium while they're working on getting their skill up to the Fel Iron and outlands level. One thing worth noting is that somewhere in the past few patches, they've made it so you can mine Fel Iron at 275, which is pretty nice. No more running around the Eastern Plaguelands looking for Rich Thorium Nodes for those last few points when you'd rather be in Hellfire Peninsula.
was on the first page. The second and third pages have more interesting potential as well. There's a whole area of research on museum education as well as journals both practical and theoretical. I'm sure there's stuff out there that can help.
Posts on slashdot are all exciting and interesting and stuff, but journal articles and other sources are peer-reviewed and typically written by people with real expertise in the field (e.g., Ph.Ds)
Science fiction isn't about "telling the future", it's about making commentary about the Human Condition, putting together entertaining yarns, looking at what-if scenarios in society. Do you think PKD really believed any of the futuristic technology he talked about (read Ubik for a nice example) was really possible? Who knows - it's just a necessary condition to set up the scenario in which we can see interesting ideas play ouy.
Any quick read of the New Masters of SF (china mieville, ian macdonald, iain m banks, ken mcleod, dan simmons) will show you that the genre is alive, kicking, and more literary than ever before.
I love my Razer naga, but it's worth noting that the Naga's buttons are not reprogrammable. They're either the top row of your keyboard or they're the number pad. If this is really 18 fully-programmable buttons, it's got more functionality that way. Of course, it's totally lacking in the Panache department. I mean, where's the cool backlight?
Heh, I just posted this response in a different thread, but it's just as applicable here. I guess that's what [redundant] means, but if both posts get up to 5, both rebuttals ought to, eh?
It doesn't have all that high of a mortality rate so far, so it is not (currently) all that fatal (although - in 1918, the mortality rate was estimated to be between 10 and 20 percent. Of course, we've got better drugs these days).
However, since most seasonal influenza is of the H3 family instead of the H1 family, our regular immunities won't protect us very well. This makes H1N1 likely to be very widespread - lots of people who typically don't get sick will get sick. It's not like we're all going to start living The Stand or anything, but it is a pretty significant event. We have a major flu pandemic only a few times a century.
It is, so it is not (currently) all that fatal (although - in 1918, the mortality rate was estimated to be between 10 and 20 percent. Of course, we've got better drugs these days).
However, since most seasonal influenza is of the H3 family instead of the H1 family, our regular immunities won't protect us very well. This makes H1N1 likely to be very widespread - lots of people who typically don't get sick will get sick. It's not like we're all going to start living The Stand or anything, but it is a pretty significant event. We have a major flu pandemic only a few times a century.
I still use my Dreamcast from time to time. I love having a real controller attached to my emulators - I play old games on the dreamcast, and long ago hacked a NES-style square controller into one of the dreamcast's inputs for extra-real castlevania and whatnot. As a nostalgia machine, it's great. Of course nowadays you can play homebrewed games on your PC or what have you, but there's something much more exciting about using a real console machine. Dunno why.
I don't know why you'd particularly want to run X11 on a kindle, or certain apps. But there's definitely a space here for stuff like other eBook formats, word-processing (eInk looks great when you're outside), and improving on the general Kindle user experience. For example - the DX has PDF reading, but there's no real organization of PDFs other than by filename. What if I want to organize all my work PDFs (journal articles and whatnot) by journal, author, keyword, etc? Wouldn't it be cool if someone ported Papers to the Kindle DX?
Generally speaking, I love the Kindle hardware as a display device. The interface and user experience is pretty terrible, especially coming from a regular computer where there's always SOMETHING you can download to fix your problems.
It's really annoying to have to manually launch a browser and tweet every time I take a dump. Automated poop-tweeting (at least from home) is a godsend.
It pulled information about me and my friends and showed it to me. Most of that information looked shared, that is, it wasn't anything I couldn't otherwise see by just clicking on a friend's facebook page. But it's information that would be private to some random app developer.
That's the problem - you mark most of your profile as "private" so only friends can see it. But then a friend of yours runs an app (any app at all), and the app has all the privileges that your friend does, allowing the app to gather all the "private" data that you wanted hidden from the Wide World. A popular enough application (mafia wars, etc) could pull a ton of data about people and just sit on it.
I've no clue what the Men in the Black Helicopters want with a bajillion pictures of people in semi-compromising situations and a ton of half-thought out wall posts and other such drivel, but there we are.
On the macintosh version at least, the 'check for updates' menu item is in the Help menu. Because that's clearly where it belongs. I only found it because I was just about to search the help for advice on where to find it.
So, I actually clicked through to RTFA, and was stunned by the article. I'm pretty sure it's a fake. Just to quote it - "There is so much nonsense on the internet about Scientology, all of which was written by anti-religion extremists in the employ of the Psychiatric-Pharmaceutical industry. Many are also being paid by certain depraved, degenerate factions within the German government. You can't believe any of it. If these scumbags had their way, all children would be psych-drugged into oblivion, most eventually becoming high school gunmen; vicious de-programmers would constantly be leaping out from shadowy corners; there would be all-night electroshock parlors on the high street of every village, town and city; and anyone who tried to live an ethical life would quickly receive an icepick lobotomy."
That scans more like Burroughs than anything else. Kind of a satirical send-up of the scientologists, you know? If it *is* real, I think this guy should write more press releases.
I dunno, the picture of the guy wearing the HAL suit seemed pretty unrealistic to me. Plus, the company's name is "cyberdyne", and they've named their product HAL, ffs. It seems like a big lark to me - runs on a battery? that makes you 10 times stronger for 5 hours? And it only costs 4,200 bucks? Something here seems a little off.
I think it's similar to how Kara Thrace is supposed to lead them to their end as well - it's end as in end of the journey, rather than the wiping out of all existence.
Merit pay for "student achievement" is a bad idea. Not because I'm some kind of communist, but because I'm one of the (it seems) relatively few people that actually think about what student achievement in science education looks like.
Knowing random facts about stuff is only a side-effect of actually being scientifically literate. The idea of scientific literacy includes knowing the core concepts of science, being able to construct (and deconstruct) scientific arguments, being able to use the tools of science, and being able to participate in the broader scientific community. Knowing what percentage of the earth's surface is covered in water isn't really part of that puzzle AT ALL. (I'm a relatively "literate" person, with a BS, MS, and PhD, although not in earth science, and I thought it was closer to 60%).
Science education is of supreme importance to the future. But if you're really serious about improving science education, you have to think HARD about what you mean by that. You mean: making sure people have all the pieces of scientific literacy, not just making students memorize facts.
Once you accept that point (and clearly, slashdot comment threads are not the places for real debate, but try reading How People Learn (bransford and brown) and Taking Science to School (big committee, but published by the NAP) for more insight there).... where was I? Oh yes, if you accept that scientific literacy is more than just knowing facts, you have to take a critical look at the standardized tests you're using to base teacher merit pay on. They don't actually test scientific literacy. They test fact retention for the most part, and scientific process skills to a lesser extent. But process skills in these things are tested in a content-free way that completely lacks any kind of face validity as to its relationship to actual scientific inquiry practices.
So, think about it: we're going to base teacher merit pay on student performance. Fine. But if you want to do that RIGHT, you have to actually measure the kind of performance you want, rather than settle for the kind of performance that's easily testable on a large scale. That turns out to be a nigh-intractable problem, and it's this intellectual cutting of corners (testing what you can test, and valuing that, instead of valuing what's central to each discipline and accepting that testing for performance in that fashion is going to be expensive and a real challenge) that's led to the travesty of NCLB - nationwide failure of a system that's supposed to help our most fragile natural resource.
Anyway. The biggest problem with all of this is that thinking hard about education is a real challenge. Teachers have a very important set of critical skills that most science folks don't understand (since most science folks tend to think that science should be just as easy to everybody else as it was to them). Sure, there are plenty of bad teachers. But basing merit pay on test performance will do very little to improve education if the tests are deeply flawed.
I'm often in the same position - looking at software from a usability standpoint and shaking my head in wonder and frustration. It's reassuring that Gates is actually worried about that kind of stuff. It's clear that most of MS isn't, or wasn't at the time. I haven't tried Win7 yet, but Vista isn't much of an improvement in real usability. They added glitter and chrome, but the knobs are still counter-intuitive. That's one thing to say about Mac designers, is that they know how to use affordances in their UI design.
Anyway, if you're out there, Mr. Gates, I'd make an excellent addition to your usability team. You know how to contact me.
Slashdot Mirror
To be honest, it wasn't all that good. I don't know why it got so many awards- there was no plot, it was difficult to believe that the story actually could have happened (and many people involved in real explosive disposal units in iraq/afghanistan said the same), and the characters were one-dimensional and uninspiring.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/09/fmrisalmon/
fMRI is a fairly arcane art- it's nowhere near the "thought detector" most laypeople think it is. The actual practice is rife with the chance to show confirmation bias, given the kind of data filtering that goes on during the process. Check out the link above- scientists were able to show the reaction that a fish had to watching pictures of pleasant situations (babies, puppies, flowers, etc). The fish was dead at the time of the test, however. So, if fMRI can be used to show that a dead salmon has feelings, I'm not likely to trust it for a "lie detector".
Here's the graph. Health Care expenditures, as a percentage of US GDP, have increased pretty significantly over the last 40 years. Keep in mind that health care costs are PART of GDP (so when WellPoint raises insurance rates, it actually shows up as an increase in GDP, which helps illustrate why GDP might not be the best indicator of our national economic health). That means that the expenditures in the health care sector have been growing much faster than those in most other sectors of the economy - if they were all growing equally, the portion of the GDP associated with health care would stay flat.
I have my own opinions about how to solve this mess, but I'm not in congress and I have trouble making my fish agree with me, let alone other people. So I won't talk about those, just about the facts of the situation.
It's built on top of Eclipse, so I imagine that there's a pretty straightforward way to switch back to the standard eclipse view. We'll see - I signed up for the beta.
Hi, I'm a mac. And my mouse has 18 buttons.
So, it's got wireless and I don't even know if they make Nomads anymore. But: no handwriting input, no web cam. Lame.
These days, people only mine Thorium while they're working on getting their skill up to the Fel Iron and outlands level. One thing worth noting is that somewhere in the past few patches, they've made it so you can mine Fel Iron at 275, which is pretty nice. No more running around the Eastern Plaguelands looking for Rich Thorium Nodes for those last few points when you'd rather be in Hellfire Peninsula.
I went to google scholar, typed in "museum technology children" and this link:
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=503376.503430&type=series
was on the first page. The second and third pages have more interesting potential as well. There's a whole area of research on museum education as well as journals both practical and theoretical. I'm sure there's stuff out there that can help.
Posts on slashdot are all exciting and interesting and stuff, but journal articles and other sources are peer-reviewed and typically written by people with real expertise in the field (e.g., Ph.Ds)
No, it hasn't.
Science fiction isn't about "telling the future", it's about making commentary about the Human Condition, putting together entertaining yarns, looking at what-if scenarios in society. Do you think PKD really believed any of the futuristic technology he talked about (read Ubik for a nice example) was really possible? Who knows - it's just a necessary condition to set up the scenario in which we can see interesting ideas play ouy.
Any quick read of the New Masters of SF (china mieville, ian macdonald, iain m banks, ken mcleod, dan simmons) will show you that the genre is alive, kicking, and more literary than ever before.
I love my Razer naga, but it's worth noting that the Naga's buttons are not reprogrammable. They're either the top row of your keyboard or they're the number pad. If this is really 18 fully-programmable buttons, it's got more functionality that way. Of course, it's totally lacking in the Panache department. I mean, where's the cool backlight?
Heh, I just posted this response in a different thread, but it's just as applicable here. I guess that's what [redundant] means, but if both posts get up to 5, both rebuttals ought to, eh?
It doesn't have all that high of a mortality rate so far, so it is not (currently) all that fatal (although - in 1918, the mortality rate was estimated to be between 10 and 20 percent. Of course, we've got better drugs these days).
However, since most seasonal influenza is of the H3 family instead of the H1 family, our regular immunities won't protect us very well. This makes H1N1 likely to be very widespread - lots of people who typically don't get sick will get sick. It's not like we're all going to start living The Stand or anything, but it is a pretty significant event. We have a major flu pandemic only a few times a century.
It is, so it is not (currently) all that fatal (although - in 1918, the mortality rate was estimated to be between 10 and 20 percent. Of course, we've got better drugs these days).
However, since most seasonal influenza is of the H3 family instead of the H1 family, our regular immunities won't protect us very well. This makes H1N1 likely to be very widespread - lots of people who typically don't get sick will get sick. It's not like we're all going to start living The Stand or anything, but it is a pretty significant event. We have a major flu pandemic only a few times a century.
I still use my Dreamcast from time to time. I love having a real controller attached to my emulators - I play old games on the dreamcast, and long ago hacked a NES-style square controller into one of the dreamcast's inputs for extra-real castlevania and whatnot. As a nostalgia machine, it's great. Of course nowadays you can play homebrewed games on your PC or what have you, but there's something much more exciting about using a real console machine. Dunno why.
I don't know why you'd particularly want to run X11 on a kindle, or certain apps. But there's definitely a space here for stuff like other eBook formats, word-processing (eInk looks great when you're outside), and improving on the general Kindle user experience. For example - the DX has PDF reading, but there's no real organization of PDFs other than by filename. What if I want to organize all my work PDFs (journal articles and whatnot) by journal, author, keyword, etc? Wouldn't it be cool if someone ported Papers to the Kindle DX?
Generally speaking, I love the Kindle hardware as a display device. The interface and user experience is pretty terrible, especially coming from a regular computer where there's always SOMETHING you can download to fix your problems.
It's really annoying to have to manually launch a browser and tweet every time I take a dump. Automated poop-tweeting (at least from home) is a godsend.
It pulled information about me and my friends and showed it to me. Most of that information looked shared, that is, it wasn't anything I couldn't otherwise see by just clicking on a friend's facebook page. But it's information that would be private to some random app developer.
That's the problem - you mark most of your profile as "private" so only friends can see it. But then a friend of yours runs an app (any app at all), and the app has all the privileges that your friend does, allowing the app to gather all the "private" data that you wanted hidden from the Wide World. A popular enough application (mafia wars, etc) could pull a ton of data about people and just sit on it.
I've no clue what the Men in the Black Helicopters want with a bajillion pictures of people in semi-compromising situations and a ton of half-thought out wall posts and other such drivel, but there we are.
Haven't they ever seen any movies? Or watch television shows?
"Hai guysz, lookit! I made an artificially-intelligent evil supergenius! What could go wrong?"
On the macintosh version at least, the 'check for updates' menu item is in the Help menu. Because that's clearly where it belongs. I only found it because I was just about to search the help for advice on where to find it.
http://n7.netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu/summary/id=ae8199f5-24744-ed002743-edf2-4f04-8f17
from the report:
"Direct UDP access to remote DNS servers (port 53) is allowed.
The applet was also able to directly request a large DNS response."
So, I actually clicked through to RTFA, and was stunned by the article. I'm pretty sure it's a fake. Just to quote it - "There is so much nonsense on the internet about Scientology, all of which was written by anti-religion extremists in the employ of the Psychiatric-Pharmaceutical industry. Many are also being paid by certain depraved, degenerate factions within the German government. You can't believe any of it. If these scumbags had their way, all children would be psych-drugged into oblivion, most eventually becoming high school gunmen; vicious de-programmers would constantly be leaping out from shadowy corners; there would be all-night electroshock parlors on the high street of every village, town and city; and anyone who tried to live an ethical life would quickly receive an icepick lobotomy."
That scans more like Burroughs than anything else. Kind of a satirical send-up of the scientologists, you know? If it *is* real, I think this guy should write more press releases.
Nostalgia is a failure of memory.
I dunno, the picture of the guy wearing the HAL suit seemed pretty unrealistic to me. Plus, the company's name is "cyberdyne", and they've named their product HAL, ffs. It seems like a big lark to me - runs on a battery? that makes you 10 times stronger for 5 hours? And it only costs 4,200 bucks? Something here seems a little off.
I think it's similar to how Kara Thrace is supposed to lead them to their end as well - it's end as in end of the journey, rather than the wiping out of all existence.
Merit pay for "student achievement" is a bad idea. Not because I'm some kind of communist, but because I'm one of the (it seems) relatively few people that actually think about what student achievement in science education looks like.
Knowing random facts about stuff is only a side-effect of actually being scientifically literate. The idea of scientific literacy includes knowing the core concepts of science, being able to construct (and deconstruct) scientific arguments, being able to use the tools of science, and being able to participate in the broader scientific community. Knowing what percentage of the earth's surface is covered in water isn't really part of that puzzle AT ALL. (I'm a relatively "literate" person, with a BS, MS, and PhD, although not in earth science, and I thought it was closer to 60%).
Science education is of supreme importance to the future. But if you're really serious about improving science education, you have to think HARD about what you mean by that. You mean: making sure people have all the pieces of scientific literacy, not just making students memorize facts.
Once you accept that point (and clearly, slashdot comment threads are not the places for real debate, but try reading How People Learn (bransford and brown) and Taking Science to School (big committee, but published by the NAP) for more insight there).... where was I? Oh yes, if you accept that scientific literacy is more than just knowing facts, you have to take a critical look at the standardized tests you're using to base teacher merit pay on. They don't actually test scientific literacy. They test fact retention for the most part, and scientific process skills to a lesser extent. But process skills in these things are tested in a content-free way that completely lacks any kind of face validity as to its relationship to actual scientific inquiry practices.
So, think about it: we're going to base teacher merit pay on student performance. Fine. But if you want to do that RIGHT, you have to actually measure the kind of performance you want, rather than settle for the kind of performance that's easily testable on a large scale. That turns out to be a nigh-intractable problem, and it's this intellectual cutting of corners (testing what you can test, and valuing that, instead of valuing what's central to each discipline and accepting that testing for performance in that fashion is going to be expensive and a real challenge) that's led to the travesty of NCLB - nationwide failure of a system that's supposed to help our most fragile natural resource.
Anyway. The biggest problem with all of this is that thinking hard about education is a real challenge. Teachers have a very important set of critical skills that most science folks don't understand (since most science folks tend to think that science should be just as easy to everybody else as it was to them). Sure, there are plenty of bad teachers. But basing merit pay on test performance will do very little to improve education if the tests are deeply flawed.
I'm often in the same position - looking at software from a usability standpoint and shaking my head in wonder and frustration. It's reassuring that Gates is actually worried about that kind of stuff. It's clear that most of MS isn't, or wasn't at the time. I haven't tried Win7 yet, but Vista isn't much of an improvement in real usability. They added glitter and chrome, but the knobs are still counter-intuitive. That's one thing to say about Mac designers, is that they know how to use affordances in their UI design.
Anyway, if you're out there, Mr. Gates, I'd make an excellent addition to your usability team. You know how to contact me.