For those who don't live in NYC, there's a shuttle train with three tracks that goes from Times Square (42nd and 7th) to Grand Central (42nd and Park/4th), which is about 1/2 of a mile/1 km. The shuttle doesn't connect quickly to any other train, and they run about every 3 minutes during rush hour and take 2 minutes. It would take less than 15 minutes to walk that distance. Instead, they should replace those tracks with moving walkways. Instead of taking 5 minutes (or more off-peak) and the cost of running subways, paying conductors, etc., it could take 7 minutes, have a lot higher capacity, and a lot lower cost. Win-win.
I don't understand how this could possibly work. Web posting and bandwidth is not free. The only reason FB is is because of its advertising and other tie-ins, none of which would work well if they weren't targeted. No web site could get substantial portions of the world's population on board if they had to charge money to cover development and server costs.
If you can come up with a non-evil social networking business model that allows your platform to attract and support hundreds of millions of simultaneous users, dominate the single largest sector of the Internet, and the resulting costs, with 99.99% uptime, you're not just a genius, you're a god.
People, at least some people, are happy to pay for news services, especially if they're non-profit news services like National Public Radio. (Which, at least prior to the recession, was growing rapidly!) If journalism as a whole can put itself into a realm where people feel like they're supporting something they participate in and believe in, it can succeed in the Internet era. I wrote about this a couple of months ago: http://www.harlan.harris.name/2009/10/online-publishing-micropayments-and-warm-fuzzy-feelings/ Excerpt:
But I think there’s a way that might work, a way that leverages human psychology. People like to feel like they’re in control, and they like to feel like they have a voice in the system. Micropayment systems that require you to pay 10 cents to read an article, based on a headline or a link, or subscription systems that take your money and give you something you can get elsewhere for free, just make you resentful. So instead, design the system so that you associate feeling good about what you have just read with giving money to the people who produced the content.
I know. This whole line of research is nearly impossible to make work. You'd need lasers to project coherent light onto the cornea (ow), since otherwise you can't get an image in focus, and a high-powered sensory-computational system to constantly shift the projected image in the opposite direction from saccadic and microsaccadic eye movements. I wish it were being developed by a public company so I could sell it short.
Reading the article, it seems as if the flu vaccine is reasonably effective in reducing morbidity (incidence of infection) among the majority of the population, who are healthy and have noncompromised immune systems. But, the evidence is unclear as to whether it reduced mortality (death) among people who are old or otherwise have weakened immune systems. Even if the vaccine does nothing at all for the elderly per se, it doesn't mean immunization of the healthy is a bad idea, for two reasons. First, as mentioned in the article, herd immunity effects can reduce the incidence of flu in the elderly, thus indirectly reducing mortality. Second, influenza sucks and reduces productivity by knocking people out of work for 3 days. In an economic sense, it is totally worth doing, even if it doesn't reduce deaths at all. The conclusion of the article should be "flu vaccinations are worthwhile, if not exactly for the reason you thought they were."
I don't think I'd predict that WebOS will be up near Android or the iPhone in 2012, but it'll likely still be around. The original analysis doesn't even mention them. Many people think that WebOS has the best technology of any of the existing mobile OSs, although they obviously need more apps (coming soon) and more phones (coming soon).
That's why you randomize, to avoid having to measure and control for the propensity to engage in risky behavior. I'm really puzzled what you think you're trying to argue. This is the simplest design in the world. Two equal groups of randomly-assigned people. One group gets a treatment, one gets a placebo. Neither group knows which group they're in. Measure the outcome. How would you do it better?
That's how random-assignment experimental design is done. It's not bogus. It's very well understood both statistically and philosophically. I'm sorry you don't like it, but it's been the basis of the scientific method for a couple hundred years...
It could just be that people on the placebo took more risks than the people who didn't which is why it is a statistical outlier.
Why would they take more risks? The whole point of a placebo is that you don't know if it's a placebo or not. So there's no reason to expect a change in behavior in one group versus the other. In fact, the behavior change should be driven in the other direction. If there was some reason to think that you got the vaccine (say, side effects not present with the placebo), then you would be likely to increase your risky behavior and increase your likelihood of infection! In this case, they got an effect in the other direction -- the treated group had less infections.
Not necessarily. HIV works by aikido-ing the immune system. It could be that the vaccine could either fully prevent infection or fully fail to prevent infection. Once the virus becomes established in immune cells, the presence of the vaccine and an immune response might be totally insignificant to the progress of the infection.
Yes, although there's an issue of multiple comparisons. There have been a fair number of HIV vaccine trials over the years. This is the first that's found statistically significant results. But if you were to test 20 different non-effective vaccines at a 5% significance level, you'd expect one of the tests to be significant just by chance. This is certainly an intriguing result, but it could be an outlier, and must be replicated.
I don't want have to decide *before* I read an article whether I want to pay for it, I want to decide *after*. To that end, I propose the following micropayment system. If I want to get content from a consortium of providers (say, anything owned by The New York Times Company, or Time-Warner, or Seed Media Group, or a group of publishers that set up their own consortium), I set up an account, pay my $50/year, and get access. If I like a piece of content (article, podcast, interactive graphic, whatever), I click the "Tip the Author(s)" button, and a chunk of my $50, maybe 10 cents, gets redirected to the actual people creating the content I actually like (not just start to read). If I don't use up my $50 for the year, it just gets split internally by the consortium. This way, readers have control over where the money goes and get to associate "paying money" with "feeling good about what they read", providers get cash, and the best providers get the most cash.
I don't think so. This treatment should be on the order of thousands of dollars, versus tens out thousands of dollars for brain surgery or repeated radiation treatments. Plus, there should be much, much fewer side effects.
Also, many disorders of the type they're interested in treating with this technique affect young people whose lifetime incomes will dwarf the costs of successful treatments.
Would you rather have everything hanging from a single point on that wing, basically making the longest possible (balanced) lever, or have the weight split in two and attached at two points?
Well, from the point of view of moment of inertia, I'd much rather have the weight at the center, actually. That plane is going to have some seriously weird torque going on when it makes turns.
Um, yeah, this is not likely to work. The key is making a cable four times stronger than anything currently existing, 50,000 miles long, with no flaws. Gambatte, guys.
(Incidentally, it would be much easier to build a cable that would work for the moon or for Mars.)
In the 1980s, the Japanese government funded a massive "Fifth Generation" computer project, which was supposed to revolutionize parallel computing and AI. By almost all accounts, it was a total waste of money. I expect this project may be as well. (Although, any increase in lightweight cable strength would have commercial applications, as would the beamed power required to make the crawlers work...)
The "false positive" rate is sorta meaningless, because, when it comes to terrorists, there were NO "hits" and NO "false negatives". That is, no terrorists were detected trying to get onto a plane, and no terrorists successfully snuck onto a plane and carried out an attack. That is, there were no terrorists.
The false positive rate would be a more useful measure if true positives were more common, and we could decide if this approach actually worked. As it is, we can only guess.
If I recall, one of the requirements for the new Lunar X Prize is the shooting of some high-def video from the lunar surface. (For some *very* pricey stock footage!) I imagine it would be much easier to do that with a high-capacity link, such as what you'd get with a laser. This is the sort of technology that the X Prize (and NASA) should be supporting.
The differences between the brains of liberals and conservatives is probably inconclusive. Why? The differences between the beliefs of liberals and conservatives aren't even consistent. Many people that consider themselves liberal hold some conservative beliefs and vice versa. If that was the case, and "liberal" and "conservative" were meaningless labels, then the study would have concluded that there's no difference between those two groups on this cognitive task. But, their statistical tests found a fairly strong and very reliable correlation between self-reported political views and the brain waves of their subjects. So, in fact, the differences are definitely not inconclusive.
This study makes about as much sense as studying the difference between the brains of blonds (that bleach their hair) and brunettes. It's been the common view for decades that there is no biological (neurological, personality) basis for political beliefs, and that they're entirely socially constructed. This study is one of quite a few over the last 10 years that have shown pretty clearly that that view is false, and that political views are to a significant extent derived from personality traits. The monitoring of conflicts in information processing is a very low-level individual trait, but it does make sense that it could lead to different types of political views.
And, as others have mentioned, there's no reason to think that it's always, or even usually, a good idea to look for internal conflicts in every little task. It's more likely that a mixture of both traits in a society gives a better result for a population than an all-liberals or all-conservatives society.
The participants in the research were almost certainly undergraduates taking introductory psychology classes at NYU, which is quite a liberal campus. It's possible that the conservatives that they found were, as you said, not typical conservatives. Perhaps replication at the University of Nebraska would be helpful?
The paper says that self-reported scores on the liberal-conservative scale account for 85% of the variance in voting patterns. A 2-D survey would only give additional information if the go/no-go task performance was correlated with (say) economic views and not social views.
My understanding (I am not a neuroscientist, but I am a cognitive scientist) is that the anterior cingulate is pretty clearly involved with conflict monitoring. A more significant issue is that the ERP measure is not good at all at localizing activity. It's certainly possible that they were measuring a different location than they thought they were. (Although they're experts in this stuff, and presumably are at least fairly confident that they were measuring the signals in the appropriate way.)
This said, given the pretty extensive and growing literature about the psychological underpinnings of liberalism and conservatism (having to do with how emotional processes relate to ones view of the political system and its stability, among other things), it wouldn't surprise me at all if those psychological differences had neurological underpinnings that could be observed in non-political tasks.
Check out Radio Paradise, which plays eclectic mostly-pop/rock (but some jazz and blues and electronica and country and occasional classical). http://www.radioparadise.com/ You'll likely hear a lot of stuff you already like, and hear some new stuff too. You'll never hear anything new listening to your own CDs.
Uh, ridiculous. The charting code works, barely, but it's full of weird bugs, interface wackiness, and major, huge, usefulness-preventing limitations. My understanding is that a from-scratch rewrite of the Chart code was on the table for 2.0, but they didn't have the resources to do it and it got delayed, probably until 3.0. I use Chart for quick-and-dirty graphs when exploring data, but for real production graphs I use Grace.
From the story (if you read it...):
The Dragon capsule is the centerpiece of the proposal SpaceX submitted March 3 under NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) demonstration program.
An appropriate acronym, COTS, already used for "Commercial, Off The Shelf"...
And closely related to a long-standing acronym in the space-enthusiasts community, CATS, for Cheap Access To Space.
Slashdot Mirror
Hah, good for you. They can move the train operators to other lines that could use more service!
For those who don't live in NYC, there's a shuttle train with three tracks that goes from Times Square (42nd and 7th) to Grand Central (42nd and Park/4th), which is about 1/2 of a mile/1 km. The shuttle doesn't connect quickly to any other train, and they run about every 3 minutes during rush hour and take 2 minutes. It would take less than 15 minutes to walk that distance. Instead, they should replace those tracks with moving walkways. Instead of taking 5 minutes (or more off-peak) and the cost of running subways, paying conductors, etc., it could take 7 minutes, have a lot higher capacity, and a lot lower cost. Win-win.
I don't understand how this could possibly work. Web posting and bandwidth is not free. The only reason FB is is because of its advertising and other tie-ins, none of which would work well if they weren't targeted. No web site could get substantial portions of the world's population on board if they had to charge money to cover development and server costs. If you can come up with a non-evil social networking business model that allows your platform to attract and support hundreds of millions of simultaneous users, dominate the single largest sector of the Internet, and the resulting costs, with 99.99% uptime, you're not just a genius, you're a god.
Incidentally, R does not really support 64-bit integers, either. http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.r.devel/17281
Excerpt:
I know. This whole line of research is nearly impossible to make work. You'd need lasers to project coherent light onto the cornea (ow), since otherwise you can't get an image in focus, and a high-powered sensory-computational system to constantly shift the projected image in the opposite direction from saccadic and microsaccadic eye movements. I wish it were being developed by a public company so I could sell it short.
Reading the article, it seems as if the flu vaccine is reasonably effective in reducing morbidity (incidence of infection) among the majority of the population, who are healthy and have noncompromised immune systems. But, the evidence is unclear as to whether it reduced mortality (death) among people who are old or otherwise have weakened immune systems. Even if the vaccine does nothing at all for the elderly per se, it doesn't mean immunization of the healthy is a bad idea, for two reasons. First, as mentioned in the article, herd immunity effects can reduce the incidence of flu in the elderly, thus indirectly reducing mortality. Second, influenza sucks and reduces productivity by knocking people out of work for 3 days. In an economic sense, it is totally worth doing, even if it doesn't reduce deaths at all. The conclusion of the article should be "flu vaccinations are worthwhile, if not exactly for the reason you thought they were."
I don't think I'd predict that WebOS will be up near Android or the iPhone in 2012, but it'll likely still be around. The original analysis doesn't even mention them. Many people think that WebOS has the best technology of any of the existing mobile OSs, although they obviously need more apps (coming soon) and more phones (coming soon).
That's why you randomize, to avoid having to measure and control for the propensity to engage in risky behavior. I'm really puzzled what you think you're trying to argue. This is the simplest design in the world. Two equal groups of randomly-assigned people. One group gets a treatment, one gets a placebo. Neither group knows which group they're in. Measure the outcome. How would you do it better?
That's how random-assignment experimental design is done. It's not bogus. It's very well understood both statistically and philosophically. I'm sorry you don't like it, but it's been the basis of the scientific method for a couple hundred years...
It could just be that people on the placebo took more risks than the people who didn't which is why it is a statistical outlier.
Why would they take more risks? The whole point of a placebo is that you don't know if it's a placebo or not. So there's no reason to expect a change in behavior in one group versus the other. In fact, the behavior change should be driven in the other direction. If there was some reason to think that you got the vaccine (say, side effects not present with the placebo), then you would be likely to increase your risky behavior and increase your likelihood of infection! In this case, they got an effect in the other direction -- the treated group had less infections.
Not necessarily. HIV works by aikido-ing the immune system. It could be that the vaccine could either fully prevent infection or fully fail to prevent infection. Once the virus becomes established in immune cells, the presence of the vaccine and an immune response might be totally insignificant to the progress of the infection.
Yes, although there's an issue of multiple comparisons. There have been a fair number of HIV vaccine trials over the years. This is the first that's found statistically significant results. But if you were to test 20 different non-effective vaccines at a 5% significance level, you'd expect one of the tests to be significant just by chance. This is certainly an intriguing result, but it could be an outlier, and must be replicated.
I don't want have to decide *before* I read an article whether I want to pay for it, I want to decide *after*. To that end, I propose the following micropayment system. If I want to get content from a consortium of providers (say, anything owned by The New York Times Company, or Time-Warner, or Seed Media Group, or a group of publishers that set up their own consortium), I set up an account, pay my $50/year, and get access. If I like a piece of content (article, podcast, interactive graphic, whatever), I click the "Tip the Author(s)" button, and a chunk of my $50, maybe 10 cents, gets redirected to the actual people creating the content I actually like (not just start to read). If I don't use up my $50 for the year, it just gets split internally by the consortium. This way, readers have control over where the money goes and get to associate "paying money" with "feeling good about what they read", providers get cash, and the best providers get the most cash.
I don't think so. This treatment should be on the order of thousands of dollars, versus tens out thousands of dollars for brain surgery or repeated radiation treatments. Plus, there should be much, much fewer side effects. Also, many disorders of the type they're interested in treating with this technique affect young people whose lifetime incomes will dwarf the costs of successful treatments.
Would you rather have everything hanging from a single point on that wing, basically making the longest possible (balanced) lever, or have the weight split in two and attached at two points?
Well, from the point of view of moment of inertia, I'd much rather have the weight at the center, actually. That plane is going to have some seriously weird torque going on when it makes turns.
Um, yeah, this is not likely to work. The key is making a cable four times stronger than anything currently existing, 50,000 miles long, with no flaws. Gambatte, guys. (Incidentally, it would be much easier to build a cable that would work for the moon or for Mars.) In the 1980s, the Japanese government funded a massive "Fifth Generation" computer project, which was supposed to revolutionize parallel computing and AI. By almost all accounts, it was a total waste of money. I expect this project may be as well. (Although, any increase in lightweight cable strength would have commercial applications, as would the beamed power required to make the crawlers work...)
The "false positive" rate is sorta meaningless, because, when it comes to terrorists, there were NO "hits" and NO "false negatives". That is, no terrorists were detected trying to get onto a plane, and no terrorists successfully snuck onto a plane and carried out an attack. That is, there were no terrorists. The false positive rate would be a more useful measure if true positives were more common, and we could decide if this approach actually worked. As it is, we can only guess.
If I recall, one of the requirements for the new Lunar X Prize is the shooting of some high-def video from the lunar surface. (For some *very* pricey stock footage!) I imagine it would be much easier to do that with a high-capacity link, such as what you'd get with a laser. This is the sort of technology that the X Prize (and NASA) should be supporting.
The participants in the research were almost certainly undergraduates taking introductory psychology classes at NYU, which is quite a liberal campus. It's possible that the conservatives that they found were, as you said, not typical conservatives. Perhaps replication at the University of Nebraska would be helpful? The paper says that self-reported scores on the liberal-conservative scale account for 85% of the variance in voting patterns. A 2-D survey would only give additional information if the go/no-go task performance was correlated with (say) economic views and not social views. My understanding (I am not a neuroscientist, but I am a cognitive scientist) is that the anterior cingulate is pretty clearly involved with conflict monitoring. A more significant issue is that the ERP measure is not good at all at localizing activity. It's certainly possible that they were measuring a different location than they thought they were. (Although they're experts in this stuff, and presumably are at least fairly confident that they were measuring the signals in the appropriate way.) This said, given the pretty extensive and growing literature about the psychological underpinnings of liberalism and conservatism (having to do with how emotional processes relate to ones view of the political system and its stability, among other things), it wouldn't surprise me at all if those psychological differences had neurological underpinnings that could be observed in non-political tasks.
Check out Radio Paradise, which plays eclectic mostly-pop/rock (but some jazz and blues and electronica and country and occasional classical). http://www.radioparadise.com/ You'll likely hear a lot of stuff you already like, and hear some new stuff too. You'll never hear anything new listening to your own CDs.
Uh, ridiculous. The charting code works, barely, but it's full of weird bugs, interface wackiness, and major, huge, usefulness-preventing limitations. My understanding is that a from-scratch rewrite of the Chart code was on the table for 2.0, but they didn't have the resources to do it and it got delayed, probably until 3.0. I use Chart for quick-and-dirty graphs when exploring data, but for real production graphs I use Grace.
Robotic mules are for people like us on Slashdot. You know, people with no friends to help us move...