I think it's more along the lines of "technology is very powerful and often allows us to carry out our wildest dreams -- no matter how bad or good they are." I don't think he's pushing for outlawing it altogether but just regulating it. Examples I can think of include when we know a corporation is using it to, say, profile customers who visit public stores and shop in certain sections (without explicit consent) or say that the Church of Scientology decides to use it at protests. Is it wrong to regulate that kind of usage of it? Actually can you please explain where Franken said we need to "outlaw it"? Because you seem to be pushing this to an extreme to invalidate his point.
This is another case if outlawing technology. Someone can look at a person, compare them to a lineup of photos, and then look them up in a phonebook and call them. But because a computer can do it so much better and so much quicker, we are scared and feel the need to censor progress. What about the freedom to take photos? The freedom to process photos?
I can only imagine that when someone invents teleportation, it will be outlawed and the designs burned and the inventor executed, because of the fear that 75% of the population will lose their jobs.
Technology is powerful, there's no way to argue with that. Look at the evolution of guns. Look at the advent of the Maxim gun. Do you think that the laws at the time covered cases where people start stockpiling automatic weapons? Technology has the power to enable to the user past their original abilities and as such, yes, we do find ourselves forced to regulate certain extremes. You can only imagine that the designs would be burned and inventor executed because that's what Al Franken is proposing we do to facial recognition? Try not to hyperbole on your way to the parking lot. We wouldn't outlaw teleportation used for transportation of goods and services, hell, why do you think we built the interstate highway system!? We would outlaw the use of teleporation to rob your neighbor's home or banks!
When are we going to accept change and take steps to live within that world? If you are so afraid of it, then stop putting your photo online? If you are a celebrity, then too bad.
I do agree that the government shouldn't be monitoring without a warrant though. Just like they aren't supposed to before technology.
Yep, it's okay that this hurts everyone else right up until Big Brother and Evil Corp are using it to track/profile/target you and your family. Then I'll bet you'll come around to Al Franken's regulation of this technology in both private corporation and government sectors.
Kang: SQL for all. *crowd boos* Kang: Very well, NoSQL for anyone. *crowd boos* Kang: Hmm... SQL for some projects, miniature NoSQL implementations for others. *crowd cheers*
For some reason there was no link to the original source that kinda got the scoop. So here's the link to 'Switcheroo' which is This American Life's episode that covered this. It's free to stream, you can click the third link to Act II just to hear the coverage of this thing. I listened to it on the radio when it aired and sent it around as I found it really interesting (also a follow up here). There's a funny part where Ryan Smith is revealing everything about Journatic and he makes a comment about how it's not what journalism is supposed to be and Sarah Koenig says, "You are so fired. You realize that, right?" And then there's this odd pause and he says "Yeah, I am I guess. I'm okay with that." Another great part of that clip is when the owner of Journatic (CEO Brian Timpone) comes on and openly talks about it and defends his company (quite unsuccessfully, in my opinion). But hats off to him, he is a huge fan of TAL and so instead of giving one of those canned "could not be reached for comment" they got a real person arguing for his business venture. He actually argues that this saves newspapers money and therefore allows them report on the important stuff while outsourcing the inane stuff to Filipino freelancers who get absolutely no credit (and ridiculously low wages) for their (often correspondingly subpar) work.
I now have five of these in my possession with one lent to a friend whose wife keeps him on a very short leash financially. And I had one arduino that was fun to tinker with but I'm more excited about these just because of the prospect of the numbers. Even if I never write one line of code that utilizes this board specifically, there are going to be hundreds of projects developed by hobbyists, teachers, students, etc that are going to target this particular chipset more than any other just based purely on the numbers game. And, I must admit jealously as an American, many UK students that take CS courses are going to come out of high school fully versed in this particular chipset with free time and college and on their hands to make exciting or entertaining projects with it. And the $25/$35 price point really enables that. I'm much more daring with these boards because I have five of them (if I burned out my arduino mega that'd be a painful learning experience). And since I have five, one is hooked up to a USB drive with all my movies and music to my TV. Another is permanently attached to a monitor with a wireless keyboard and mouse. Another is simply on the network and I can SSH into it and run code on it.
Lastly I'd add that they are simple. Buy a $300 machine from Dell and watch something go bad on it at some point in time. There's not a lot to go bad on these devices but they haven't been around long enough to test their reliability of MTTF in the wild. So I could eat my words on that point but so far they run like a champ for me with no defects.
Frankly put, the pervasive nature of this product is going to make any code you write for it consumable by many people -- the demand is so high one can only speculate on how high that number will become. I'm definitely sending some of these to my younger cousins that have shown an interest in computer science and I hope the schools in the US make an effort to leverage these devices.
I'm not a lawyer but from this part of the transcript on pastebin:
Bob Wiechering: Mr. House, I notice you are taking notes. Attempting to create your own transcript is a violation of rule 6(e) of this grand jury. We have brought this to the attention of your counsel, and although he feels differently on the matter, we assert that you must stop taking notes at this time.
David House: Let me consult with my attorney.
[House leaves the grand jury room and returns one minute later]
David House: My lawyer asks that you refer all questions about notes to him.
It would seem that the rule in question now puts him in contempt of court? It appears to explicitly mention what is happening here. I wonder what his lawyer told him about taking these notes and then releasing them.
Well, I'm not going to judge before all the facts are in but after doing a bit of digging we can see from one of the researcher's CVs:
Arslan BK and Gaucher EA Replaying the Tape of Life Through Experimental Evolution of Ancient EF-Tu proteins Astrobiology Science Conference 2010: Evolution and Life: Surviving Catastrophes and Extremes on Earth and Beyond, held April 26-20, 2010 in League City, Texas. LPI Contribution No. 1538
Which I think was just a presentation that provides very little information given all I can find is this PDF:
Whether evolution would ‘replay the
tape of life’ if given the opportunity has long fascinated
biologists. Paleogenetics via laboratory resurrected
ancient genes not only reveals information regarding
ancestral phenotypes and environments but
also provides an opportunity to ‘replay’ the molecular
tape of life. Recent work has demonstrated that ancestral
sequences can be computationally determined and
experimentally resurrected. The ideal paleoexperimental
evolution system requires an organism
with a short generation time and a protein whose ancestral
genotype and phenotype used to replace the
modern gene and causes the modern host to be less fit.
The research described here focuses on Elongation
Factor Tu (EF-Tu) involved in the protein synthesis
machinery of both eukaryotic and prokaryotic organisms.
The optimal thermostability of EF-Tus correlates
with the optimal thermostability of their host organisms
and are ideal for these types of experiments. Previously
we have resurrected ancient EF-Tus and
showed that these ancient proteins display a range of
thermostability profiles. We will replace the modern
EF-Tu sequences with ancient EF-Tus and observe
their adaptation through experimental evolution. Results
from this work will help us identify whether evolution
is repetitive for this experimental system.
I don't think that really answers your question and I think this research has only been presented at conferences, published in conference proceedings and not yet peer reviewed in a journal (if it has there is no mention of it on Kacar's CV). I also find it odd that on her site she's using the phrase "tree of life" and not "web of life" which I thought was a more modern way of looking at evolution -- especially in prokaryotes.
I will say that it is probably within line to chide the researcher for putting this little blurb on her research page:
Experimental Evolution of Ancient Proteins
To assess the role of contingency in evolution, I construct an experimental time machine in the lab by inserting previously resurrected genes into a modern bacterial genomes, then subjecting them to experimental evolution. Observing the real-time evolution of ancient genes as they adapt to the conditions of modern bacteria allows us to analyze evolution in action.
"Experimental time machine?" Please, leave the hype and sensationalism to the "science" reporters.
“we want to know if an organism’s history limits its future and if evolution always leads to a single, defined point or whether evolution has multiple solutions to a given problem.”
I would wager it would almost have to be the latter. For example, I found it odd that the article made no mention of horizontal gene transfer and how, over 500 million years, the chance of that bacteria participating in HGT with a distantly related bacteria could have given it, say, a faster growth mechanism -- just like bacterial resistance to drugs is theorized to be a result of HGT. This is probably a useful experiment to look at one of the many mechanisms of evolution but not the entire picture of evolution nor could it effectively draw a final conclusion that "evolution always leads to a single, defined point."
With every passing news item about particle physics, it seems everyone's pet theory mutates or breaks off into different sects. I read some Brian Greene in high school and have since become a little flustered with string theory... or rather the many variations. The cynic in me fears that any new information on the Higgs Boson (or lack thereof) will result in more not less theories that should unify the four fundamental forces. Could you explain how information on the Higgs (one way or the other) would rule out certain symmetries or models that many people have been theorizing? Can I expect this to at least reduce our set of possible theories and not just provide N more mutations for each existing theory that strives to account for what we just found? Or should I just buckle up for everyone pushing their version through these results no matter what they show?
So say hypothetically that with this discovery we quickly unify the four fundamental forces of our universe. Does the 'particle hunt' end there? Is there any reason there aren't more fundamental particles -- even ones that might not be predicted by the Standard Model but do exist? If your answer is "no one knows," what is your gut feeling and why?
Since you're a fan of free software, why don't we see more open data efforts in particle physics? I see headlines like this and they're kind of a turnoff. Aside from this super confusing applet I haven't been able to find torrents of the data available on these tests. Why is that? I mean, as a software developer there is a legitimate effort of folks writing open source software and then there's a legitimate effort of people using that software to accomplish many things and everyone deserves credit. So why are particle physicists so keen on being the collectors and (at least initially) the sole keepers of their data? It would seem to make sense to me that people should be rewarded based on their collection of data and how meticulous and well they do that while any group can consume and derive results from said data. I understand the process has gotten more open but why so slowly? Why not torrent your data to whoever wants it immediately after you get it?
In regards to the Higgs Boson, what's the stupidest thing you've seen in the press? Has anything in particular made you really laugh or groan? Has the reporting been overly irresponsible for this discovery process or just the same old press that you're used to?
I read about a 'kickstarter' for academic research the other day but oddly enough the one I wanted to put money into was closed already with 1% funding. After thinking about it, I don't understand what it is about these spinoffs that cannot be satisfied by the existing kickstarter? I mean you can kickstart anything right? So what's to stop MedStartr and IAMScientist projects from achieving success on kickstarter? What does a site dedicated to a subdomain offer over kickstarter?
The forcing is substantial over the past 2,000 years, up to four times as large as the 1.6Wm2 net anthropogenic forcing since 1750 (ref. 4), but the trend varies considerably over time, space and with season5. Using numerous high-latitude proxy records, slow orbital changes have recently been shown6 to gradually force boreal summer temperature cooling over the common era.
That's the second sentence of the summary. How can it not be about AGW when it talks about this having an effect opposite of "net anthropogenic forcing since 1750"? Did you even read the paper?
Or are you saying AGW is nothing but goalseeking, and any data point that lessons the potential impact, or lessens the fear of a global apocalypse is thus unwelcome?
No, I did not say that. This paper looks legitimate and should be published and was published. It is interesting. My problem was that they seemed to have cherry picked a date range and then The Guardian took that and ran with it. In my opinion they flat out misinterpreted what the paper was saying. And here is the biggest problem I have with the article, the fact that they say "the last 2,000 years" when they really mean the period between 138 BC–AD 1900. I am attacking factual inaccuracies and bad reporting. Oh and you think I brought up AGW? How about this from the article:
Needless to say, prominent alarmist scientists and the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have not taken this view...
And you're attacking me for bringing AGW into this? AGW isn't about goalseeking, it's about getting an accurate estimate on how much effect we are having on our environment. It isn't unwelcome if it's true and this paper is true. Whether this is pro or anti AGW doesn't make factual inaccuracies any less problematic in science reporting!
A team lead by dr Esper of the University of Mainz has researched tree rings and concluded that over the past 2,000 years
That's odd, according to the image from the paper the trend in question is from 138 BC–AD 1900. Of course, after reading the Guardian article, it's clear that the only papers in Nature worth this "reporter's" time are those that confirm his professional opinion on the state of global temperatures. Tell me, why exactly didn't they construct a trend from 138 BC–AD 2012? Was that 1900-2012 range more difficult to acquire for some hilarious reason? I mean, the data is in the graph right there.
You can select special time ranges, you can select windows and you can look at millions of years of data and say that temperatures right now are no big deal. But when you start to look at the rate of change (even in the paper's graph linked above) and you notice recently we're starting to approach rates that are increasingly less frequent in the historical record, I think it's okay to start to talk about what could be causing it. I mean now we're talking about the last two thousand years and yeah, that's an acceptable window but if we never swing back down below to average it out, at what point are you going to admit that the theory of C02 affecting global average temperatures has some weight to it? Trust me, if we increase by 2 degrees Celsius, you can increase this window back five millennium and say "Hey, they used to have temperatures warmer than we do now." It's entirely possible to endlessly play this game by moving the goal posts. But I don't think the Earth is going to be able to adapt as well as humans do to rapid change. I guess the only thing that can convince people is time and repercussions that actually inconvenience humans.
After seeing how Slashdot reacted to Ron Paul realigning his priorities, I think it's worth noting that "internet freedom" means taking the bad with the good. On the one hand, everyone noticed that SOPA would be an impossibility with the Pauls' new proposition. On the other hand, fines like these or even investigations to what Google or Safari or users are doing on the internet would be completely outside of the government's jurisdiction and as such would requires users to punish Google for these Safari abuses. And it is my opinion that the free market would not only care little about such an issue but be powerless to stop the largest online search provider.
So remember when you get excited about things like:
The manifesto, obtained yesterday by BuzzFeed, is titled "The Technology Revolution" and lays out an argument — in doomsday tones —for keeping the government entirely out of regulating anything online, and for leaving the private sector to shape the new online space.
You need to consider this story and how the private sector will abuse privacy left and right if it drives up revenues. With not even a public slap on the wrist from the government, you are faced with individuals playing a PR campaign against massive corporations. That rarely ends well for the individuals and the users.
So why not focus on faster browsing rather than debugging ?!?
As a web developing, most browsers (yes, even IE) have gotten to the sub millisecond rendering ranges. I mean, we're getting to the point where the browser is negligible compared to your network. Yes, you have broadband and it should be lightning fast but there are even little unavoidable delays for each GET or POST. So the next best thing is to empower developers who write the JavaScript code to be able to find out where their delays are. As debugging improves, we can even breakdown the experience and display that to the developer in the browser for each resource (images, CSS, JS, etc) on a page and then the developer can think about turning all those images into a spritesheet or improving some code. I mean, this is actually making the browsing experience faster for everybody by putting the right tools in the developer's hands. You can spend forever optimizing the backend but it doesn't mean jack squat when you're querying for 99 separate little images when the user first hits the page.
(ever try loading Slashdot with firebug accidentally enabled?)
Yeah, it takes forever. But what is much faster is using the built in Web Console in the tools menu in newer versions of Firefox. I forget what version it was that started natively supporting debugging but it got a lot better (4 I think?). I'm very excited to see these improvements but my JavaScript has to support versions of Firefox all the way back to 3.6 so I'm still using Firebug and I'm still super grateful that Firebug came around. It literally revolutionized debugging web applications for me. There could have been tools before it but, man, that was the final nail on IE's coffin for support from us. Hell, even Chrome's built in debugging is way better than anything I can find on IE. I know the latest IE versions have gotten better but it's my strong opinion that every single person who uses the internet should be thankful for Chrome, Mozilla, Venkman and these debugging tools. They made the web experience a hell of a lot better and open by empowering developers.
I found this quote in the article from Han really entertaining:
“By joining Microsoft, we will be able to take advantage of the tremendous momentum of the Microsoft Office Division, tightly interoperate with its products, and deliver this technology to a very broad set of customers.”
Right, because what I wanted for an input device for my word processing and spreadsheet applications is an 80" display that has no keyboard or mouse and relies on multitouch. Oh and if I was going to buy a Perceptive Pixel product, I'd really like it to be tightly integrated and optimized with a particular operating system instead of deciding on my own what is best for my needs. I think by "broad set of customers" he meant "now just Windows users or whatever Microsoft wants me to say as I laugh all the way to the bank." I mean Perceptive Pixel currently supports "C, C++, C#, Java, Windows XP, 7, Linux in both 32- and 64-bit architectures." How long before that's just MS Visual Studio and Windows?
Theatrhythm is impressive, enjoyable, and one of the best examples of why it's worth owning a 3DS and that wacky stylus.
And then you say:
The device's 3D perspective doesn't add much to this game, but the system's upgraded graphic capabilities are put to great use, and the sound is excellent. The Final Fantasy characters are all recognizable, but cuter and more cartoonish than in their original incarnations.
So a long time ago I bought a DS Lite and then the DSi XL came out and I was told that I just had to have it. So I bought it and was not too impressed. Bigger screen, now I can buy from an online store, use an SD card, etc. Now I need to have a 3DS so I can play games that don't take advantage of the 3D perspective?
Why add 3D perspective and a "whacky stylus" to a game that does not need it? You can still play regular DS games on a 3DS right? So why are game publishers going 3DS for the sake of 3D? That just feels so gimmicky to me. Especially when they can access other systems (like all of them) that do not use 3D technology if they make a non-3D version of the same game or just go non-3D natively. I really do not understand.
This game looks really fun and it looks like it'd be right in my wheelhouse. I just can't justify buying a third Nintendo DS. Furthermore, I feel like this is by Nintendo's design as a way to get people like me who drag their feet to ante up. It's a risky venture and I'm not surprised to see the price anarchy ensue for them to move consoles. If my own personal experience is any indication, I don't think their 3DS XL is going to sell well. Guess I'll add it to my long list of games that I'll hopefully someday play.
"You shouldn't have disgraced yourself by stooping to trolling your readers with an article about what essentially amounts to using a full blown word processor for a tweet. Albeit an rather long example of one," countered another.
Yeah he is being right about criticizing the example being an too long one. Why Jack Kerouac's On-the-Road is stream of conscious flowing but my posts, the ones that have the similar validity of writing or of grammar, are the same quality for some reason make you mad while his wins awards? Society has the double standards if we're going to talk about any of.
First concern is that a comparison of 938 comments at The Wall Street Journal versus 7000 comments at The Huffington Post means nothing to me. Some sites attract more vocal readers and when you cater to one side or the other you're going to get a lot of stupid comments reiterating the same thing. I'd also wager that The Wall Street Journal is trying to target the online demographic of their paper readership that are used to reading the paper the old fashion way: if you wanted to comment, you wrote the paper. Just because internet citizens don't have the patience to read 1,000 words so they don't comment doesn't mean you experienced less traffic. You could just as well argue that the sites had the same exact readership but 7x the amount of "readers" got through the article with enough stamina left to comment at The Huffington Post.
I agree that The Huffington Post is doing much better search engine optimization. That part is true because when I google for a news item they somehow will beat out even the AFP in my search results. And I do think that gets them more traffic. But I don't think counting the number of comments means anything at all. Even as a liberal, some of their titles disgust me so there's no question they are poking and prodding readers into commenting more.
Lastly, ever since The Wall Street Journal put up that arcane paywall, I don't think I can even read the comments let alone click a link to go there and see anything. Even if it's an Op-Ed they are practically gutting themselves while aggregators feed off their remains.
using high yield words such as 'Squandering' and 'Snafu,'
How exactly are those "high yield words"? They just seem more memorable and inflammatory to me which (surprise surprise) nets them 7 kilocomments.
How much of this can be done automatically and how much of this must be hand guided? For example you talked about fingerprints changing over time and being used only as a guide. Is there a measurement or confidence variable that you can employ to automate when the fingerprint is still valid or has morphed too much? Or is that something that a human overlord must monitor and do research to notice that a new apartment building has just been opened and there are now hundreds of new signals? It feels like you are using an open domain that could have outliers and irregularities that require a human to clean the data before it can be trusted to give you low false positives and true negatives. What statistical methods do you use to overcome these sort of real world problems so that your system can be put anywhere and work?
Something that surprises me is that we're so obsessed with the exact positioning of things on Earth but at great exo-solar distances, we seem to be okay with measurements to the nearest million light years. A couple days ago I read about a new method devised to measure location to within a few hundred meters of something 200 million kilometers away from Earth and it struck me as odd that more effort isn't put into this. While the practicality of Earthbound work is far greater, the implications for physics and verifying theories seems to be an obvious benefit for better positional measurements in space. I know satellites and objects near Earth are heavily measured but why isn't there more attention paid to precision of deep space objects? What problems prevent sensor fusion from being applied to space? Too much noise? No way to actually verify your results?
I'd imagine a lot of positioning calculations involve accounting for or adjusting for known effects or noise. For example, accounting for general relativity in GPS. What is the most surprising correction you've ever come across (even on an exam or done in theory)? Have you ever found yourself saying "I didn't think that could affect the calculations so much."
Slashdot Mirror
Technology is too good! We need to outlaw it!
I think it's more along the lines of "technology is very powerful and often allows us to carry out our wildest dreams -- no matter how bad or good they are." I don't think he's pushing for outlawing it altogether but just regulating it. Examples I can think of include when we know a corporation is using it to, say, profile customers who visit public stores and shop in certain sections (without explicit consent) or say that the Church of Scientology decides to use it at protests. Is it wrong to regulate that kind of usage of it? Actually can you please explain where Franken said we need to "outlaw it"? Because you seem to be pushing this to an extreme to invalidate his point.
This is another case if outlawing technology. Someone can look at a person, compare them to a lineup of photos, and then look them up in a phonebook and call them. But because a computer can do it so much better and so much quicker, we are scared and feel the need to censor progress. What about the freedom to take photos? The freedom to process photos?
I can only imagine that when someone invents teleportation, it will be outlawed and the designs burned and the inventor executed, because of the fear that 75% of the population will lose their jobs.
Technology is powerful, there's no way to argue with that. Look at the evolution of guns. Look at the advent of the Maxim gun. Do you think that the laws at the time covered cases where people start stockpiling automatic weapons? Technology has the power to enable to the user past their original abilities and as such, yes, we do find ourselves forced to regulate certain extremes. You can only imagine that the designs would be burned and inventor executed because that's what Al Franken is proposing we do to facial recognition? Try not to hyperbole on your way to the parking lot. We wouldn't outlaw teleportation used for transportation of goods and services, hell, why do you think we built the interstate highway system!? We would outlaw the use of teleporation to rob your neighbor's home or banks!
When are we going to accept change and take steps to live within that world? If you are so afraid of it, then stop putting your photo online? If you are a celebrity, then too bad.
I do agree that the government shouldn't be monitoring without a warrant though. Just like they aren't supposed to before technology.
Yep, it's okay that this hurts everyone else right up until Big Brother and Evil Corp are using it to track/profile/target you and your family. Then I'll bet you'll come around to Al Franken's regulation of this technology in both private corporation and government sectors.
If someone is bothering you, you take their life away from them.
If someone who has no life is bothering you, you give them one so they have no time to bother you.
Kang: SQL for all.
*crowd boos*
Kang: Very well, NoSQL for anyone.
*crowd boos*
Kang: Hmm... SQL for some projects, miniature NoSQL implementations for others.
*crowd cheers*
For some reason there was no link to the original source that kinda got the scoop. So here's the link to 'Switcheroo' which is This American Life's episode that covered this. It's free to stream, you can click the third link to Act II just to hear the coverage of this thing. I listened to it on the radio when it aired and sent it around as I found it really interesting (also a follow up here). There's a funny part where Ryan Smith is revealing everything about Journatic and he makes a comment about how it's not what journalism is supposed to be and Sarah Koenig says, "You are so fired. You realize that, right?" And then there's this odd pause and he says "Yeah, I am I guess. I'm okay with that." Another great part of that clip is when the owner of Journatic (CEO Brian Timpone) comes on and openly talks about it and defends his company (quite unsuccessfully, in my opinion). But hats off to him, he is a huge fan of TAL and so instead of giving one of those canned "could not be reached for comment" they got a real person arguing for his business venture. He actually argues that this saves newspapers money and therefore allows them report on the important stuff while outsourcing the inane stuff to Filipino freelancers who get absolutely no credit (and ridiculously low wages) for their (often correspondingly subpar) work.
Consider the issue explained
To go a little further, I'd like to remind everyone that it was developed and pitched as an educational tool in the UK with some big backers.
I now have five of these in my possession with one lent to a friend whose wife keeps him on a very short leash financially. And I had one arduino that was fun to tinker with but I'm more excited about these just because of the prospect of the numbers. Even if I never write one line of code that utilizes this board specifically, there are going to be hundreds of projects developed by hobbyists, teachers, students, etc that are going to target this particular chipset more than any other just based purely on the numbers game. And, I must admit jealously as an American, many UK students that take CS courses are going to come out of high school fully versed in this particular chipset with free time and college and on their hands to make exciting or entertaining projects with it. And the $25/$35 price point really enables that. I'm much more daring with these boards because I have five of them (if I burned out my arduino mega that'd be a painful learning experience). And since I have five, one is hooked up to a USB drive with all my movies and music to my TV. Another is permanently attached to a monitor with a wireless keyboard and mouse. Another is simply on the network and I can SSH into it and run code on it.
Lastly I'd add that they are simple. Buy a $300 machine from Dell and watch something go bad on it at some point in time. There's not a lot to go bad on these devices but they haven't been around long enough to test their reliability of MTTF in the wild. So I could eat my words on that point but so far they run like a champ for me with no defects.
Frankly put, the pervasive nature of this product is going to make any code you write for it consumable by many people -- the demand is so high one can only speculate on how high that number will become. I'm definitely sending some of these to my younger cousins that have shown an interest in computer science and I hope the schools in the US make an effort to leverage these devices.
Bob Wiechering: Mr. House, I notice you are taking notes. Attempting to create your own transcript is a violation of rule 6(e) of this grand jury. We have brought this to the attention of your counsel, and although he feels differently on the matter, we assert that you must stop taking notes at this time.
David House: Let me consult with my attorney.
[House leaves the grand jury room and returns one minute later]
David House: My lawyer asks that you refer all questions about notes to him.
It would seem that the rule in question now puts him in contempt of court? It appears to explicitly mention what is happening here. I wonder what his lawyer told him about taking these notes and then releasing them.
Arslan BK and Gaucher EA Replaying the Tape of Life Through Experimental Evolution of Ancient EF-Tu proteins Astrobiology Science Conference 2010: Evolution and Life: Surviving Catastrophes and Extremes on Earth and Beyond, held April 26-20, 2010 in League City, Texas. LPI Contribution No. 1538
Which I think was just a presentation that provides very little information given all I can find is this PDF:
Whether evolution would ‘replay the tape of life’ if given the opportunity has long fascinated biologists. Paleogenetics via laboratory resurrected ancient genes not only reveals information regarding ancestral phenotypes and environments but also provides an opportunity to ‘replay’ the molecular tape of life. Recent work has demonstrated that ancestral sequences can be computationally determined and experimentally resurrected. The ideal paleoexperimental evolution system requires an organism with a short generation time and a protein whose ancestral genotype and phenotype used to replace the modern gene and causes the modern host to be less fit. The research described here focuses on Elongation Factor Tu (EF-Tu) involved in the protein synthesis machinery of both eukaryotic and prokaryotic organisms. The optimal thermostability of EF-Tus correlates with the optimal thermostability of their host organisms and are ideal for these types of experiments. Previously we have resurrected ancient EF-Tus and showed that these ancient proteins display a range of thermostability profiles. We will replace the modern EF-Tu sequences with ancient EF-Tus and observe their adaptation through experimental evolution. Results from this work will help us identify whether evolution is repetitive for this experimental system.
I don't think that really answers your question and I think this research has only been presented at conferences, published in conference proceedings and not yet peer reviewed in a journal (if it has there is no mention of it on Kacar's CV). I also find it odd that on her site she's using the phrase "tree of life" and not "web of life" which I thought was a more modern way of looking at evolution -- especially in prokaryotes.
I will say that it is probably within line to chide the researcher for putting this little blurb on her research page:
Experimental Evolution of Ancient Proteins
To assess the role of contingency in evolution, I construct an experimental time machine in the lab by inserting previously resurrected genes into a modern bacterial genomes, then subjecting them to experimental evolution. Observing the real-time evolution of ancient genes as they adapt to the conditions of modern bacteria allows us to analyze evolution in action.
"Experimental time machine?" Please, leave the hype and sensationalism to the "science" reporters.
“we want to know if an organism’s history limits its future and if evolution always leads to a single, defined point or whether evolution has multiple solutions to a given problem.”
I would wager it would almost have to be the latter. For example, I found it odd that the article made no mention of horizontal gene transfer and how, over 500 million years, the chance of that bacteria participating in HGT with a distantly related bacteria could have given it, say, a faster growth mechanism -- just like bacterial resistance to drugs is theorized to be a result of HGT. This is probably a useful experiment to look at one of the many mechanisms of evolution but not the entire picture of evolution nor could it effectively draw a final conclusion that "evolution always leads to a single, defined point."
With every passing news item about particle physics, it seems everyone's pet theory mutates or breaks off into different sects. I read some Brian Greene in high school and have since become a little flustered with string theory ... or rather the many variations. The cynic in me fears that any new information on the Higgs Boson (or lack thereof) will result in more not less theories that should unify the four fundamental forces. Could you explain how information on the Higgs (one way or the other) would rule out certain symmetries or models that many people have been theorizing? Can I expect this to at least reduce our set of possible theories and not just provide N more mutations for each existing theory that strives to account for what we just found? Or should I just buckle up for everyone pushing their version through these results no matter what they show?
So say hypothetically that with this discovery we quickly unify the four fundamental forces of our universe. Does the 'particle hunt' end there? Is there any reason there aren't more fundamental particles -- even ones that might not be predicted by the Standard Model but do exist? If your answer is "no one knows," what is your gut feeling and why?
Since you're a fan of free software, why don't we see more open data efforts in particle physics? I see headlines like this and they're kind of a turnoff. Aside from this super confusing applet I haven't been able to find torrents of the data available on these tests. Why is that? I mean, as a software developer there is a legitimate effort of folks writing open source software and then there's a legitimate effort of people using that software to accomplish many things and everyone deserves credit. So why are particle physicists so keen on being the collectors and (at least initially) the sole keepers of their data? It would seem to make sense to me that people should be rewarded based on their collection of data and how meticulous and well they do that while any group can consume and derive results from said data. I understand the process has gotten more open but why so slowly? Why not torrent your data to whoever wants it immediately after you get it?
In regards to the Higgs Boson, what's the stupidest thing you've seen in the press? Has anything in particular made you really laugh or groan? Has the reporting been overly irresponsible for this discovery process or just the same old press that you're used to?
I read about a 'kickstarter' for academic research the other day but oddly enough the one I wanted to put money into was closed already with 1% funding. After thinking about it, I don't understand what it is about these spinoffs that cannot be satisfied by the existing kickstarter? I mean you can kickstart anything right? So what's to stop MedStartr and IAMScientist projects from achieving success on kickstarter? What does a site dedicated to a subdomain offer over kickstarter?
Maybe this paper has nothing to do with AGW?
What are you talking about? From the paper itself:
The forcing is substantial over the past 2,000 years, up to four times as large as the 1.6Wm2 net anthropogenic forcing since 1750 (ref. 4), but the trend varies considerably over time, space and with season5. Using numerous high-latitude proxy records, slow orbital changes have recently been shown6 to gradually force boreal summer temperature cooling over the common era.
That's the second sentence of the summary. How can it not be about AGW when it talks about this having an effect opposite of "net anthropogenic forcing since 1750"? Did you even read the paper?
Or are you saying AGW is nothing but goalseeking, and any data point that lessons the potential impact, or lessens the fear of a global apocalypse is thus unwelcome?
No, I did not say that. This paper looks legitimate and should be published and was published. It is interesting. My problem was that they seemed to have cherry picked a date range and then The Guardian took that and ran with it. In my opinion they flat out misinterpreted what the paper was saying. And here is the biggest problem I have with the article, the fact that they say "the last 2,000 years" when they really mean the period between 138 BC–AD 1900. I am attacking factual inaccuracies and bad reporting. Oh and you think I brought up AGW? How about this from the article:
Needless to say, prominent alarmist scientists and the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have not taken this view ...
And you're attacking me for bringing AGW into this? AGW isn't about goalseeking, it's about getting an accurate estimate on how much effect we are having on our environment. It isn't unwelcome if it's true and this paper is true. Whether this is pro or anti AGW doesn't make factual inaccuracies any less problematic in science reporting!
A team lead by dr Esper of the University of Mainz has researched tree rings and concluded that over the past 2,000 years
That's odd, according to the image from the paper the trend in question is from 138 BC–AD 1900. Of course, after reading the Guardian article, it's clear that the only papers in Nature worth this "reporter's" time are those that confirm his professional opinion on the state of global temperatures. Tell me, why exactly didn't they construct a trend from 138 BC–AD 2012? Was that 1900-2012 range more difficult to acquire for some hilarious reason? I mean, the data is in the graph right there.
You can select special time ranges, you can select windows and you can look at millions of years of data and say that temperatures right now are no big deal. But when you start to look at the rate of change (even in the paper's graph linked above) and you notice recently we're starting to approach rates that are increasingly less frequent in the historical record, I think it's okay to start to talk about what could be causing it. I mean now we're talking about the last two thousand years and yeah, that's an acceptable window but if we never swing back down below to average it out, at what point are you going to admit that the theory of C02 affecting global average temperatures has some weight to it? Trust me, if we increase by 2 degrees Celsius, you can increase this window back five millennium and say "Hey, they used to have temperatures warmer than we do now." It's entirely possible to endlessly play this game by moving the goal posts. But I don't think the Earth is going to be able to adapt as well as humans do to rapid change. I guess the only thing that can convince people is time and repercussions that actually inconvenience humans.
So remember when you get excited about things like:
The manifesto, obtained yesterday by BuzzFeed, is titled "The Technology Revolution" and lays out an argument — in doomsday tones —for keeping the government entirely out of regulating anything online, and for leaving the private sector to shape the new online space.
You need to consider this story and how the private sector will abuse privacy left and right if it drives up revenues. With not even a public slap on the wrist from the government, you are faced with individuals playing a PR campaign against massive corporations. That rarely ends well for the individuals and the users.
So why not focus on faster browsing rather than debugging ?!?
As a web developing, most browsers (yes, even IE) have gotten to the sub millisecond rendering ranges. I mean, we're getting to the point where the browser is negligible compared to your network. Yes, you have broadband and it should be lightning fast but there are even little unavoidable delays for each GET or POST. So the next best thing is to empower developers who write the JavaScript code to be able to find out where their delays are. As debugging improves, we can even breakdown the experience and display that to the developer in the browser for each resource (images, CSS, JS, etc) on a page and then the developer can think about turning all those images into a spritesheet or improving some code. I mean, this is actually making the browsing experience faster for everybody by putting the right tools in the developer's hands. You can spend forever optimizing the backend but it doesn't mean jack squat when you're querying for 99 separate little images when the user first hits the page.
(ever try loading Slashdot with firebug accidentally enabled?)
Yeah, it takes forever. But what is much faster is using the built in Web Console in the tools menu in newer versions of Firefox. I forget what version it was that started natively supporting debugging but it got a lot better (4 I think?). I'm very excited to see these improvements but my JavaScript has to support versions of Firefox all the way back to 3.6 so I'm still using Firebug and I'm still super grateful that Firebug came around. It literally revolutionized debugging web applications for me. There could have been tools before it but, man, that was the final nail on IE's coffin for support from us. Hell, even Chrome's built in debugging is way better than anything I can find on IE. I know the latest IE versions have gotten better but it's my strong opinion that every single person who uses the internet should be thankful for Chrome, Mozilla, Venkman and these debugging tools. They made the web experience a hell of a lot better and open by empowering developers.
“By joining Microsoft, we will be able to take advantage of the tremendous momentum of the Microsoft Office Division, tightly interoperate with its products, and deliver this technology to a very broad set of customers.”
Right, because what I wanted for an input device for my word processing and spreadsheet applications is an 80" display that has no keyboard or mouse and relies on multitouch. Oh and if I was going to buy a Perceptive Pixel product, I'd really like it to be tightly integrated and optimized with a particular operating system instead of deciding on my own what is best for my needs. I think by "broad set of customers" he meant "now just Windows users or whatever Microsoft wants me to say as I laugh all the way to the bank." I mean Perceptive Pixel currently supports "C, C++, C#, Java, Windows XP, 7, Linux in both 32- and 64-bit architectures." How long before that's just MS Visual Studio and Windows?
Theatrhythm is impressive, enjoyable, and one of the best examples of why it's worth owning a 3DS and that wacky stylus.
And then you say:
The device's 3D perspective doesn't add much to this game, but the system's upgraded graphic capabilities are put to great use, and the sound is excellent. The Final Fantasy characters are all recognizable, but cuter and more cartoonish than in their original incarnations.
So a long time ago I bought a DS Lite and then the DSi XL came out and I was told that I just had to have it. So I bought it and was not too impressed. Bigger screen, now I can buy from an online store, use an SD card, etc. Now I need to have a 3DS so I can play games that don't take advantage of the 3D perspective?
Why add 3D perspective and a "whacky stylus" to a game that does not need it? You can still play regular DS games on a 3DS right? So why are game publishers going 3DS for the sake of 3D? That just feels so gimmicky to me. Especially when they can access other systems (like all of them) that do not use 3D technology if they make a non-3D version of the same game or just go non-3D natively. I really do not understand.
This game looks really fun and it looks like it'd be right in my wheelhouse. I just can't justify buying a third Nintendo DS. Furthermore, I feel like this is by Nintendo's design as a way to get people like me who drag their feet to ante up. It's a risky venture and I'm not surprised to see the price anarchy ensue for them to move consoles. If my own personal experience is any indication, I don't think their 3DS XL is going to sell well. Guess I'll add it to my long list of games that I'll hopefully someday play.
"You shouldn't have disgraced yourself by stooping to trolling your readers with an article about what essentially amounts to using a full blown word processor for a tweet. Albeit an rather long example of one," countered another.
Yeah he is being right about criticizing the example being an too long one. Why Jack Kerouac's On-the-Road is stream of conscious flowing but my posts, the ones that have the similar validity of writing or of grammar, are the same quality for some reason make you mad while his wins awards? Society has the double standards if we're going to talk about any of.
I agree that The Huffington Post is doing much better search engine optimization. That part is true because when I google for a news item they somehow will beat out even the AFP in my search results. And I do think that gets them more traffic. But I don't think counting the number of comments means anything at all. Even as a liberal, some of their titles disgust me so there's no question they are poking and prodding readers into commenting more.
Lastly, ever since The Wall Street Journal put up that arcane paywall, I don't think I can even read the comments let alone click a link to go there and see anything. Even if it's an Op-Ed they are practically gutting themselves while aggregators feed off their remains.
using high yield words such as 'Squandering' and 'Snafu,'
How exactly are those "high yield words"? They just seem more memorable and inflammatory to me which (surprise surprise) nets them 7 kilocomments.
How much of this can be done automatically and how much of this must be hand guided? For example you talked about fingerprints changing over time and being used only as a guide. Is there a measurement or confidence variable that you can employ to automate when the fingerprint is still valid or has morphed too much? Or is that something that a human overlord must monitor and do research to notice that a new apartment building has just been opened and there are now hundreds of new signals? It feels like you are using an open domain that could have outliers and irregularities that require a human to clean the data before it can be trusted to give you low false positives and true negatives. What statistical methods do you use to overcome these sort of real world problems so that your system can be put anywhere and work?
Something that surprises me is that we're so obsessed with the exact positioning of things on Earth but at great exo-solar distances, we seem to be okay with measurements to the nearest million light years. A couple days ago I read about a new method devised to measure location to within a few hundred meters of something 200 million kilometers away from Earth and it struck me as odd that more effort isn't put into this. While the practicality of Earthbound work is far greater, the implications for physics and verifying theories seems to be an obvious benefit for better positional measurements in space. I know satellites and objects near Earth are heavily measured but why isn't there more attention paid to precision of deep space objects? What problems prevent sensor fusion from being applied to space? Too much noise? No way to actually verify your results?
I'd imagine a lot of positioning calculations involve accounting for or adjusting for known effects or noise. For example, accounting for general relativity in GPS. What is the most surprising correction you've ever come across (even on an exam or done in theory)? Have you ever found yourself saying "I didn't think that could affect the calculations so much."