If they made street signs, guide rails, and guide-lines that electrically generated heat (using solar powered batteries or all that power spent on streetlights on 24/7 and a good resitor) this system would be much more useful. Being able to see more stuff than potential roadkill would make the road a lot safer. Course, it'd be tough to convert everything, but the converiosn should be relatively cheap.
A little off topic, but...has anyone heard about other apps for car-mounted HUDs? Maybe soon well have maps linked to a GPS showing current location, all the info normally displayed on the *meters in a convenient out of the way place on our windshield, all controlled by voice.
If Only I had a spare Cryogenic chamber to take a nap in...
Okay, wasn't it the Third Law of Thermodynamics that stated that eventually all motion would slow to a stop, and (at least in my interpretation) all systems would eventually just, spin down?
No. Since energy stays constant and thde size of the universe (if closed) will never get to infinity, the energy (whether it is in the form of the kinetic energy you speak of, E=mc^2, or whatever) will just get less dense as the universe expands. The cosmological constant is a force (not completely explained) that, in a snese, helps the third law along: By forcing the expansion of the universe, it prevents a return to order that the recollapse of everything would be.
Check out Hawking on black holes and the increase of entropy that they create...much of the information applies. (the articles are linked from his hompepage at cambridge).(Link)
>I simply can't quite understand his.. ummm.. unique way of doing poetry.
Be glad for that one.
PS--malign.net is a very cool domain name. Hope you do something especially rockin' with it--are you into the whole protest thing? You could use it as a public forum for exposing political/corporate/bigwig corruption/evil/greed/stupidity. "Acidic Satire" is perhaps the tone I'm picturing...make of that phrase what you will.
PPS--"vacant emptinesses"-silly things we say that we think sound important and that make sense to us when we say them, but that are really more superficial than they seem at first. Most often a problem of communicating a good idea effectively (stupid inadeqauacy of language!!).
Sorry, but I cant see "Information doesn't want to be free-it already is" as anything else. What is this supposed to mean? Information may be 'free' (widely disseminated), 'free' of charge(a la open source software or public info about a book), 'free' (open to anyone who wants it), etc etc etc. In all of these meanings there are many possible degrees of freedom, and it does not seem that there is some fundamental way in which information is free in all of them.
Therfore: what the Fsck?!!
Don't take this criticism personally--You probably did mean something, maybe even something cool, but the meaning you had in mind is too much for most of us to extract with accuracy without help, since it is not obvious ftom the accepted meanings of the words employed. Therefore it is a "vacant emptiness" (redundant to stress point). We all need to try and be a little more precise/careful. When we arent, it is fun to laugh and not take ourselves too seriously. Karma bait? I dunno, a lot of slashdotters seem to prefer cloudy pseudo-profundity to clarity, but I find the accusation tasteless and mean.Ad hominem attacks contribute nothing in a disussion concerning the content of the post. Hope you dont think Im being an ass.
The oversimplification of the problem makes the researchers who have been involved sound like idiots, which of course they are not.
Cut scene A: Neurobiologist and psychologist reading paper. Headline "A mixture of Nature and Nurture determines behavior and potential." Both immediately smack foreheads, saying "Of Course!! Why didn't we realize this before!!??" in profoundly astounded tones. Having seen the blinding light of revelation, they go home.
End cut scene.
Of course everybody knows that a mixture of nature (the kind of natural environment that exists) and nurture (what kinds of interaction occur with this environment) determine evrything about the brain.
The question, though, is where these boundaries should be drawn. How much of what we consider in ourselves to be easily influenced by our conscious decisions is determined at birth? What limits have been imposed upon our learning capacity and how quickly we are able to learn? Are there natural/born geniuses? If so, are they the only kind, or can we create genius if we provide the proper set of interactions? Can we make everyone a potential genius through gene therapy, and how much social engineering would be necessary to complete sucha creation?
it is disappointing that the slashdot community has glanced so superficially at these issues. I thought the idea was to get behind the media hype to the truly new and meaty stuff.
Please do not take this critism too personally--I understand that the post was not meant to be particularly serious. 'Course, that's part of what I'm whining about:-)
Assuming you want to take the risk of becoming a bad guy yourself:-)
Maybe we should sick prorams like this onto the tralls of abusive corporate CEOS (read: sweatshop kings) and corrupt politicians themselves, once we have sufficient [shrug] reason to suspect them. Imagine exposing their corruption to the law and the masses simultaneously once it becomes so obviously visible that it is impossible to deny...what a way for geeks to engineer social change!
Although its not very nice...If I had moderator points, youd be 'funny.' Come on Signal, ya gotta admit it...sometimes, whether wemean to or not, we all spout out vacnat emptinesses, and this guy called you for it in a clever manner.
Consilience: Book by E.O Wilson about the unification of science, in which he describes his vision of a bunch of fragmeneted disciplines whose provinces overlap at the edges, but which are growing closer to unity all the time. I thought it was a good book, and perhaps you should read it just to understand what the 'other camp' is thinking.
AFAIK, your claim amounts to the following:
1. Complex systems are more than the sum of their parts; due to complex interactions and stuff, they possess properties that none of their parts have. These properties are commonly called emergent properties.
2. These properties cannot be predicted from simply knowing the properties of the parts.
3. Therefore, any understanding of a complex system needs to start from the top and go down, and any knowledge gained from reductionist dissection is only complementary at best.
Is this approximatley correct? Assuming that it is, I have no choice but to say that The idea that complex systems are not describable from the bottom up is a silly trend which has only persisted because of our ignorance. An example:
In the late 70's/early 80s (I think...) John lovelock created a system called daisyworld in order or demonstrtae emergent properties in an easily uunderstood environment. He was advocating Gainaism at the time, and wanted to show how high-level properties couold emerge from low-level simplicity.
The system contained as simple earth model, with a normal temperature variation along the surface and an sun that got continually hotter w/ time. The planet contained 3 types of daisies-grey, white, and black. Eventually, the planet got hot enough for the black daisies to survive (since they absorbed the most heat). The more daisies there were, the higher (lower? yeah, lower) the albedo of the planet, the more energy it absorbed, and the hotter it got. As the temperature increased, it eventually go too hot near the poles for the black daisies, so grey and white daisies (which reflected more energy) began to thrive near the equator. The mix of grey, white, and black daisies contiued to change according to the 'needs' of the planet, ending up, eventualy, with only a bunch of white daisies for awhile, and then with all life dying as the sun got too hot.
The point: the temperature was regulated by the interactions of the daisies. The planet adjusted itself to work toward conditions favoring life. Lovlelock referred to it as the planets homeostasis. However, the emergent property of temeoprature regualtion could be predicted by reduction of the system into its componenet parts, as long as you knew all the rule and understood the physics behind. In this case--simplified beyond everything weve ever actually seen along similar lines by many orders of magnitude--we understand everything. The only reason this objection to reductionism has held up this long is becasue of our ignorance concerning otehr complex systems like social behavior, tornadoes, and the brain. Someday, well be able to predict everythig form a knowedge about the atoms involved; were just not there yet.
Sorry If ive been unclear...really, check out consilience if you are interested, or even the web of life by Fritjof Capra, for a more in depth discussion.
I imagine it takes a lot more energy to grow new dendrites and synapses than just to modify existing ones. And how do they know in which direction to grow, anyway?
Absolutely correct. So we wouldnt expect new synapses to be grown unless there is a good reason that the synapses couldnt just be modified (occams razor + evolution selecting for the most efficient system). However, I think the argument that it one cannot actually store information that is consciously asccesible *only* using weights is compelling enough a reason. Not that ther is any actual [gasp] proof.
As far as 'knowing' which direction to grow in, and how the connections are built and controlled precisely...well, you hit the nail on the head. AFAIK, nobody has a fscking clue. Some people at my university (Brandeis) and Harvard are collaborating on an attempted exlplanation, but it is all only speculation at this point (if any of you working in such a project are listening, I apologize for the summary judgement! Feel free to correct me!!). The basic idea seems ot be that the neurons excrete some kind of growth factor when they want a new connection; this factor somehow stimulates all cells within a certain distance to send out new dendrites, and the dendrites lach on to whatever they hit first. Doesnt sound very efficient or precise to me..somehow I bet the brain isa lot better at choosing where to send the new dendrites.
If you find anything interesting concerning synaptogenesis (research links, commentary, etc), I would be interested in hearing about them.
The 'weights' you speak of--actually the rate of firing/strength of impulse transmitted)--might change because new synapses are being created between neurons that are already connected. Personally, I think there is more eveidence that new protein channels are being inserted in the synaptic wall, but many others disagree. Althoguh this alteration of a syapses' stregnth (LTP or LDP) permits the creation'alteration of associations between neurons, I do not believe it is sufficient to explain learning(information storage). Behavioral patterns are modified: say, for example, that your pleasure centers are being stimulated at the same time as you hear a certain high-pitched tone. You will soon display a 'preference' for the tone in question, including the full-blown emotional response produced by hormone prduction that we have all come to know and cherish. However, information that you are able to access consciously is different. I am gonna stickj to my guns and state that one needs the creation fo new synapses to actually learn anything.
Of course, this assertion of function is irrelevant(sorry again...but I had to explain myself). The fact that new synapses are created was demonstrated empirically by a bunch of clever fellows who attached radioactive tracers to molecules associated with synaptic walls and then taking samples (these experiments were all on rats, of course) over a period of time and comparing the amount of radioactivity deiplayed. The average number of synapses/mm^2 from the same region changed quite a bit in response to various stimluli. I dont have a refernce on hand, but check your text. Im sure youll find plenty.
If no new synapses were built you wouldnt be able to learn anything, create new associations, change, or even egt really good at the latest FPS. Now, I dont know about you, but as for me...youre absolutely right!;-)
My advice: takea neurobiology course instead of a psych course. The biological underpinnings of behavior are being discoverd and soon (decades, maybe, but still soon) psychology will disappear, since it will have been reduced to biology. MAybe by then Evrythign will have been reduced to physcis under GUT anyway...read consilience.
sorry for the rambling...its real late. Just wanted to point out what I am sure is obvious to you in retrospect.
And that is what the debate is really about: whether or not the rate one is able to learn is static or if its potetntial is detemnied by genetics. The ability to retain information once it is learnde is also very important--check out the article on making smart mice by altering their genes
In this case, they put in a few exra copies of a gene that codes for the protein channels necessary for LTP (Long-Term-Potentiation: the name neuropysch types have for the synapse strengthening that is thought ot be the basis of all learning). The mice got a lot 'smarter': they could go through mazes faster, and they learned new tasks much more rapidly than their genetically deficient peers due to their ability to rapidly integrate information into their brain.
The issue is really not as obvious as the above posters seem to be claiming. 'nuff said.
violence and anger-a sea of rasised fists-can never succeed in a battle against tyranny...they only erect new manifestataions of it and replace the instituions that propagate it with newer, subtler ones.
The history of all violent revolutions tells us this unambiguously. Lenin worked in a hospital for orphans for 2 years...but he got angry. It was all downhill fom there. God only knows how the hell well ever be able to change stuff without the energy and visibility of anger...one o fthe tragedies of human history is that almost all revolutionary sentiment has been enslaved by the hatred, anger, and violence it rose up against.
There *may* be a finite number of resources; it depends on whether you term knowledge and technology as resources, in which case I'd have to claim it's fundamentally unbounded.
even these have limits...there are some problems the human mind is simply not able to solve. Ever tried figuring out how to make energy on a barren, blasted rock drained of natural resources with, say, a piece of bubble gum and some bailing twine? (with a time limit, of course...)
But the causes weren't unrelated: they were nearly all connected, in one form or another, to perceptions of threats to freedom and to corporate greed and immorality, and to the failure of domestic or international governmental authorities to curb or respond to either
Once the corporate disonformation system is dismantled and people really begin to see what our ages-old philosophy of greed has done to us, the corporate system really has no chance of surviving. Perhaps distributism will take its place; perhaps capitalism will even die off eventually.
Its nice to say things like that. Warm and fuzzzy, like most illusions and few truths. Katz is perhaps too optimistic: the hard, more factually based truth is that the system is not going to give up and fall down as soon as a few protestors start showing up in a few cities. The corporations have power, and histroy has been nothing if not a record of _just_how_far people will go to hold on to their power, at whatever cost to the current morality of convenience. Champion the liberating power of information technology all you want, we need planning. The system has all the resources, historical inertia on its side, and it has the advantage of being the defender. McTimes, the Gore and Bush campaigns (both brought to you by Shell (tm)), The disillusined rhetoric of those who have tried to change things and have failed (read: the advice of the boomer generation), social power/money, the established literary base (bought and propped up by the affluent, who like to think of themselves as *good*) which proclaims that our system is th best ever thought up, tax collectors, the army, the police---all of these are forms of power, each capable fo inflicitng violence of one flavor or another on any attmpt to steal power from those who have monopolized it for so long.
We need a plan.
There are plenty of smart people here. Perhaps we can start providing some real ideas, stuff taht might work, ways to Fight against the corporate machine and all the ways the Status Quo has of attacking proponents of change. With the help of people like the folk at Znet, maybe we can actually get something done. This is as good a place as any to begin the fight against corporatism. Slashdot is pretty much immune to corporate attack tde to its size and popularoty, something not true for most independent media outlets, and we have long discussed the issues behind corporate stupidity and greed (patents, world-domination efforts, monopolies: read the $ in M$!!), privacy abuses, and the dangers of unregulated self-interest. We are an educated communityu, many of us with enough influene within the corporate world to actually change things...something present in almost no other commmunity as committed to social change as Slashdot is.
We are Geeks! Hear us roar! Lets F$%! some shit up! (constructively, of course;-)
"Do not doubt that a small, comitted group of people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." -Margaret Mead
before we blast them as the Great Evil, look at some of the good they can do - ideally, a corporation wants money, it gains this by producing a product and selling it. it sells it by making its product something we want.
Unfortunately, sometimes a corporation can force us to buy things that we need (say food, medical suplies, shelter, etc.) and the issue of choosing to purchase their product becomes the choice to live or to die (or at least live in a very compromised fashion). Admittedly, this is not often the case in the US, where competition generally insures that at least one of the producers of a given product wil retain a set of ethics, but it occurs frequently in developing coundtries, where oligarchies or monopolies are more easily established (and maintained once tehy are established, with the help of little pocket grease for the local robber baron). In addition, ethical producers are not alwys to be found. WItness the difficulty in _actually_Getting_ your hands on clothes not producedc by multinational giants who employ the slave-labor of children...
Corporations, then, are able to frequently frofit from the need of the people rather than their want. Once they have established a monopoly, it is difficult ot exercise the kind of control-through boycotting that you seem to be implicitly supporting. If your local supermarket buys food from companies that use (for example) huge indiscriminate fishing nets to collect 'product' more efficiently (that simply happens to kill everything they encounter, devastating local ecologies and eventually destroying the very sytem on which it depends), but there are no other food suppliers locally, what should one do?
My point is, corporations have achieved some pretty spectaculary forms of efficency (things individuals simple could not have accomplished on their own)
Agreed. however, the most important word in the sentence is "indivduals." It is not foolish (IMHO) to believe that a concerted group of intellligent, educated people are capable of choosing for themswelves what products would be most beneficial for them. If the decisions about what to produce were made communally (read: via a direct democracy a la Athens, once again made fesaable through the net) and the means of priduction were also collectively owned, it is entirely possible to reatin distributive efficiency while avoiding the imprisoning/self-destructive lack of morality created when one only pays attention to The Bottom Line. I have faith that the collective intelligence of a people (you shall be assimilated...) is at;least as capable of making effective decisions as the semi-blind forces of the market. Then again, perhaps I am too unrealsitic about human ability, but I sincerely believe that the information revolution--and it is a revolution, one that has only just begun--will result in the inevitable education of mankind. Everyone will benefit. Perhaps this link between an increased ability to disseminate information and the revolutionary behavior of educated people fighting for their futre was the connection Katz was trying to establish in his paper [Shrug].
IMO anyone who says something intelligent should be listened to...
Not such a bad thing...most political sentiments are previewed in music, and when the speakers are intelligent, educated (RATM members all have degrees, most Ivy, whatever its good for), how can it be foolish to take political advice from a band? In this case, IMHO, the band in question is smarter than most odf our elected representatives, and they certainly turn their energies to more conrtuctive results (ever check how much of their gross theydoante to charities?)
bottom line for Ignorant people: educate tyourself before letting your opinions become too firm.
"Free trade" has no net benefit for these people OR their country. The sole beneficiary is the corporation. But then again, that seems to be the whole point of the "free trade" system, anyway...
Or at least the CEOs benefit.
Not even the corporation, if one takes a longer view of things...they will lose out eventually once the economies of the disadvataged countries (the overburdened and 'overtaxed social welfare systems') collapse. The consumers will no longer be able to purchase the grain, or anythingn else for that matter. The original corporate oppressor wil then lose revenue, possibly going out of business (hopefully) or reloacting (probably) or propping up the economy of the client state with loans and otehr tricky maneuvers of capitalism (very probably).
IMF bailouts and the like are ways to temporarily prop-up other countries' economies in order to ensure that they remain our 'trading partners' (read: unwilling dependents) economically, and politically our allies "read: slaves because of their own corporate interest and the political muscle it has in their demo/pluto-cracies).
However, debt can only increase for so long, and currencies can only be devalued to a certain limit before an economy collapses from its own excesses and/or its people revolt.
Scary. If the US economy collapses (in whatever panic scenario you want: stock bubble colapsing due to overvaluation, too much 'wealth effect' buying with little increase in actual infrastructure and collapse of debt pyramid seems the most likely of teh doom scenarios), then all of the other economies it has been propping up with its buying power will fail too. Any recession that starts here will quickly become global, and will magnify itself in uncontrollable feedback loops....
The fudamnetal flaw of capitalism, IMHO, is that the philosophy it springs from does not realize that it is in the selfish (best) interest of everyone to cooperate with everyone else. This is the lesson of evolution, clearly seen in millions of (successful, despite anti-Marxian dissenters amongst their ranks;-) ant colonies, the existence of biologically coded human morality at all, and the socibiologists (esp. E.O. Wilson). Until this realization is somehow forced home we will be doomed to see fruitless repeats of the struggle to protect mankind from his own greed...Seattle is only the beginning; the tip of the iceberg of emotional discontent and intellectual unease that currently exists about the promise of capitalism and the limits of growth....
Who knows? Maybe sombody smart will save us from our own stupidities yet?
In optimism,
Matt
Feel free to email me, unless you are a compusive spammer
Check out the clubofrome.com and their book, _The Limits of Growth_. Very interesting stuff that wa revolutionary when it was published, and prolly now too.
How bout AI or a downloaded personality? Or perhaps a program suite containing the genome and programs to filter/analyze it? I'm sure well figure out plenty of appplications once we get the opportunity.
Until they get a real spectrum taken directly from these planets, it is worthless to spceculate about the temperature of these planets. Residual heating from gravitational formation/subsequent contraction (as seen most noably in Jupiter) and atmospheric effects (as pointed out elsewhere)could and probably do have _huge_ effects on the actual temperature ofthese places. SO, why does this guy sound as though hes convinced the place is actually as warm as "a hot day in sacramento" when he, a profssional astronomer, must surely know that we just cant tell how hot it is yet...?
What is this equilibrium temperature stuff, and why refer to it if it is only a very rough guideline? -confused, esperandus
Slashdot Mirror
A little off topic, but...has anyone heard about other apps for car-mounted HUDs? Maybe soon well have maps linked to a GPS showing current location, all the info normally displayed on the *meters in a convenient out of the way place on our windshield, all controlled by voice.
If Only I had a spare Cryogenic chamber to take a nap in...
No. Since energy stays constant and thde size of the universe (if closed) will never get to infinity, the energy (whether it is in the form of the kinetic energy you speak of, E=mc^2, or whatever) will just get less dense as the universe expands. The cosmological constant is a force (not completely explained) that, in a snese, helps the third law along: By forcing the expansion of the universe, it prevents a return to order that the recollapse of everything would be.
Check out Hawking on black holes and the increase of entropy that they create...much of the information applies. (the articles are linked from his hompepage at cambridge).(Link)
Be glad for that one.
PS--malign.net is a very cool domain name. Hope you do something especially rockin' with it--are you into the whole protest thing? You could use it as a public forum for exposing political/corporate/bigwig corruption/evil/greed/stupidity. "Acidic Satire" is perhaps the tone I'm picturing...make of that phrase what you will.
PPS--"vacant emptinesses"-silly things we say that we think sound important and that make sense to us when we say them, but that are really more superficial than they seem at first. Most often a problem of communicating a good idea effectively (stupid inadeqauacy of language!!).
Sorry, but I cant see "Information doesn't want to be free-it already is" as anything else. What is this supposed to mean? Information may be 'free' (widely disseminated), 'free' of charge(a la open source software or public info about a book), 'free' (open to anyone who wants it), etc etc etc. In all of these meanings there are many possible degrees of freedom, and it does not seem that there is some fundamental way in which information is free in all of them.
Therfore: what the Fsck?!!
Don't take this criticism personally--You probably did mean something, maybe even something cool, but the meaning you had in mind is too much for most of us to extract with accuracy without help, since it is not obvious ftom the accepted meanings of the words employed. Therefore it is a "vacant emptiness" (redundant to stress point). We all need to try and be a little more precise/careful. When we arent, it is fun to laugh and not take ourselves too seriously. Karma bait? I dunno, a lot of slashdotters seem to prefer cloudy pseudo-profundity to clarity, but I find the accusation tasteless and mean.Ad hominem attacks contribute nothing in a disussion concerning the content of the post. Hope you dont think Im being an ass.
later.
Cut scene A: Neurobiologist and psychologist reading paper. Headline "A mixture of Nature and Nurture determines behavior and potential." Both immediately smack foreheads, saying "Of Course!! Why didn't we realize this before!!??" in profoundly astounded tones. Having seen the blinding light of revelation, they go home.
End cut scene.
Of course everybody knows that a mixture of nature (the kind of natural environment that exists) and nurture (what kinds of interaction occur with this environment) determine evrything about the brain.
The question, though, is where these boundaries should be drawn. How much of what we consider in ourselves to be easily influenced by our conscious decisions is determined at birth? What limits have been imposed upon our learning capacity and how quickly we are able to learn? Are there natural/born geniuses? If so, are they the only kind, or can we create genius if we provide the proper set of interactions? Can we make everyone a potential genius through gene therapy, and how much social engineering would be necessary to complete sucha creation?
it is disappointing that the slashdot community has glanced so superficially at these issues. I thought the idea was to get behind the media hype to the truly new and meaty stuff.
Please do not take this critism too personally--I understand that the post was not meant to be particularly serious. 'Course, that's part of what I'm whining about :-)
Matt
Maybe we should sick prorams like this onto the tralls of abusive corporate CEOS (read: sweatshop kings) and corrupt politicians themselves, once we have sufficient [shrug] reason to suspect them. Imagine exposing their corruption to the law and the masses simultaneously once it becomes so obviously visible that it is impossible to deny...what a way for geeks to engineer social change!
Dr. Moureau reference?
Although its not very nice...If I had moderator points, youd be 'funny.' Come on Signal, ya gotta admit it...sometimes, whether wemean to or not, we all spout out vacnat emptinesses, and this guy called you for it in a clever manner.
AFAIK, your claim amounts to the following:
1. Complex systems are more than the sum of their parts; due to complex interactions and stuff, they possess properties that none of their parts have. These properties are commonly called emergent properties.
2. These properties cannot be predicted from simply knowing the properties of the parts.
3. Therefore, any understanding of a complex system needs to start from the top and go down, and any knowledge gained from reductionist dissection is only complementary at best.
Is this approximatley correct? Assuming that it is, I have no choice but to say that The idea that complex systems are not describable from the bottom up is a silly trend which has only persisted because of our ignorance. An example:
In the late 70's/early 80s (I think...) John lovelock created a system called daisyworld in order or demonstrtae emergent properties in an easily uunderstood environment. He was advocating Gainaism at the time, and wanted to show how high-level properties couold emerge from low-level simplicity.
The system contained as simple earth model, with a normal temperature variation along the surface and an sun that got continually hotter w/ time. The planet contained 3 types of daisies-grey, white, and black. Eventually, the planet got hot enough for the black daisies to survive (since they absorbed the most heat). The more daisies there were, the higher (lower? yeah, lower) the albedo of the planet, the more energy it absorbed, and the hotter it got. As the temperature increased, it eventually go too hot near the poles for the black daisies, so grey and white daisies (which reflected more energy) began to thrive near the equator. The mix of grey, white, and black daisies contiued to change according to the 'needs' of the planet, ending up, eventualy, with only a bunch of white daisies for awhile, and then with all life dying as the sun got too hot.
The point: the temperature was regulated by the interactions of the daisies. The planet adjusted itself to work toward conditions favoring life. Lovlelock referred to it as the planets homeostasis. However, the emergent property of temeoprature regualtion could be predicted by reduction of the system into its componenet parts, as long as you knew all the rule and understood the physics behind. In this case--simplified beyond everything weve ever actually seen along similar lines by many orders of magnitude--we understand everything. The only reason this objection to reductionism has held up this long is becasue of our ignorance concerning otehr complex systems like social behavior, tornadoes, and the brain. Someday, well be able to predict everythig form a knowedge about the atoms involved; were just not there yet.
Sorry If ive been unclear...really, check out consilience if you are interested, or even the web of life by Fritjof Capra, for a more in depth discussion.
"Until all are one."-Optimus Prime (a Buddhist?)
Absolutely correct. So we wouldnt expect new synapses to be grown unless there is a good reason that the synapses couldnt just be modified (occams razor + evolution selecting for the most efficient system). However, I think the argument that it one cannot actually store information that is consciously asccesible *only* using weights is compelling enough a reason. Not that ther is any actual [gasp] proof.
As far as 'knowing' which direction to grow in, and how the connections are built and controlled precisely...well, you hit the nail on the head. AFAIK, nobody has a fscking clue. Some people at my university (Brandeis) and Harvard are collaborating on an attempted exlplanation, but it is all only speculation at this point (if any of you working in such a project are listening, I apologize for the summary judgement! Feel free to correct me!!). The basic idea seems ot be that the neurons excrete some kind of growth factor when they want a new connection; this factor somehow stimulates all cells within a certain distance to send out new dendrites, and the dendrites lach on to whatever they hit first. Doesnt sound very efficient or precise to me..somehow I bet the brain isa lot better at choosing where to send the new dendrites.
If you find anything interesting concerning synaptogenesis (research links, commentary, etc), I would be interested in hearing about them.
The 'weights' you speak of--actually the rate of firing/strength of impulse transmitted)--might change because new synapses are being created between neurons that are already connected. Personally, I think there is more eveidence that new protein channels are being inserted in the synaptic wall, but many others disagree. Althoguh this alteration of a syapses' stregnth (LTP or LDP) permits the creation'alteration of associations between neurons, I do not believe it is sufficient to explain learning(information storage). Behavioral patterns are modified: say, for example, that your pleasure centers are being stimulated at the same time as you hear a certain high-pitched tone. You will soon display a 'preference' for the tone in question, including the full-blown emotional response produced by hormone prduction that we have all come to know and cherish. However, information that you are able to access consciously is different. I am gonna stickj to my guns and state that one needs the creation fo new synapses to actually learn anything.
Of course, this assertion of function is irrelevant(sorry again...but I had to explain myself). The fact that new synapses are created was demonstrated empirically by a bunch of clever fellows who attached radioactive tracers to molecules associated with synaptic walls and then taking samples (these experiments were all on rats, of course) over a period of time and comparing the amount of radioactivity deiplayed. The average number of synapses/mm^2 from the same region changed quite a bit in response to various stimluli. I dont have a refernce on hand, but check your text. Im sure youll find plenty.
whats a neurobiology?
My advice: takea neurobiology course instead of a psych course. The biological underpinnings of behavior are being discoverd and soon (decades, maybe, but still soon) psychology will disappear, since it will have been reduced to biology. MAybe by then Evrythign will have been reduced to physcis under GUT anyway...read consilience.
sorry for the rambling...its real late. Just wanted to point out what I am sure is obvious to you in retrospect.
TTFN (ta-ta-for-now, as tigger would say)
- (http://biomedicine.about.com/business/biotech/
l ibrary/weekly/aa090299.htm)
In this case, they put in a few exra copies of a gene that codes for the protein channels necessary for LTP (Long-Term-Potentiation: the name neuropysch types have for the synapse strengthening that is thought ot be the basis of all learning). The mice got a lot 'smarter': they could go through mazes faster, and they learned new tasks much more rapidly than their genetically deficient peers due to their ability to rapidly integrate information into their brain.The issue is really not as obvious as the above posters seem to be claiming. 'nuff said.
So we shouldnt be afraid of change, and support a valid successor once it ocmes out. But the ideology behind linux will never go away...
The history of all violent revolutions tells us this unambiguously. Lenin worked in a hospital for orphans for 2 years...but he got angry. It was all downhill fom there. God only knows how the hell well ever be able to change stuff without the energy and visibility of anger...one o fthe tragedies of human history is that almost all revolutionary sentiment has been enslaved by the hatred, anger, and violence it rose up against.
to quote John Lennon "All we need is love..."
even these have limits...there are some problems the human mind is simply not able to solve. Ever tried figuring out how to make energy on a barren, blasted rock drained of natural resources with, say, a piece of bubble gum and some bailing twine? (with a time limit, of course...)
Once the corporate disonformation system is dismantled and people really begin to see what our ages-old philosophy of greed has done to us, the corporate system really has no chance of surviving. Perhaps distributism will take its place; perhaps capitalism will even die off eventually.
Its nice to say things like that. Warm and fuzzzy, like most illusions and few truths. Katz is perhaps too optimistic: the hard, more factually based truth is that the system is not going to give up and fall down as soon as a few protestors start showing up in a few cities. The corporations have power, and histroy has been nothing if not a record of _just_how_far people will go to hold on to their power, at whatever cost to the current morality of convenience. Champion the liberating power of information technology all you want, we need planning. The system has all the resources, historical inertia on its side, and it has the advantage of being the defender. McTimes, the Gore and Bush campaigns (both brought to you by Shell (tm)), The disillusined rhetoric of those who have tried to change things and have failed (read: the advice of the boomer generation), social power/money, the established literary base (bought and propped up by the affluent, who like to think of themselves as *good*) which proclaims that our system is th best ever thought up, tax collectors, the army, the police---all of these are forms of power, each capable fo inflicitng violence of one flavor or another on any attmpt to steal power from those who have monopolized it for so long.
We need a plan.
There are plenty of smart people here. Perhaps we can start providing some real ideas, stuff taht might work, ways to Fight against the corporate machine and all the ways the Status Quo has of attacking proponents of change. With the help of people like the folk at Znet, maybe we can actually get something done. This is as good a place as any to begin the fight against corporatism. Slashdot is pretty much immune to corporate attack tde to its size and popularoty, something not true for most independent media outlets, and we have long discussed the issues behind corporate stupidity and greed (patents, world-domination efforts, monopolies: read the $ in M$!!), privacy abuses, and the dangers of unregulated self-interest. We are an educated communityu, many of us with enough influene within the corporate world to actually change things...something present in almost no other commmunity as committed to social change as Slashdot is.
We are Geeks! Hear us roar! Lets F$%! some shit up! (constructively, of course ;-)
"Do not doubt that a small, comitted group of people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." -Margaret Mead
Unfortunately, sometimes a corporation can force us to buy things that we need (say food, medical suplies, shelter, etc.) and the issue of choosing to purchase their product becomes the choice to live or to die (or at least live in a very compromised fashion). Admittedly, this is not often the case in the US, where competition generally insures that at least one of the producers of a given product wil retain a set of ethics, but it occurs frequently in developing coundtries, where oligarchies or monopolies are more easily established (and maintained once tehy are established, with the help of little pocket grease for the local robber baron). In addition, ethical producers are not alwys to be found. WItness the difficulty in _actually_Getting_ your hands on clothes not producedc by multinational giants who employ the slave-labor of children...
Corporations, then, are able to frequently frofit from the need of the people rather than their want. Once they have established a monopoly, it is difficult ot exercise the kind of control-through boycotting that you seem to be implicitly supporting. If your local supermarket buys food from companies that use (for example) huge indiscriminate fishing nets to collect 'product' more efficiently (that simply happens to kill everything they encounter, devastating local ecologies and eventually destroying the very sytem on which it depends), but there are no other food suppliers locally, what should one do?
My point is, corporations have achieved some pretty spectaculary forms of efficency (things individuals simple could not have accomplished on their own)
Agreed. however, the most important word in the sentence is "indivduals." It is not foolish (IMHO) to believe that a concerted group of intellligent, educated people are capable of choosing for themswelves what products would be most beneficial for them. If the decisions about what to produce were made communally (read: via a direct democracy a la Athens, once again made fesaable through the net) and the means of priduction were also collectively owned, it is entirely possible to reatin distributive efficiency while avoiding the imprisoning/self-destructive lack of morality created when one only pays attention to The Bottom Line. I have faith that the collective intelligence of a people (you shall be assimilated...) is at ;least as capable of making effective decisions as the semi-blind forces of the market. Then again, perhaps I am too unrealsitic about human ability, but I sincerely believe that the information revolution--and it is a revolution, one that has only just begun--will result in the inevitable education of mankind. Everyone will benefit. Perhaps this link between an increased ability to disseminate information and the revolutionary behavior of educated people fighting for their futre was the connection Katz was trying to establish in his paper [Shrug].
Hope this isnt too scary.
Matt
Mcrouch@brandeis.edu
WEll PUT! My kingdom for some moderations points....
college dining halls. Starbucks.
Not such a bad thing...most political sentiments are previewed in music, and when the speakers are intelligent, educated (RATM members all have degrees, most Ivy, whatever its good for), how can it be foolish to take political advice from a band? In this case, IMHO, the band in question is smarter than most odf our elected representatives, and they certainly turn their energies to more conrtuctive results (ever check how much of their gross theydoante to charities?)
bottom line for Ignorant people: educate tyourself before letting your opinions become too firm.
Or at least the CEOs benefit.
Not even the corporation, if one takes a longer view of things...they will lose out eventually once the economies of the disadvataged countries (the overburdened and 'overtaxed social welfare systems') collapse. The consumers will no longer be able to purchase the grain, or anythingn else for that matter. The original corporate oppressor wil then lose revenue, possibly going out of business (hopefully) or reloacting (probably) or propping up the economy of the client state with loans and otehr tricky maneuvers of capitalism (very probably).
IMF bailouts and the like are ways to temporarily prop-up other countries' economies in order to ensure that they remain our 'trading partners' (read: unwilling dependents) economically, and politically our allies "read: slaves because of their own corporate interest and the political muscle it has in their demo/pluto-cracies).
However, debt can only increase for so long, and currencies can only be devalued to a certain limit before an economy collapses from its own excesses and/or its people revolt.
Scary. If the US economy collapses (in whatever panic scenario you want: stock bubble colapsing due to overvaluation, too much 'wealth effect' buying with little increase in actual infrastructure and collapse of debt pyramid seems the most likely of teh doom scenarios), then all of the other economies it has been propping up with its buying power will fail too. Any recession that starts here will quickly become global, and will magnify itself in uncontrollable feedback loops....
The fudamnetal flaw of capitalism, IMHO, is that the philosophy it springs from does not realize that it is in the selfish (best) interest of everyone to cooperate with everyone else. This is the lesson of evolution, clearly seen in millions of (successful, despite anti-Marxian dissenters amongst their ranks;-) ant colonies, the existence of biologically coded human morality at all, and the socibiologists (esp. E.O. Wilson). Until this realization is somehow forced home we will be doomed to see fruitless repeats of the struggle to protect mankind from his own greed...Seattle is only the beginning; the tip of the iceberg of emotional discontent and intellectual unease that currently exists about the promise of capitalism and the limits of growth....
Who knows? Maybe sombody smart will save us from our own stupidities yet?
In optimism,
Matt
Feel free to email me, unless you are a compusive spammer
mcrouch@brandeis.edu
Check out the clubofrome.com and their book, _The Limits of Growth_. Very interesting stuff that wa revolutionary when it was published, and prolly now too.
How bout AI or a downloaded personality? Or perhaps a program suite containing the genome and programs to filter/analyze it? I'm sure well figure out plenty of appplications once we get the opportunity.
What is this equilibrium temperature stuff, and why refer to it if it is only a very rough guideline? -confused, esperandus