He says pain is accentuated because it is more important to survival than mild thirst.
"The sensation with the most immediate implications for survival is pushed to the forefront of attention," he said.
Dr Farrell says the findings suggest it could be wise for people who are about to go through a painful experience should drink more water beforehand.
He says evidence from different types of studies also support this relationship between drinking water and pain.
But could people deliberately use dehydration to maximise pain, say via torture?
"We suspect if they got dehydrated enough that the overwhelming sense of thirst would probably make pain less rather than more," he said.
Previous studies in rats have shown that mild thirst makes the animals feel more pain but severe dehydration actually dulls pain, he says.
He says this too makes sense from the point of view of survival.
"If you were very dehydrated it would pay to suppress pain because it might get in the way of your search for water," he said.
Wouldn't that imply that the more hydrated you are, the more salient the pain should be, because then thirst is particularly irrelevant to your current needs? They say that "mild thirst" is not as pressing a survival need as experienced pain--well then, wouldn't NO thirst be even less pressing than the pain? I don't get it. They predict the situation switches for severe dehydration which makes sense (the thirst is more salient than the pain) but they don't explain why the pain should be more salient for mild thirst as compared to slaked thirst.
I would guess the logic in the actual PNAS paper is better. Perhaps it's the reporting here that's got something screwy.
Could anyone post or point to a good methods for subverting embedded video so that they can be downloaded to the computer? Or how to mine them out of my cache? Sometimes looking at the source is enough to find a SRC tag to wget, but often that redirects, and more sophisticated methods (like these google videos) seem especially tricky to someone as "unleet" as me.
Like many of you, I don't want to distribute the thing, but I would like to watch it once in a while without having to stream the damn thing every time.
The biggest problem I tend to face is that people don't know where the hardware ends, and where the OS Begins and where the OS Ends and the Applications begins. When they are doing something over the network or locally.
Yup, it's a problem. But isn't this an illusion that software developers (OS and apps) are deliberately trying to foster? I believe they call it "tight integration." For most lay people, I think it's been a confusing success and a successful confusion.
If the only high speed option that people have is Bell South, and Bell South doesn't give them improved access to sites they want to go to, they'll cancel and either have nothing, or go back to dialup. Why pay Bell South for high speed access if, from the customer's perspective, the sites they want to go to aren't fast?
Because throttled 512kbps is still much, much faster than peak 56kbps. You're right, most people aren't geeks, they won't know what they're missing speedwise. Except to know that, even crippled, it's still far faster and far more convenient (no phone tie-up hassles) than dialup.
There is no last mile competition required, because there is *plenty* of competition at the other end
Um, right, which is why you'll also see "WELCOME BELLSOUTH USERS! Our site features BSOptimized(TM) access just for you!" Because, let's see: Number of last mile competitors at the broadband level: 2 (Bellsouth and local cable co--mainly Charter or Comcast in the south) Number of content providers: >>2
Some rich content providers WILL bite, and you'll have the ghettoization of content by ISP. Unlike your analysis, the truth is BS has a near monopolistic access to content consumers over a large swath of the country. At least for "serious" content like video, VOIP, etc. This is a prisoner's dillema. Do they cooperate with each other and say screw you BS, and, as collateral damage, alienate that user base? Or does an individaul content provider defect, pay its protection money to BS, set itself apart from its content competitors and, in partnership with BS, achieve near monolopy over that user base?
There's a lot less train tracks than trains stations here.
When you know how to spot it, it become blatantly obvious: product identifiers become non-words or just short strings of digits so the manufacturer's name will again become part of product mentions. Auto manufacturers have known this for decades. Remember when the "Legend" and "Vigor" brands disappeared in favor of the "Acura TL" and "Acura RL?" Acura learned form what BMW, Mercedes, and others knew for years. You don't drive a 323i or a C350, you drive a BMW 323i or a Mercedes C350. Only when in-context do the models become shortened to their simple model names or series/class name. Now Intel's following this path.
I think this is an empirical question. I'd like to see data that suggest having particularly unmemorable model names significantly improves association with the company. "It makes intuitive sense" doesn't fly. BMW and Mercedes have strong brand name cachet because of their legendary association with luxury and performance engineering. I'm not convinced their byzantine model naming system accentuates that association. Honda and Toyota have a powerful association with reliability and prudent engineering and they have "named" models. Does having an "Accord" or a "Camry" somehow make the carmakers themselves less memorable as brands? Maybe maybe not. Even if so, is it an effect that's significant? Does it REALLY matter?
Personally, I find random number/letter strings annoying and harder to keep straight. They impose a higher working memory load than the nicely "prechunked" proper names. This fact there is already a large, old psychological literature to support. The new "trend" seems to be to exploit this annoyance with meaningless model numbers to benefit the memorability of the maker. But does that transfer (if real) overcome the annoyance of dealing with the "psychologically crippled" model names?
I think that cryptic model names may have another cost--it makes the various models blend together in a way that makes it difficult to strongly stratify the product line. There is a big "psychological" difference between a Corolla and a Camry. How much difference is there (psychologically) between a 325 and a 525? There's a $15,000 difference in price tag, so you better make the 525 buyer really feel like there getting something special to move them up. But if a "BMW is a BMW" then why bother? How much more status does a 5 series buy you, except among the congnescenti?
"Celeron", "Pentium," "Xenon," "Itanium" all have strong, distinct associations in my mind. Celeron and Itanium, particularly negative. Even though, as many pointed out, Celerons (and Xeons) are often just small variants on the Pentium line. But they each have a very different mental niche. With an alphabet soup of processors, it will be hard (except for the nerds, natch) to keep them straight and opt for one over another.
But then again, maybe not. These are empirical, testable questions. Intuition shouldn't drive these kinds of mundane choices, data should.
Aw man. thecorporation.com is now some promo site for a documentary?! Does anyone else remember when thecorporation were the purveyors of Humor Product(TM) and hosted such bits a Kitty Lick III: The Shedding (a hilarious FPS spoof?), and the Stop Kitty Porn campaign? Or the RGB Ribbon Campaign to eradicate free speech on the web? Good times, good times. Those were the olden days of the web. Man I'm old.
While having actual guitar riffs sounds cool, but as cool as a blaring guitar might sound anything that's not melodic will soon begin to sound very annoying after a few hundred repetitions.
Please watch TFV. This is Fripp. These aren't rockin' "riffs." It's very ambient, very ethereal, very atmospheric.
But having listened to it, it's also very moody and melancholy. It doesn't make me feel like "Wow, it's big, bright digital world out there!" It's more like, "Blue screens make me sad."
I would hypothesize that individuals who are really good at finding happiness are not very good at passing on their genes. If you find something that makes you happier than reproduction, why would you reproduce?
Except that scads of social psychology research shows that happier people are far more attractive as mates than unhappy people. So, first, it's not very likely somebody will find something that makes them so happy they want to sacrifice sexual opportunities to pursue it (unless it's being monastic), and second, to the extent they do find something that makes them exceedingly happy, they will likely have many more sexual opportunities as a pleasant side effect.
The problem, according to Gilbert, is that we're really bad at knowing just HOW happy something will make us in the long run. Here's a conversation with Gilbert on the same site that hosted this poll.
Humans have not been around for millions of years.
Yeah, but we have been evolving for millions of years, haven't we? Anyway, my use of the word "evolve" is completely a red herring--I wasn't suggesting an evolutionary account for our current state of happiness. It was just a rhetorical device. In any case, we are now self-aware enough, sophisticated enough, and educated enough that we do not make choices based largely on "evolutionary" drives. We are deliberative creatures and we make our own choices in life, yet most of us feel that real "happiness" is elusive.
Gilbert has a very interesting set of explanations for why this is--mainly, we are very bad at predicting just how lastingly happy certain decisions or events will make our lives. The problem is we tend grossly overestimate the impact of things--both good and bad--on our actual happiness. Interestingly, the same website that has this poll also has an "interview" with Dan Gilbert that covers many of his ideas:
Dan Gilbert is a bit of a hero of mine. His research basically is about happiness--it's all any of us really, universally, want, so why, after millions of years of evolution, are we so bad at finding it? We should be experts! His stuff on affective forecasting and rationalization is amazing. I highly recommend his papers--and hearing him talk, if you ever have the opportunity, even more so! Anyway, he's a REAL character, and his response betrays that:
DANIEL GILBERT Psychologist, Harvard University
The idea that ideas can be dangerous
Dangerous does not mean exciting or bold. It means likely to cause great harm. The most dangerous idea is the only dangerous idea: The idea that ideas can be dangerous.
We live in a world in which people are beheaded, imprisoned, demoted, and censured simply because they have opened their mouths, flapped their lips, and vibrated some air. Yes, those vibrations can make us feel sad or stupid or alienated. Tough shit. That's the price of admission to the marketplace of ideas. Hateful, blasphemous, prejudiced, vulgar, rude, or ignorant remarks are the music of a free society, and the relentless patter of idiots is how we know we're in one. When all the words in our public conversation are fair, good, and true, it's time to make a run for the fence.
Well, Dan, have you read Slashdot lately? I think we're still all right. For now.
Government control of internet access? the terrible possibilities resound in my head: censorship, digital rights, privacy, and reprisal.
Uhmmm...you do realize that until 1991 internet access WAS exclusively governmentally controlled and limited? It was called NSFNET at the time, and a lot of people actually think it was a lot freer place back then (and in the few years of web emergence that followed).
It all depends on which government body is controlling the internet, and, more importantly, who's controlling the government at the time.
The genetic basis for lying around and shoveling potato chips in your mouth all day has been know for some time. It's mainly due to overproduction of fritoceptors which heighten sensitivity to snaxamine-2.
Sword of the Phoenix closed?! That actually made me mist up. I haven't been permanently in Atlanta for 10 years now, and I haven't played AD&D in maybe 15, but boy, did I spend a lot of time and money at the Sword in my day. My first dice. Books. Modules. Miniatures. Everything. Back at the old Park Place location at Perimeter. And the Plaza at Lenox. (They had two stores, long before the Brookhaven spot...)
Man. That's like a little bit of my nerd history gone. That's sad. That's really sad.
Give some logical, scientific explanation as to why a theory is taught as fact, and it is rare that any opposing theory is taught in parallel.
Yeah, and how about we start teaching these heretical theories with their proper opposition too!
That crazy special relativity vs. cosmic aether Clumsy Mendeleevian theory of the elements vs. the neat and tidy Aristotlean four (earth,air,fire, water) Shaky oxygen theory of combustion vs. phlogiston Bogus neural basis of behavior theory vs Descartes' hydraulic theory Dubious Pasteurian germ theory of disease vs. demonic posession Blashemous Copernican heliocentric theory vs. blessed geocentricism.
All of those on the left have mountains and mountains of data supporting them, wheras those on the right don't have a shred of evidence, but hey, but they're still just theories that haven't been "proven" (stupid science never proving anything), so we can't be passing anything off as facts without a nice, fair and balanced presentation of all sides.
Here's some other "theoretical concepts" that have no room in our classroom of facts: gravity, light, magneticism, electricity, radiation, atoms, life.
Also explain to me why it is that many teenagers... don't know the difference between evolution and natural selection.
Gee, I don't know, maybe it's because saying "natural selection is not evolution" is like saying "internal combustion is not car driving." It doesn't make any sense because the two concepts are not comparable. In each case, the first is a mechanism (one of many) by which the second happens. It's called a category error, and whatever other distinction you think you might be drawing is confused and wrong.
For example, if I had the money, I would love to finance a study to see how effective relaxation techniques (TM, Yoga, other breathing exercises, exercise...) are in reducing anxiety.
Look at the research of Jon Kabat-Zinn. Here's an example.
If someone could do that, then lo and behold, suddenly the car manufacturers would claim THEY own the car concept, you just own a license to operate an instance of it.
Having read only the summary (I'm definitely going to read the paper), and being a psychologist myself, I think this is an incredibly cynical, and I hope, unfounded conclusion that this guy has come to. I do not know what he means by the majority of papers are "false." For false misleadingly implies that the relationship claimed is invalid, but without an alternate account, he can only say the claimed relationship is unreliable. There's a big difference. Malfeasance aside, a "false" result means that the null hypothesis was improperly rejected (if the study reports a likely relationship) or that the null hypothesis SHOULD have been rejected (if the study reports a null or "negative" finding). He complains that there is a bias against reporting negative results (this is true), so I presume he means that most studies do not have sufficient power (according to his statistics) to adequately make the claim they do. This does NOT mean the conclusion of these studies are wrong, but that, according to him, they cannot be claimed with sufficient statistical certainty (because of false positive rates--type I error). Psychologists, despite your experience, are very cognizant of this and control for these things pretty carefully. Now I have some seen some crap methods and crap analysis, but it's not over half the papers out there. And the most influential papers in the field have results that are 1) produced by the most respected researchers 2) replicated multiple times in other studies. So, even if there is a bolus of cruft science out there, I find it very hard to believe it's driving any field. There's a lot crap journals people just don't really heed much--not because people assume the science is faulty, but mainly because the work is not particularly important. To that end, let's face it, this paper is in the Public Library of Science which--while I applaud the endeavor's open access objectives--is not exactly the most prestigious methods journal around. I have a feeling, if this paper gets "noticed," some statistician is going to rake over his method.
The science reporting in that article is so horrific I can't even stand it.
I will look at the original Neuroimage article and try make sense of what they actually found.
"White matter" isn't central to any kind of function. It's simply the myelinated axons of neurons. "Grey matter" (neural cell bodies) is where all the "thinking" happens whether its emotional, cognitive, verbal, spatial, perceptual, whatever. Perhaps they did diffusion tensor imaging or some sort of connectivity analysis and found more interconnectivity in women's brains. That's already been known from the anatomy. You don't "see" white matter activity in fMRI. Anyway, it doesn't immediately follow for me why interconnectivity produces better verbal ability but not better mathematical or spatial reasoning ability. It seems like it would be best for analogistic reasoning--drawing comparisons between disparate processes or domains--which is central to scientific reasoning. And yet, men tend to be more represented in science.
They were also able to create extreme conditions in which the light signal travelled faster than 300 million meters a second. And even though this seems to violate all sorts of cherished physical assumptions, Einstein needn't move over - relativity isn't called into question, because only a portion of the signal is affected.
Vague, but like others before have conjectured, probably a change in phase velocity.
I'm glad that you're admitting your position is conjecture, because then it will easier to admit that it's wrong.
The "if you look hard enough" argument doesn't hold water here simply because you don't have to look very hard to find that the overwhelming evidence supports the reality of human-mediated global warming. Just because there happens to be extreme, obstinate polarization on an issue (and lots of google hits on each side), doesn't mean both sides deserve equal consideration. Unfortunately this is exactly what happens in the press in a misguided to effort to give "equal time"-- see this great piece on this topic at the Columbia Journalism Review.
There certainly is a sociology to science, and some truth to what you suggest--that scientists are biased toward proving themselves right. But, in fact, Kevin Dunbar has done a lot research looking at how scientists reason, and found that the more senior the scientist, the more skeptical and pessimistic they are about the import or validity of new results from their lab. With increased experience comes some jading from having seen enough studies not work out. Plus, with increased stature comes a higher perceived standard that one's work must meet, more attention and scrutiny from fellow luminaries, and just a lack of need to "prove oneself" to the field. So when the heavy-hitters in the National Academy of Sciences band together to say something, it pays to take them very seriously.
Anyway, when scientists compete theoretically, it tends to be over pedantic aspects that may be essential to the field, but have little bearing on the "big message." And as your parent poster notes, in the case of global warming, you're talking about the unanimous consesus of whole bodies of scientists--thousands of scientists in dozens of subfields. That's not the kind of position that can be dismissed with "oh, they just want to make themselves look good."
So, it's like a computer that utilitizes the KVM, along with networking and other peripherals, of the host? So, it's like a computer and KVM switch packed into one? Like a parasitic little computer that has no input/output devices of its own, but depends on the host to provide these? Why would I want to carry around a computer that depends on finding another computer to use? Does it allow access to the HD or other internals of the host...for security, recovery, or hacking? Cuz unless it allows me to interact with the host in some way that's meaningful, or lets me leverage some of the host's resources beyond its peripherals, why would one carry around a computer that is useless without another computer?
The key part of "neuroprosthetic" is "prosthetic". I don't think we'll ever see MR used in a prosthetic context.
As for mind reading, I think signal to noise ratio is a lot more problematic than temporal resolution. BOLD response lags neural activity, by what 6-8 seconds? That'd still be pretty good to read somebody's mind at an 8 second latency. You can do better than that with sophisticated deconvolution methods in tightly controlled experiments. But THATs the real problem. It's the amount of signal averaging, post-processing you have to do to get anything meaningful. Not to mention the tight experimental control. No way could this ever be done in real time or in natural settings.
As for your second point, could you point me to the paper that localizes consciousness in the prefrontal cortex? Obviously, if you take out somebody's V1 they're not going to lose consciousness, but lobotomized patients are conscious too. But, you know, if I remove your brainstem recticular formation, I kinda bet you will lose consciousness, even if nobody thinks it's the "seat" of intention.
Anyway, I'm being facetious, but conscious awareness isn't a neural place, it's a neural network. And it's a whole messy ball of wax. And if we're talking about visual awareness, you better believe the whole visual system is involved. Even in imagery, as you know Koslyn showed.
Every time someone publishes an interesting fMRI result the press call it mind reading. This is study about binocular rivalry and being able to predict which of two rivalrous stimuli are being attended just by looking at MR signal. Lots of people are working on this sort of thing. What happens is that under certain conditions, when two stimuli are presented separately to each eye, rather than combining the images, the brain maintains both separately and "switches" between which of the two are currently being attended. You have some limited ability to control which of the two you attend to, although you kind of habituate and then spontaneously switch. It's similar to viewing a Necker cube: you can switch which faces are in front or in the back of the cube. Anyway, the coolness of this study is that they could tell which of the two stimuli were being attended just by looking at the brain data (confirmed by the subjective reports of the participants in real time). It's important to note that they don't do this in real time! The MR data take a lot of post-processing and statistical analysis before they get anything out of it.
Anyway, the novelty here is that rather than stimulus predicting what brain area should be recruited (like most MR vision studies), they say, given that this bit of brain lit up, we're going to predict what you were looking at (or in this case, attending to). This is mind-reading, but you know, only in the most academic and post-hoc sense. It's not the first time it's been done, btw. Jim Haxby has done this sort of thing with people looking at overlapping pictures of people and places.
It's cool (to scientists) without needing to sensationalize it as mind-reading. Real mind-reading is coming, don't worry. But not for decades, if not a century. And yes, the government is interested in it (they approach brain scientists about this sort of stuff all the time). Right now they want a "better" lie detector. (By which, I suppose, means one that works at all since the polygraph is bunk). But we're a long, long way off.
The time course of fMRI is currently way too slow for use in neuroprosthetic
How about the problem of carrying around a liquid-helium cooled 3 tesla magnet and RF coil on your head? That kinda cramps the prosthetic angle.
As for reading thoughts -- the studies looked at primary auditory and primary visual cortex, the two cortical areas least likely to be involved in conscious thought.
I have no idea what this means. You never hear or see anything consciously?
Slashdot Mirror
Fromt the article:
Survival instinct
He says pain is accentuated because it is more important to survival than mild thirst.
"The sensation with the most immediate implications for survival is pushed to the forefront of attention," he said.
Dr Farrell says the findings suggest it could be wise for people who are about to go through a painful experience should drink more water beforehand.
He says evidence from different types of studies also support this relationship between drinking water and pain.
But could people deliberately use dehydration to maximise pain, say via torture?
"We suspect if they got dehydrated enough that the overwhelming sense of thirst would probably make pain less rather than more," he said.
Previous studies in rats have shown that mild thirst makes the animals feel more pain but severe dehydration actually dulls pain, he says.
He says this too makes sense from the point of view of survival.
"If you were very dehydrated it would pay to suppress pain because it might get in the way of your search for water," he said.
Wouldn't that imply that the more hydrated you are, the more salient the pain should be, because then thirst is particularly irrelevant to your current needs? They say that "mild thirst" is not as pressing a survival need as experienced pain--well then, wouldn't NO thirst be even less pressing than the pain? I don't get it. They predict the situation switches for severe dehydration which makes sense (the thirst is more salient than the pain) but they don't explain why the pain should be more salient for mild thirst as compared to slaked thirst.
I would guess the logic in the actual PNAS paper is better. Perhaps it's the reporting here that's got something screwy.
Could anyone post or point to a good methods for subverting embedded video so that they can be downloaded to the computer? Or how to mine them out of my cache? Sometimes looking at the source is enough to find a SRC tag to wget, but often that redirects, and more sophisticated methods (like these google videos) seem especially tricky to someone as "unleet" as me.
Like many of you, I don't want to distribute the thing, but I would like to watch it once in a while without having to stream the damn thing every time.
The biggest problem I tend to face is that people don't know where the hardware ends, and where the OS Begins and where the OS Ends and the Applications begins. When they are doing something over the network or locally.
Yup, it's a problem. But isn't this an illusion that software developers (OS and apps) are deliberately trying to foster? I believe they call it "tight integration." For most lay people, I think it's been a confusing success and a successful confusion.
If the only high speed option that people have is Bell South, and Bell South doesn't give them improved access to sites they want to go to, they'll cancel and either have nothing, or go back to dialup. Why pay Bell South for high speed access if, from the customer's perspective, the sites they want to go to aren't fast?
Because throttled 512kbps is still much, much faster than peak 56kbps. You're right, most people aren't geeks, they won't know what they're missing speedwise. Except to know that, even crippled, it's still far faster and far more convenient (no phone tie-up hassles) than dialup.
There is no last mile competition required, because there is *plenty* of competition at the other end
Um, right, which is why you'll also see "WELCOME BELLSOUTH USERS! Our site features BSOptimized(TM) access just for you!" Because, let's see:
Number of last mile competitors at the broadband level: 2 (Bellsouth and local cable co--mainly Charter or Comcast in the south)
Number of content providers: >>2
Some rich content providers WILL bite, and you'll have the ghettoization of content by ISP. Unlike your analysis, the truth is BS has a near monopolistic access to content consumers over a large swath of the country. At least for "serious" content like video, VOIP, etc. This is a prisoner's dillema. Do they cooperate with each other and say screw you BS, and, as collateral damage, alienate that user base? Or does an individaul content provider defect, pay its protection money to BS, set itself apart from its content competitors and, in partnership with BS, achieve near monolopy over that user base?
There's a lot less train tracks than trains stations here.
When you know how to spot it, it become blatantly obvious: product identifiers become non-words or just short strings of digits so the manufacturer's name will again become part of product mentions. Auto manufacturers have known this for decades. Remember when the "Legend" and "Vigor" brands disappeared in favor of the "Acura TL" and "Acura RL?" Acura learned form what BMW, Mercedes, and others knew for years. You don't drive a 323i or a C350, you drive a BMW 323i or a Mercedes C350. Only when in-context do the models become shortened to their simple model names or series/class name. Now Intel's following this path.
I think this is an empirical question. I'd like to see data that suggest having particularly unmemorable model names significantly improves association with the company. "It makes intuitive sense" doesn't fly. BMW and Mercedes have strong brand name cachet because of their legendary association with luxury and performance engineering. I'm not convinced their byzantine model naming system accentuates that association. Honda and Toyota have a powerful association with reliability and prudent engineering and they have "named" models. Does having an "Accord" or a "Camry" somehow make the carmakers themselves less memorable as brands? Maybe maybe not. Even if so, is it an effect that's significant? Does it REALLY matter?
Personally, I find random number/letter strings annoying and harder to keep straight. They impose a higher working memory load than the nicely "prechunked" proper names. This fact there is already a large, old psychological literature to support. The new "trend" seems to be to exploit this annoyance with meaningless model numbers to benefit the memorability of the maker. But does that transfer (if real) overcome the annoyance of dealing with the "psychologically crippled" model names?
I think that cryptic model names may have another cost--it makes the various models blend together in a way that makes it difficult to strongly stratify the product line. There is a big "psychological" difference between a Corolla and a Camry. How much difference is there (psychologically) between a 325 and a 525? There's a $15,000 difference in price tag, so you better make the 525 buyer really feel like there getting something special to move them up. But if a "BMW is a BMW" then why bother? How much more status does a 5 series buy you, except among the congnescenti?
"Celeron", "Pentium," "Xenon," "Itanium" all have strong, distinct associations in my mind. Celeron and Itanium, particularly negative. Even though, as many pointed out, Celerons (and Xeons) are often just small variants on the Pentium line. But they each have a very different mental niche. With an alphabet soup of processors, it will be hard (except for the nerds, natch) to keep them straight and opt for one over another.
But then again, maybe not. These are empirical, testable questions. Intuition shouldn't drive these kinds of mundane choices, data should.
Aw man. thecorporation.com is now some promo site for a documentary?! Does anyone else remember when thecorporation were the purveyors of Humor Product(TM) and hosted such bits a Kitty Lick III: The Shedding (a hilarious FPS spoof?), and the Stop Kitty Porn campaign? Or the RGB Ribbon Campaign to eradicate free speech on the web? Good times, good times. Those were the olden days of the web. Man I'm old.
While having actual guitar riffs sounds cool, but as cool as a blaring guitar might sound anything that's not melodic will soon begin to sound very annoying after a few hundred repetitions.
Please watch TFV. This is Fripp. These aren't rockin' "riffs." It's very ambient, very ethereal, very atmospheric.
But having listened to it, it's also very moody and melancholy. It doesn't make me feel like "Wow, it's big, bright digital world out there!" It's more like, "Blue screens make me sad."
I would hypothesize that individuals who are really good at finding happiness are not very good at passing on their genes. If you find something that makes you happier than reproduction, why would you reproduce?
Except that scads of social psychology research shows that happier people are far more attractive as mates than unhappy people. So, first, it's not very likely somebody will find something that makes them so happy they want to sacrifice sexual opportunities to pursue it (unless it's being monastic), and second, to the extent they do find something that makes them exceedingly happy, they will likely have many more sexual opportunities as a pleasant side effect.
The problem, according to Gilbert, is that we're really bad at knowing just HOW happy something will make us in the long run. Here's a conversation with Gilbert on the same site that hosted this poll.
Humans have not been around for millions of years.
_ index.html
Yeah, but we have been evolving for millions of years, haven't we? Anyway, my use of the word "evolve" is completely a red herring--I wasn't suggesting an evolutionary account for our current state of happiness. It was just a rhetorical device. In any case, we are now self-aware enough, sophisticated enough, and educated enough that we do not make choices based largely on "evolutionary" drives. We are deliberative creatures and we make our own choices in life, yet most of us feel that real "happiness" is elusive.
Gilbert has a very interesting set of explanations for why this is--mainly, we are very bad at predicting just how lastingly happy certain decisions or events will make our lives. The problem is we tend grossly overestimate the impact of things--both good and bad--on our actual happiness. Interestingly, the same website that has this poll also has an "interview" with Dan Gilbert that covers many of his ideas:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/gilbert03/gilbert
Dan Gilbert is a bit of a hero of mine. His research basically is about happiness--it's all any of us really, universally, want, so why, after millions of years of evolution, are we so bad at finding it? We should be experts! His stuff on affective forecasting and rationalization is amazing. I highly recommend his papers--and hearing him talk, if you ever have the opportunity, even more so! Anyway, he's a REAL character, and his response betrays that:
DANIEL GILBERT
Psychologist, Harvard University
The idea that ideas can be dangerous
Dangerous does not mean exciting or bold. It means likely to cause great harm. The most dangerous idea is the only dangerous idea: The idea that ideas can be dangerous.
We live in a world in which people are beheaded, imprisoned, demoted, and censured simply because they have opened their mouths, flapped their lips, and vibrated some air. Yes, those vibrations can make us feel sad or stupid or alienated. Tough shit. That's the price of admission to the marketplace of ideas. Hateful, blasphemous, prejudiced, vulgar, rude, or ignorant remarks are the music of a free society, and the relentless patter of idiots is how we know we're in one. When all the words in our public conversation are fair, good, and true, it's time to make a run for the fence.
Well, Dan, have you read Slashdot lately? I think we're still all right. For now.
Government control of internet access? the terrible possibilities resound in my head: censorship, digital rights, privacy, and reprisal.
Uhmmm...you do realize that until 1991 internet access WAS exclusively governmentally controlled and limited? It was called NSFNET at the time, and a lot of people actually think it was a lot freer place back then (and in the few years of web emergence that followed).
It all depends on which government body is controlling the internet, and, more importantly, who's controlling the government at the time.
The genetic basis for lying around and shoveling potato chips in your mouth all day has been know for some time. It's mainly due to overproduction of fritoceptors which heighten sensitivity to snaxamine-2.
Sword of the Phoenix closed?! That actually made me mist up. I haven't been permanently in Atlanta for 10 years now, and I haven't played AD&D in maybe 15, but boy, did I spend a lot of time and money at the Sword in my day. My first dice. Books. Modules. Miniatures. Everything. Back at the old Park Place location at Perimeter. And the Plaza at Lenox. (They had two stores, long before the Brookhaven spot...)
Man. That's like a little bit of my nerd history gone. That's sad. That's really sad.
Give some logical, scientific explanation as to why a theory is taught as fact, and it is rare that any opposing theory is taught in parallel.
Yeah, and how about we start teaching these heretical theories with their proper opposition too!
That crazy special relativity vs. cosmic aether
Clumsy Mendeleevian theory of the elements vs. the neat and tidy Aristotlean four (earth,air,fire, water)
Shaky oxygen theory of combustion vs. phlogiston
Bogus neural basis of behavior theory vs Descartes' hydraulic theory
Dubious Pasteurian germ theory of disease vs. demonic posession
Blashemous Copernican heliocentric theory vs. blessed geocentricism.
All of those on the left have mountains and mountains of data supporting them, wheras those on the right don't have a shred of evidence, but hey, but they're still just theories that haven't been "proven" (stupid science never proving anything), so we can't be passing anything off as facts without a nice, fair and balanced presentation of all sides.
Here's some other "theoretical concepts" that have no room in our classroom of facts: gravity, light, magneticism, electricity, radiation, atoms, life.
Also explain to me why it is that many teenagers... don't know the difference between evolution and natural selection.
Gee, I don't know, maybe it's because saying "natural selection is not evolution" is like saying "internal combustion is not car driving." It doesn't make any sense because the two concepts are not comparable. In each case, the first is a mechanism (one of many) by which the second happens. It's called a category error, and whatever other distinction you think you might be drawing is confused and wrong.
For example, if I had the money, I would love to finance a study to see how effective relaxation techniques (TM, Yoga, other breathing exercises, exercise...) are in reducing anxiety.
Look at the research of Jon Kabat-Zinn. Here's an example.
If someone could do that, then lo and behold, suddenly the car manufacturers would claim THEY own the car concept, you just own a license to operate an instance of it.
Having read only the summary (I'm definitely going to read the paper), and being a psychologist myself, I think this is an incredibly cynical, and I hope, unfounded conclusion that this guy has come to. I do not know what he means by the majority of papers are "false." For false misleadingly implies that the relationship claimed is invalid, but without an alternate account, he can only say the claimed relationship is unreliable. There's a big difference. Malfeasance aside, a "false" result means that the null hypothesis was improperly rejected (if the study reports a likely relationship) or that the null hypothesis SHOULD have been rejected (if the study reports a null or "negative" finding). He complains that there is a bias against reporting negative results (this is true), so I presume he means that most studies do not have sufficient power (according to his statistics) to adequately make the claim they do. This does NOT mean the conclusion of these studies are wrong, but that, according to him, they cannot be claimed with sufficient statistical certainty (because of false positive rates--type I error). Psychologists, despite your experience, are very cognizant of this and control for these things pretty carefully. Now I have some seen some crap methods and crap analysis, but it's not over half the papers out there. And the most influential papers in the field have results that are 1) produced by the most respected researchers 2) replicated multiple times in other studies. So, even if there is a bolus of cruft science out there, I find it very hard to believe it's driving any field. There's a lot crap journals people just don't really heed much--not because people assume the science is faulty, but mainly because the work is not particularly important. To that end, let's face it, this paper is in the Public Library of Science which--while I applaud the endeavor's open access objectives--is not exactly the most prestigious methods journal around. I have a feeling, if this paper gets "noticed," some statistician is going to rake over his method.
The science reporting in that article is so horrific I can't even stand it.
I will look at the original Neuroimage article and try make sense of what they actually found.
"White matter" isn't central to any kind of function. It's simply the myelinated axons of neurons. "Grey matter" (neural cell bodies) is where all the "thinking" happens whether its emotional, cognitive, verbal, spatial, perceptual, whatever. Perhaps they did diffusion tensor imaging or some sort of connectivity analysis and found more interconnectivity in women's brains. That's already been known from the anatomy. You don't "see" white matter activity in fMRI. Anyway, it doesn't immediately follow for me why interconnectivity produces better verbal ability but not better mathematical or spatial reasoning ability. It seems like it would be best for analogistic reasoning--drawing comparisons between disparate processes or domains--which is central to scientific reasoning. And yet, men tend to be more represented in science.
They were also able to create extreme conditions in which the light signal travelled faster than 300 million meters a second. And even though this seems to violate all sorts of cherished physical assumptions, Einstein needn't move over - relativity isn't called into question, because only a portion of the signal is affected.
Vague, but like others before have conjectured, probably a change in phase velocity.
Please note and follow the link at the end.
I'm glad that you're admitting your position is conjecture, because then it will easier to admit that it's wrong.
The "if you look hard enough" argument doesn't hold water here simply because you don't have to look very hard to find that the overwhelming evidence supports the reality of human-mediated global warming. Just because there happens to be extreme, obstinate polarization on an issue (and lots of google hits on each side), doesn't mean both sides deserve equal consideration. Unfortunately this is exactly what happens in the press in a misguided to effort to give "equal time"-- see this great piece on this topic at the Columbia Journalism Review.
There certainly is a sociology to science, and some truth to what you suggest--that scientists are biased toward proving themselves right. But, in fact, Kevin Dunbar has done a lot research looking at how scientists reason, and found that the more senior the scientist, the more skeptical and pessimistic they are about the import or validity of new results from their lab. With increased experience comes some jading from having seen enough studies not work out. Plus, with increased stature comes a higher perceived standard that one's work must meet, more attention and scrutiny from fellow luminaries, and just a lack of need to "prove oneself" to the field. So when the heavy-hitters in the National Academy of Sciences band together to say something, it pays to take them very seriously.
Anyway, when scientists compete theoretically, it tends to be over pedantic aspects that may be essential to the field, but have little bearing on the "big message." And as your parent poster notes, in the case of global warming, you're talking about the unanimous consesus of whole bodies of scientists--thousands of scientists in dozens of subfields. That's not the kind of position that can be dismissed with "oh, they just want to make themselves look good."
So, it's like a computer that utilitizes the KVM, along with networking and other peripherals, of the host? So, it's like a computer and KVM switch packed into one? Like a parasitic little computer that has no input/output devices of its own, but depends on the host to provide these? Why would I want to carry around a computer that depends on finding another computer to use? Does it allow access to the HD or other internals of the host...for security, recovery, or hacking? Cuz unless it allows me to interact with the host in some way that's meaningful, or lets me leverage some of the host's resources beyond its peripherals, why would one carry around a computer that is useless without another computer?
The key part of "neuroprosthetic" is "prosthetic". I don't think we'll ever see MR used in a prosthetic context.
As for mind reading, I think signal to noise ratio is a lot more problematic than temporal resolution. BOLD response lags neural activity, by what 6-8 seconds? That'd still be pretty good to read somebody's mind at an 8 second latency. You can do better than that with sophisticated deconvolution methods in tightly controlled experiments. But THATs the real problem. It's the amount of signal averaging, post-processing you have to do to get anything meaningful. Not to mention the tight experimental control. No way could this ever be done in real time or in natural settings.
As for your second point, could you point me to the paper that localizes consciousness in the prefrontal cortex? Obviously, if you take out somebody's V1 they're not going to lose consciousness, but lobotomized patients are conscious too. But, you know, if I remove your brainstem recticular formation, I kinda bet you will lose consciousness, even if nobody thinks it's the "seat" of intention.
Anyway, I'm being facetious, but conscious awareness isn't a neural place, it's a neural network. And it's a whole messy ball of wax. And if we're talking about visual awareness, you better believe the whole visual system is involved. Even in imagery, as you know Koslyn showed.
Every time someone publishes an interesting fMRI result the press call it mind reading. This is study about binocular rivalry and being able to predict which of two rivalrous stimuli are being attended just by looking at MR signal. Lots of people are working on this sort of thing. What happens is that under certain conditions, when two stimuli are presented separately to each eye, rather than combining the images, the brain maintains both separately and "switches" between which of the two are currently being attended. You have some limited ability to control which of the two you attend to, although you kind of habituate and then spontaneously switch. It's similar to viewing a Necker cube: you can switch which faces are in front or in the back of the cube. Anyway, the coolness of this study is that they could tell which of the two stimuli were being attended just by looking at the brain data (confirmed by the subjective reports of the participants in real time). It's important to note that they don't do this in real time! The MR data take a lot of post-processing and statistical analysis before they get anything out of it.
Anyway, the novelty here is that rather than stimulus predicting what brain area should be recruited (like most MR vision studies), they say, given that this bit of brain lit up, we're going to predict what you were looking at (or in this case, attending to). This is mind-reading, but you know, only in the most academic and post-hoc sense. It's not the first time it's been done, btw. Jim Haxby has done this sort of thing with people looking at overlapping pictures of people and places.
It's cool (to scientists) without needing to sensationalize it as mind-reading. Real mind-reading is coming, don't worry. But not for decades, if not a century. And yes, the government is interested in it (they approach brain scientists about this sort of stuff all the time). Right now they want a "better" lie detector. (By which, I suppose, means one that works at all since the polygraph is bunk). But we're a long, long way off.
The time course of fMRI is currently way too slow for use in neuroprosthetic
How about the problem of carrying around a liquid-helium cooled 3 tesla magnet and RF coil on your head? That kinda cramps the prosthetic angle.
As for reading thoughts -- the studies looked at primary auditory and primary visual cortex, the two cortical areas least likely to be involved in conscious thought.
I have no idea what this means. You never hear or see anything consciously?