Sorry their device probably does not measure brainwaves. A single electrode on the forehead would measure only forehead muscle activity (EMG) and eye movements (EOG), but not brainwave activity (EEG). The developers are basically banking that you wrinkle your forehead when you "concentrate". As an aside, EMG is really easy to record, while EEG is much more complicated and not well-suited to a consumer device.
I hope it's the marketing department BS and not the inventors who are misrepresenting their product.
When I applied to the UCs in in the 1990s, I remember rural and inner-city students got bonus points on their applications, partly for this reason. (Yup, the first 50% of UC students are selected by an aging mainframe, based on a weighted sum of GPA, SAT/ACT scores, and various bonus points like this... back then, being an "underrepresented minority" also gave you bonus points, but voters made that illegal by the end of the 90s.) It looks like they still have a system that is somewhat accommodating.
No, it's not too different in the UK... the armed thugs with police badges randomly shoot brown people. I'd say Jean Charles de Menezes had his right to an intact head violated rather severely by the Metropolitan Police.
Many of us young scientists are leaving the US, largely due to this situation. I recently graduated from a biomedically-oriented PhD program at a major California university. Including myself, about a third of the students who completed their degrees in the past year have gone to Europe or Japan or Australia. We've all seen how hard it is to get funding for a postdoc in the US now. In fact, I submitted the exact same research proposal to NIH and to a European funding agency. The NIH grant reviewers appeared to be looking for an excuse not to fund me and rejected it outright -- they claimed I had no experience with the type of research I was proposing to do, despite the fact that it directly followed from my dissertation and my previous five years of work! Totally demoralized, imagine my surprise when I found out the following month that the European agency scored me in the top 5% of their (extremely competitive) application pool.
What we might have developing here is a serious conflict-of-interest situation. NIH grants are generally reviewed by peer researchers within our scientific specialties. Since funds are now so limited, I wouldn't be surprised if the reviewers themselves are thinking, "Well, if I score this grant favorably, that would leave less funding for my lab!"
But I digress. Star foreign scientists and students are no longer seeing a stint in the US as obligatory. Between the increasingly dire funding situation and immigration difficulties as well as rapidly increasing prestige of non-American research, they're opting to go elsewhere.
I also worry for the future of the US. But if the US doesn't want us back, I'll be more than happy living somewhere the people appreciate and respect science, and provide the funding to back it up.
Isn't a more pressing consequence of analog termination the effective discontinuation of rural mobile phone service? Travel into the boonies away from an interstate, particularly west of the Mississippi, and digital service rapidly disappears. The article only skirts this issue by saying that OnStar's service map still depicts the analog coverage area, which extends into more remote areas. This became quite clear to me on a trip last week to the Mojave desert and Death Valley. My friend's car decided to give up just as we reached a remote corner of Death Valley, some 75 miles away from the last town with digital cell service. I once had a Verizon digital+analog phone for these situations, but of course, retired it recently. Luckily, a ranger came by fairly soon and was able to place an analog cell call to get us towed. But now these remote areas are going to be left without service, and all we hear about is that poor OnStar users who mostly never leave the city might be inconvenienced? From now on, I guess the only options will be satellite phones at $10/minute, or CB radio, or yodelling.
But being tracked yourself is not necessarily a liability... it can also be an alibi in case you're erroneously fingered for a crime. Several years ago, my brother was arrested at his college's library for some significant act of vandalism that he didn't commit. He had only been there a few minutes, when a witness pointed him out to the responding officer... apparently mistaken identity, as I'm sure there were tons of other brown dudes in the library of a college with a significant Indian and Hispanic population. (The incident had apparently occurred about an hour prior, and the police had already arrived.) He was later exonerated by a record of his login at the computer lab on the other side of campus, so there was no way he could have even been at the library when the incident occurred. The police believed it was him and were fully intending to prosecute -- not to mention the college intended to expel him and sue him for the property damage -- until he remembered about the login and produced the evidence.
And does it have a real GPS in it (not that flaky E911 stuff, but the real thing like you see in some Linux smartphones? If it had a GPS integrated with Google maps and had the navigation/tracking features of a basic Garmin unit, that would justify the price even more.
Apple finally acknowledged the CPU whine in August, and will replace the logic board. I sent in my MBP recently; it took about a week for them to repair it and ship it back to me, and the whine is now unnoticeable. I now hear it only when my ear is right up to the keyboard; before, it used to permeate the entire room if there was no environmental noise to mask it.
Incidentally, the new logic board runs at least 15C cooler for me... it used to go up to 65 degrees C when idle, and maxed out at 97 degrees C under full load (with Einstein@home)! Now it's usually about 50C idle, and haven't seen it get above 80C yet under load. Not sure if the new board is inherently cooler, or if they tweaked the fans...
Perhaps not a general computing application, but many of us in the scientific community could use something like that for all sorts of things. I work in the neuroimaging field, and for some of the fanciest analyses I'm developing, I have no choice but to farm it out to a dedicated cluster. For testing/development purposes and smaller jobs, I would love to do the same on my own workstation.
it A) probably existed all along or B) formerly dormant seeds germinated and multiplied.
"B" is a likely explanation for this story. California has been inundated with storm after storm this rainy season, resulting in massive blooms even in such forbidding places as Death Valley. Seeds that have been dormant for years finally decided this winter was the right time to wake up and party.
Srihari explained that the model generated by the system on the basis of the 9/11 corpus found that terrorists Binal Shibh and Mohamed Atta shared apartments in Hamburg, Germany; Atta and Nawaf al Hazmi were hijackers involved in the 9/11 attacks and Hazmi found an apartment in San Diego with the help of Anwar Aulaq, an imam named at a mosque in San Diego.
Hmmm... sounds kinda like Friendster for terrorists... Jihadster?!
Uhh, yes. Maybe crawling doesn't produce weird effects, but try walking across the room fast or sprinting if you're brave. It's the change in the magnetic field incident to your head that's key, not the strength of the field per se. The back of the magnet is the best place to produce the visual effect ("phosphenes" -- sparkles or flickering in your vision, caused by stimulation of the retina), since the field there is not as uniform... it's happened to me in our 4.7T magnet. Fast/steep gradient switching can also stimulate phosphenes, another reason there are guidelines on safe parameters. One reference for this effect is here: http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/hecs-sesc/ccrpb/publication/87ehd127/print.htm
In the really tall tree areas, like in Big Trees National Monument in central CA, what might be a 35 mph wind swaying the tops of those 300 foot trees, is reduced to a very gentle breeze at ground level. You are not really aware of it till you look up wondering where the wind noise is coming from.
Sorry to call you on your shit, as you make a few intelligent points, but "Big Trees National Monument"? My ass can talk better than that! Perhaps you mean Sequoia National Park in the Sierras? Or Muir Woods Nat'l Monument near San Francisco? Or maybe I'm being elitist and I haven't heard of Big Trees since you meant central Canada.:)
Remember, your tax burden includes property taxes. Even if you don't own real estate yourself, you would be paying it through your rent. Sorry it doesn't get spelled out for you on your receipt.:)
The "inserted lenses" procedure is called ICRS (intrastromal corneal ring segments), marketed under the brand name "Intacs." I volunteered in an eye clinic one summer several years ago, and worked with ICRS patients during the FDA trial period... the results seemed on par with LASIK at the time. However, I haven't really followed up on it since, so I can't vouch for its safety or efficacy.
[Sorry for the duplicate, lost the formatting on my original post.]
I am a graduate student in biomedical engineering, and did a rotation through a vision research lab three years ago. One of the lab's goals was to improve the algorithms used in modeling the cornea's surface, in order to reduce the risk of optical side effects, so I learned quite a bit about this very topic.
The best advice I can give is to go to a university medical center to get it done. Those doctors are experienced and have the best diagnostic equipment, and will turn you away if you might not be a good candidate. Also, academic clinics will often give discounts if you're a student at the affiliated university.
The bargain basement eye surgery clinics you see advertised in the newspaper and on TV tend to be more concerned about quantity rather than quality. I was appalled to hear that many don't even bother running standard screening that could disqualify patients... they just operate even if you might be at significant risk of a poor outcome.
So here are the things to know: Probably the most common complaint after surgery is poor night vision, to the point that some people can no longer drive at night. This happens because your pupil opens up big in the dark and can allow light to pass through the rough edges of the zapped area. This causes a lot of optical distortion, resulting in glare, starbursts, etc. There's a few technical issues as to why they can't just zap a wider area (including the surface modeling problems I mentioned). Bottom line is that if your pupils open up especially big, refractive surgery is not for you at this time. A reputable clinic will check to see how big your pupils open up.
This brings up another point. Even people who can no longer see at night might still have "20/20" vision. [A technicality often expoited by the less reputable clinics.] 20/20 vision means that you can read the next to last line on an eye chart from in a well-lit exam room. It means nothing about glare or night vision. There are other tests which a reputable clinic should run (eye pressure, corneal topography, etc.) Also, keep in mind that you can (and should) have each eye treated on separate occasions. Get one eye zapped, let it heal, see if the results make you happy. If so, get the other one done.
That said, the risk of a totally botched operation is quite small. It's *extremely* unlikely that your daytime vision would be any worse than when you started. Nearly all of the ophthalmologists and optometrists I know who work with refractive surgery have had it done themselves. Also, most patients and friends I know who've had it done are extremely satisfied with the results. I am currently disqualified because of the big pupil problem, but otherwise I would get it myself...
I am a graduate student in biomedical engineering, and did a rotation through a vision research lab three years ago. One of the lab's goals was to improve the algorithms used in modeling the cornea's surface, in order to reduce the risk of optical side effects, so I learned quite a bit about this very topic.
The best advice I can give is to go to a university medical center to get it done. Those doctors are experienced and have the best diagnostic equipment, and will turn you away if you might not be a good candidate. Also, academic clinic will often give discounts if you're a student at the affiliated university.
The bargain basement eye surgery clinics you see advertised in the newspaper and on TV tend to be more concerned about quantity rather than quality. I was appalled to hear that many don't even bother running standard screening that could disqualify patients.
So here are the things to know:
Probably the most common complaint after surgery is poor night vision, to the point that some people can no longer drive at night. This happens because your pupil opens up big in the dark and can allow light to pass through the rough edges of the zapped area. This causes a lot of optical distortion, resulting in glare, starbursts, etc. There's a few technical issues as to why they can't just zap a wider area (including the surface modeling problems I mentioned). Bottom line is that if your pupils open up especially big, refractive surgery is not for you at this time. A reputable clinic will check to see how big your pupils open up.
This brings up another point. Even people who can no longer see at night might still have "20/20" vision. [A technicality often expoited by the less reputable clinics.] 20/20 vision means that you can read the next to last line on an eye chart from in a well-lit exam room. It means nothing about glare or night vision.
There are other tests which a reputable clinic should run (eye pressure, corneal topography, etc.)
Also, keep in mind that you can (and should) have each eye treated on separate occasions. Get one eye zapped, let it heal, see if the results make you happy. If so, get the other one done.
That said, the risk of a totally botched operation is quite small. It's *extremely* unlikely that your daytime vision would be any worse than when you started. Nearly all of the ophthalmologists and optometrists I know who work with refractive surgery have had it done themselves. Also, most patients and friends I know who've had it done are extremely satisfied with the results. I am currently disqualified because of the big pupil problem, but otherwise I would get it myself...
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry their device probably does not measure brainwaves. A single electrode on the forehead would measure only forehead muscle activity (EMG) and eye movements (EOG), but not brainwave activity (EEG). The developers are basically banking that you wrinkle your forehead when you "concentrate". As an aside, EMG is really easy to record, while EEG is much more complicated and not well-suited to a consumer device.
I hope it's the marketing department BS and not the inventors who are misrepresenting their product.
[I am a professional EEG researcher.]
Safari has had a private/pr0n browsing mode for 3+ years...
When I applied to the UCs in in the 1990s, I remember rural and inner-city students got bonus points on their applications, partly for this reason. (Yup, the first 50% of UC students are selected by an aging mainframe, based on a weighted sum of GPA, SAT/ACT scores, and various bonus points like this... back then, being an "underrepresented minority" also gave you bonus points, but voters made that illegal by the end of the 90s.) It looks like they still have a system that is somewhat accommodating.
No, it's not too different in the UK... the armed thugs with police badges randomly shoot brown people. I'd say Jean Charles de Menezes had his right to an intact head violated rather severely by the Metropolitan Police.
They already have!
What we might have developing here is a serious conflict-of-interest situation. NIH grants are generally reviewed by peer researchers within our scientific specialties. Since funds are now so limited, I wouldn't be surprised if the reviewers themselves are thinking, "Well, if I score this grant favorably, that would leave less funding for my lab!"
But I digress. Star foreign scientists and students are no longer seeing a stint in the US as obligatory. Between the increasingly dire funding situation and immigration difficulties as well as rapidly increasing prestige of non-American research, they're opting to go elsewhere.
I also worry for the future of the US. But if the US doesn't want us back, I'll be more than happy living somewhere the people appreciate and respect science, and provide the funding to back it up.
Isn't a more pressing consequence of analog termination the effective discontinuation of rural mobile phone service? Travel into the boonies away from an interstate, particularly west of the Mississippi, and digital service rapidly disappears. The article only skirts this issue by saying that OnStar's service map still depicts the analog coverage area, which extends into more remote areas. This became quite clear to me on a trip last week to the Mojave desert and Death Valley. My friend's car decided to give up just as we reached a remote corner of Death Valley, some 75 miles away from the last town with digital cell service. I once had a Verizon digital+analog phone for these situations, but of course, retired it recently. Luckily, a ranger came by fairly soon and was able to place an analog cell call to get us towed. But now these remote areas are going to be left without service, and all we hear about is that poor OnStar users who mostly never leave the city might be inconvenienced? From now on, I guess the only options will be satellite phones at $10/minute, or CB radio, or yodelling.
But being tracked yourself is not necessarily a liability... it can also be an alibi in case you're erroneously fingered for a crime. Several years ago, my brother was arrested at his college's library for some significant act of vandalism that he didn't commit. He had only been there a few minutes, when a witness pointed him out to the responding officer... apparently mistaken identity, as I'm sure there were tons of other brown dudes in the library of a college with a significant Indian and Hispanic population. (The incident had apparently occurred about an hour prior, and the police had already arrived.) He was later exonerated by a record of his login at the computer lab on the other side of campus, so there was no way he could have even been at the library when the incident occurred. The police believed it was him and were fully intending to prosecute -- not to mention the college intended to expel him and sue him for the property damage -- until he remembered about the login and produced the evidence.
It's not Google's fault -- gmail is still in beta! :)
yes, generally one must be very careful if one would like to get away with murder. e.g., make sure the gloves don't fit.
High quality versions of Jeff Hawkin's talk at UC Berkeley are available here.
And does it have a real GPS in it (not that flaky E911 stuff, but the real thing like you see in some Linux smartphones? If it had a GPS integrated with Google maps and had the navigation/tracking features of a basic Garmin unit, that would justify the price even more.
Their new college intern probably solved this problem for them. Beer before liquor, never been sicker... now, OTOH, liquor before beer...
Incidentally, the new logic board runs at least 15C cooler for me... it used to go up to 65 degrees C when idle, and maxed out at 97 degrees C under full load (with Einstein@home)! Now it's usually about 50C idle, and haven't seen it get above 80C yet under load. Not sure if the new board is inherently cooler, or if they tweaked the fans...
Perhaps not a general computing application, but many of us in the scientific community could use something like that for all sorts of things. I work in the neuroimaging field, and for some of the fanciest analyses I'm developing, I have no choice but to farm it out to a dedicated cluster. For testing/development purposes and smaller jobs, I would love to do the same on my own workstation.
"B" is a likely explanation for this story. California has been inundated with storm after storm this rainy season, resulting in massive blooms even in such forbidding places as Death Valley. Seeds that have been dormant for years finally decided this winter was the right time to wake up and party.
Uhh, yes. Maybe crawling doesn't produce weird effects, but try walking across the room fast or sprinting if you're brave. It's the change in the magnetic field incident to your head that's key, not the strength of the field per se. The back of the magnet is the best place to produce the visual effect ("phosphenes" -- sparkles or flickering in your vision, caused by stimulation of the retina), since the field there is not as uniform... it's happened to me in our 4.7T magnet. Fast/steep gradient switching can also stimulate phosphenes, another reason there are guidelines on safe parameters. One reference for this effect is here: http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/hecs-sesc/ccrpb/publication /87ehd127/print.htm
Sorry to call you on your shit, as you make a few intelligent points, but "Big Trees National Monument"? My ass can talk better than that! Perhaps you mean Sequoia National Park in the Sierras? Or Muir Woods Nat'l Monument near San Francisco? Or maybe I'm being elitist and I haven't heard of Big Trees since you meant central Canada. :)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c
Remember, your tax burden includes property taxes. Even if you don't own real estate yourself, you would be paying it through your rent. Sorry it doesn't get spelled out for you on your receipt. :)
The "inserted lenses" procedure is called ICRS (intrastromal corneal ring segments), marketed under the brand name "Intacs." I volunteered in an eye clinic one summer several years ago, and worked with ICRS patients during the FDA trial period... the results seemed on par with LASIK at the time. However, I haven't really followed up on it since, so I can't vouch for its safety or efficacy.
[Sorry for the duplicate, lost the formatting on my original post.]
I am a graduate student in biomedical engineering, and did a rotation through a vision research lab three years ago. One of the lab's goals was to improve the algorithms used in modeling the cornea's surface, in order to reduce the risk of optical side effects, so I learned quite a bit about this very topic.
The best advice I can give is to go to a university medical center to get it done. Those doctors are experienced and have the best diagnostic equipment, and will turn you away if you might not be a good candidate. Also, academic clinics will often give discounts if you're a student at the affiliated university.
The bargain basement eye surgery clinics you see advertised in the newspaper and on TV tend to be more concerned about quantity rather than quality. I was appalled to hear that many don't even bother running standard screening that could disqualify patients... they just operate even if you might be at significant risk of a poor outcome.
So here are the things to know:
Probably the most common complaint after surgery is poor night vision, to the point that some people can no longer drive at night. This happens because your pupil opens up big in the dark and can allow light to pass through the rough edges of the zapped area. This causes a lot of optical distortion, resulting in glare, starbursts, etc. There's a few technical issues as to why they can't just zap a wider area (including the surface modeling problems I mentioned). Bottom line is that if your pupils open up especially big, refractive surgery is not for you at this time. A reputable clinic will check to see how big your pupils open up.
This brings up another point. Even people who can no longer see at night might still have "20/20" vision. [A technicality often expoited by the less reputable clinics.] 20/20 vision means that you can read the next to last line on an eye chart from in a well-lit exam room. It means nothing about glare or night vision. There are other tests which a reputable clinic should run (eye pressure, corneal topography, etc.) Also, keep in mind that you can (and should) have each eye treated on separate occasions. Get one eye zapped, let it heal, see if the results make you happy. If so, get the other one done.
That said, the risk of a totally botched operation is quite small. It's *extremely* unlikely that your daytime vision would be any worse than when you started. Nearly all of the ophthalmologists and optometrists I know who work with refractive surgery have had it done themselves. Also, most patients and friends I know who've had it done are extremely satisfied with the results. I am currently disqualified because of the big pupil problem, but otherwise I would get it myself...
I am a graduate student in biomedical engineering, and did a rotation through a vision research lab three years ago. One of the lab's goals was to improve the algorithms used in modeling the cornea's surface, in order to reduce the risk of optical side effects, so I learned quite a bit about this very topic. The best advice I can give is to go to a university medical center to get it done. Those doctors are experienced and have the best diagnostic equipment, and will turn you away if you might not be a good candidate. Also, academic clinic will often give discounts if you're a student at the affiliated university. The bargain basement eye surgery clinics you see advertised in the newspaper and on TV tend to be more concerned about quantity rather than quality. I was appalled to hear that many don't even bother running standard screening that could disqualify patients. So here are the things to know: Probably the most common complaint after surgery is poor night vision, to the point that some people can no longer drive at night. This happens because your pupil opens up big in the dark and can allow light to pass through the rough edges of the zapped area. This causes a lot of optical distortion, resulting in glare, starbursts, etc. There's a few technical issues as to why they can't just zap a wider area (including the surface modeling problems I mentioned). Bottom line is that if your pupils open up especially big, refractive surgery is not for you at this time. A reputable clinic will check to see how big your pupils open up. This brings up another point. Even people who can no longer see at night might still have "20/20" vision. [A technicality often expoited by the less reputable clinics.] 20/20 vision means that you can read the next to last line on an eye chart from in a well-lit exam room. It means nothing about glare or night vision. There are other tests which a reputable clinic should run (eye pressure, corneal topography, etc.) Also, keep in mind that you can (and should) have each eye treated on separate occasions. Get one eye zapped, let it heal, see if the results make you happy. If so, get the other one done. That said, the risk of a totally botched operation is quite small. It's *extremely* unlikely that your daytime vision would be any worse than when you started. Nearly all of the ophthalmologists and optometrists I know who work with refractive surgery have had it done themselves. Also, most patients and friends I know who've had it done are extremely satisfied with the results. I am currently disqualified because of the big pupil problem, but otherwise I would get it myself...