For example, I believe its generally accepted that acupuncture [nih.gov] does something, we're just not sure how and what.
The problem with acupuncture studies is that they can't be done double-blinded: that is, the acupuncturist always knows whether he is doing "real" acupuncture or "sham" acupuncture*. This then leads to a bias effect, in which the patient is unconsciously cued as to whether or not the treatment "should" work, and expectation effects are stronger than any purported acupuncture benefits (e.g., Bausell et al 2005, Eval Health Prof). I remember a study, which I cannot dig up at the moment, in which the researchers gave acting lessons to the acupuncturist to ensure that they behaved in exactly the same way with respect to the patients between real and sham treatments, and when they did so acupuncture did not outdo the placebo.
* You can, in theory, do double-blinded by randomly assigning patients to one of two technicians, both of which were naive to acupuncture treatment before the study's beginning. They are then trained equally on two different sets of acupuncture points, one valid and one invalid, with no knowledge of which one of them is which. However, objectively this isn't really a fair test of acupuncture: consider the case where you tried to tackle the effectiveness of heart surgery using the same model.
Having read the original paper to the best of my ability (which is not perhaps very good), as far as I can see, the "critics" are arguing that the gravitational ripples might not have been caused by inflation directly, but by another process which happens to be a by-product of inflation. So unless I'm missing something, even if the critics are right, BICEP2 has still provided proof of inflation.
When you control for species, there are no differences between humans and lizards.
It's good that sexual discrimination legislation has (mostly) sorted out the problem of women not being paid the same for equal work. That doesn't change the fact that, on the whole, there's a salary gap. As the linked article points out, some big factors out of this are the fact that women tend to leave their jobs more early, to have more intermittent commitments to work. The article seems quite content to leave the implication that, basically, this means that it's all the fault of women for just not caring about their career enough. Much more relevant would be an examination of why women are more likely to have this lack of commitment, and whether e.g. bullying in the work place, or unfavourable maternity/paternity leave arrangements are contributing to this. In the UK, for example, the statutes are actually quite sexist in this regard: statutory maternity leave is available for a year, but statutory paternity leave is only available for at most half a year, and that requires that the mother return to work; otherwise it is only two weeks. Which means that, should a couple wish to start a family, it is necessarily the mother that is going to take the brunt of time away from work and the perceived lack of career commitment that will result.
The article summary is a bit misleading. Universal Credit has from beginning to end been the child of the Department of Work and Pensions. The Government Digital Service, the in-house IT design expert office, is technically part of the Cabinet Office, but that's only because it's a centralised IT design service meant to serve all branches of the government. Also, the summary skips over the critical part of the article: the GDS is pulling out because the project is being run in direct contradiction with their own recommendations. Looking at the situation, it's difficult to apportion any part of the blame for the project troubles to the Cabinet Office; it seems to lie entirely on the shoulders of the DWP.
Because of the initial chicken-and-egg problem. The Slashdot moderation system requires a large base of committed users willing to spend time on moderation, but if new users are only exposed to an unmoderated comment system, it's hard to convince them (or at least, the worthwhile ones) to exert any effort on the system. Even on existing sites, you're faced with the problem that the undesirable users are more committed to the site than the desirable ones, and enabling user moderation will make that so much worse in the short term that it will choke off the long-term. By virtue of its age, Slashdot circumvented this: no real competition, no expectation of moderation at all initially, and novelty of the moderation system all served to build a large base of potential moderators at launch of moderation. Even then, it's hard to estimate what degree of the success was just luck.
Maybe this is a silly, minor thing, but it bothers me these sort of blurbs always just talk about faceless "scientists." Does it really take that much work to find out who the principal researchers were? Maybe more people would be inspired to get into science if it actually seemed to come with some measure of face rather than anonymity in a lab coat.
The issue here isn't that there's iPhone apps being developed during a recession, it's that money is being invested in a duplication of services when the government is looking to slash spending by up to 40% across the board. When we're looking at a devastation of public services, it's hard to condone spending intended to benefit a minority of Britons with access to a luxury device.
Compare that to the other religions. To the best of my knowledge, there is no super-secret ultra-eyes-only version of the Bible that only the elite Christians get to read. There is no "not for the viewing of non-believers" version of the Qu'ran that only the most devout Muslims get to read. But there are secret Scientology documents which explain core beliefs of Scientology that the general rank and file of the CoS do not have access to.
Unfortunately, it's a bit more complicated than that. Esotericism is, at least historically, a common religious practice. Gnosticism, Mormonism, at least a few Buddhist sects, and arguably the Masonic tradition all spring to mind. All of these have the idea that there are truths which should not be made available to the uninitiated, as they are not prepared to receive them correctly.
So this is the complicated problem: there are no really good grounds for condemning Scientology as a religion. The problems arise, rather, from the Church of Scientology as an institution. Letting aside the heavy-handed tactics used to recruit new members and to protect the Church, the fees charged for initiation seem to shift the practice from esotericism to exploitation. It's worth pointing out that very few people have objections to the Free Zone, emphasizing that the primary objection to the Church of Scientology is fundamentally organizational, rather than religious per se.
I'm no expert or insider in the game industry at all, but console manufacturers have to be aware that a portion of their current success relative to PC gaming has to do with their platform standardization, the fact that games "just work" on consoles. Upgradeable system software is already a worrisome step away from that golden standard, and homebrew and system hacks are getting back into PC-level of complexity. Which is fine, as long as people recognize any problems they might have are a result of their own messing around, and not a fault of the console manufacturer. That's pretty much what their efforts accomplish, really. Certainly they haven't been able to stamp out homebrew.
So it's not entirely unreasonable for console manufacturers to be taking this attitude. Should you be allowed to do whatever you want with your own hardware? Yes, but the hardware manufacturer has no obligation to make it easy for you.
The honest way of asking the question would be "do you believe murderers should be executed?"
This isn't entirely "honest" either, as it creates a bias in the respondent by portraying the person to be executed as guilty. If you contrasted the results of a poll done with that question to one where the question was, "Do you support the execution of people convicted of murder?" you'd likely find that you had more in favour of capital punishment in the former survey. By phrasing it in the less direct way, you leave open the possibility that the person has been wrongfully convicted, and that would make some of your respondents hesitate.
All of which is to say: poll design is very hard, and even when you're not setting out to be "blatantly dishonest" it's possible to bias results. As others have said, never trust a poll where you don't get to see the survey design (more than just the question of immediate relevance, as other questions asked can also bias the respondent to a particular mindset).
At the same time, you prove one of his points. Your post is a morass of jargon and acronyms that form an obstacle to contribution. My work-related knowledge might be useful and appreciated on Wikipedia, but I don't have the time to read all these incomprehensibly-named standards for inclusion to find out, less time to write up an article that ends up getting deleted because it violated one of these standards, and even less to defend it in the deletion process. It was hard enough to justify spending time on writing Wikipedia articles when the only issue was the worry that it would be modified by a troll or non-specialist afterwards; when the concerns starts being editors and administrators, then there's just no question of participation. Nor is this attitude limited to just me; I can tell my peers feel the same way by the fact that the articles relating to my research interests are all crap.
Wikipedia's basic issue is and has always been how to get people knowledgeable in a subject to write on that subject. Wikipedians might think this inclusionist vs deletionist debate is "ancient history," but the way it has been settled is a barrier to participation by experts. Standard encyclopedias are pro-actively exclusionist. They ask people to participate, and so people are happy to devote effort to an article, knowing that their work is guaranteed to be accepted. Wikipedia is retroactively deletionist, applying a raft of various inclusions standards to written articles, with no clear place to go and ask, "If I were to write this article, will it be accepted?" The perception now is that writing a Wikipedia article necessarily includes committing to defending your work in deletion proceedings. And that is more of a time commitment than most experts are willing to put out.
I think his point might be this: when you enforce strong password policies, you reduce exposure but you do not prevent someone gaining access to your systems. They only have to be lucky once. Strong password policies make it harder for them to be lucky, but not impossible. What do you gain with a strong password policy? You make it much more difficult for someone to use a dictionary attack. Aren't there other ways to protect against that?
What do you lose with a strong password policy? Good user habits. They will start writing passwords down, or reusing them, and in general starting to do thinks we know you shouldn't. The policy starts becoming a direct impediment to the users, and so they naturally do their best to work around it. You may have reduced your exposure to brute force attacks, but you've opened yourself up to social engineering, and it's not clear that you've won by doing so.
Which is why (I think) he makes the point about user education. Getting users to follow good security procedures would likely solve more problems than any possible technical solution. This in turn requires a recognition that there are certain technical solutions you simply cannot put in place if you want people to use your system in a secure fashion.
Does anybody who has spent more than 2 minutes thinking about the human mind really believe that first argument?
In the sense that it is an oversimplification, useful to establish things in a word-count limited introduction, but whose primary role seems to be to lead laypeople to grotesque and frightening misapprehensions, no, neuroscientists don't believe that first argument.
It is unquestionable that there is neural activity in the absence of sensory stimuli or motor response. It is also known that this activity is not unstructured but correlated across the neuronal population (though the significance of this fact is a point of dispute). Nor does anyone assume that this activity does not have the ability to influence the response of an organism -- neuronal activity is neuronal activity.
At the same time, the paramount task of the nervous system is to process the environment around the organism and respond to it appropriately. To be successful in the natural selection sense, you cannot ignore pain, mating signals, fire, loud noises, sudden movements, etc., and when something comes up, you must be able to formulate and implement a strategy which can actually deal with the situation that stimulus describes. Sensory experience is a huge part of neural activity, and if deprived of it long enough -- so that the only activity is the spontaneous activity mentioned above -- the brain enters a degenerate state. Or, to put it another way, you go insane.
The nervous system, then, is a massively complex system which has a baseline pattern of activity, is receiving constant input from a variety of sensory organs (even when you close your eyes, or plug your ears, you receive input from them; it's just meaningless), all of which is being modulated by "supervisory systems" (e.g, the dopaminergic and serotonergic systems) that control meta-response properties such as attention, anticipation, learning, expectation, and so on. The debate can be reduced to two issues. The first is: once you have accounted for stimulus-driven activity and the effects of the higher-order supervisory systems, does the baseline activity contribute any significant fraction of the organism's final response? And if so, is the baseline activity no more than the muddled-together echo of past stimulus-driven activity rattling around the recurrent network that is the brain and can thus be regarded as simply random noise, or is it meaningful in its own right?
The paper in question tries to address the first of these questions. Their results seem to demonstrate that a large fraction of the inter-trial variability in a motor task cannot be explained by known modulating factors such as attention, and thus can be attributed primarily to the baseline activity. Thus, baseline activity would appear to be a major influence on response. The second question remains open, and it is really the core of the issue. These results, however, go a long way towards making it a pressing issue.
The experiment may well be scientifically interesting, but not for the reason advertised.
The experiment is scientifically interesting, and for exactly the reasons advertised. There is a fundamental difference between neuroscience and psychology. One studies the operation of the nervous system, and the other studies the nature of the human mind. The basic element of study of neuroscience is spikes, of which you are never aware; psychology interests itself in thoughts, which (from the perspective of a neuroscientist) we can't even meaningfully define, let alone measure. Perhaps one day we might be able to unite the two, but at this point, a criticism of neuroscience based on psychological principles is no more well-founded than lambasting the mathematics of game theory because it runs afoul of sociological thought.
So yeah, seems like there was mail fraud, but in a technically-correct-but-really-lame sense of "fraud" that reeks of desperation to pin something - anything - on Kurtz.
Speaking as a researcher, I am actually very much in favour of an investigation to determine if the allegation is correct, and if so, legal action against both Mr. Kurtz and Dr. Ferrell.
Researchers occasionally need to work with substances that are legitimately dangerous, and no one wants handled by untrained individuals or stored in inappropriate facilities. To balance that need for access with the very real safety concerns, there is a system of checks and balances in place to make sure that hazardous materials will be handled properly. If the allegations are correct, then Mr. Kurtz and Dr. Ferrell flaunted those measures. Nothing other than their common sense kept them from doing the same thing with more dangerous substances, and if we could all rely on the common sense of others, then we wouldn't need laws to begin with.
If this sort of attitude, where researchers start dismissing safety regulations because they "know better" becomes commonplace, then regulations are only going to get stricter, and punishments harsher. I don't want that, I don't need that, and Mr. Kurtz' valid point about government attitudes doesn't at all mitigate the error he made in bypassing safety regulations to prove his point.
No direct experience with the data in question, or indeed any climatological data at all, but this isn't really an uncommon case in science. People collect and store their own data. The full extent of raw data is often massive, it's often poorly indexed, and there is no such thing as a consistent storage format. Practically speaking, this means that whenever you want to get someone else's data, you have to get in touch with someone who would have collected it, ask them to filter out the part of the data you want, and then send it to you with an explanation of how to make sense of it. It might seem like secrecy, but it's mostly a product of best use of time. Scientists get grant money by analyzing data and publishing the results, not spending the effort to make the raw data publicly available.
So if the casino fixes the game so that you lose it's just business as usual. But if the casino fixes the game so that you win then you're stealing from the casino? What kind of twisted logic is this?
Whoa, there. (Legitmate) casinos don't "fix" games. Everything is pure random chance, and there are regulatory measures in place to guarantee that there are no cheats in place to make outcomes non-random in a way that favours the casino. The odds are slanted in the house's favour, so that the client can never win, but the casino doesn't hide this. Anyone willing to sit down and think can work out that you can't win against the house. Gamblers aren't being cheated, they're being stupid.
Even letting aside the fact that "they try to cheat me so I'll cheat them" is the exact sort of moral reprehensibility that leads to the unethical self-serving corporate behaviour that we all love to criticize, it just doesn't apply here. The casino people made a mistake, and nobody should think that they deserve to profit of it. This is the same thing as stealing the money out of a wallet you find lying in the street; it doesn't matter who the wallet belongs to, it's still wrong. Not realizing that it was a mistake is legitimate; not trusting the casino to be honest when they claim there was a mistake is also understandable. But once the authorities involved have confirmed there was a mistake, there is only one moral thing to do, and that's to return the money.
The world isn't going to become a better place if we start cheating the cheaters. If you think casinos are being unethical, take the high road, and don't go there; don't start acting like them.
I've got an idea: imagine travelling faster than light by using black holes to deform space-time beyond relativistic constraints. The idea is that you take an array of black holes and position them around the object; not only do you get a singularity, but the tidal forces can be arranged to cancel each other out, letting you move within the singularity without being destroyed.
I had an idea. I (effectively) blogged it. And if someone else comes up with it, and makes a working prototype, no sane person should argue that my blog should keep them from earning a patent.
Every patent is an obvious idea in retrospect. In reverse, it's also true that the idea of most patents was obvious beforehand: there were undoubtedly many people who thought that making an electrical device which produces light would be a great idea before Edison came along. The devil is in the details, and what matters is implementation. The standard of patents is that the process they describe should be sufficiently unique and innovative that an expert of the field would not conceive doing it that way prior to being introduced to the patented process; that's the logic that underlies the decision behind the Seldon patent decision.
Simply jotting down ideas doesn't address this issue at all. Even outlining the method doesn't really help, since the patent applicant could easily argue that while it might have seemed like an obvious approach, there were non-trivial technical issues that would arise in trying to implement that approach that their process addresses; the fact that the blogger would neither have mentioned those issues, nor built a working prototype, could reasonably be seen to support the applicant. The amount of effort that would need to go into each blog to actually make it worthwhile would basically boil down to implenting the idea, and that's far beyond what I suspect either the author wishes to suggest, or what any blogger would be willing to invest.
The problems with the patent process are well-established: an overburdened reviewing agency, combined with a fundamental issue regarding the appropriateness of patents on concepts rather than physical entities. I don't see how creating an unmoderated repository of random ideas solves either problem.
There's nothing on the site, as far as I can see, that gives any details about how they select the scientists who are going to moderate the videos. The closest I can find is their blog, which suggests that their criterion, however, they find them, is just that they be at least a current undergraduate student in a science-related discipline.
Given that Sciencehack is only really aiming to be a Youtube for science, maybe this doesn't really mean very much. Still, a little more openness about the process would have been encouraging.
Science has given us dozens of "magic wands" the last century, why would it stop now?
Good question. Ask your government (whoever they might be) why they are progressively less interested in funding science in general, let alone highly speculative basic research. We won't find any "magic wands" if people aren't looking.
People get very smug, I note, about the "power of science." This is a new thing. The first three quarters of Anno Domini had next to no scientific progress at all, because people didn't care to look at the world. When we made study of the world a priority, we got results. Now, increasingly, when we care about research at all, we tend to ask the question, "how will this help me tomorrow?" Just like everything in the world, you get out of science what you put into it.
Or, more generally: rights come with responsibilities. Which is something most of the animal rights movements fail to acknowledge.
Indeed, this is the issue. Do they plan to try apes for assault when they bite or injure humans? Can they be evicted from their habitats for squatting if unable to prove ownership? Can people now press public indecency charges if they see two chimps getting it on in the zoo?
A basic premise of, as far as I know, the majority of schools of ethics is reciprocity: when you abrogate the rights of others, you surrender your own rights. I think that no one would argue that a chimpanzee raised in the wild would have any understanding of what it means to respect the basic rights of humans. Perhaps a chimpanzee can be trained to do so, but doing so would, if you accept the argument of animal rights activists, itself represent a basic violation of 'chimpanzee rights.' So, the question is, can humans enter into any meaningful social contract with chimpanzees? And the answer, I would say, is no.
All of which is a completely different issue from the question: as humans, what do we think our moral obligations are in the treatment of non-human species? Protecting the welfare of animals, as a social contract between humans, is obviously an issue that many people find important, and is worth debate and legislation. But this would be a covenant made by humans binding the behaviour of humans; a legal farce of giving animals equal standing in the law to humans is frankly counter-productive.
(Not only are the cortices of different species drastically different, scientists often chose regions of cortex that have no correlation in humans. Many neuroscientists are studying the Barrel Cortex. It is a region of cortex that is specifically designed to integrate the signals from the whiskers of a Rodent. Humans don't have whiskers and we also don't have Barrel Cortex. Anything learned about the circuitry of the Barrel Cortex will not necessarily correlate to human cortex.
"Barrel cortex" is a descriptive name give to the primary somatosensory cortex of rodents. Humans do have primary somatosensory cortex, and it follows the same general principles of organization in the two species. The "barrels" that correspond to the whiskers are over-representations that correspond to the primary sensory modality of rats and mice. While humans don't have whiskers, and don't have barrels corresponding to their fingers (the functional homologue of the role of the whiskers), you can make an interesting case that many of the features that define barrel cortex are replicated in primate visual cortex -- the dominant sensory modality for those species. So, while humans don't have barrel cortex, we do have a "primary sensory modality cortex," and by studying as many "primary sensory modality cortices" as we can, we can hope to understand principles of organization.
The circuitry of both the cerebellum and the hippocampus have been described beautifully (they have both been known for well over 50 years). However once we no this circuitry it yields no light on how the circuitry actually accomplishes its task.
This is true, but only in the sense that in neither of these areas is the "task" well-understood. When progress is made in understanding what role a nucleus serves, then the knowledge of the architecture generally provides huge insights into how that role is accomplished.
Failure to integrate both intra and inter population circuitry. I have yet to read a paper that does a good job of integrating these two studies. Most neuroscientist pick one emphasis and stick with it. In order to understand exactly what the cortex is doing you must integrate all levels of research into your studies.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this. Assuming that you mean that people do not both record the spiking patterns of neurons and determine how those neurons are connected, this is because this is impossible in any system with a neocortex. A given neuron might connect to at most hundreds of other neurons; this means that the odds of selecting two neurons that are directly connected are infinitesmal. It is possible in some invertebrates to do this sort of study, but they do not have a neocortex.
Study of the cortex is insufficient.
Your general point is well made, but the corpus callosum is not a brain area; it's just a fibre tract. The complications arise from sub-cortical nuclei such as the basal ganglia and the cerebellum, that connect to essentially the entirety of the brain, or the thalamus, a near-obligatory relay in getting information from the receptors to the neocortex. There is a vast amount of auditory processing in the cochlear and superior olivary nuclei and inferior colliculus before auditory information even reaches the neocortex; there are visual-receptor-to-motor-output loops that bypass the cortex entirely.
Caveat: I am a neuroscientist. I am not familiar with the works of Mr. Hawkins.
That is a wonderful thing, though. First of all, claims can be tested. They'll either live up to the description, or they won't.
Most "grand-scale theories of brain operation", in fact, fail to make claims that can be tested, at least not in the foreseeable future. They predict the large-scale algorithms by which the brain operates. They do not make any claims as to the behavior of any individual neurons, and this is the data we have to work with. Moreover, these theories generally fail to provide any explanation for existing data, such as the diversity in neuronal phenotypes, the connectivity architecture, functional segregation, the wealth of neurotransmitters, laminar structure and why the details of this structure varies across the neocortex, differences in histochemical labelling, and so on and so forth. In short, these theories tend to be computer science, and not neuroscience. They might represent major progress in the question, "how do we make a machine that can solve a difficult computational problem?" but they have very little significance in answering the question, "what are the principles that underlie neural performance?"
Aside from that, I found some very interesting things in his descriptions of the HTM. For instance, I found the following precise description of enabling religious behavior: First, he describes how HTMs handle specific, non-overlapping domains (and of course this doesn't mean that another HTM can't relate those to each other.) One might handle financial markets, another speech, another cars. Then he says "After initial training, an HTM can continue to learn or not" Emphasis mine. So you can set up an HTM in a learning situation where you limit the input to descriptions consisting of sensory data of any arbitrarily limited set of patterns you like, get it to see the world represented by those patterns as you wish, and then disable learning for that particular HTM. Other HTMs can continue to learn, but that one is "frozen." Sounds like the perfect recipe for a priest or supplicant to me. Does that not sound like the very core definition of "unshakable faith"?
Not really. The ability to stop learning is a crucial element of learning. In the existing computational literature, this is related to the problem of overfitting: there comes a point where additional learning is dominated by attempts to explain noise in the data, and can actually lead to degraded performance. A classic example of "frozen learning" in living animals include the zebra finch male (who learns one song only in his life, which remains unchanged past adolescence). Anecedotally, you can also think of human accents in speech; most people never lose the accents they develop in childhood, no matter how hard they might try. Of course, both of the examples illustrate that it is not a matter of stopping learning; learning can in fact occur, but much slower and under much more extreme conditions.
From the perspective of neuroscience (and in fact, from the unsupervised learning perspective in general), given that there are lots of models that can learn and stop learning, the much more relevant question is: how can the system switch between these two states?
For all the doubt being thrown this fellow's way, you know, eventually someone will come up with something like this and it will be a working model of such a system. It's a tough problem, very abstract and requiring a lot of insight, but as with all problems discovered to date where we can actually get our hands on the system under study, there is no indication that any part of it exists in any way outside the sphere of nature and the natural rules we already know - and we know a lot of basic rules.
Is the problem a supernatural one? Of course not. It is a very tough problem. The issue is not, at this point, a lack of theory.
Nowadays, when breaking the law, a company-supplied penalty is paid and case closed.
"Normal" people go to jail.....
People still might. The AG isn't waiving rights to press criminal charges against indiviuals, and in fact is pressing ahead with at least five cases, including against Dunn.
This actually doesn't seem like a terrible thing to me. A civil case against HP would be an enormous burden on the state of California, drag on for years, and by the virtue of the sheer size of HP, be unlikely to result in anything more than a wrist-slap. This settlement gets HP to admit to wrongdoing, puts some measures in place (pathetic though they may be) to try and keep them from doing it again, and not only saves the state money, but gives them a warchest to go after the real villains in this case: the executives who felt that the shield of incorporation gave them the right to condone and engage in unethical behaviour.
Too bad there was no such guarantee to begin with that f(x) = lim y -> x f(y) !! That's what defines a continuous function.
Fair enough, so let me clarify what I meant. This proposal, essentially, swaps singularities for discontinuities, and introduces discontinuities at infinity for most functions. That might be nice from the perspective of a computer scientist, but it's not very sastisfactory to most everyone else. There's an "aesthetic" level: point discontinuities aren't really much more tractable than singularities. But more importantly, whenever possible, we like to treat functions with singularities as if at the singular point, the function took on the value of the limit at the singularity. It's very convenient for us to have tanh(infinitity)=1, e^(-infinity)=0, and lim sin(k*0)/0 = k. In his transreal arithmetic, these functions do have values, but they're not the limits, and hence not what we want. So in the end, we end up having to do the exact same thing we did before: look for special cases in the domain and treat them differently, but now it's actually less defensible. The function is defined, it's just not the value we want.
Maybe if I had more experience with the IEEE floating point standard, I could see more merit to this proposal. But just from an analysis background, it seems like all of the special cases that exist in the standard formulation are still in place here, just concealed by a bit of sleight of hand. The definition of division in his formulation strikes me as being especially overly-convoluted.
A fundamental part of his explanation pivots on the following being true:
1/0 = infinity
-1/0 = -infinity
And for him it is true; he's defined infinity to have these values. He very specifically wants a fixed value for infinity.
So, according to that, the following would hold:
if 1/0 = infinity
then infinity * 0 = 1
which does not work, for obvious reasons. This I told my teacher in 6th grade.
Nor does this work. Division, in his system, is not the multiplicative inverse, but the reciprocal. So, for him:
1/0 = infinity implies 0/1 = 1/infinity, which does in fact meet our expectations.
Basically, what he's done with his system is come up with a (completely consistent, as far as I can tell from scanning from his website) framework where singularities now have a defined value, which means that all functions are defined everywhere on the real line (or the transreal line, which is what he calls his infinity-and-nullity supplemented system). Which is great, as far as it goes. But there's a big trade-off for this: there is now no longer a guarantee that if both f(x) and the limit at x of f both exist, that they will have the same value. The example he himself gives is the hypebolic tangent at infinity; the limit is 1, but by direct evaluation, it ends up being nullity. To get around this, he proposes a hierarchy of value determinations; a function is defined at a point by its transreal arithmetic value only if a different value isn't suggested by analysis. So tanh(infinity) would be treated as 1, even though working through the definition of tanh requires the value to be nullity in his system.
So in summary, he's defined terms so that division by zero is consistent and workable, but the price is that even relatively simple calculus becomes a lot more complicated. Nor is it all clear that transreal arithmetic will hold up with higher mathematics at all (when infinity is valued rather than defined by limits, how does cardinality work?). So I think he's got to a better job selling it than "it's better than NaN or having values undefined," because I can't see how it is.
Slashdot Mirror
For example, I believe its generally accepted that acupuncture [nih.gov] does something, we're just not sure how and what.
The problem with acupuncture studies is that they can't be done double-blinded: that is, the acupuncturist always knows whether he is doing "real" acupuncture or "sham" acupuncture*. This then leads to a bias effect, in which the patient is unconsciously cued as to whether or not the treatment "should" work, and expectation effects are stronger than any purported acupuncture benefits (e.g., Bausell et al 2005, Eval Health Prof). I remember a study, which I cannot dig up at the moment, in which the researchers gave acting lessons to the acupuncturist to ensure that they behaved in exactly the same way with respect to the patients between real and sham treatments, and when they did so acupuncture did not outdo the placebo.
* You can, in theory, do double-blinded by randomly assigning patients to one of two technicians, both of which were naive to acupuncture treatment before the study's beginning. They are then trained equally on two different sets of acupuncture points, one valid and one invalid, with no knowledge of which one of them is which. However, objectively this isn't really a fair test of acupuncture: consider the case where you tried to tackle the effectiveness of heart surgery using the same model.
Having read the original paper to the best of my ability (which is not perhaps very good), as far as I can see, the "critics" are arguing that the gravitational ripples might not have been caused by inflation directly, but by another process which happens to be a by-product of inflation. So unless I'm missing something, even if the critics are right, BICEP2 has still provided proof of inflation.
When you control for species, there are no differences between humans and lizards.
It's good that sexual discrimination legislation has (mostly) sorted out the problem of women not being paid the same for equal work. That doesn't change the fact that, on the whole, there's a salary gap. As the linked article points out, some big factors out of this are the fact that women tend to leave their jobs more early, to have more intermittent commitments to work. The article seems quite content to leave the implication that, basically, this means that it's all the fault of women for just not caring about their career enough. Much more relevant would be an examination of why women are more likely to have this lack of commitment, and whether e.g. bullying in the work place, or unfavourable maternity/paternity leave arrangements are contributing to this. In the UK, for example, the statutes are actually quite sexist in this regard: statutory maternity leave is available for a year, but statutory paternity leave is only available for at most half a year, and that requires that the mother return to work; otherwise it is only two weeks. Which means that, should a couple wish to start a family, it is necessarily the mother that is going to take the brunt of time away from work and the perceived lack of career commitment that will result.
The article summary is a bit misleading. Universal Credit has from beginning to end been the child of the Department of Work and Pensions. The Government Digital Service, the in-house IT design expert office, is technically part of the Cabinet Office, but that's only because it's a centralised IT design service meant to serve all branches of the government. Also, the summary skips over the critical part of the article: the GDS is pulling out because the project is being run in direct contradiction with their own recommendations. Looking at the situation, it's difficult to apportion any part of the blame for the project troubles to the Cabinet Office; it seems to lie entirely on the shoulders of the DWP.
I too wonder why more sites don't adopt it.
Because of the initial chicken-and-egg problem. The Slashdot moderation system requires a large base of committed users willing to spend time on moderation, but if new users are only exposed to an unmoderated comment system, it's hard to convince them (or at least, the worthwhile ones) to exert any effort on the system. Even on existing sites, you're faced with the problem that the undesirable users are more committed to the site than the desirable ones, and enabling user moderation will make that so much worse in the short term that it will choke off the long-term. By virtue of its age, Slashdot circumvented this: no real competition, no expectation of moderation at all initially, and novelty of the moderation system all served to build a large base of potential moderators at launch of moderation. Even then, it's hard to estimate what degree of the success was just luck.
Maybe this is a silly, minor thing, but it bothers me these sort of blurbs always just talk about faceless "scientists." Does it really take that much work to find out who the principal researchers were? Maybe more people would be inspired to get into science if it actually seemed to come with some measure of face rather than anonymity in a lab coat.
The issue here isn't that there's iPhone apps being developed during a recession, it's that money is being invested in a duplication of services when the government is looking to slash spending by up to 40% across the board. When we're looking at a devastation of public services, it's hard to condone spending intended to benefit a minority of Britons with access to a luxury device.
Compare that to the other religions. To the best of my knowledge, there is no super-secret ultra-eyes-only version of the Bible that only the elite Christians get to read. There is no "not for the viewing of non-believers" version of the Qu'ran that only the most devout Muslims get to read. But there are secret Scientology documents which explain core beliefs of Scientology that the general rank and file of the CoS do not have access to.
Unfortunately, it's a bit more complicated than that. Esotericism is, at least historically, a common religious practice. Gnosticism, Mormonism, at least a few Buddhist sects, and arguably the Masonic tradition all spring to mind. All of these have the idea that there are truths which should not be made available to the uninitiated, as they are not prepared to receive them correctly.
So this is the complicated problem: there are no really good grounds for condemning Scientology as a religion. The problems arise, rather, from the Church of Scientology as an institution. Letting aside the heavy-handed tactics used to recruit new members and to protect the Church, the fees charged for initiation seem to shift the practice from esotericism to exploitation. It's worth pointing out that very few people have objections to the Free Zone, emphasizing that the primary objection to the Church of Scientology is fundamentally organizational, rather than religious per se.
So it's not entirely unreasonable for console manufacturers to be taking this attitude. Should you be allowed to do whatever you want with your own hardware? Yes, but the hardware manufacturer has no obligation to make it easy for you.
This isn't entirely "honest" either, as it creates a bias in the respondent by portraying the person to be executed as guilty. If you contrasted the results of a poll done with that question to one where the question was, "Do you support the execution of people convicted of murder?" you'd likely find that you had more in favour of capital punishment in the former survey. By phrasing it in the less direct way, you leave open the possibility that the person has been wrongfully convicted, and that would make some of your respondents hesitate.
All of which is to say: poll design is very hard, and even when you're not setting out to be "blatantly dishonest" it's possible to bias results. As others have said, never trust a poll where you don't get to see the survey design (more than just the question of immediate relevance, as other questions asked can also bias the respondent to a particular mindset).
Wikipedia's basic issue is and has always been how to get people knowledgeable in a subject to write on that subject. Wikipedians might think this inclusionist vs deletionist debate is "ancient history," but the way it has been settled is a barrier to participation by experts. Standard encyclopedias are pro-actively exclusionist. They ask people to participate, and so people are happy to devote effort to an article, knowing that their work is guaranteed to be accepted. Wikipedia is retroactively deletionist, applying a raft of various inclusions standards to written articles, with no clear place to go and ask, "If I were to write this article, will it be accepted?" The perception now is that writing a Wikipedia article necessarily includes committing to defending your work in deletion proceedings. And that is more of a time commitment than most experts are willing to put out.
What do you lose with a strong password policy? Good user habits. They will start writing passwords down, or reusing them, and in general starting to do thinks we know you shouldn't. The policy starts becoming a direct impediment to the users, and so they naturally do their best to work around it. You may have reduced your exposure to brute force attacks, but you've opened yourself up to social engineering, and it's not clear that you've won by doing so.
Which is why (I think) he makes the point about user education. Getting users to follow good security procedures would likely solve more problems than any possible technical solution. This in turn requires a recognition that there are certain technical solutions you simply cannot put in place if you want people to use your system in a secure fashion.
In the sense that it is an oversimplification, useful to establish things in a word-count limited introduction, but whose primary role seems to be to lead laypeople to grotesque and frightening misapprehensions, no, neuroscientists don't believe that first argument.
It is unquestionable that there is neural activity in the absence of sensory stimuli or motor response. It is also known that this activity is not unstructured but correlated across the neuronal population (though the significance of this fact is a point of dispute). Nor does anyone assume that this activity does not have the ability to influence the response of an organism -- neuronal activity is neuronal activity.
At the same time, the paramount task of the nervous system is to process the environment around the organism and respond to it appropriately. To be successful in the natural selection sense, you cannot ignore pain, mating signals, fire, loud noises, sudden movements, etc., and when something comes up, you must be able to formulate and implement a strategy which can actually deal with the situation that stimulus describes. Sensory experience is a huge part of neural activity, and if deprived of it long enough -- so that the only activity is the spontaneous activity mentioned above -- the brain enters a degenerate state. Or, to put it another way, you go insane.
The nervous system, then, is a massively complex system which has a baseline pattern of activity, is receiving constant input from a variety of sensory organs (even when you close your eyes, or plug your ears, you receive input from them; it's just meaningless), all of which is being modulated by "supervisory systems" (e.g, the dopaminergic and serotonergic systems) that control meta-response properties such as attention, anticipation, learning, expectation, and so on. The debate can be reduced to two issues. The first is: once you have accounted for stimulus-driven activity and the effects of the higher-order supervisory systems, does the baseline activity contribute any significant fraction of the organism's final response? And if so, is the baseline activity no more than the muddled-together echo of past stimulus-driven activity rattling around the recurrent network that is the brain and can thus be regarded as simply random noise, or is it meaningful in its own right?
The paper in question tries to address the first of these questions. Their results seem to demonstrate that a large fraction of the inter-trial variability in a motor task cannot be explained by known modulating factors such as attention, and thus can be attributed primarily to the baseline activity. Thus, baseline activity would appear to be a major influence on response. The second question remains open, and it is really the core of the issue. These results, however, go a long way towards making it a pressing issue.
The experiment may well be scientifically interesting, but not for the reason advertised.
The experiment is scientifically interesting, and for exactly the reasons advertised. There is a fundamental difference between neuroscience and psychology. One studies the operation of the nervous system, and the other studies the nature of the human mind. The basic element of study of neuroscience is spikes, of which you are never aware; psychology interests itself in thoughts, which (from the perspective of a neuroscientist) we can't even meaningfully define, let alone measure. Perhaps one day we might be able to unite the two, but at this point, a criticism of neuroscience based on psychological principles is no more well-founded than lambasting the mathematics of game theory because it runs afoul of sociological thought.
Speaking as a researcher, I am actually very much in favour of an investigation to determine if the allegation is correct, and if so, legal action against both Mr. Kurtz and Dr. Ferrell.
Researchers occasionally need to work with substances that are legitimately dangerous, and no one wants handled by untrained individuals or stored in inappropriate facilities. To balance that need for access with the very real safety concerns, there is a system of checks and balances in place to make sure that hazardous materials will be handled properly. If the allegations are correct, then Mr. Kurtz and Dr. Ferrell flaunted those measures. Nothing other than their common sense kept them from doing the same thing with more dangerous substances, and if we could all rely on the common sense of others, then we wouldn't need laws to begin with.
If this sort of attitude, where researchers start dismissing safety regulations because they "know better" becomes commonplace, then regulations are only going to get stricter, and punishments harsher. I don't want that, I don't need that, and Mr. Kurtz' valid point about government attitudes doesn't at all mitigate the error he made in bypassing safety regulations to prove his point.
No direct experience with the data in question, or indeed any climatological data at all, but this isn't really an uncommon case in science. People collect and store their own data. The full extent of raw data is often massive, it's often poorly indexed, and there is no such thing as a consistent storage format. Practically speaking, this means that whenever you want to get someone else's data, you have to get in touch with someone who would have collected it, ask them to filter out the part of the data you want, and then send it to you with an explanation of how to make sense of it. It might seem like secrecy, but it's mostly a product of best use of time. Scientists get grant money by analyzing data and publishing the results, not spending the effort to make the raw data publicly available.
Whoa, there. (Legitmate) casinos don't "fix" games. Everything is pure random chance, and there are regulatory measures in place to guarantee that there are no cheats in place to make outcomes non-random in a way that favours the casino. The odds are slanted in the house's favour, so that the client can never win, but the casino doesn't hide this. Anyone willing to sit down and think can work out that you can't win against the house. Gamblers aren't being cheated, they're being stupid.
Even letting aside the fact that "they try to cheat me so I'll cheat them" is the exact sort of moral reprehensibility that leads to the unethical self-serving corporate behaviour that we all love to criticize, it just doesn't apply here. The casino people made a mistake, and nobody should think that they deserve to profit of it. This is the same thing as stealing the money out of a wallet you find lying in the street; it doesn't matter who the wallet belongs to, it's still wrong. Not realizing that it was a mistake is legitimate; not trusting the casino to be honest when they claim there was a mistake is also understandable. But once the authorities involved have confirmed there was a mistake, there is only one moral thing to do, and that's to return the money.
The world isn't going to become a better place if we start cheating the cheaters. If you think casinos are being unethical, take the high road, and don't go there; don't start acting like them.
I had an idea. I (effectively) blogged it. And if someone else comes up with it, and makes a working prototype, no sane person should argue that my blog should keep them from earning a patent.
Every patent is an obvious idea in retrospect. In reverse, it's also true that the idea of most patents was obvious beforehand: there were undoubtedly many people who thought that making an electrical device which produces light would be a great idea before Edison came along. The devil is in the details, and what matters is implementation. The standard of patents is that the process they describe should be sufficiently unique and innovative that an expert of the field would not conceive doing it that way prior to being introduced to the patented process; that's the logic that underlies the decision behind the Seldon patent decision.
Simply jotting down ideas doesn't address this issue at all. Even outlining the method doesn't really help, since the patent applicant could easily argue that while it might have seemed like an obvious approach, there were non-trivial technical issues that would arise in trying to implement that approach that their process addresses; the fact that the blogger would neither have mentioned those issues, nor built a working prototype, could reasonably be seen to support the applicant. The amount of effort that would need to go into each blog to actually make it worthwhile would basically boil down to implenting the idea, and that's far beyond what I suspect either the author wishes to suggest, or what any blogger would be willing to invest.
The problems with the patent process are well-established: an overburdened reviewing agency, combined with a fundamental issue regarding the appropriateness of patents on concepts rather than physical entities. I don't see how creating an unmoderated repository of random ideas solves either problem.
Given that Sciencehack is only really aiming to be a Youtube for science, maybe this doesn't really mean very much. Still, a little more openness about the process would have been encouraging.
Good question. Ask your government (whoever they might be) why they are progressively less interested in funding science in general, let alone highly speculative basic research. We won't find any "magic wands" if people aren't looking.
People get very smug, I note, about the "power of science." This is a new thing. The first three quarters of Anno Domini had next to no scientific progress at all, because people didn't care to look at the world. When we made study of the world a priority, we got results. Now, increasingly, when we care about research at all, we tend to ask the question, "how will this help me tomorrow?" Just like everything in the world, you get out of science what you put into it.
Indeed, this is the issue. Do they plan to try apes for assault when they bite or injure humans? Can they be evicted from their habitats for squatting if unable to prove ownership? Can people now press public indecency charges if they see two chimps getting it on in the zoo?
A basic premise of, as far as I know, the majority of schools of ethics is reciprocity: when you abrogate the rights of others, you surrender your own rights. I think that no one would argue that a chimpanzee raised in the wild would have any understanding of what it means to respect the basic rights of humans. Perhaps a chimpanzee can be trained to do so, but doing so would, if you accept the argument of animal rights activists, itself represent a basic violation of 'chimpanzee rights.' So, the question is, can humans enter into any meaningful social contract with chimpanzees? And the answer, I would say, is no.
All of which is a completely different issue from the question: as humans, what do we think our moral obligations are in the treatment of non-human species? Protecting the welfare of animals, as a social contract between humans, is obviously an issue that many people find important, and is worth debate and legislation. But this would be a covenant made by humans binding the behaviour of humans; a legal farce of giving animals equal standing in the law to humans is frankly counter-productive.
"Barrel cortex" is a descriptive name give to the primary somatosensory cortex of rodents. Humans do have primary somatosensory cortex, and it follows the same general principles of organization in the two species. The "barrels" that correspond to the whiskers are over-representations that correspond to the primary sensory modality of rats and mice. While humans don't have whiskers, and don't have barrels corresponding to their fingers (the functional homologue of the role of the whiskers), you can make an interesting case that many of the features that define barrel cortex are replicated in primate visual cortex -- the dominant sensory modality for those species. So, while humans don't have barrel cortex, we do have a "primary sensory modality cortex," and by studying as many "primary sensory modality cortices" as we can, we can hope to understand principles of organization.
This is true, but only in the sense that in neither of these areas is the "task" well-understood. When progress is made in understanding what role a nucleus serves, then the knowledge of the architecture generally provides huge insights into how that role is accomplished.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this. Assuming that you mean that people do not both record the spiking patterns of neurons and determine how those neurons are connected, this is because this is impossible in any system with a neocortex. A given neuron might connect to at most hundreds of other neurons; this means that the odds of selecting two neurons that are directly connected are infinitesmal. It is possible in some invertebrates to do this sort of study, but they do not have a neocortex.
Your general point is well made, but the corpus callosum is not a brain area; it's just a fibre tract. The complications arise from sub-cortical nuclei such as the basal ganglia and the cerebellum, that connect to essentially the entirety of the brain, or the thalamus, a near-obligatory relay in getting information from the receptors to the neocortex. There is a vast amount of auditory processing in the cochlear and superior olivary nuclei and inferior colliculus before auditory information even reaches the neocortex; there are visual-receptor-to-motor-output loops that bypass the cortex entirely.
Most "grand-scale theories of brain operation", in fact, fail to make claims that can be tested, at least not in the foreseeable future. They predict the large-scale algorithms by which the brain operates. They do not make any claims as to the behavior of any individual neurons, and this is the data we have to work with. Moreover, these theories generally fail to provide any explanation for existing data, such as the diversity in neuronal phenotypes, the connectivity architecture, functional segregation, the wealth of neurotransmitters, laminar structure and why the details of this structure varies across the neocortex, differences in histochemical labelling, and so on and so forth. In short, these theories tend to be computer science, and not neuroscience. They might represent major progress in the question, "how do we make a machine that can solve a difficult computational problem?" but they have very little significance in answering the question, "what are the principles that underlie neural performance?"
Not really. The ability to stop learning is a crucial element of learning. In the existing computational literature, this is related to the problem of overfitting: there comes a point where additional learning is dominated by attempts to explain noise in the data, and can actually lead to degraded performance. A classic example of "frozen learning" in living animals include the zebra finch male (who learns one song only in his life, which remains unchanged past adolescence). Anecedotally, you can also think of human accents in speech; most people never lose the accents they develop in childhood, no matter how hard they might try. Of course, both of the examples illustrate that it is not a matter of stopping learning; learning can in fact occur, but much slower and under much more extreme conditions.
From the perspective of neuroscience (and in fact, from the unsupervised learning perspective in general), given that there are lots of models that can learn and stop learning, the much more relevant question is: how can the system switch between these two states?
Is the problem a supernatural one? Of course not. It is a very tough problem. The issue is not, at this point, a lack of theory.
People still might. The AG isn't waiving rights to press criminal charges against indiviuals, and in fact is pressing ahead with at least five cases, including against Dunn.
This actually doesn't seem like a terrible thing to me. A civil case against HP would be an enormous burden on the state of California, drag on for years, and by the virtue of the sheer size of HP, be unlikely to result in anything more than a wrist-slap. This settlement gets HP to admit to wrongdoing, puts some measures in place (pathetic though they may be) to try and keep them from doing it again, and not only saves the state money, but gives them a warchest to go after the real villains in this case: the executives who felt that the shield of incorporation gave them the right to condone and engage in unethical behaviour.
Fair enough, so let me clarify what I meant. This proposal, essentially, swaps singularities for discontinuities, and introduces discontinuities at infinity for most functions. That might be nice from the perspective of a computer scientist, but it's not very sastisfactory to most everyone else. There's an "aesthetic" level: point discontinuities aren't really much more tractable than singularities. But more importantly, whenever possible, we like to treat functions with singularities as if at the singular point, the function took on the value of the limit at the singularity. It's very convenient for us to have tanh(infinitity)=1, e^(-infinity)=0, and lim sin(k*0)/0 = k. In his transreal arithmetic, these functions do have values, but they're not the limits, and hence not what we want. So in the end, we end up having to do the exact same thing we did before: look for special cases in the domain and treat them differently, but now it's actually less defensible. The function is defined, it's just not the value we want.
Maybe if I had more experience with the IEEE floating point standard, I could see more merit to this proposal. But just from an analysis background, it seems like all of the special cases that exist in the standard formulation are still in place here, just concealed by a bit of sleight of hand. The definition of division in his formulation strikes me as being especially overly-convoluted.
And for him it is true; he's defined infinity to have these values. He very specifically wants a fixed value for infinity.
Nor does this work. Division, in his system, is not the multiplicative inverse, but the reciprocal. So, for him: 1/0 = infinity implies 0/1 = 1/infinity, which does in fact meet our expectations.
Basically, what he's done with his system is come up with a (completely consistent, as far as I can tell from scanning from his website) framework where singularities now have a defined value, which means that all functions are defined everywhere on the real line (or the transreal line, which is what he calls his infinity-and-nullity supplemented system). Which is great, as far as it goes. But there's a big trade-off for this: there is now no longer a guarantee that if both f(x) and the limit at x of f both exist, that they will have the same value. The example he himself gives is the hypebolic tangent at infinity; the limit is 1, but by direct evaluation, it ends up being nullity. To get around this, he proposes a hierarchy of value determinations; a function is defined at a point by its transreal arithmetic value only if a different value isn't suggested by analysis. So tanh(infinity) would be treated as 1, even though working through the definition of tanh requires the value to be nullity in his system.
So in summary, he's defined terms so that division by zero is consistent and workable, but the price is that even relatively simple calculus becomes a lot more complicated. Nor is it all clear that transreal arithmetic will hold up with higher mathematics at all (when infinity is valued rather than defined by limits, how does cardinality work?). So I think he's got to a better job selling it than "it's better than NaN or having values undefined," because I can't see how it is.