The best part about biometrics, is, when someone gets your fingerprint, or makes a mold of your face after knocking you out with a billy club, you can totally..... uuuuhhhh.... get..a new one?
I will say, it would be easy to make wild claims about what areas of the brain "do" things just by looking at a scan and showing a pretty picture.
That said, consider these things:
While non-peer-reviewed publications often publish exciting results, the scientific community typically does not accept brain regions without corroboration from many different studies with different stimuli, often including monkey studies where real electrodes and not just low-res fMRI can be used
It is difficult to get the numbers of subject that would be considered standard in other studies for fMRI studies. First off you actually need subjects who will do the assigned task, then you need them to do it perfectly still, for anywhere between 20 minutes to several hours (usually in no more than 1-hour segments). So the likelihood that just one study could prove something is quite small.
In many (perhaps most) studies, all the subjects brains are averaged together for data analysis, there are several different ways of doing this, none of them particularly accurate. This again calls attention to the need for multiple studies
It's also important to actually know what you're looking at when you see pictures of "brain activity", usually you are looking at the averaged activity of many subjects, after it has been run through (most likely) some form of general linear model or event-related analysis. Both of these methods estimate and fit a hemodynamic response function (the pattern of brain response to a stimulus), and what you're actually looking at is the fit or perhaps t-values (roughly fit/std. deviation) for each voxel.
Also note, that for almost any study, I could pick some random brain areas that are "lighting up" and claim a response, but they would almost certainly be shot down with more subjects, another study, etc.
bottom line, responsible investigators can make good sense out of fMRI data, but doing one experiment and claiming you "found the love [or insert whatever emotion/though] center is irresponsible and should be correlated with other studies and hopefully monkey studies as well.
If this is true, I suppose addresses and license plates aren't personal either, they just identify cars and houses, it's not as though those things usually contain the same people. Or what about phone numbers, that really only identifies my phone, not me the individual. And when you stop to think about it, my email is really just a code so the mailserver knows where to put some bytes it receives, it doesn't really have anything to do with me.
It seems like fortran would be an awful choice, sure it's fast and lots of big-deal libraries use it, but who cares?
Firstly, it's not as if you can't call fortran libraries from another language (matlab anyone?), secondly, if you learn to program, and become a professional, then you can learn another language. I don't think there's too many people out there who honestly find it easier to program in fortran than ${ANY_OTHER_LANGUAGE}
I've always felt C and C++ to be ideal intro languages, they are fast on their own, they very closely represent what is happening on the CPU (pointers, they're easy enough to optimize by hand) so as a student you get some good insight into how the computer actually works, and they are much more similar to modern languages (matlab python php etc etc) than fortran.
Furthermore, the speed of the language isn't the only thing that matters, if I'm writing stuff for in-house processing, and it takes me a month to write it in fortran, and a day in python, I don't really care if the python is twice (3 5 10) times slower, because my calculation will still be done faster. Furthermore consider the time it takes to debug matlab/python vs a compiled language like C or fortran, matlab and python (or java, etc) tell me where and what the problem was, as opposed to "SEG FAULT" 5 hours into processing.
And what happens when I decide I need to change my code? Attempt to decipher fortran or C, rebuild it, test it, sic it on my huge dataset and hope all goes well? Or just edit a text file and have things work.
Not to say C and other truly compiled languages don't have their place, I still use them for my biggest of big data, and I know in a lot of fields (let's take particle physics for example) the data is just too big to do in anything slower than C.
But for teaching first year students, a language that they can understand, will be useful to them, and will give them a taste of what they can do with a text editor and compiler/interpreter is what's really important. Teaching fortran like that seems like early optimization, and we all know where that leads.
Even better, use ubuntu, you can switch to a temporary guest account that gets deleted on logout, you don't even need to keep the browsing cache and related garbage around.
Yeah,
I used to work at a defense contractor and classified systems are on separate networks, and to my knowlege are universally separate from anything connected to the internet.
sensitive is the lowest (or maybe second lowest?) classification, so breaking into "sensitive" servers isn't a particularly big deal, although I guess they might eek something useful out of it. Is our biggest fear that attackers might learn the inner secrets of publicly available government websites?
basically anything that they don't explicitly publish falls into this category as far as I can tell.
This just in, the constitution is in fact the "supreme law of the land" and everyone and every law in the US is bound by it (unless of course they contribute enough to someone's campaign yacht).
Are you suggesting that a public school could bar black or gay students from attending, because that sort of thing is only in the federal (and not state) constitution?
I'd be interested to see how far you get with that argument
HOLY COW!
I just watched that star trek episode this morning, where they try to revive a sun with photon torpedoes.
BUT IT EXPLODES!!!
We must prevent our lawmakers from attempting this.
Our sun will explode.
I think we should teach how gravity might not exist.
After all, it's still just a "Theory" we havn't actually found the particles (or whatever) that cause it.
I for one don't believe in gravity.
Last time I checked that was the law 'round these parts. Unless we're in Mother Russia where it's the other way around and you have to sit in a cage during your "trial".
People *might* be stealing from my house, so they should have to pay me as if they were. I can't proove it, but c'mon, thing of how I'm (probably) being wronged!
They're spacin me out with all their "electro-waves" I wonder if they know they've been bombarded with electro-waves their whole life. Or maybe they haven't heard of the sun.
First off, I'd much rather have my pin number stolen than my thumb, eye, or head.
Secondly, any national database of important data will be comprimised, somebody gets their laptop stolen, oops I misplaced the backup tapes, etc.
Third, How much would this cost? probably billions of dollars after you factor in personnel, mountains of new biometric equipment, vast server centers to store all the data. Could we seriously not come up with a better way to spend billions of dollars? Even if we want to spend that money on "terrorism" instead of something useful like education or health care, we could hire tons of police officers, train some bomb dogs, what have you.
Fourth, who gets to use this biometric data? how much can the see of it? It seems to be a major privacy and security hole, and would no doubt allow for many organizations to abuse it greatly.
I want to meet the kids that would sign up for a class like that. It's like those anti-piracy commercials they put at the beginning of rental dvd's "Hey kids, do what the man says, or we'll make you sign a settlement for a couple grand, and tell your friends how not cool it is"
I had an internship over the summer at a large scholary journal archiving company who used lucene. I found it to be very easy to learn and powerful to use and customize. I was easily able to manage the tags and whatnot for documents, also I didn't really notice any issues with scalability, we indexed millions of documents and were able to search them just fine. It also has some nice basic options to get you on the way with semantic indexing if that is your bag (there are some better tools for that, but a lucene index is a good place to start for those)
Making new labor laws isn't the solution, even though it may be the right thing to do at the moment. while i agree that total free trade is really only hurting americans right now, trade laws only allow us to continue to profit off of the rest of the world's poverty. the reason america became an economic superpower in the first place is because we industrialzed before other countries, and that made us special, now, other countries are also industrialized, and we arn't special anymore, it seems to me that it would be wise to use our current wealth to help project ourselves to something new, as opposed to stubbornly sticking to labor laws that only insulate us from the rest of the world. while blalant outsourcing is only going to hurt americans today, hiding behind laws won't help us in the long run, we need to become better educated and find something that can make us stand out in the world, because manufacturing and mass production isn't going to cut it anymore.
As someone said earlier, for anyone without a highspeed conection it would still be quicker probably to just go to the store and get it. and even with a broadband connection, it still might be quicker to just go to the store and get it, especially if we are considering hi-def movies or maybe movies with multiple disks (special editions etc). i was downloading 650mb cd images yesterday and those took almost 10-15 minutes each even on my highspeed connection, and correct me if i'm wrong, but arn't dvd's bigger than that anyways? not to say that i would be renting movies this way anyways, because just getting a dvd is still easier, but i don't think it's a terrible idea all together.
While I completely agree that violent video games, movies, etc. do promote violence and that kids who engage in these things are probably more likely to be violent as they will find it more acceptable, laws that regulate who can buy what won't help anything, because ultimately, as a parent, the best thing you can do for your kids is to raise them such that they choose not to be violent. because while reasonable control laws might make it a little harder for your kids to obtain the media in question, they will always get it somehow, be it from a friend, or at school, or elsewhere. If a kid is not violent it's because he chooses not to be, and while violent videogames certainly don't help, i think our legislators have plenty more pressing needs on their hands than making sure kids don't play "innapropriate games."
To quote MC Hawking, "the second law is quite specific as to where it applies, only in a closed system must the entropy count rise, the earth is not a closed system, it's powered by the sun"
Slashdot Mirror
The best part about biometrics, is, when someone gets your fingerprint, or makes a mold of your face after knocking you out with a billy club, you can totally..... uuuuhhhh.... get..a new one?
I will say, it would be easy to make wild claims about what areas of the brain "do" things just by looking at a scan and showing a pretty picture.
That said, consider these things:
While non-peer-reviewed publications often publish exciting results, the scientific community typically does not accept brain regions without corroboration from many different studies with different stimuli, often including monkey studies where real electrodes and not just low-res fMRI can be used
It is difficult to get the numbers of subject that would be considered standard in other studies for fMRI studies. First off you actually need subjects who will do the assigned task, then you need them to do it perfectly still, for anywhere between 20 minutes to several hours (usually in no more than 1-hour segments). So the likelihood that just one study could prove something is quite small.
In many (perhaps most) studies, all the subjects brains are averaged together for data analysis, there are several different ways of doing this, none of them particularly accurate. This again calls attention to the need for multiple studies
It's also important to actually know what you're looking at when you see pictures of "brain activity", usually you are looking at the averaged activity of many subjects, after it has been run through (most likely) some form of general linear model or event-related analysis. Both of these methods estimate and fit a hemodynamic response function (the pattern of brain response to a stimulus), and what you're actually looking at is the fit or perhaps t-values (roughly fit/std. deviation) for each voxel.
Also note, that for almost any study, I could pick some random brain areas that are "lighting up" and claim a response, but they would almost certainly be shot down with more subjects, another study, etc.
bottom line, responsible investigators can make good sense out of fMRI data, but doing one experiment and claiming you "found the love [or insert whatever emotion/though] center is irresponsible and should be correlated with other studies and hopefully monkey studies as well.
If this is true, I suppose addresses and license plates aren't personal either, they just identify cars and houses, it's not as though those things usually contain the same people. Or what about phone numbers, that really only identifies my phone, not me the individual. And when you stop to think about it, my email is really just a code so the mailserver knows where to put some bytes it receives, it doesn't really have anything to do with me.
It's all about how many leet hax you have.
30Gb can't possibly deliver the definition I require for my 90,000p 200' television. That's why I use LTO tapes exclusively for my video pleasure.
Seriously?
You had kiddie porn on your computer and you gave it to circuit city?
you couldn't even put it in a passworded zip or something?
Besides, who even downloads and saves porn anyways? Hasn't this guy heard of the internet? He should be punished for being a total moron
It seems like fortran would be an awful choice, sure it's fast and lots of big-deal libraries use it, but who cares?
Firstly, it's not as if you can't call fortran libraries from another language (matlab anyone?), secondly, if you learn to program, and become a professional, then you can learn another language. I don't think there's too many people out there who honestly find it easier to program in fortran than ${ANY_OTHER_LANGUAGE}
I've always felt C and C++ to be ideal intro languages, they are fast on their own, they very closely represent what is happening on the CPU (pointers, they're easy enough to optimize by hand) so as a student you get some good insight into how the computer actually works, and they are much more similar to modern languages (matlab python php etc etc) than fortran.
Furthermore, the speed of the language isn't the only thing that matters, if I'm writing stuff for in-house processing, and it takes me a month to write it in fortran, and a day in python, I don't really care if the python is twice (3 5 10) times slower, because my calculation will still be done faster. Furthermore consider the time it takes to debug matlab/python vs a compiled language like C or fortran, matlab and python (or java, etc) tell me where and what the problem was, as opposed to "SEG FAULT" 5 hours into processing.
And what happens when I decide I need to change my code? Attempt to decipher fortran or C, rebuild it, test it, sic it on my huge dataset and hope all goes well? Or just edit a text file and have things work.
Not to say C and other truly compiled languages don't have their place, I still use them for my biggest of big data, and I know in a lot of fields (let's take particle physics for example) the data is just too big to do in anything slower than C.
But for teaching first year students, a language that they can understand, will be useful to them, and will give them a taste of what they can do with a text editor and compiler/interpreter is what's really important. Teaching fortran like that seems like early optimization, and we all know where that leads.
Even better, use ubuntu, you can switch to a temporary guest account that gets deleted on logout, you don't even need to keep the browsing cache and related garbage around.
Yeah, I used to work at a defense contractor and classified systems are on separate networks, and to my knowlege are universally separate from anything connected to the internet. sensitive is the lowest (or maybe second lowest?) classification, so breaking into "sensitive" servers isn't a particularly big deal, although I guess they might eek something useful out of it. Is our biggest fear that attackers might learn the inner secrets of publicly available government websites? basically anything that they don't explicitly publish falls into this category as far as I can tell.
"OpenOffice.org now uses a technique called anti-aliasing..."
WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF TOMORROW!!!!!!!
This just in, the constitution is in fact the "supreme law of the land" and everyone and every law in the US is bound by it (unless of course they contribute enough to someone's campaign yacht).
Are you suggesting that a public school could bar black or gay students from attending, because that sort of thing is only in the federal (and not state) constitution?
I'd be interested to see how far you get with that argument
HOLY COW! I just watched that star trek episode this morning, where they try to revive a sun with photon torpedoes. BUT IT EXPLODES!!! We must prevent our lawmakers from attempting this. Our sun will explode.
The pandora! It does all of these things, and is the size of a ds. And the best part is it might not even be varporware!
I think we should teach how gravity might not exist. After all, it's still just a "Theory" we havn't actually found the particles (or whatever) that cause it. I for one don't believe in gravity.
Last time I checked that was the law 'round these parts. Unless we're in Mother Russia where it's the other way around and you have to sit in a cage during your "trial". People *might* be stealing from my house, so they should have to pay me as if they were. I can't proove it, but c'mon, thing of how I'm (probably) being wronged!
They're spacin me out with all their "electro-waves" I wonder if they know they've been bombarded with electro-waves their whole life. Or maybe they haven't heard of the sun.
First off, I'd much rather have my pin number stolen than my thumb, eye, or head. Secondly, any national database of important data will be comprimised, somebody gets their laptop stolen, oops I misplaced the backup tapes, etc. Third, How much would this cost? probably billions of dollars after you factor in personnel, mountains of new biometric equipment, vast server centers to store all the data. Could we seriously not come up with a better way to spend billions of dollars? Even if we want to spend that money on "terrorism" instead of something useful like education or health care, we could hire tons of police officers, train some bomb dogs, what have you. Fourth, who gets to use this biometric data? how much can the see of it? It seems to be a major privacy and security hole, and would no doubt allow for many organizations to abuse it greatly.
I want to meet the kids that would sign up for a class like that. It's like those anti-piracy commercials they put at the beginning of rental dvd's "Hey kids, do what the man says, or we'll make you sign a settlement for a couple grand, and tell your friends how not cool it is"
I had an internship over the summer at a large scholary journal archiving company who used lucene. I found it to be very easy to learn and powerful to use and customize. I was easily able to manage the tags and whatnot for documents, also I didn't really notice any issues with scalability, we indexed millions of documents and were able to search them just fine. It also has some nice basic options to get you on the way with semantic indexing if that is your bag (there are some better tools for that, but a lucene index is a good place to start for those)
I want a picture of me with no face, and see what face it gives me! (c'mon clint eastwood)
Making new labor laws isn't the solution, even though it may be the right thing to do at the moment. while i agree that total free trade is really only hurting americans right now, trade laws only allow us to continue to profit off of the rest of the world's poverty. the reason america became an economic superpower in the first place is because we industrialzed before other countries, and that made us special, now, other countries are also industrialized, and we arn't special anymore, it seems to me that it would be wise to use our current wealth to help project ourselves to something new, as opposed to stubbornly sticking to labor laws that only insulate us from the rest of the world. while blalant outsourcing is only going to hurt americans today, hiding behind laws won't help us in the long run, we need to become better educated and find something that can make us stand out in the world, because manufacturing and mass production isn't going to cut it anymore.
As someone said earlier, for anyone without a highspeed conection it would still be quicker probably to just go to the store and get it. and even with a broadband connection, it still might be quicker to just go to the store and get it, especially if we are considering hi-def movies or maybe movies with multiple disks (special editions etc). i was downloading 650mb cd images yesterday and those took almost 10-15 minutes each even on my highspeed connection, and correct me if i'm wrong, but arn't dvd's bigger than that anyways? not to say that i would be renting movies this way anyways, because just getting a dvd is still easier, but i don't think it's a terrible idea all together.
While I completely agree that violent video games, movies, etc. do promote violence and that kids who engage in these things are probably more likely to be violent as they will find it more acceptable, laws that regulate who can buy what won't help anything, because ultimately, as a parent, the best thing you can do for your kids is to raise them such that they choose not to be violent. because while reasonable control laws might make it a little harder for your kids to obtain the media in question, they will always get it somehow, be it from a friend, or at school, or elsewhere. If a kid is not violent it's because he chooses not to be, and while violent videogames certainly don't help, i think our legislators have plenty more pressing needs on their hands than making sure kids don't play "innapropriate games."
To quote MC Hawking, "the second law is quite specific as to where it applies, only in a closed system must the entropy count rise, the earth is not a closed system, it's powered by the sun"