When we first heard of Grafedia, we thought it was an amazing new technology: take a photo of a word with your camera phone and it turns into a clickable link. The truth is more mundane, although you wouldn't guess that from the hype. The word does indicate an e-mail account - e.g. word@grafedia.net - but the picture-taking is superfluous. All Grafedia really is is a mailserver whose e-mail accounts return files to anyone who e-mails. The "twist" is that the person who creates the account has to upload a file and then tattoo, spraypaint, or engrave the word out in the wild. It's more like an invitation to urban blight than an honest-to-goodness new medium. John Geraci, who dreamed this up, sees it as an extension of the Internet. He and at least one Grafedia fan Wired interviewed claim that they don't advocate vandalism. Meanwhile, we wait for software that can read words from photos and turn them into links.
Tay-Sachs does not produce crippled people, so it does not work as you hypothesize.
The selection would only apply to people who are heterozygous for Tay-Sachs, i.e. they are carriers of the gene. Infants who are born homozygous, with two copies of the gene, only live a few years. All die by age 5. There is no cure.
So, as you can see, there wouldn't be a whole lot of people crippled with Tay-Sachs running away from the Cossacks....
Depends on the dinosaur now, doesn't it? You can't really ask "How big are bird eggs?" and expect a simple answer, can you?
Dinosaurs varied from roughly chicken-sized to the huge sauropods. Titanosaurs, the family of the largest of all dinosaurs, laid spherical eggs about 15 cm in diameter.
Researchers Pinpoint Brain's Sarcasm Sensor
By Randy Dotinga
HealthDay Reporter
MONDAY, May 23 (HealthDay News) -- Oh yeah, right!
No, it's true -- many of you don't go a day without dishing out several doses of sarcasm. But some brain-damaged people can't comprehend sarcasm, and Israeli researchers think it's because a specific brain region has gone dark.
The region, according to the researchers, handles the task of detecting hidden meaning, a crucial component of sarcasm. If that part of the brain is out of commission, the irony doesn't come through, the scientists report in the May issue of Neuropsychology.
"People with prefrontal brain damage suffer from difficulties in understanding other people's mental states, and they lack empathy," said study co-author Simone Shamay-Tsoory, a researcher at the University of Haifa. "Therefore, they can't understand what the speaker really is talking about, and get only the literal meaning."
The findings, Shamay-Tsoory said, could help rehabilitation centers do a better job of helping brain-damaged patients adjust to the world and understand other people.
In their study, Shamay-Tsoory and her colleagues first enrolled 58 subjects -- 25 participants with prefrontal-lobe damage, 17 who were healthy and 16 who had damage to the posterior lobe of the brain.
Then they tested each person by exposing them to several "neutral" and sarcastic comments recorded by actors as part of a story. This "sarcasm meter" was designed to gauge how well the subjects could comprehend the unique kind of irony that is sarcasm.
For example, actors read phrases such as "don't work too hard" in both a neutral sense (meaning "you're a hard worker") and a sarcastic sense (meaning "you're a real slacker"). Each comment came in proper context as part of a story about, say, a worker who's sleeping or a worker who's grinding away at his job.
All the subjects understood the sarcasm except for those with damage to the prefrontal area, which is above the eye sockets and behind the forehead. And among those, people with damage to a specific area known as the ventromedial area had the most trouble deciphering sarcasm.
The researchers think lesions in several parts of the brain can contribute to an inability to understand sarcasm. But, they wrote, this particular area is important because it draws on your innate recognition of the emotions of other people -- empathy -- and past experiences to comprehend a speaker's intentions.
Brian Knutson, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Stanford University, said the findings make sense because the brain's cortex handles a variety of sophisticated tasks, and sarcasm could be on the list.
The findings also reflect a growing interest in how emotion is processed by the brain. "Emotion has not been a popular topic in science for a long time," because it's difficult to measure, he said, but things are changing.
The coolest thing to me is the glass Coke bottle. Of course it's simple geometry, but I just love the way the shadow in the primal photo becomes the bottle in the dual photo and vice versa. Check out the positions of each in both photos against the book behind them.
That just shakes my drawers.
Was anyone else expected Penn to pop into the video with the three of clubs and say "Is this your card?"
P.S. Sorry for the high-tech post full of jargon....
We at Netsurfer Digest have been fighting this problem for years, not only with AOL, but with similarly clueless ISPs.
We're a subscription-based e-zine, and have been for 11 years.
Technically, it's superb. I live in a neighbourhood of mostly older people, so my share of the bandwidth is eneormous. I get T1 speeds on my cable modem as a matter of course. Also, it seems to be more reliable than its only real broadband competitor, Sympatico (owned by Bell Canada), according to what I see among my circle of friends.
I'm not all that keen on Videotron's capitulation here, but I'm not going to change ISPs over it.
Now, just to clear up some misconceptions....
Back when blank media became a consumer good, the media companies feared losses of revenue to copying. They convinced the federal government to assess a fee on all blank media and recording devices to make up for those losses.
There was a catch, however. The government can't tax an illegal activity. In order to mandate these fees, the government had to legalize the duplication of content for personal use. So we Canadians have been able to tape our albums, record TV shows, etc. within the bounds of the law for the longest time.
Then came the digital revolution.
The entertainment moguls demanded that the same fees be assessed on CD writers, blank CDs, blank DVDs, etc. The government agreed and extended the financial protection - but as a consequence also had to extend the right to make copies on the new media. As a result, downloading content is (still) pefectly legal in Canada.
Uploading copyrighted content, however, is not legal and never has been. It may at first seem odd that we can download but not upload, but it's a consequence of the laws that give us the right to copy, not the right to share.
The Canadian Recording Industry Association went to the Copyright Board to change this right and was Heismaned. The board ruled that they have been collecting the assessed fees and that that money was the industry compensation. Furthermore, the board ruled that such rights extend to downloading files. The board did extend the fee to cover digital music players.
More here: http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-5121479.html
A robot that really imitated Parasaurolophus would be quadrupedal. Trackway evidence, as well as circumstantial evidence by way of anatomy, indicates that hadrosaurs walked on all fours.
They could rear up on two legs and probably could move around on two legs for short distances but, like the ceratopsians, they were evolving into heavier forms from lightweight ancestors that were more functionally bipedal (like Fabrosaurids, Hypsilophodontids, etc.).
This is what has been happeneing for decades. It's called cladistics, and most publications on taxonomy will now always include a "tree" in the discussion.
Each of the branches has become a class, order, sub-class, sub-order etc. and the goal of cladistics is to make sure that each branch leads to a set of only related organisms (a clade).
It's taking the established Linnaen nomenclature and mapping it onto modern taxonomy, which saves time and is unioversally recognized.
By the way, "tree" is not an accurate word for a cladogram. It's more like a flexible set of linked Koosh balls or something, because what you choose as the root or trunk of the tree is completely arbitrary. A tree also implies a hierarchy of value - e.g frogs are more advanced than bacteria and humans are more advanced than frogs - which does not exist in nature.
Fifteen years ago, I worked in a diabetes research lab. One of the research groups worked on human/mice chimeras as standard practice.
In 1988, a group at Stanford built a "race" of naturally immune deficient mice with human immune systems and published the result in Science (McCune, Weissman et al).
It's called the SCID-hu mouse, "hu" being short for "human".
I saw this in Netsurfer Digest yesterday and it's at Slashdot today?
OK, so maybe NSD isn't always on the leading edge and iCE has been around a while, but the sequence of appearances this weekend couldn't be a coincidence, could it?
"Frankly I'm amazed that movies caught on before TV since there's so much more TV, and they tend to be smaller files than movies."
Assuming a $40 monthly cable bill and the low estimate of 40 hours of TV watched per month, you get $1 per hour.
A 90-minute movie costs $10 or so in the theatre and $3 or so to rent - rates that are double or higher the (elevated estimate of) per hour cost of watching TV.
Combine this with the fact that movies are more entertaining than TV and that TV shows are more easily recorded for personal usethan movies, and I'm not that surprised that movie-sharing is more popular than TV-sharing online.
What Stewart says goes to the heart of journalism. Look at societies that don't have a free press. They are ruled, generally, by governments with strong hands, which have little patience for opposition in thought or practice.
The role of journalist is not strictly to provide a window of truth, but to empower those without power. Journalism, done properly, challenges those who hold power and penetrate the shields held up by those who want to keep all the power for themselves.
As a journalist, you represent the public. You need to fight for access and return to the public what you learn. This is what Stewart is saying. It doesn't matter who you support, what matters is that you get the information that the public can digest.
Power, however, doesn't just mean government. It is also corporate. Companies and organizations can put out press releases all day long. They have the ability to lobby, which the public does not - and by organizations, I mean more than corporations. The NRA and the ACLU lobby just as capably as Monsanto or Microsoft. Journalism's job is to support the little guy.
This is the drummer beating in opposition to complaints that the press is too liberal. It has to be liberal, although it doesn't have to be partisan. It attracts liberal-leaning personalities, those who want to stand up for the common man in the face of financial and ruling interests. The reason so much press is so atrocious today is because so much of the press has been absorbed by those very financial interests. Who does AOL Time Warner serve? I'll give you a hint, and it starts with "stockholders", not "public".
Anybody who wants journalists to serve people rather than interests needs to abhor two things: media conglomeration and government secrecy. One of the Bush administration's very first acts was to limit the release of Presidential records, of the past and the present. It's appalling.
Bill Moyers recently gave a speech discussing these issues. Here are a few choice quotes:
What's important for the journalist is not how close you are to power but how close you are to reality....
The job of trying to tell the truth about people whose job it is to hide the truth is almost as complicated and difficult as trying to hide it in the first place. Unless you're willing to fight and refight the same battles until you go blue in the face, drive the people you work with nuts going over every last detail to make certain you've got it right, and then take hit after unfair hit accusing you of "bias", or these days even a point of view, there's no use even trying....
I am reminded of the answer the veteran journalist Richard Reeves gave when asked by a college student to define "real news." "Real news," said Richard Reeves "is the news you and I need to keep our freedoms."...
One study reports that the number of crime stories on the network news tripled over six years. Another reports that in fifty-five markets in thirty-five states, local news was dominated by crime and violence, triviality and celebrity. The Project for Excellence in Journalism, reporting on the front pages of the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, on the ABC, CBS, and NBC Nightly news programs, and on Time and Newsweek, showed that from l977 to l997 the number of stories about government dropped from one in three to one in five, while the number of stories about celebrities rose from one in every fifty stories to one in every fourteen. What difference does it make? Well, its government that can pick our pockets, slap us into jail, run a highway through our back yard, or send us to war. Knowing what government does is "the news we need to keep our freedoms."...
"A journalist tries to get the facts right," tries to get "as close as possible to the verifiable truth" - not to help one side win or lose but "to inspire public discussion." Neutrality, he concludes, is not a core principle of journalism, "but the commitment to facts, to public consideration, and to inde
Harry Truman used to have sign on his desk in the Oval Office: "The buck stops here."
I imagine George Bush has a sign on his desk: "The buck stops, um - somewhere else."
Whether or not the Bush administration foisted known lies or used mistaken judgement, whether or not the war in Iraq was planned from inauguration or if it was really meant to combat an immediate threat, the fact remains that the war was a big fat mistake and the administration refuses to take responsibility for it.
Technically, a projection onto sunglasses or other lens/screen in front of the eye is not a HUD (Head Up Display) because you don't need to keep your head up. You would be able to watch even with your head between your knees, or with your head between someone else's knees. You get the point....
I suppose you could call it an EFD (Eyes Front Display), though.
Slashdot Mirror
See my link for where the original appeared.
Clickable Graffiti, or Not
When we first heard of Grafedia, we thought it was an amazing new technology: take a photo of a word with your camera phone and it turns into a clickable link. The truth is more mundane, although you wouldn't guess that from the hype. The word does indicate an e-mail account - e.g. word@grafedia.net - but the picture-taking is superfluous. All Grafedia really is is a mailserver whose e-mail accounts return files to anyone who e-mails. The "twist" is that the person who creates the account has to upload a file and then tattoo, spraypaint, or engrave the word out in the wild. It's more like an invitation to urban blight than an honest-to-goodness new medium. John Geraci, who dreamed this up, sees it as an extension of the Internet. He and at least one Grafedia fan Wired interviewed claim that they don't advocate vandalism. Meanwhile, we wait for software that can read words from photos and turn them into links.
If you're a just a Tay-Sachs gene carrier, it's invisible - there's no physical effect whatsoever.
The selection would only apply to people who are heterozygous for Tay-Sachs, i.e. they are carriers of the gene. Infants who are born homozygous, with two copies of the gene, only live a few years. All die by age 5. There is no cure.
So, as you can see, there wouldn't be a whole lot of people crippled with Tay-Sachs running away from the Cossacks....
Also being a Jew, and a Tay-Sachs carrier, I'm smart enough to confirm what you're saying.
Tom, is that you? You and your pinched metatarsals (grumble, grumble...)
Dinosaurs varied from roughly chicken-sized to the huge sauropods. Titanosaurs, the family of the largest of all dinosaurs, laid spherical eggs about 15 cm in diameter.
Sorta like that NASCAR oval that used to be Dallas/Fort Worth and the Massachussetts Memorial Hockey Arena.
I believe the plural as spoken in the movie is ROUSes.
Does somebody want to do my homework and see if the person who sent this to Slashdot is the same as the domain owner?
Boy, they made a GOOD movie....
Researchers Pinpoint Brain's Sarcasm Sensor
By Randy Dotinga
HealthDay Reporter
MONDAY, May 23 (HealthDay News) -- Oh yeah, right!
No, it's true -- many of you don't go a day without dishing out several doses of sarcasm. But some brain-damaged people can't comprehend sarcasm, and Israeli researchers think it's because a specific brain region has gone dark.
The region, according to the researchers, handles the task of detecting hidden meaning, a crucial component of sarcasm. If that part of the brain is out of commission, the irony doesn't come through, the scientists report in the May issue of Neuropsychology.
"People with prefrontal brain damage suffer from difficulties in understanding other people's mental states, and they lack empathy," said study co-author Simone Shamay-Tsoory, a researcher at the University of Haifa. "Therefore, they can't understand what the speaker really is talking about, and get only the literal meaning."
The findings, Shamay-Tsoory said, could help rehabilitation centers do a better job of helping brain-damaged patients adjust to the world and understand other people.
In their study, Shamay-Tsoory and her colleagues first enrolled 58 subjects -- 25 participants with prefrontal-lobe damage, 17 who were healthy and 16 who had damage to the posterior lobe of the brain.
Then they tested each person by exposing them to several "neutral" and sarcastic comments recorded by actors as part of a story. This "sarcasm meter" was designed to gauge how well the subjects could comprehend the unique kind of irony that is sarcasm.
For example, actors read phrases such as "don't work too hard" in both a neutral sense (meaning "you're a hard worker") and a sarcastic sense (meaning "you're a real slacker"). Each comment came in proper context as part of a story about, say, a worker who's sleeping or a worker who's grinding away at his job.
All the subjects understood the sarcasm except for those with damage to the prefrontal area, which is above the eye sockets and behind the forehead. And among those, people with damage to a specific area known as the ventromedial area had the most trouble deciphering sarcasm.
The researchers think lesions in several parts of the brain can contribute to an inability to understand sarcasm. But, they wrote, this particular area is important because it draws on your innate recognition of the emotions of other people -- empathy -- and past experiences to comprehend a speaker's intentions.
Brian Knutson, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Stanford University, said the findings make sense because the brain's cortex handles a variety of sophisticated tasks, and sarcasm could be on the list.
The findings also reflect a growing interest in how emotion is processed by the brain. "Emotion has not been a popular topic in science for a long time," because it's difficult to measure, he said, but things are changing.
Looks like it's your lucky day.... :)
The coolest thing to me is the glass Coke bottle. Of course it's simple geometry, but I just love the way the shadow in the primal photo becomes the bottle in the dual photo and vice versa. Check out the positions of each in both photos against the book behind them. That just shakes my drawers. Was anyone else expected Penn to pop into the video with the three of clubs and say "Is this your card?" P.S. Sorry for the high-tech post full of jargon....
We at Netsurfer Digest have been fighting this problem for years, not only with AOL, but with similarly clueless ISPs. We're a subscription-based e-zine, and have been for 11 years.
I'm not all that keen on Videotron's capitulation here, but I'm not going to change ISPs over it.
Now, just to clear up some misconceptions....
Back when blank media became a consumer good, the media companies feared losses of revenue to copying. They convinced the federal government to assess a fee on all blank media and recording devices to make up for those losses.
There was a catch, however. The government can't tax an illegal activity. In order to mandate these fees, the government had to legalize the duplication of content for personal use. So we Canadians have been able to tape our albums, record TV shows, etc. within the bounds of the law for the longest time.
Then came the digital revolution.
The entertainment moguls demanded that the same fees be assessed on CD writers, blank CDs, blank DVDs, etc. The government agreed and extended the financial protection - but as a consequence also had to extend the right to make copies on the new media. As a result, downloading content is (still) pefectly legal in Canada.
Uploading copyrighted content, however, is not legal and never has been. It may at first seem odd that we can download but not upload, but it's a consequence of the laws that give us the right to copy, not the right to share.
The Canadian Recording Industry Association went to the Copyright Board to change this right and was Heismaned. The board ruled that they have been collecting the assessed fees and that that money was the industry compensation. Furthermore, the board ruled that such rights extend to downloading files. The board did extend the fee to cover digital music players.
More here: http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-5121479.html
They could rear up on two legs and probably could move around on two legs for short distances but, like the ceratopsians, they were evolving into heavier forms from lightweight ancestors that were more functionally bipedal (like Fabrosaurids, Hypsilophodontids, etc.).
Each of the branches has become a class, order, sub-class, sub-order etc. and the goal of cladistics is to make sure that each branch leads to a set of only related organisms (a clade).
It's taking the established Linnaen nomenclature and mapping it onto modern taxonomy, which saves time and is unioversally recognized.
By the way, "tree" is not an accurate word for a cladogram. It's more like a flexible set of linked Koosh balls or something, because what you choose as the root or trunk of the tree is completely arbitrary. A tree also implies a hierarchy of value - e.g frogs are more advanced than bacteria and humans are more advanced than frogs - which does not exist in nature.
In 1988, a group at Stanford built a "race" of naturally immune deficient mice with human immune systems and published the result in Science (McCune, Weissman et al).
It's called the SCID-hu mouse, "hu" being short for "human".
URL should be http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/
OK, so maybe NSD isn't always on the leading edge and iCE has been around a while, but the sequence of appearances this weekend couldn't be a coincidence, could it?
Assuming a $40 monthly cable bill and the low estimate of 40 hours of TV watched per month, you get $1 per hour.
A 90-minute movie costs $10 or so in the theatre and $3 or so to rent - rates that are double or higher the (elevated estimate of) per hour cost of watching TV.
Combine this with the fact that movies are more entertaining than TV and that TV shows are more easily recorded for personal usethan movies, and I'm not that surprised that movie-sharing is more popular than TV-sharing online.
The role of journalist is not strictly to provide a window of truth, but to empower those without power. Journalism, done properly, challenges those who hold power and penetrate the shields held up by those who want to keep all the power for themselves.
As a journalist, you represent the public. You need to fight for access and return to the public what you learn. This is what Stewart is saying. It doesn't matter who you support, what matters is that you get the information that the public can digest.
Power, however, doesn't just mean government. It is also corporate. Companies and organizations can put out press releases all day long. They have the ability to lobby, which the public does not - and by organizations, I mean more than corporations. The NRA and the ACLU lobby just as capably as Monsanto or Microsoft. Journalism's job is to support the little guy.
This is the drummer beating in opposition to complaints that the press is too liberal. It has to be liberal, although it doesn't have to be partisan. It attracts liberal-leaning personalities, those who want to stand up for the common man in the face of financial and ruling interests. The reason so much press is so atrocious today is because so much of the press has been absorbed by those very financial interests. Who does AOL Time Warner serve? I'll give you a hint, and it starts with "stockholders", not "public".
Anybody who wants journalists to serve people rather than interests needs to abhor two things: media conglomeration and government secrecy. One of the Bush administration's very first acts was to limit the release of Presidential records, of the past and the present. It's appalling.
Bill Moyers recently gave a speech discussing these issues. Here are a few choice quotes:
What's important for the journalist is not how close you are to power but how close you are to reality....
The job of trying to tell the truth about people whose job it is to hide the truth is almost as complicated and difficult as trying to hide it in the first place. Unless you're willing to fight and refight the same battles until you go blue in the face, drive the people you work with nuts going over every last detail to make certain you've got it right, and then take hit after unfair hit accusing you of "bias", or these days even a point of view, there's no use even trying....
I am reminded of the answer the veteran journalist Richard Reeves gave when asked by a college student to define "real news." "Real news," said Richard Reeves "is the news you and I need to keep our freedoms."...
One study reports that the number of crime stories on the network news tripled over six years. Another reports that in fifty-five markets in thirty-five states, local news was dominated by crime and violence, triviality and celebrity. The Project for Excellence in Journalism, reporting on the front pages of the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, on the ABC, CBS, and NBC Nightly news programs, and on Time and Newsweek, showed that from l977 to l997 the number of stories about government dropped from one in three to one in five, while the number of stories about celebrities rose from one in every fifty stories to one in every fourteen. What difference does it make? Well, its government that can pick our pockets, slap us into jail, run a highway through our back yard, or send us to war. Knowing what government does is "the news we need to keep our freedoms."...
"A journalist tries to get the facts right," tries to get "as close as possible to the verifiable truth" - not to help one side win or lose but "to inspire public discussion." Neutrality, he concludes, is not a core principle of journalism, "but the commitment to facts, to public consideration, and to inde
I imagine George Bush has a sign on his desk: "The buck stops, um - somewhere else."
Whether or not the Bush administration foisted known lies or used mistaken judgement, whether or not the war in Iraq was planned from inauguration or if it was really meant to combat an immediate threat, the fact remains that the war was a big fat mistake and the administration refuses to take responsibility for it.
I suppose you could call it an EFD (Eyes Front Display), though.