Correct, but only because the psychometricians shoehorn the data into a normal distribution which they simply assume is correct. The distribution of raw scores is more like a log-normal or Pearson type IV curve. Above 140 IQ there are substatially more people than the normal curve predicts. See the work of Vernon Sare on the log-normal distribution and Cyril Burt on the Pearson type IV distribution, as well as the high number of childre nwith IQs over 160 tested by the Gifted Development center in Colorado.
Mathematically IQ is not a measure of ability but purely the (often extrapolated) rarity of that ability. Rasch measures such as the Change-Sensitive Scores on the new Stanford-Binet V are an alternative to rarity-based scores. Rasch measures give a pure dimensionless measure of both question difficulty and test-taker ability. These measures demonstrate that there is a bigger difference in ability between the smartest people and average people than there is between the average people and two-year old children. (See Deborah Ruf's service bulletin for Riverside publishing for the test data.)
The GP is almost right, but the wealth distribution is a backwards "L" shape - far more unequal than the distribution of intellect, which in absolute terms varies less than a factor of two between people, usually much less.
You are SO full of shit. It isn't much harder than it used to be to get poisons or glass or resin knives or thermite or many unusual kinds of explosives on an airplane than it used to be. The TSA does nothing to make airplanes safer. You would in fact be safer if they GAVE you a knife as you got on the plane. At least then the passengers would have a fighting chance aginst whatever got through the screening system.
The TSA needs to demonstrate that every action they take is the minimum infringement of Constitutional Rights possible to ensure their limited purpose of ensuring the safety of other passengers. If you can't damage a plane with your pot or your bench warrant for running a stop sign, then it is none of the TSA's business.
The truth is, searching everyone for drugs and checking them for warrants is not the secondary purpose of the TSA. It is the only thing at which they are fairly effective. So now you "voluntarily" give up your Constitutional Rights if you want to travel by any means. The net effect of current legal interpretations is that buses, trains (if you can find one), airplanes and in some cases even cars all now do not require a warrant or probable cause for the cops to search whatever they feel like.
The interpretation you defend could just as easily be applied to the public roads - you have a choice, after all - no one is forcing you to step outside your home, so your consent to search can be inferred. That is only a small step away from the current situation, which in some ways is actually already worse.
Hotel rooms, apartments, condos and houses are all subject to search on tips from people outside law-enforcement, even if made anonymously. Walking or riding a bike long distances or in poor districts is of course suspicious activity in itself, clearly designed to attempt to evade checkpoints. If you don't have a proper vehicle, then the cops know the odds of you defending yourself against an illegal search in court are almost nil, so don't count on the Bill of Techicalities to save your ass. If you resist an illegal search you may be beaten, tased, or even shot and you will go to jail and it will cost you time in jail and a whopping chunk of money - in the unlikely event you are found innocent. Otherwise it's a prison term, plus other penalties that permanently deprive you of your rights.
Welcome to the Police State. Good thing it's so effective at keeping drugs and weapons and terrorists out of the country, or people might start to wonder whether our polititians and judges could use some time behind bars themselves.
That's interesting to know. I never heard about the hemp thing even though my very cool Asian Religions professor taught a lot about Shinto and spent years in Japan for her thesis. She told us that applying the English word "religion" to Shinto creates a lot of false expectations; Shinto is a collection of traditional practices. Belief is sometimes a part of it, sometimes not. Some of the other posters in this thread seem not to know this.
I get the impression that for many or most Japanese, Shinto is mostly cultural, or things people do for good luck because they're harmless or pretty or expected, rather than because of complete belief - akin to more elaborate versions of lighting a candle in church, pitching pennies in a pool or throwing spilled salt over the shoulder. There are religious sides to it, of course, but my point is that Shinto does not fit neatly into the category of a religion, but it is deeply intertwined with culture and folklore. And certainly the culture does not remind anybody of the Rastafarians. (It does make me wonder what Japan would be like, though, if everybody fired up a bowl of the kind. Boggles the mind, no?) I don't recall much ganja in the Kojiki, either. As you implied, hemp must be a minor aspect of Shinto/ Japanese culture relating to fiber and seed rather than drugs.
Botanicals shouldnt get lumped in with vitamins. St. John's Wort is a mild MAO inhibitor, I believe. Some other plants like Syrian Rue are strong MAO inhibitors. If seratonin is low due to a lack of precursors, then some supplements such as lecithin or choline might help. Sleep disorders are usual in depression and seem to be as much a cause as an effect, so natural sleep aids such as melatonin may be helpful. And sometimes improved body health will pull the mind along with it, so vitamins should not be written off entirely, although diet in general is more important. A relatively steady blood glucose damps mood swings. Excercise often helps, as do yoga, breathing meditation, and similar activities that increase the oxygen available to the brain.
Also the standard antidepressants are not that much more effective than placebos in clinical trials - certainly less than five times better, generally less. A significant number of people will do better with placebos than they would with nothing - and they get fewer side effects. The belief that you are doing something to improve your state of mind has an effect by itself.
A much better chart for physicists and physical chemists is Stowe's 3-D periodic table. http://chemlab.pc.maricopa.edu/periodic/stowetable.html which arranges things according to the principal quantum numbers. It comes out completely symmetric.
Hell, from my window, not 500 ft. away I could see the building where BellSouth provisions 95% of all the DSL lines in the Southeast for all the NSPs.
*Earthlink told me I was in a CLEC area and my line didn't qualify.*
I got the BellSouth guy who handles Earthlink's wholesale account to set them straight, but I doubt anyone else could. And I don't think anyone below VP could tell engineering where to put a DSLAM. The network build-out plans are publicly posted, however. (in a locked filing cabinet in a disused latrine in a dark, stairless basement with a sign saying "beware the leopard")
That's why it's called ADSL - Asymetric Digital Subscriber Line. There were good technical reasons having to do with the limitations of the existing phone company outside plant, some subtlties of crosstalk at different frequencies, the need for affordable modems dictating lower transmit levels and frequencies than the DSLAM uses, and the need to divide up the spectrum in the line in a uniform way in order to not get interference between lines in the same bundle. That last requirement meant that the typical user pattern of more downloading than uploading had to be reflected in the ADSL frequency allocations. The upside is that there is virtually never a problem with low-frequency upstream connectivity with its lightly loaded carriers, while downstream is plagued with interference and high-frequency attenuation.
Until the phone company feels like spending several hundred dollars per line to switch to a completely different standard, you aren't going to get much above 768 kbps upstream, or maybe 1024 if your line is something like 50 ft of AWG 10.
The sad thing is there is no reason it has to be like this. I worked for three years for BellSouth Business Systems (BBS) in the Digital Services Group (DSG) Service Activation and Repair (SAR) section as an ADSL "Multimedia Technician" (MT), which was an old job classification that must have sounded more reassuring than "Network Overlord" to the suits.
We had complete control of the network between the user and the NSPs' switches, including the 2E6 phone lines, 1E4 DSLAMs (DSL Access Multiplexer - the actual DSL boxen), 1E3 ATM switches, and all layers of provisioning software plus all the databases and network management tools - 25 different applications, some new, some 30 years old. If it couldn't be fixed in software we could call anyone in the company - CO and field techs to VPs and get anything done - except get a new DSLAM put where it was needed. One thing we could do (but weren't allowed to) was to make lines work better than they should. Virtually any line can go at 3 Mbps and most can work at 6 or even 8 Mbps just by setting a variable. Most - no, all - upstream links were fat and empty, so there is no good reason for not letting people use what is already there. Conversely, if a poor 20 kft line that never should have qualified could be made usable and even reliable by throttling the bandwidth to a lower rate, we weren't allowed to do it. Even using line profiles that used more robust encoding or changed the noise margin requirements to block intermittently noisy frequencies were verboten. Not that many of my coworkers knew how to do that, of course.
The excuse always given was that the FCC tariffs (service- and company-specific regulations) dictated what we could do. I read all the BS ADSL FCC tariffs I could find, but I never found any such restrictions. Basically the ILECs have a reflexively greedy, dog-in-the-manger attitude towards providing service. If they can give you less for the same money, then they will, even if it is no more effort or expense is required to do better.
I could go on about BS's Soviet bureaucracy and its recent infatuation with moronic Six Sigma pseudo-measurements of everything except whether the problem was fixed, or about its subsidiary NSP, BellSouth.net, which closed most of its domestic call centers, (even Oak Ridge, the only one that had a clue) and outsourced the jobs to India, the Phillipines, and even Costa Rica, but I'm getting tired.
Trust me on this - RFID has no place in the design of the keys. It can't give enough power and it would complicate the design. It could use between 2 and 4 "brushes" (sliding electrical contacts with one contact springy and bowed outwards). Or it could use fine-stranded cable with sufficient strain relief. But what they most likely will use is the kind of flexible printed circuit material often found in optical drive assemblies (Mylar, I believe).
This is really cool stuff. Essentially they're making silicon wafers smaller by removing all the silicon in the substrate after the wafer is fabbed. Then they can put this few-micron-thick layer onto another fabbed wafer - perhaps made with a different process - then they can repeat the process. This allows sensor, analog, processor and memory to be made in the best processes for each function but with communication channels tens of thousands of wires wide and only microns long.
This article is worth reading - this is going to be huge. Also there is a really fantastic picture of a see-through microprocessor wafer with the article.
From the article:
Wafer-level stacking also allows for short connections between different types of chips. "Particularly today the industry is trying to combine memory with the processor, and more than half of the chip is taken up by memory," Lu explains. "When we stack layers, we have a processor on the bottom and layer the memory on top, with a short access time between them." Lu says the reduction of memory access time would be a huge advancement for large-scale computer clusters calculating nuclear reactions and weather broadcasting, for example.
"You are also creating new functionality," says Nalamasu. "Such technology has vast implications, for example, integrating biochips with silicon chips. The wonderful thing is that if we adopt this technology, we'll develop things we can't even envision today."
You are overestimating your knowledge. I had Horowitz and Hill's undisputed bible, "The Art of Electronics", open on my desk as usual, so I checked the index. "Power supply" refers exclusively to sources of DC power in TAoE. The AC mains are called simply "power lines" or referred to more specifically with voltage, e.g. "120V AC". I don't know why you think sticking the officious little word "unit" on the end of the common term "power supply" makes a difference. To me the word "unit" simply suggests that it is being treated as a black box component rather than as a mutable part of the circuit design. In context you could refer to the AC mains as "the power supply", but when used by an electronic engineer without qualification, the term means a circuit which provides a local source of DC, most often one which derives its own power from an AC input.
As for supercaps, the carbon aerogel Cooper-Bussman PowerStor 2.5V 50F (0.025ohms @ 1kHz, 18.5mm dia.x 42 mm height) caps are available for $17.26 ea / qty. 100. (http://dkc3.digikey.com/PDF/T052/0919.pdf, http://www.cooperet.com/products/products.cfm?page =supercapacitors). You would need 5-10 of these (depending on capacitance variance and circuit efficiency) to store 1 kJ (100W x 10sec) plus a fancy charge pump to get the voltage up to the 12V needed. A brute-force approach would use 24-36 caps and would leak a little due to the voltage-sharing resistors needed for series capacitors.) Not cheap enough, but getting there, as I said. Of course, if you only need enough power to refresh the DRAM and perhaps power a device other than the main processor which transfers the data to flash memory, then you would need much less juice. Also promising is the idea of using batteries bufered by supercapacitors for situations with a high peak/average current ratio.
Just for anyone else out there who doesn't know what a power supply is, it's a box built into the computer case that turns the wall socket AC into the steady DC the computer needs. You don't plug other things into it. A UPS, on the other hand, often has printers and lamps and subwoofers and whatnot hooked up to it because it has lots of inviting AC plugs.
With automatic hibernation and a built-in small UPS, no other peripherals would need power in order to preserve data, which is the most essential function of a UPS. Batteries wouldn't really be needed, either - pretty soon supercapacitors will be cheap enough to do the job.
Look, this is not some sort of abstract intellectual argument. The GP is describing the feelings of the public, not specifically whether the bad situations of today have been around in some form for many years. It is average person's current increased perception of an eroding position which creates the mindset which presently determines public response on economic issues. I think the GP poster expressed the American public's mood quite incisively.
*** Also just to correct one of your irrelevant points above, tuition was of course rising faster than inflation in the late '90s and still is doing so today.
I agree completely. This course was a bit of fluff. If you read the preprint paper about the course you'll see that it is filled with the most gag-inducing edubabble imaginable. I have taught 10 year-olds about nanotech at a higher level than this.
The sources and readings were especially lame. For example, the only required book for the class was the 150-page SciAm hack job on nanotech. The readings had only one chapter from Engines of Creation and nothing from Nanosystems. Even the popular, non-technical stuff was not the best - why no Ed Regis or Neal Stephenson?
For that matter, you have the right to back a crypto-fascist military agressor controlled by corporate oligarchs. It doesn't mean the Europeans have to embrace you or let you in - the difference is that the Europeans will probably admit you anyway. Otherwise it would be kinda like inviting everybody in the neighborhood over for a barbecue, then excluding the neighbor who works at the slaughterhouse because he seems a little too enthusiastic about his job.
The American position is closer to inviting everybody in the neighborhood over for a barbecue, then skewering and roasting the ones who prefer the potato salad to the long pig.
Any price is too high for Google stock. It is non-voting stock, and if you read the prospectus it offers no dividends EVER. The earnings are irrelevant - they promise never to give any of it to their stockholders. And the stock is dilutable, of course - any time they feel like it they can make your theoretical portion of the company into a smaller portion.
So what exactly are you buying? Thinking that someone else will want to buy their stock in the future is naive - the only thing they have to offer the market is buzz, and that always fades.
You can make money on google, though - just sell short.
The parent post to which I was responding referred to UV as ionizing radiation. There is no scientific difference between extreme UV and soft X-rays. Some UV is ionizing radiation - it can break the bonds in most biological molecules and thus cause cellular damage. It does not matter whether the damage was caused by gamma rays, UV, or massive particles - only the extent of damage itself matters. UV is more strongly absorbed by the body than x-rays and this offsets its lower energy for those reactions where the UV has enough energy to break the bonds in question at all, which it usually does in the case in biological materials. BTW IR is the standard abbriviation for infrared, not for ionizing radiation, particularly in contexts where ultraviolet is abbriviated as "UV".
Ionizing radiation only causes cancer above a threshold dose which can be raised by prior exposure - previous low doses can immunize against the effects of later high doses. The repeatedly demonstrated dose curves show a "J" shape - the risks of cancer go down with increasing radiation until they reach a minimum well below the mortality rate for low-background radiation subjects. After that the mortality graph goes upward until the risk matches that of the low-background subjects, and keeps going up at even higher doses. For radon the optimum dose to prevent lung cancer is at about 3.5 times the total background radiation from other sources (background is 5-10K nuclear disintegrations per second, mostly from the potassium-40 in the body). For other radioactivity where the emitters are not ingested the optimum dose is around 10 REM per year - 50 times the background level. The residents of some villages in Iran get 70 REM/yr. yet suffer no increase in mortality.
"I can quote 10^2 papers that do link IR [sic]with cancer." Sure - at higher dosages.
"Also, we have actually seen DNA damage in human cells after IR [sic] exposure." Yes, and we have actually seen muscle fiber damage after exercise. The body's repair systems then make the muscle stronger than it was in the first place. An analogous process happens with cellular radiation damage.
"Irradiated cells initiate protective responses within a few hours, including radical detoxification, DNA repair, cell removal by stimulated immune response, and apoptosis. These responses are also used to repair endogenous DNA and other metabolic damage as well (Feinendegen & Pollycove, 2001; Luckey, 1991, p. 5). Radiation damage caused by a low initial dose induces a DNA repair mechanism that allows efficient repair of a large number of breaks from a high later dose. This has been investigated by biochemical experimenters in great detail (Wolff, 1992). Radiation hormesis, therefore, is a moderate overcompensation to a disruption in homeostasis caused by the radiation; it is a stimulus to the repair mechanisms that cope with nonradiation damage as well, so that the overall effect is a health benefit (Cuttler,2002)." http://www.scientificexploration.org/jse/articles/ pdf/17.3_kauffman.pdf[a good review of the literature for and against radiation hormesis]
Some ionizing radiation is not bad for you in small amounts - it is actually beneficial. The idea that the damage is cumulative and has a zero threshold is an assumption that has been disproven. See http://cnts.wpi.edu/RSH/Docs/index_science.html for links to the scientific studies done on radiation hormesis.
Here's a brief overview of some studies listed in http://www.angelfire.com/mo/radioadaptive/inthorm. html: "1-According to UNSCEAR report (1994), among A-bomb survivors from Hiroshimaand Nagazaki who received doses lower than 200 mSv, there was no increase in the number of total cancer death. Mortality caused by leukemia was evenlower in this population at doses below 100 mSv than age-matched controlcohorts. 2-Mifune (1992) (Mifune et al. 1992) and his co-workers indicated that in a spa area (Misasa), with an average indoor radon level of 35 Bq/m3, the lung cancer incidence was about 50% of that in a low-level radon region. Their results also showed that in the above mentioned high background radiation area, the mortality rate caused by all types of cancer was 37% lower. 3-According to Mine et al. (1981), among A-bomb survivors from Nagasaki, in some age categories, the observed annual rate of death is less than what is statistically expected. 4-Kumatori and his colleagues (Kumatori et al. 1980) reported that according to their 25 year follow up study of Japanese fishermen who were heavily contaminated by plutunium (hydrogen bomb test at Bikini), no one died from cancer. " "1-In an Indian study, it was observed that in areas with a high-background radiation level, the incidence of cancer and also the mortality rate due to cancer was significantly less than similar areas with a low backgroundradiation level (Nambi and Soman 1987). 2-In a very large scale study in U.S.A, it was found that the mortality rate due to all malignancies was lower in states with higher annual radiation dose (Frigerio 1976). 3- In a large scale Chinese study, it was showed that the mortality rate due to cancer was lower in an area with a relatively high background radiation (74,000 people), while the control group (78,000 people) who lived in anarea with low background radiation had a higher rate of mortality (Wei L 1990). 4-In the U.S.A., it was indicated that significantly, the total cancer mortalityis inversely correlated with background radiation dose (Cohen BL. 1993). "
Will YOU ultimately halt and die, or exhaust your state space and start repeating yourself, or go on forever as some immortal soul or computaion or whatnot? Are you or any of us really not subject to the halting problem?
"the closer to analog the system's encoding is the more susceptible it is to noise."
But for any given level of noise there is an optimum coding which is a subset of analog which in general is a richer subset of analog than digital is. Optimum != digital.
And in fact you can do error-correction in analog - that's what op-amp designers do to transistors and op-amp users take advantage of when putting components in the feedback loop, thus linearizing whatever component is used. Error correction is also the essence of differential signaling and the right-leg driver in EEG, among many other circuits. As with digital error correction, there are limits, and you can't optimize everything at once. I see no reason why one can't do error corrections with any kind of signal regardless of its physical encoding.
Despite your ignorance of the fact, analog computing is alive and well in frequency-domain applications, in classical cybernetic feedback mechanisms, in control theory using simulated analog systems, in phase-locked loops, analog programmable system on chip and array products, in essentially every piece of test equipment ever and most consumer products, too. A purpose-built analog computer that scales and offsets a signal, demodulates and band-limits it performs the equivalent of hundreds of MIPS of processing on a high-quality video signal, and you've got one that does all that and more in every TV.
Yes - simulate. The interesting question is not: "can a digital computer simulate anything", but rather: "what is the most efficient way to simulate things".
For a given amount of matter and energy, the greater the number of states that the constituents can assume and the finer the time resolution of their evolutions, then the greater their complexity and thus the greater potential processing power for a system. In other words the closer to analog the system's encoding is, the greater its processing power and the greater its difficulty in being simulated by a coarser level of representation such as digital.
Neurons are not digital. To be digital you must not only have quantitized levels but also clocking. (Asynchronous digital is a misnomer - it does not work digitally in reentrant networks unless there is an equivalent to clocking built-in.) Neurons operate similarly to a type of analog electronics known as "pulse-width modulation". Neural information is mostly coded in the relative phases of inputs to a neuron, which vary with the relative frequencies of the inputs. The weightings of the inputs are also analog and vary in an analog way over time. The time-dependent summation functions of neurons are also analog. There are even some neurons with continuously variable voltage outputs. Neurons are completely analog, and the relative consistency of output pulse shapes in most neurons has nothing to do with digital logic or digital math. The noise-resistance in both frequency-domain PWM and in digital methods comes from voltage quantitization but that is the only similarity.
Slashdot Mirror
Correct, but only because the psychometricians shoehorn the data into a normal distribution which they simply assume is correct. The distribution of raw scores is more like a log-normal or Pearson type IV curve. Above 140 IQ there are substatially more people than the normal curve predicts. See the work of Vernon Sare on the log-normal distribution and Cyril Burt on the Pearson type IV distribution, as well as the high number of childre nwith IQs over 160 tested by the Gifted Development center in Colorado.
Mathematically IQ is not a measure of ability but purely the (often extrapolated) rarity of that ability. Rasch measures such as the Change-Sensitive Scores on the new Stanford-Binet V are an alternative to rarity-based scores. Rasch measures give a pure dimensionless measure of both question difficulty and test-taker ability. These measures demonstrate that there is a bigger difference in ability between the smartest people and average people than there is between the average people and two-year old children. (See Deborah Ruf's service bulletin for Riverside publishing for the test data.)
The GP is almost right, but the wealth distribution is a backwards "L" shape - far more unequal than the distribution of intellect, which in absolute terms varies less than a factor of two between people, usually much less.
You are SO full of shit. It isn't much harder than it used to be to get poisons or glass or resin knives or thermite or many unusual kinds of explosives on an airplane than it used to be. The TSA does nothing to make airplanes safer. You would in fact be safer if they GAVE you a knife as you got on the plane. At least then the passengers would have a fighting chance aginst whatever got through the screening system.
The TSA needs to demonstrate that every action they take is the minimum infringement of Constitutional Rights possible to ensure their limited purpose of ensuring the safety of other passengers. If you can't damage a plane with your pot or your bench warrant for running a stop sign, then it is none of the TSA's business.
The truth is, searching everyone for drugs and checking them for warrants is not the secondary purpose of the TSA. It is the only thing at which they are fairly effective. So now you "voluntarily" give up your Constitutional Rights if you want to travel by any means. The net effect of current legal interpretations is that buses, trains (if you can find one), airplanes and in some cases even cars all now do not require a warrant or probable cause for the cops to search whatever they feel like.
The interpretation you defend could just as easily be applied to the public roads - you have a choice, after all - no one is forcing you to step outside your home, so your consent to search can be inferred. That is only a small step away from the current situation, which in some ways is actually already worse.
Hotel rooms, apartments, condos and houses are all subject to search on tips from people outside law-enforcement, even if made anonymously. Walking or riding a bike long distances or in poor districts is of course suspicious activity in itself, clearly designed to attempt to evade checkpoints. If you don't have a proper vehicle, then the cops know the odds of you defending yourself against an illegal search in court are almost nil, so don't count on the Bill of Techicalities to save your ass. If you resist an illegal search you may be beaten, tased, or even shot and you will go to jail and it will cost you time in jail and a whopping chunk of money - in the unlikely event you are found innocent. Otherwise it's a prison term, plus other penalties that permanently deprive you of your rights.
Welcome to the Police State. Good thing it's so effective at keeping drugs and weapons and terrorists out of the country, or people might start to wonder whether our polititians and judges could use some time behind bars themselves.
That's interesting to know. I never heard about the hemp thing even though my very cool Asian Religions professor taught a lot about Shinto and spent years in Japan for her thesis. She told us that applying the English word "religion" to Shinto creates a lot of false expectations; Shinto is a collection of traditional practices. Belief is sometimes a part of it, sometimes not. Some of the other posters in this thread seem not to know this.
I get the impression that for many or most Japanese, Shinto is mostly cultural, or things people do for good luck because they're harmless or pretty or expected, rather than because of complete belief - akin to more elaborate versions of lighting a candle in church, pitching pennies in a pool or throwing spilled salt over the shoulder. There are religious sides to it, of course, but my point is that Shinto does not fit neatly into the category of a religion, but it is deeply intertwined with culture and folklore. And certainly the culture does not remind anybody of the Rastafarians. (It does make me wonder what Japan would be like, though, if everybody fired up a bowl of the kind. Boggles the mind, no?) I don't recall much ganja in the Kojiki, either. As you implied, hemp must be a minor aspect of Shinto/ Japanese culture relating to fiber and seed rather than drugs.
Botanicals shouldnt get lumped in with vitamins. St. John's Wort is a mild MAO inhibitor, I believe. Some other plants like Syrian Rue are strong MAO inhibitors. If seratonin is low due to a lack of precursors, then some supplements such as lecithin or choline might help. Sleep disorders are usual in depression and seem to be as much a cause as an effect, so natural sleep aids such as melatonin may be helpful. And sometimes improved body health will pull the mind along with it, so vitamins should not be written off entirely, although diet in general is more important. A relatively steady blood glucose damps mood swings. Excercise often helps, as do yoga, breathing meditation, and similar activities that increase the oxygen available to the brain.
Also the standard antidepressants are not that much more effective than placebos in clinical trials - certainly less than five times better, generally less. A significant number of people will do better with placebos than they would with nothing - and they get fewer side effects. The belief that you are doing something to improve your state of mind has an effect by itself.
A much better chart for physicists and physical chemists is Stowe's 3-D periodic table. http://chemlab.pc.maricopa.edu/periodic/stowetable .html which arranges things according to the principal quantum numbers. It comes out completely symmetric.
Hell, from my window, not 500 ft. away I could see the building where BellSouth provisions 95% of all the DSL lines in the Southeast for all the NSPs.
*Earthlink told me I was in a CLEC area and my line didn't qualify.*
I got the BellSouth guy who handles Earthlink's wholesale account to set them straight, but I doubt anyone else could. And I don't think anyone below VP could tell engineering where to put a DSLAM. The network build-out plans are publicly posted, however. (in a locked filing cabinet in a disused latrine in a dark, stairless basement with a sign saying "beware the leopard")
That's why it's called ADSL - Asymetric Digital Subscriber Line. There were good technical reasons having to do with the limitations of the existing phone company outside plant, some subtlties of crosstalk at different frequencies, the need for affordable modems dictating lower transmit levels and frequencies than the DSLAM uses, and the need to divide up the spectrum in the line in a uniform way in order to not get interference between lines in the same bundle. That last requirement meant that the typical user pattern of more downloading than uploading had to be reflected in the ADSL frequency allocations. The upside is that there is virtually never a problem with low-frequency upstream connectivity with its lightly loaded carriers, while downstream is plagued with interference and high-frequency attenuation.
Until the phone company feels like spending several hundred dollars per line to switch to a completely different standard, you aren't going to get much above 768 kbps upstream, or maybe 1024 if your line is something like 50 ft of AWG 10.
The sad thing is there is no reason it has to be like this. I worked for three years for BellSouth Business Systems (BBS) in the Digital Services Group (DSG) Service Activation and Repair (SAR) section as an ADSL "Multimedia Technician" (MT), which was an old job classification that must have sounded more reassuring than "Network Overlord" to the suits.
We had complete control of the network between the user and the NSPs' switches, including the 2E6 phone lines, 1E4 DSLAMs (DSL Access Multiplexer - the actual DSL boxen), 1E3 ATM switches, and all layers of provisioning software plus all the databases and network management tools - 25 different applications, some new, some 30 years old. If it couldn't be fixed in software we could call anyone in the company - CO and field techs to VPs and get anything done - except get a new DSLAM put where it was needed. One thing we could do (but weren't allowed to) was to make lines work better than they should. Virtually any line can go at 3 Mbps and most can work at 6 or even 8 Mbps just by setting a variable. Most - no, all - upstream links were fat and empty, so there is no good reason for not letting people use what is already there. Conversely, if a poor 20 kft line that never should have qualified could be made usable and even reliable by throttling the bandwidth to a lower rate, we weren't allowed to do it. Even using line profiles that used more robust encoding or changed the noise margin requirements to block intermittently noisy frequencies were verboten. Not that many of my coworkers knew how to do that, of course.
The excuse always given was that the FCC tariffs (service- and company-specific regulations) dictated what we could do. I read all the BS ADSL FCC tariffs I could find, but I never found any such restrictions. Basically the ILECs have a reflexively greedy, dog-in-the-manger attitude towards providing service. If they can give you less for the same money, then they will, even if it is no more effort or expense is required to do better.
I could go on about BS's Soviet bureaucracy and its recent infatuation with moronic Six Sigma pseudo-measurements of everything except whether the problem was fixed, or about its subsidiary NSP, BellSouth.net, which closed most of its domestic call centers, (even Oak Ridge, the only one that had a clue) and outsourced the jobs to India, the Phillipines, and even Costa Rica, but I'm getting tired.
Trust me on this - RFID has no place in the design of the keys. It can't give enough power and it would complicate the design. It could use between 2 and 4 "brushes" (sliding electrical contacts with one contact springy and bowed outwards). Or it could use fine-stranded cable with sufficient strain relief. But what they most likely will use is the kind of flexible printed circuit material often found in optical drive assemblies (Mylar, I believe).
This is really cool stuff. Essentially they're making silicon wafers smaller by removing all the silicon in the substrate after the wafer is fabbed. Then they can put this few-micron-thick layer onto another fabbed wafer - perhaps made with a different process - then they can repeat the process. This allows sensor, analog, processor and memory to be made in the best processes for each function but with communication channels tens of thousands of wires wide and only microns long.
This article is worth reading - this is going to be huge. Also there is a really fantastic picture of a see-through microprocessor wafer with the article.
From the article:
Wafer-level stacking also allows for short connections between different types of chips. "Particularly today the industry is trying to combine memory with the processor, and more than half of the chip is taken up by memory," Lu explains. "When we stack layers, we have a processor on the bottom and layer the memory on top, with a short access time between them." Lu says the reduction of memory access time would be a huge advancement for large-scale computer clusters calculating nuclear reactions and weather broadcasting, for example.
"You are also creating new functionality," says Nalamasu. "Such technology has vast implications, for example, integrating biochips with silicon chips. The wonderful thing is that if we adopt this technology, we'll develop things we can't even envision today."
You are overestimating your knowledge. I had Horowitz and Hill's undisputed bible, "The Art of Electronics", open on my desk as usual, so I checked the index. "Power supply" refers exclusively to sources of DC power in TAoE. The AC mains are called simply "power lines" or referred to more specifically with voltage, e.g. "120V AC". I don't know why you think sticking the officious little word "unit" on the end of the common term "power supply" makes a difference. To me the word "unit" simply suggests that it is being treated as a black box component rather than as a mutable part of the circuit design. In context you could refer to the AC mains as "the power supply", but when used by an electronic engineer without qualification, the term means a circuit which provides a local source of DC, most often one which derives its own power from an AC input.
e =supercapacitors). You would need 5-10 of these (depending on capacitance variance and circuit efficiency) to store 1 kJ (100W x 10sec) plus a fancy charge pump to get the voltage up to the 12V needed. A brute-force approach would use 24-36 caps and would leak a little due to the voltage-sharing resistors needed for series capacitors.) Not cheap enough, but getting there, as I said. Of course, if you only need enough power to refresh the DRAM and perhaps power a device other than the main processor which transfers the data to flash memory, then you would need much less juice. Also promising is the idea of using batteries bufered by supercapacitors for situations with a high peak/average current ratio.
As for supercaps, the carbon aerogel Cooper-Bussman PowerStor 2.5V 50F (0.025ohms @ 1kHz, 18.5mm dia.x 42 mm height) caps are available for $17.26 ea / qty. 100. (http://dkc3.digikey.com/PDF/T052/0919.pdf, http://www.cooperet.com/products/products.cfm?pag
Just for anyone else out there who doesn't know what a power supply is, it's a box built into the computer case that turns the wall socket AC into the steady DC the computer needs. You don't plug other things into it. A UPS, on the other hand, often has printers and lamps and subwoofers and whatnot hooked up to it because it has lots of inviting AC plugs.
With automatic hibernation and a built-in small UPS, no other peripherals would need power in order to preserve data, which is the most essential function of a UPS. Batteries wouldn't really be needed, either - pretty soon supercapacitors will be cheap enough to do the job.
Look, this is not some sort of abstract intellectual argument. The GP is describing the feelings of the public, not specifically whether the bad situations of today have been around in some form for many years. It is average person's current increased perception of an eroding position which creates the mindset which presently determines public response on economic issues. I think the GP poster expressed the American public's mood quite incisively.
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Also just to correct one of your irrelevant points above, tuition was of course rising faster than inflation in the late '90s and still is doing so today.
They're called ribosomes, and they can make any type of biological protein from the appropriate sequence of RNA instructions.
I agree completely. This course was a bit of fluff. If you read the preprint paper about the course you'll see that it is filled with the most gag-inducing edubabble imaginable. I have taught 10 year-olds about nanotech at a higher level than this.
The sources and readings were especially lame. For example, the only required book for the class was the 150-page SciAm hack job on nanotech. The readings had only one chapter from Engines of Creation and nothing from Nanosystems. Even the popular, non-technical stuff was not the best - why no Ed Regis or Neal Stephenson?
For that matter, you have the right to back a crypto-fascist military agressor controlled by corporate oligarchs. It doesn't mean the Europeans have to embrace you or let you in - the difference is that the Europeans will probably admit you anyway. Otherwise it would be kinda like inviting everybody in the neighborhood over for a barbecue, then excluding the neighbor who works at the slaughterhouse because he seems a little too enthusiastic about his job.
The American position is closer to inviting everybody in the neighborhood over for a barbecue, then skewering and roasting the ones who prefer the potato salad to the long pig.
"But the price itself doesn't matter."
Any price is too high for Google stock. It is non-voting stock, and if you read the prospectus it offers no dividends EVER. The earnings are irrelevant - they promise never to give any of it to their stockholders. And the stock is dilutable, of course - any time they feel like it they can make your theoretical portion of the company into a smaller portion.
So what exactly are you buying? Thinking that someone else will want to buy their stock in the future is naive - the only thing they have to offer the market is buzz, and that always fades.
You can make money on google, though - just sell short.
The common and often asymptomatic STD, Human Papiloma Virus, (HPV) is the principal cause of cervical cancer.
The parent post to which I was responding referred to UV as ionizing radiation. There is no scientific difference between extreme UV and soft X-rays. Some UV is ionizing radiation - it can break the bonds in most biological molecules and thus cause cellular damage. It does not matter whether the damage was caused by gamma rays, UV, or massive particles - only the extent of damage itself matters. UV is more strongly absorbed by the body than x-rays and this offsets its lower energy for those reactions where the UV has enough energy to break the bonds in question at all, which it usually does in the case in biological materials. BTW IR is the standard abbriviation for infrared, not for ionizing radiation, particularly in contexts where ultraviolet is abbriviated as "UV".
/ pdf/17.3_kauffman.pdf[a good review of the literature for and against radiation hormesis]
Ionizing radiation only causes cancer above a threshold dose which can be raised by prior exposure - previous low doses can immunize against the effects of later high doses. The repeatedly demonstrated dose curves show a "J" shape - the risks of cancer go down with increasing radiation until they reach a minimum well below the mortality rate for low-background radiation subjects. After that the mortality graph goes upward until the risk matches that of the low-background subjects, and keeps going up at even higher doses. For radon the optimum dose to prevent lung cancer is at about 3.5 times the total background radiation from other sources (background is 5-10K nuclear disintegrations per second, mostly from the potassium-40 in the body). For other radioactivity where the emitters are not ingested the optimum dose is around 10 REM per year - 50 times the background level. The residents of some villages in Iran get 70 REM/yr. yet suffer no increase in mortality.
"I can quote 10^2 papers that do link IR [sic]with cancer." Sure - at higher dosages.
"Also, we have actually seen DNA damage in human cells after IR [sic] exposure." Yes, and we have actually seen muscle fiber damage after exercise. The body's repair systems then make the muscle stronger than it was in the first place. An analogous process happens with cellular radiation damage.
"Irradiated cells initiate protective responses within a few hours, including radical detoxification, DNA repair, cell removal by stimulated immune response, and apoptosis. These responses are also used to repair endogenous DNA and other metabolic damage as well (Feinendegen & Pollycove, 2001; Luckey, 1991, p. 5). Radiation damage caused by a low initial dose induces a DNA repair mechanism that allows efficient repair of a large number of breaks from a high later dose. This has been investigated by biochemical experimenters in great detail (Wolff, 1992). Radiation hormesis, therefore, is a moderate overcompensation to a disruption in homeostasis caused by the radiation; it is a stimulus to the repair mechanisms that cope with nonradiation damage as well, so that the overall effect is a health benefit (Cuttler,2002)."
http://www.scientificexploration.org/jse/articles
Some ionizing radiation is not bad for you in small amounts - it is actually beneficial. The idea that the damage is cumulative and has a zero threshold is an assumption that has been disproven. See http://cnts.wpi.edu/RSH/Docs/index_science.html for links to the scientific studies done on radiation hormesis.
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Here's a brief overview of some studies listed in http://www.angelfire.com/mo/radioadaptive/inthorm
"1-According to UNSCEAR report (1994), among A-bomb survivors from Hiroshimaand Nagazaki who received doses lower than 200 mSv, there was no increase in the number of total cancer death. Mortality caused by leukemia was evenlower in this population at doses below 100 mSv than age-matched controlcohorts.
2-Mifune (1992) (Mifune et al. 1992) and his co-workers indicated that in a spa area (Misasa), with an average indoor radon level of 35 Bq/m3, the lung cancer incidence was about 50% of that in a low-level radon region. Their results also showed that in the above mentioned high background radiation area, the mortality rate caused by all types of cancer was 37% lower.
3-According to Mine et al. (1981), among A-bomb survivors from Nagasaki, in some age categories, the observed annual rate of death is less than what is statistically expected.
4-Kumatori and his colleagues (Kumatori et al. 1980) reported that according to their 25 year follow up study of Japanese fishermen who were heavily contaminated by plutunium (hydrogen bomb test at Bikini), no one died from cancer. "
"1-In an Indian study, it was observed that in areas with a high-background radiation level, the incidence of cancer and also the mortality rate due to cancer was significantly less than similar areas with a low backgroundradiation level (Nambi and Soman 1987).
2-In a very large scale study in U.S.A, it was found that the mortality rate due to all malignancies was lower in states with higher annual radiation dose (Frigerio 1976).
3- In a large scale Chinese study, it was showed that the mortality rate due to cancer was lower in an area with a relatively high background radiation (74,000 people), while the control group (78,000 people) who lived in anarea with low background radiation had a higher rate of mortality (Wei L 1990).
4-In the U.S.A., it was indicated that significantly, the total cancer mortalityis inversely correlated with background radiation dose (Cohen BL. 1993). "
I know I'll get modded down, but the mod squad should give the nod and mod up the mod up request above.
Will YOU ultimately halt and die, or exhaust your state space and start repeating yourself, or go on forever as some immortal soul or computaion or whatnot? Are you or any of us really not subject to the halting problem?
"the closer to analog the system's encoding is the more susceptible it is to noise."
But for any given level of noise there is an optimum coding which is a subset of analog which in general is a richer subset of analog than digital is. Optimum != digital.
And in fact you can do error-correction in analog - that's what op-amp designers do to transistors and op-amp users take advantage of when putting components in the feedback loop, thus linearizing whatever component is used. Error correction is also the essence of differential signaling and the right-leg driver in EEG, among many other circuits. As with digital error correction, there are limits, and you can't optimize everything at once. I see no reason why one can't do error corrections with any kind of signal regardless of its physical encoding.
Despite your ignorance of the fact, analog computing is alive and well in frequency-domain applications, in classical cybernetic feedback mechanisms, in control theory using simulated analog systems, in phase-locked loops, analog programmable system on chip and array products, in essentially every piece of test equipment ever and most consumer products, too. A purpose-built analog computer that scales and offsets a signal, demodulates and band-limits it performs the equivalent of hundreds of MIPS of processing on a high-quality video signal, and you've got one that does all that and more in every TV.
Yes - simulate. The interesting question is not: "can a digital computer simulate anything", but rather: "what is the most efficient way to simulate things".
For a given amount of matter and energy, the greater the number of states that the constituents can assume and the finer the time resolution of their evolutions, then the greater their complexity and thus the greater potential processing power for a system. In other words the closer to analog the system's encoding is, the greater its processing power and the greater its difficulty in being simulated by a coarser level of representation such as digital.
Neurons are not digital. To be digital you must not only have quantitized levels but also clocking. (Asynchronous digital is a misnomer - it does not work digitally in reentrant networks unless there is an equivalent to clocking built-in.) Neurons operate similarly to a type of analog electronics known as "pulse-width modulation". Neural information is mostly coded in the relative phases of inputs to a neuron, which vary with the relative frequencies of the inputs. The weightings of the inputs are also analog and vary in an analog way over time. The time-dependent summation functions of neurons are also analog. There are even some neurons with continuously variable voltage outputs. Neurons are completely analog, and the relative consistency of output pulse shapes in most neurons has nothing to do with digital logic or digital math. The noise-resistance in both frequency-domain PWM and in digital methods comes from voltage quantitization but that is the only similarity.