This has been done before with fluorinert and mineral oil. In fact, there was a posting here on Slashdot back in 2000 where the guys did liquid nitrogen-cooled fluorinert. Definitely more cool-points (pun intended) for that.
Fluorinert is definitely a better choice over mineral oil if you ever intend on being able to upgrade or fix the PC, since fluorinert evaporates without a residue, but it's a bit pricey.
However, it turns out that older minds are more flexible than you give them credit for.
I'm aware of plasticity of neurons. I also didn't say that adults can't learn or that synaptic pruning stops completely, but it certainly slows down significantly by the late teens to early twenties.
Again, I'm not saying the brain isn't an amazingly adaptive and powerful thing. It absolutely is. What I'm saying is that it has limits, which the original poster seems unwilling to acknowledge.
So obviously you haven't heard of the experiment where they created a device with a grid pattern of dull pins. The pins formed a grid pattern that was placed on the tongue. When the pins were raised in the manner of a object that was seen by a video device, the wearer could learn to interpret the pattern of raised pins just as if they had seen the pattern coming in from the eye. In the experiement, wearers could learn to see obstacles and avoid them in walking and also to "see" things like a drinking glass and reach out and grab it. So, I stand by my statement. We have yet to reach the limit of the various patterns a brain can interpret.
Actually, I have heard of the experiment and I didn't say humans can't learn. That would be stupid. Adults who lose their vision can also learn brail. But that doesn't mean you can simply connect a bunch of inputs to the brain and the brain is going to figure out what the pattern of inputs means. That's a very different thing than figuring out what a pattern impression on the tongue means. The tongue has been wired into your brain your whole life and like you fingers, has a disproportional large number of sensory neurons.
That said, the brain has very fixed limitations. It can only deal with certain frequency ranges and different neurons are constrained to different frequency ranges. There are also a finite number of neurons in the brain, limiting the number of inputs (the number of neurons that receive sensory input is a small percentage of the total) and the total processing power. So I stand by my assertion that the brain, while quite powerful, by its very nature has fixed limitations in what types of patterns it can interpret which you appear to be unwilling to acknowledge.
I would note that the success of cochlear implants is attributable to the ability of the brain to recognise and interpret any pattern stream.
Actually, this is a bit misleading. Cochlear implants break the sound up into different frequencies using a fast fourier transform, and sending signals based on the various frequencies to the appropriate nerves. While the cochlea doesn't do math, obviously, the hairs of the cochlea perform more or less the same function with different hairs resonating at different frequencies and depending on which hairs resonate, the appropriate nerves are stimulated.
So really, a cochlear implant performs virtually the same function as the cochlea sending pretty much the same patterns to the brain.
I agree that the brain is very flexible, but if a cochlear implant didn't provide virtually the same signal that the cohclea does, the people using them would have to learn to recognize speech and other sounds from scratch, which isn't the case. This is why people who have lost their hearing for only a short period of time tend to find them more useful than people who have been deaf for life.
The brain is quite adaptive, but to say it can "recognize and interpret any pattern stream" is a great exaggeration. Additionally, most of the brains adaptability comes at an early age. By the early 20s after most of the synaptic pruning has happened (young children have roughly 10 times as many synapses as adults), the ability of the brain to learn new things, particularly the generalized pattern recognition type abilities, becomes greatly diminished.
1> Your happiness in general shouldn't be based on your job. Sometimes people take shitty jobs because they need to pay the bills. You think people like cleaning toilets or hauling garbage? Some might, but I suspect most don't really care for it. And yet, I know a lot of people who have shitty jobs but very happy lives. They just learn not to let their job get them down and they learn to make the most of their time outside their job.
2> That said, if you have the option, you should get a job that brings you pleasure, 'cause it's worth more than money. After all, you're probably spending most of your waking hours doing your job.
My general impression in IT (not necessarily security), is that the people who do it because they truly enjoy IT, are the ones who are going to be happiest in their jobs. On the other hand, people who go into it only for the money, tend to be the most miserable, unhappy people in IT. It's not just that they may not like it to begin with. They probably liked aspects when they got into it. But working in IT can be more trying than other jobs if you're not into it.
Most jobs (and not all, obviously), don't require you to constantly stay on top of a very quickly evolving subject matter. Let's face it, once you know accounting for example, you're done. It's not like it's a fast paced field with lots of changing ideas and innovation. The same can be said for most other fields. Obviously most technology related fields are this way. Medicine as well, but largely due to advances in technology and its effect on biology and biochemistry research.
To be good in tech, you have to stay on top of things and a lot of times, you have to do that outside your job as well as in your job. If you don't love it, or at least like it quite a bit, trying to keep pace with it can be incredibly frustrating.
On the other hand, if by chance anyone from MediaSentry does actually go to jail (and I really doubt that will be the case), it would pretty much eliminate this practice, at least in Michigan. And that declaws a portion of the RIAA and MPAAs' operations.
I think the problem is the failure to distinguish a scripting language from an application development language. JavaScript is designed for the square hole of scripting. It shouldn't be mashed into the round hole of application development. Nothing lives in a vacuum. Different tools are used for different jobs. Look at any major web app and you'll probably find compiled code and scripting languages like JavaScript and maybe some Perl and maybe some other stuff.
If you make all the tools do everything, then they'll all be cluttered masses of junk. If on the other hand, different tools perform different functions, then instead of using one cluttered mass of junk, you can uses several tools that each perform specific types of tasks that they're appropriate to, as it should be.
Sure, it can be a pain in the butt to learn to use different tools, but it's far less of a pain in the butt than trying to maintain a big app written with a nasty language that tries to do more than it should.
On the other hand, an avian brain seems to have extremely useful capabilities and is far, far more compact.
To mimic human intelligence, you really only need to use a fraction of the brain. A reasonably large fraction, but there are a number of areas you can get rid of.
Part of it has to do with how much you're trying to simulate as well. If you're not simulating the entire body, then that's a great deal of motor related regions that can be removed. Obviously you'd need some sort of input and output to the brain, but it doesn't necessarily have to be human-like.
You can also get rid of pacemaker cells for breathing and some of the other body regulatory functions. You'd probably still want the pacemaker cells for the circadian rhythm. Some of the vision stuff could probably be simplified. After all, the retina has far more rods and cones than any digital camera could support, so you could cut down on their number and the related and their related bipolar, amacrine, and ganglia. In fact, you'd be able to scale down a lot of the visual cortex comparably.
Anyway, I suspect you could get most of the core of human intelligence and still scale the brain down to about 1/8th or less of its current size. Still, that's a few orders of magnitude larger than what we can simulate at this point.
Blue Brain simulated about 10 seconds of a single rat neocortical column. A human neocortical column has about 6 times more neurons than a rat's and there are about a million neocortical columns in the human brain. I'm not sure how long it took to run those calculations for the 10 second simulation of a single rat neocortical column, but I suspect it was months. So, we're clearly some orders of magnitude away from simulating real-time intelligent brains, even if you scale down the brain size significantly.
Where we're really lacking is in simplification of the calculations for neuron firing. Right now, it's generally done by calculating the ion flow through K, Na, and Ca ion channels (as well as other channels and transporters) and calculating things like ion diffusion within the membrane. The calculations are pretty complex and expensive, time-wise, and if we could find a way to simplify that, we could really speed things up a lot.
But how much it can be simplified is another issue. There seems to be some question as to how much that complexity figures into function. If it gets over-simplified, then the simulated neurons may not have the compute capability of a real neuron.
There are other issues as well, such as incomplete information on some types of neurons. This is particularly true for anything that isn't human, primate, rat, mouse, nematode, or fruit fly, as those are the most studied and they're still incomplete. I imagine that there's little detail available on magpie brain structure. At least not the kind of detail you'd find for the aforementioned species.
Wikibooks has been trying to address this for a while. The problem it seems is that unlike Wikipedia, Wikibooks just doesn't get the same traffic and support.
I think a lot of professors feel that a college textbook should be written by other professors, but the fact is, for a lot of courses, it doesn't take a PhD to write a decent textbook.
I was contributing to the Wikibooks organic chemistry text while I was taking organic chemistry. I found it was actually a great study aid. You really have to understand something before you can write about it and I found that writing the text really required me to understand the topic better than I might have otherwise pushed myself.
Now, it's possible I made some errors, but being an open contribution thing like wikipedia, I assume at some point, someone will find and correct my errors. But for the most part, I wrote a lot of text I'd like to think might be helpful.
Now, whether or not professors would teach a course based on wikibooks will probably depend, to a large degree, how complete and well developed those books eventually get, but I don't see them heading that way yet.
Sadly, most of the books are a mere outline of a true textbook. For example, their Human Physiology textbook might be a total of 10 pages printed. Not even on the verge of what one would call "comprehensive".
But the idea is right. Knowledge should be free and Wikibooks has the right idea. I'm not entirely sure what they need, whether it's better PR or what, but I'd certainly like to see it get more contributions.
First of all, from CNN's article, Patterson enjoyed her time at Google, but became disenchanted with the company's approach to search. "Google has looked pretty much the same for 10 years now," she said, "and I can guarantee it will look the same a year from now."
This is part of what works for Google. It's reliable, consistent and simple, from a user's point of view. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
My "reference search" was for "CREB", a protein. As with google, the first result was the Wikipedia article on CREB. After that, Cuil went to hell. The second result is "Uberpedia", which cloned the wikipedia article. The third result was for the same article (no longer existing) on a polish server. The 4th result was useful. The 5th result was some sort of wikipedia related server called adorons.com, but it returns an error referring you back to wikipedia. The 6th result, somewhat useful. The 7th result, another non-existent wikipedia copy on a polish server.
In addition, wikipedia offered 600K results vs. Cuil's 100K results. If they're indexing more, why are they returning fewer results?
The 1.420 gigahertz frequency was chose (I believe) because of the hydrogen line. It would seem to me that a more effective methodology would be to do a spectrum sweeping search. The odds of any intelligent species transmitting on just one frequency are unlikely enough.
Well, first of all, they were dealing with limited computational power in the first few years, so they had to put limits on what they were searching for. Now that computational power is getting to be less of an issue, they're starting to spread what they're searching for.
The original hydrogen line was chosen for several reasons. Keep in mind, they're looking for deliberate signals, not accidental signals. The hydrogen line is a pretty clean frequency area in space without as much noise as many other frequency areas. Also, since it's the hydrogen lines, it's based on something that's mathematically universal and simple. For a first round, it was an excellent choice.
You're hosting on their servers. I don't think you have much expectation of privacy, frankly. I'm all for privacy, and if you own the box, then nobody should be allowed to look at it, but if you're renting the box, just like a landlord, they should have a right to inspect it for whatever reasons. They are, to some degree, responsible for what that box contains.
On a slightly different topic, you say they're pretty good except for... And then you have a list of issues with them. I don't know who your host is, but I'd recommend CrystalTech. I have no affiliation with them other than having hosted some sites with them over the past decade or so. Other than the occasional technical problem, for example an upgrade several years ago that broke one of my apps, or one of the two times in the past 10 years when my e-mail went down, they've been solid as rock. Additionally, when I've needed help, both their online tech support as well as their phone tech support were amazing and responsive. I'll never host with anyone else as long as they continue the way they are.
The real value of code reviews is that it forces the developer to defend the zillions of decisions they made when creating the code. The developer who knows he'll have to defend his work is going to spend more time thinking about design and writing clear code.
And if the post had been about enforcing good code development, versus coding syles, I still would have brought up code reviews. But the post was about coding styles, which is why I pointed out the value of code reviews as they related to coding styles.
The parent is correct. As one of the linked articles mentions, cell phones can cause an increase in the production of stress proteins as well as increased permeability of the blood-brain barrier. In fact, it increases the permeability of albumin, for example, which can be damaging to the brain. Some exogenous toxins that might be in the blood stream would also have an easier time crossing into the brain.
For example, using 900mhz cell phones increases the phosphorylation of a number of proteins, including HSP27 and alters the expression of HSP27 and P38MAPK. These were all non-thermal changes (that is, there was no direct heat transfer in the experiment, just radiation exposure, and the temperature of the cell cultures was maintained at a steady temperature).
I'm not saying that cell phones, for sure, cause cancer or other brain damage. I think the jury is still out, but I certainly see some very plausible paths to brain injury and disease from cell phone usage. Only time and more studies can tell for sure. Cell phones haven't been around long enough for conclusive studies, as cancer can sometimes take 30+ years to develop.
I work for a major software vendor. The particular group I work in wrote the application framework for a suite of apps. Our code is mostly quite nice. There were about 20 people working on it during development and there are a few pieces that are crap, but for the most part, it's quite well designed and written.
Now, there are other groups that use this framework. One group in particular, has pretty much the same standards that our group does. The difference is, however, that their manager never had them do code reviews and so people pretty much ignored the standards. I've now been tasked with working with that group and their code is a complete nightmare. For example, a single form class with something like 16 tab pages (spread among 3 or 4 tab controls), over 200 controls, and over 9000 lines of spaghetti code.
Had this group done code reviews, this class never would have passed, and it wouldn't be such a nightmare to deal with. At this point, we're already shipping the second version, so a complete rewrite of the various nightmare components of this app are out of the question, which is too bad because it's going to be a nightmare to maintain, especially when the guy who wrote it leaves.
I've always hated doing code reviews, but this experience has made it abundantly clear to me how important they are for minimizing the damage a single clueless programmer can get away with.
In this Circuit, the âoecopyingâ element may be proved in software cases by showing an unauthorized reproduction of a copyrighted software program in the computer userâ(TM)s Random Access Memory (âoeRAMâ). The Ninth Circuit has recognized that âoethe loading of software into the RAM creates a copy under the Copyright Act.â
This seems kind of silly. By that kind of logic, isn't Microsoft committing copyright violations every time Windows loads and runs a non-Microsoft app? If I understand how Glider works, that's basically what it's doing, isn't it?
with some experts now believing general AI to be attainable within the next decade.
I think the next decade is a little ambitious. The problem is the amount of space required to store the data, which is probably hundreds or even thousands of petabytes.
For example, take the human brain. It's believed to only have about 100 billion neurons, but there are between 1 and 10 quadrillion synapses (~10 for children and between 1 and 5 for adults).
Whether it's biological or software, it'll require roughly equivalent complexity to create a brain as intelligent as a human brain.
Thousands of petabytes might be available for supercomputers in 10 years, but that volume of storage probably won't be more generally available in 10 years.
And to make the brain think at a speed within an order of magnitude or two of a human, you need to be able to process each "neuron" probably about 100 times per second (based on projects like BlueBrain)
That kind of processing power is probably at least 20 years away.
But otherwise, I agree, this is almost definitely on the horizon. I don't think a generalized ANN like the ones you're talking about will be the way it's done. I think something more akin to Blue Brain, which simulates real neurons is more likely to be where the first intelligent, sentient software will emerge.
I'm about ready for Google to go gold with something. This perma-beta crap is for the fail.
Which Google apps are you talking about? Obviously not GMail, Toolbar, Desktop, Talk, Reader, Picasa, or Sketchup. Maybe it's just that Google doesn't make things gold until they're ready...
Actually, the research I'm basing my opinions on is fairly recent. It's a single gene that might be responsible for 3 symptoms I have. By determining the allele that that I have of that gene, I can see if it matches my expectation. If it does, then it's likely that defect is the cause of the symptoms I experience. It's as simple as that.
Actually, I played with Lively a bit yesterday and I have to say, for a beta, I'm quite impressed. The poster seems to be ignoring the fact that this is a beta.
I found it FAR more user-friendly than 2nd life. The tools for building things up aren't bad. Again, it's still in beta, but it all looks very promising. Is it better than second life? I doubt it, but it's also in BETA!
I do have some issues with it. Camera doesn't seem to follow the avatar. Can't get a view from the avatar's perspective ("Avatar's View" is a view from above and behind the avatar). The camera doesn't do a very good job of following the avatar. As far as I can tell, there's no way to connect rooms together, which is something I'd like to see.
Overall, for a beta product, I'm quite impressed and look forward to seeing it when it's released.
There are a lot of people bashing this and I agree, something like what deCODEme and 23andMe provide is probably not for most people.
On the other hand, I could actually use something like this. I have some unusual issues that are very probably genetic in origin. In fact, I have a good idea of one possible genetic cause to 3 major symptoms that I have. I've spent years with various diagnoses and none of them have panned out.
There are no other tests for the particular genetic defect I suspect I have. For $985, I can find out (I checked, and the SNPs for the gene I'm looking for are covered). Given that it's took 7 years to find a medication that worked for one of my issues, nailing down the cause could end up saving me money in the long run (and if this had been available 7 years ago, might have saved me a lot of grief).
So, I'll grant, this isn't for everyone. The results are very hard for a lay person to interpret. But for some people, they could be quite handy.
You can make similar molecules using silicon, but you can't make identical molecules. If you took say, a protein, and replaced all the carbons with silicon, that protein would not function. I'm not even certain the protein would remain intact. I'm not aware of any large, complex molecules, on the scale of a protein, made with silicon as the primary backbone. Silicon chemistry simply doesn't lend itself to large, complex, molecules.
TFA: The termination shock is the region of the heliosphere where the supersonic solar wind slows to subsonic speed as it merges with the interstellar medium.
Okay boys and girls. Quick, grab your calculator and calculate the speed of sound in space...
Slashdot Mirror
This has been done before with fluorinert and mineral oil. In fact, there was a posting here on Slashdot back in 2000 where the guys did liquid nitrogen-cooled fluorinert. Definitely more cool-points (pun intended) for that.
Fluorinert is definitely a better choice over mineral oil if you ever intend on being able to upgrade or fix the PC, since fluorinert evaporates without a residue, but it's a bit pricey.
However, it turns out that older minds are more flexible than you give them credit for.
I'm aware of plasticity of neurons. I also didn't say that adults can't learn or that synaptic pruning stops completely, but it certainly slows down significantly by the late teens to early twenties.
Again, I'm not saying the brain isn't an amazingly adaptive and powerful thing. It absolutely is. What I'm saying is that it has limits, which the original poster seems unwilling to acknowledge.
So obviously you haven't heard of the experiment where they created a device with a grid pattern of dull pins. The pins formed a grid pattern that was placed on the tongue. When the pins were raised in the manner of a object that was seen by a video device, the wearer could learn to interpret the pattern of raised pins just as if they had seen the pattern coming in from the eye. In the experiement, wearers could learn to see obstacles and avoid them in walking and also to "see" things like a drinking glass and reach out and grab it. So, I stand by my statement. We have yet to reach the limit of the various patterns a brain can interpret.
Actually, I have heard of the experiment and I didn't say humans can't learn. That would be stupid. Adults who lose their vision can also learn brail. But that doesn't mean you can simply connect a bunch of inputs to the brain and the brain is going to figure out what the pattern of inputs means. That's a very different thing than figuring out what a pattern impression on the tongue means. The tongue has been wired into your brain your whole life and like you fingers, has a disproportional large number of sensory neurons.
That said, the brain has very fixed limitations. It can only deal with certain frequency ranges and different neurons are constrained to different frequency ranges. There are also a finite number of neurons in the brain, limiting the number of inputs (the number of neurons that receive sensory input is a small percentage of the total) and the total processing power. So I stand by my assertion that the brain, while quite powerful, by its very nature has fixed limitations in what types of patterns it can interpret which you appear to be unwilling to acknowledge.
I would note that the success of cochlear implants is attributable to the ability of the brain to recognise and interpret any pattern stream.
Actually, this is a bit misleading. Cochlear implants break the sound up into different frequencies using a fast fourier transform, and sending signals based on the various frequencies to the appropriate nerves. While the cochlea doesn't do math, obviously, the hairs of the cochlea perform more or less the same function with different hairs resonating at different frequencies and depending on which hairs resonate, the appropriate nerves are stimulated.
So really, a cochlear implant performs virtually the same function as the cochlea sending pretty much the same patterns to the brain.
I agree that the brain is very flexible, but if a cochlear implant didn't provide virtually the same signal that the cohclea does, the people using them would have to learn to recognize speech and other sounds from scratch, which isn't the case. This is why people who have lost their hearing for only a short period of time tend to find them more useful than people who have been deaf for life.
The brain is quite adaptive, but to say it can "recognize and interpret any pattern stream" is a great exaggeration. Additionally, most of the brains adaptability comes at an early age. By the early 20s after most of the synaptic pruning has happened (young children have roughly 10 times as many synapses as adults), the ability of the brain to learn new things, particularly the generalized pattern recognition type abilities, becomes greatly diminished.
Okay, a few things here:
1> Your happiness in general shouldn't be based on your job. Sometimes people take shitty jobs because they need to pay the bills. You think people like cleaning toilets or hauling garbage? Some might, but I suspect most don't really care for it. And yet, I know a lot of people who have shitty jobs but very happy lives. They just learn not to let their job get them down and they learn to make the most of their time outside their job.
2> That said, if you have the option, you should get a job that brings you pleasure, 'cause it's worth more than money. After all, you're probably spending most of your waking hours doing your job.
My general impression in IT (not necessarily security), is that the people who do it because they truly enjoy IT, are the ones who are going to be happiest in their jobs. On the other hand, people who go into it only for the money, tend to be the most miserable, unhappy people in IT. It's not just that they may not like it to begin with. They probably liked aspects when they got into it. But working in IT can be more trying than other jobs if you're not into it.
Most jobs (and not all, obviously), don't require you to constantly stay on top of a very quickly evolving subject matter. Let's face it, once you know accounting for example, you're done. It's not like it's a fast paced field with lots of changing ideas and innovation. The same can be said for most other fields. Obviously most technology related fields are this way. Medicine as well, but largely due to advances in technology and its effect on biology and biochemistry research.
To be good in tech, you have to stay on top of things and a lot of times, you have to do that outside your job as well as in your job. If you don't love it, or at least like it quite a bit, trying to keep pace with it can be incredibly frustrating.
Anyway, just my $0.02
On the other hand, if by chance anyone from MediaSentry does actually go to jail (and I really doubt that will be the case), it would pretty much eliminate this practice, at least in Michigan. And that declaws a portion of the RIAA and MPAAs' operations.
I think the problem is the failure to distinguish a scripting language from an application development language. JavaScript is designed for the square hole of scripting. It shouldn't be mashed into the round hole of application development. Nothing lives in a vacuum. Different tools are used for different jobs. Look at any major web app and you'll probably find compiled code and scripting languages like JavaScript and maybe some Perl and maybe some other stuff.
If you make all the tools do everything, then they'll all be cluttered masses of junk. If on the other hand, different tools perform different functions, then instead of using one cluttered mass of junk, you can uses several tools that each perform specific types of tasks that they're appropriate to, as it should be.
Sure, it can be a pain in the butt to learn to use different tools, but it's far less of a pain in the butt than trying to maintain a big app written with a nasty language that tries to do more than it should.
On the other hand, an avian brain seems to have extremely useful capabilities and is far, far more compact.
To mimic human intelligence, you really only need to use a fraction of the brain. A reasonably large fraction, but there are a number of areas you can get rid of.
Part of it has to do with how much you're trying to simulate as well. If you're not simulating the entire body, then that's a great deal of motor related regions that can be removed. Obviously you'd need some sort of input and output to the brain, but it doesn't necessarily have to be human-like.
You can also get rid of pacemaker cells for breathing and some of the other body regulatory functions. You'd probably still want the pacemaker cells for the circadian rhythm. Some of the vision stuff could probably be simplified. After all, the retina has far more rods and cones than any digital camera could support, so you could cut down on their number and the related and their related bipolar, amacrine, and ganglia. In fact, you'd be able to scale down a lot of the visual cortex comparably.
Anyway, I suspect you could get most of the core of human intelligence and still scale the brain down to about 1/8th or less of its current size. Still, that's a few orders of magnitude larger than what we can simulate at this point.
Blue Brain simulated about 10 seconds of a single rat neocortical column. A human neocortical column has about 6 times more neurons than a rat's and there are about a million neocortical columns in the human brain. I'm not sure how long it took to run those calculations for the 10 second simulation of a single rat neocortical column, but I suspect it was months. So, we're clearly some orders of magnitude away from simulating real-time intelligent brains, even if you scale down the brain size significantly.
Where we're really lacking is in simplification of the calculations for neuron firing. Right now, it's generally done by calculating the ion flow through K, Na, and Ca ion channels (as well as other channels and transporters) and calculating things like ion diffusion within the membrane. The calculations are pretty complex and expensive, time-wise, and if we could find a way to simplify that, we could really speed things up a lot.
But how much it can be simplified is another issue. There seems to be some question as to how much that complexity figures into function. If it gets over-simplified, then the simulated neurons may not have the compute capability of a real neuron.
There are other issues as well, such as incomplete information on some types of neurons. This is particularly true for anything that isn't human, primate, rat, mouse, nematode, or fruit fly, as those are the most studied and they're still incomplete. I imagine that there's little detail available on magpie brain structure. At least not the kind of detail you'd find for the aforementioned species.
Wikibooks has been trying to address this for a while. The problem it seems is that unlike Wikipedia, Wikibooks just doesn't get the same traffic and support.
I think a lot of professors feel that a college textbook should be written by other professors, but the fact is, for a lot of courses, it doesn't take a PhD to write a decent textbook.
I was contributing to the Wikibooks organic chemistry text while I was taking organic chemistry. I found it was actually a great study aid. You really have to understand something before you can write about it and I found that writing the text really required me to understand the topic better than I might have otherwise pushed myself.
Now, it's possible I made some errors, but being an open contribution thing like wikipedia, I assume at some point, someone will find and correct my errors. But for the most part, I wrote a lot of text I'd like to think might be helpful.
Now, whether or not professors would teach a course based on wikibooks will probably depend, to a large degree, how complete and well developed those books eventually get, but I don't see them heading that way yet.
Sadly, most of the books are a mere outline of a true textbook. For example, their Human Physiology textbook might be a total of 10 pages printed. Not even on the verge of what one would call "comprehensive".
But the idea is right. Knowledge should be free and Wikibooks has the right idea. I'm not entirely sure what they need, whether it's better PR or what, but I'd certainly like to see it get more contributions.
I've been working for years to prevent Alzheimer's with the medications currently available and it's working great for me!
First of all, from CNN's article, Patterson enjoyed her time at Google, but became disenchanted with the company's approach to search. "Google has looked pretty much the same for 10 years now," she said, "and I can guarantee it will look the same a year from now."
This is part of what works for Google. It's reliable, consistent and simple, from a user's point of view. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
My "reference search" was for "CREB", a protein. As with google, the first result was the Wikipedia article on CREB. After that, Cuil went to hell. The second result is "Uberpedia", which cloned the wikipedia article. The third result was for the same article (no longer existing) on a polish server. The 4th result was useful. The 5th result was some sort of wikipedia related server called adorons.com, but it returns an error referring you back to wikipedia. The 6th result, somewhat useful. The 7th result, another non-existent wikipedia copy on a polish server.
In addition, wikipedia offered 600K results vs. Cuil's 100K results. If they're indexing more, why are they returning fewer results?
I don't see myself using this anytime soon.
The 1.420 gigahertz frequency was chose (I believe) because of the hydrogen line. It would seem to me that a more effective methodology would be to do a spectrum sweeping search. The odds of any intelligent species transmitting on just one frequency are unlikely enough.
Well, first of all, they were dealing with limited computational power in the first few years, so they had to put limits on what they were searching for. Now that computational power is getting to be less of an issue, they're starting to spread what they're searching for.
The original hydrogen line was chosen for several reasons. Keep in mind, they're looking for deliberate signals, not accidental signals. The hydrogen line is a pretty clean frequency area in space without as much noise as many other frequency areas. Also, since it's the hydrogen lines, it's based on something that's mathematically universal and simple. For a first round, it was an excellent choice.
You're hosting on their servers. I don't think you have much expectation of privacy, frankly. I'm all for privacy, and if you own the box, then nobody should be allowed to look at it, but if you're renting the box, just like a landlord, they should have a right to inspect it for whatever reasons. They are, to some degree, responsible for what that box contains.
On a slightly different topic, you say they're pretty good except for... And then you have a list of issues with them. I don't know who your host is, but I'd recommend CrystalTech. I have no affiliation with them other than having hosted some sites with them over the past decade or so. Other than the occasional technical problem, for example an upgrade several years ago that broke one of my apps, or one of the two times in the past 10 years when my e-mail went down, they've been solid as rock. Additionally, when I've needed help, both their online tech support as well as their phone tech support were amazing and responsive. I'll never host with anyone else as long as they continue the way they are.
The real value of code reviews is that it forces the developer to defend the zillions of decisions they made when creating the code. The developer who knows he'll have to defend his work is going to spend more time thinking about design and writing clear code.
And if the post had been about enforcing good code development, versus coding syles, I still would have brought up code reviews. But the post was about coding styles, which is why I pointed out the value of code reviews as they related to coding styles.
The parent is correct. As one of the linked articles mentions, cell phones can cause an increase in the production of stress proteins as well as increased permeability of the blood-brain barrier. In fact, it increases the permeability of albumin, for example, which can be damaging to the brain. Some exogenous toxins that might be in the blood stream would also have an easier time crossing into the brain.
For example, using 900mhz cell phones increases the phosphorylation of a number of proteins, including HSP27 and alters the expression of HSP27 and P38MAPK. These were all non-thermal changes (that is, there was no direct heat transfer in the experiment, just radiation exposure, and the temperature of the cell cultures was maintained at a steady temperature).
I'm not saying that cell phones, for sure, cause cancer or other brain damage. I think the jury is still out, but I certainly see some very plausible paths to brain injury and disease from cell phone usage. Only time and more studies can tell for sure. Cell phones haven't been around long enough for conclusive studies, as cancer can sometimes take 30+ years to develop.
I work for a major software vendor. The particular group I work in wrote the application framework for a suite of apps. Our code is mostly quite nice. There were about 20 people working on it during development and there are a few pieces that are crap, but for the most part, it's quite well designed and written.
Now, there are other groups that use this framework. One group in particular, has pretty much the same standards that our group does. The difference is, however, that their manager never had them do code reviews and so people pretty much ignored the standards. I've now been tasked with working with that group and their code is a complete nightmare. For example, a single form class with something like 16 tab pages (spread among 3 or 4 tab controls), over 200 controls, and over 9000 lines of spaghetti code.
Had this group done code reviews, this class never would have passed, and it wouldn't be such a nightmare to deal with. At this point, we're already shipping the second version, so a complete rewrite of the various nightmare components of this app are out of the question, which is too bad because it's going to be a nightmare to maintain, especially when the guy who wrote it leaves.
I've always hated doing code reviews, but this experience has made it abundantly clear to me how important they are for minimizing the damage a single clueless programmer can get away with.
In this Circuit, the âoecopyingâ element may be proved in software cases by showing an unauthorized reproduction of a copyrighted software program in the computer userâ(TM)s Random Access Memory (âoeRAMâ). The Ninth Circuit has recognized that âoethe loading of software into the RAM creates a copy under the Copyright Act.â
This seems kind of silly. By that kind of logic, isn't Microsoft committing copyright violations every time Windows loads and runs a non-Microsoft app? If I understand how Glider works, that's basically what it's doing, isn't it?
with some experts now believing general AI to be attainable within the next decade.
I think the next decade is a little ambitious. The problem is the amount of space required to store the data, which is probably hundreds or even thousands of petabytes.
For example, take the human brain. It's believed to only have about 100 billion neurons, but there are between 1 and 10 quadrillion synapses (~10 for children and between 1 and 5 for adults).
Whether it's biological or software, it'll require roughly equivalent complexity to create a brain as intelligent as a human brain.
Thousands of petabytes might be available for supercomputers in 10 years, but that volume of storage probably won't be more generally available in 10 years.
And to make the brain think at a speed within an order of magnitude or two of a human, you need to be able to process each "neuron" probably about 100 times per second (based on projects like BlueBrain)
That kind of processing power is probably at least 20 years away.
But otherwise, I agree, this is almost definitely on the horizon. I don't think a generalized ANN like the ones you're talking about will be the way it's done. I think something more akin to Blue Brain, which simulates real neurons is more likely to be where the first intelligent, sentient software will emerge.
Google doesn't go gold because people like you who excuse errors with, "it's BETA!".
You're right. They just do it to bug you.
I'm about ready for Google to go gold with something. This perma-beta crap is for the fail.
Which Google apps are you talking about? Obviously not GMail, Toolbar, Desktop, Talk, Reader, Picasa, or Sketchup. Maybe it's just that Google doesn't make things gold until they're ready...
Actually, the research I'm basing my opinions on is fairly recent. It's a single gene that might be responsible for 3 symptoms I have. By determining the allele that that I have of that gene, I can see if it matches my expectation. If it does, then it's likely that defect is the cause of the symptoms I experience. It's as simple as that.
Actually, I played with Lively a bit yesterday and I have to say, for a beta, I'm quite impressed. The poster seems to be ignoring the fact that this is a beta.
I found it FAR more user-friendly than 2nd life. The tools for building things up aren't bad. Again, it's still in beta, but it all looks very promising. Is it better than second life? I doubt it, but it's also in BETA!
I do have some issues with it. Camera doesn't seem to follow the avatar. Can't get a view from the avatar's perspective ("Avatar's View" is a view from above and behind the avatar). The camera doesn't do a very good job of following the avatar. As far as I can tell, there's no way to connect rooms together, which is something I'd like to see.
Overall, for a beta product, I'm quite impressed and look forward to seeing it when it's released.
There are a lot of people bashing this and I agree, something like what deCODEme and 23andMe provide is probably not for most people.
On the other hand, I could actually use something like this. I have some unusual issues that are very probably genetic in origin. In fact, I have a good idea of one possible genetic cause to 3 major symptoms that I have. I've spent years with various diagnoses and none of them have panned out.
There are no other tests for the particular genetic defect I suspect I have. For $985, I can find out (I checked, and the SNPs for the gene I'm looking for are covered). Given that it's took 7 years to find a medication that worked for one of my issues, nailing down the cause could end up saving me money in the long run (and if this had been available 7 years ago, might have saved me a lot of grief).
So, I'll grant, this isn't for everyone. The results are very hard for a lay person to interpret. But for some people, they could be quite handy.
You can make similar molecules using silicon, but you can't make identical molecules. If you took say, a protein, and replaced all the carbons with silicon, that protein would not function. I'm not even certain the protein would remain intact. I'm not aware of any large, complex molecules, on the scale of a protein, made with silicon as the primary backbone. Silicon chemistry simply doesn't lend itself to large, complex, molecules.
TFA: The termination shock is the region of the heliosphere where the supersonic solar wind slows to subsonic speed as it merges with the interstellar medium.
Okay boys and girls. Quick, grab your calculator and calculate the speed of sound in space...