224 karma · joined February 3, 2012
This article is almost a parody.
My impression is (and I have not studied this) the failure in the HIV epidemic (pandemic?) wasn't a failure to develop drugs, it was a failure to perform basic epidemiological interventions to learn about and slow the progress of the disease.
http://blog.pandora.com/2012/10/09/pandora-and-artist-paymen...
The first is the value added problem, at the end of the day they aren't better than normal lectures and are actually a bit worse. It's funny that even the most innovate institutions have accomplished little more than putting lectures up online. Lectures are about on level with books when it comes to retention. A much better model would be adopting something more like code academy with a good balance of interactivity and theory.
The second and probably most important problem is the depth problem. You don't go to college to take general ed requirements. You go to take the high level sophisticated classes in your field. These classes are rarely delivered in the form of a lecture and often have extensive lab courses and student teacher interaction. I've yet to see a MOOC that can replace this effectively. Similarly, there is no good model for students to come in and pick up lab classes or lab materials. I'm sure there is a volunteer system that could do it, but it doesn't exist yet.
The final problem is of course credentialing. While many classes provide you with a certificate at the end the value of this is really up in the air. For most people, a certificate is unnecessary, the value is in the material, but if they plan to replace colleges they need to solve this problem.
I think MOOCs are the future. Just more like the 10 or 15 year future over the 5 to 10 year future.
FitBit's value increases with each app that uses it's interface to do something new. Each of those apps has it's value increased by something like FitBit coming out. Some areas of programming are competitive but most are collaborative.
Also I think most programmers see programming as a force of good in the world. Technology can protect us, help us find what we want, and even get rid of boring jobs for us, most people who write code that does something like this want others to be able to do the same. Of course this is the altruism you are talking about I suppose.
I would really like a program that wrapped something like Matlab around excel. Basically something that let you work in excel then let you hit a button to 'vomit' the variable space into Matlab code. I often find it much easier to manipulate data in Excel and often find myself working in Excel until it becomes too burdensome then swapping over and converting into Matlab or Python. I think seeing a language 'live coded' and being able to alter the live code would allow people to bridge the gap more easily. It would also fix the debugging issues as each spreadsheet would also contain a executable code that could be implanted into other spreadsheets easily, (it would also contain a number of assumptions made explicit like what variables it takes in and what it kicks out.) Of course how strings etc are handled is a messy question.
A similar tool exists for the open source scientific image altering toolbox-ImageJ that allows it to 'record' your actions and easily loop/automate your code by turning your calls into code as you perform them. I've found non-programmers can easily learn how to write 'code-like' actions into this macro language.
Horses and dogs take a lot of maintenance (more for horses obviously), but unlike a bike, car, or gun, anyone who owns one and thinks of taking it on a long trip is more likely to know how to keep it alive.
As others have mentioned, the resources to maintain bikes are not zero cost. Also, bikes rust in wetter areas fairly quickly if left outside/not maintained (your average chain is going to last ~ a year outside if not reoiled).
Bikes, mile per mile are more dangerous than walking, this might be because of cars etc, but with cracking roads and overgrowth, the risk to riding a bike becomes higher than walking. A single screw up on a bike is survivable in the modern world, it is less so in a post-apocalyptic one.
Bikes leave you vulnerable while travelling, you have to stick to main developed roads, you can only move so fast, you are easily taken out by a simple road trap. You have very little ability to 'take in surroundings' and you have to stop moving and abandon your bike to fight or hide. In a 'world gone mad' scenario someone on a bike moving overland is an easier target than someone on horse or on foot.
Bicyling long distances sucks a lot, especially for people who don't do it a lot. It's brutal on the body, hard to cross anything with elevation, and hurts the body in unique ways. Your average person might give up cycling fairly quickly for this reason. Horses, at least, travel with you when riding on them sucks.
Bikes don't work as well under non-ideal conditions. Heavy rain/snow/ice/elevation/heat all make bikes difficult to use or damage them.
Skateboards solve a lot of these (as they are easily portable). But the risk factor gets higher.
I'm not saying these items would be useless in a post-apocalyptic scenario. However, like most items, if someone wasn't extensively prepared to maintain and use them in a similar scenario, it's going to not work out for them except in the short term. (The same could be said about guns/cars/motorcycles).
Interesting exceptions in mammals are humans and (surprisingly) bats, both of which beat the curve pretty dramatically. Several mechanisms have been proposed for this exception including brain size and several specific proteins.
If anyone is interested in some more mechanistic or literature driven explanations, here is a good starting point http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC128563/
Some highlights:
Obama administration backs down on Marijuana Legalization: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/addressing-legaliz...
Army Stops using monkeys (this actually happened in response to this petition as far as I can tell): https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/army-no-longer-usi...
National Guard Joint Chief of Staff created: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/chief-national-gua...
This petition (and opinion polls probably) helped prompt the administration to appeal SOPA and PIPA: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/combating-online-p...
This petition (and some campaign promises) have slowly resulted in increased digitization, recently the house put much of their data up in XML: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/digitizing-federal...
This petition is well written if nothing else: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/doubling-and-tripl...
These petitions happened at the same time as (though it's debatable if it resulted in) the president declaring he would not defend DOMA: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/greater-protection...
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/repealing-discrimi...
This petition coincided with a policy change on student loan burden reduction: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/taking-action-redu...
I feel like this is a problem and I'm kind of disappointed Facebook did this without any notification or indication. Cancelling my credit card was annoying and it's more annoying that there is nothing I can do to fix this in the future.
However, a quick literature search indicates that there is not something as easy to monitor as P300 in animals so perhaps this is not feasible.
Basically, Steam knows what product they are selling, they sell it cheaply, they sell more of it in one place than other (like GoG and GMG), they let you mount games that aren't Steam games into it to help keep it organized. Other services simply haven't caught up and gamers seem willing to accept limitation in exchange for convenience. It's an easy target for disruption, but no one has managed to yet, Amazon is working hard but their UI is not up to snuff.
Also, achievements, friends, and groups are a nice touch that doesn't exist elsewhere in the same quality or quantity.
1. Copyright is deeply broken. It currently extends well beyond any reasonable interpretation of it's original purpose.
2. You can't enter a medium and regulate it so you can do business. The standard rules and metaphors of IP don't apply as well to digital distribution. The easiest way to prevent copyrighted work from being distributed is to not digitize it. Very few books and comics were being illegally downloaded before they started epubing them. But you can't pretend you have the right to a law on medium with a structure counter to that law.
3. "Everyone deserves to be paid for their work" is false. Everyone who does work, which can be sold in the current market, given the current realities of the world, and who price and distribute their product properly should be paid for their work. If I go clean up a public park, I have no right to charge admission. If I build a statue in a public space, I can't charge people to look at it, even if they come from far away to see it.
Everyone deserves to get a part of any profit derived from their work, is a more correct statement.
If I personally went and bought Monsanto seed and used it for my own plants the I ate/gave away and gave it to friends who all used it for personal use, Monsanto would be hard pressed to stop me/they probably wouldn't bother.
I can install anything I want on my Windows computer without approval from Microsoft. I can stop updates, limit updates, change the way my computer boots, and use (almost) any OS resources for anything I feel like. I can wipe my computer and install another OS if I feel like it. When I buy software, the company that makes it can keep updating it however they feel without any chance of the software being 'pulled' by Windows. I don't have to worry about a program I'm buying breaking Windows 'rules'. Windows doesn't control any purchases I make in any app and doesn't limit sexual content of my installs.
What iOS is doing is something entirely different from what Windows has ever done, and meaning of 'closed' is entirely different when discussing these platforms.
"Imagine for a moment what it would feel like if people walked into your company and used the lobby to call your competitors and buy their products. That’s standard consumer behavior in a bookstore. People browse, find a book they like, pull out their smart phone, and order online."
If this is the case why don't stores like B and N just offer free WiFi and add an affiliate link to anyone going to Amazon. It would let you get some profit from people buying on their phones in your store. My impression was you can more or less redirect/adjust the traffic of anyone on your Wi-Fi. Is there some ethical or logistic reason why Best Buy and B and N don't do this?
Looking at the original study:
These were intro stats classes with 100-1000. These classes are already basically a teacher lecturing, minimum engagement, simple material, no ability to have complex homework, and from the looks of things not in the student's major specialization (so super 'in-depth' learning is unnecessary)
Universities have realized for years that they are not very good at these types of classes. They've tried to move these courses online or encourage students to take these at community colleges. But, you don't (or shouldn't) go to university for these classes, you go to the university for the more specialized upper division training in your department. I would be more interested to see if a high level, small, for majors course could be replaced by a similar program. It's worth noting the even the Khan Academy classes are still the 'factory' classes, he has very few 'specialized' classes in more complicated subjects.
It would be nice to look at a field and be able to figure out what links together and what areas are connected well and which are poorly. (A possible indicator of people studying an artifact? Or perhaps an area missing out on a possibly useful technique? Would over-linking mean a trendy field? What would a broadly connected field mean? What would an incestuously connected one mean?) This would also be a good way to find the 'best' reviews that everyone cites. Add in a way to sort by year, field, and to rapidly zoom in and out on papers and topics and you'd have a fantastically powerful way to visualize science.
It would be even better if you could 'play the tape back' and show what the network looks like year by year. Do fields follow a stereotyped network behavior before exploding? Or does each explosion look different? What does the citation map of an explosion look like? What does a field that is about to 'die' look like?
Unfortunately, looking at their 'example projects' they are all the kind of things academics would write grants on or fund. They all involve either 'outreachy' things, like making DNA art or doing personal data mining on genomes or 'basic science' things like improving read write speeds. The problem is, academia already handles these things well,and real progress in any of these areas would be extremely difficult. What they really need to be funding is people who have an idea of a biotechnology product. Also, it looks like they really need to work to build a community or people would be interested in this sort of thing. The DIY bio community, such that it exists, is scattered and fragmented at best. There is no place like proggit or HN for biotech news and discussion. Most of the people who would be available and interested in submitting a product (post docs and graduating grads in biochemistry, genetics, and biotechnology) will almost certainly not hear about this dues to this scattering.
I think it's a good idea with some good biologists backing it, they just need to get a bit better on the business/social side.
I'll go through the experiment for those who don't really get the write up. Quick background:
0. Neurons are specialized cells in your brain, their firing is the basis of cognition. Neurons that fire strongly together tend to get linked. Not all your neurons are firing all at once. Not all neurons participate in a memory, but a large collection (0.1-4% depending on brain region) are used for each memory. (at least in naive mice) Memories are highly distributed across brain regions and within brain regions.
1. There is a gene 'cFos' that turns on in neurons that undergo activity. It is very short lasting, about an hour, and then it is back down. It is very cell specific, only cells used have been activated will show this gene.
2. There is a genetically inducable protein you can put in cells so that when you shine them with light they will start firing.
3. Anything genetically inducible can have a tag added that will make it impossible to induce when an animal is on a specific drug. (We'll call it Dox.)
The researchers made it so that when cFos is activated, it will transcribe the inducible light activated channel. But, it will only do this when the animal isn't on Dox. So they took the animal off Dox, exposed it to fear conditioning (they shocked it in a unique box), then put it back on Dox. So only the cells that were active during the fear conditioning will be turn on when they shine light.
They then put the animal in a new box and shined light, and the animal froze. (A sign it was afraid) They concluded that activating cells that had been active during the storing of the memory can 'reactivate' the memory, even out of it's context.
Of course there are a few major problems with this. The region of the brain they worked in is a relatively minor area of the brain. They admit in the course of the paper that each cell is used to store many memories. (They claim the assembly of cells activate the memory? But they never bother testing this.) Their firing pattern is far from physiological. The mice who underwent this 'memory reactivation' did not freeze as much as mice in normal fear conditioning and did not seem to learn the 'reactivated memory' at all. (Though again they didn't really bother testing this.) Normal fear-memory is learned quite well. This is a very preliminary but very important study in the field. It will be interesting to see how they follow this up.
Also, the Npas4 stuff is completely irrelevant to this article. There are countless markers that when 'knocked out' make it impossible to store memory.
Also here is a (paywalled) link to the paper:http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vnfv/ncurrent/full/natu...
Here is a link to another (paywalled) paper which came out today which did almost the same thing and say almost opposite results (the details explain this oddity): http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6075/1513.full?rss=1
Here is a (paywalled) more layperson write up to the second article: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6075/1455.full
"Have temper tantrums Be argumentative with adults Refuse to comply with adult requests or rules Annoy other people deliberately Blames others for mistakes or misbehavior Acts touchy and is easily annoyed Feel anger and resentment Be spiteful or vindictive Act aggressively toward peers Have difficulty maintaining friendships Have academic problems Feel a lack of self-esteem"
Those aren't authority problems, those are major social issues that must persist for greater than 6 months and make the home or school environment hostile. Also, he acts like all psychologists and psychiatrists do is prescribe medicine. This is silly, most psychiatrists and all psychologists would advocate combined therapy or behavioral therapy to help them with parent child interaction and problem solving skills. These authoritarian behavioral treatments include things like "Recognize and praise your child's positive behaviors, offer acceptable choices to your child, giving him or her a certain amount of control." ODD should NEVER get a drug prescription except in the case of comorbitity. Read more here: http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/oppositional-defiant-disord...
ADD and ADHD are over-diagnosed and ODD might also be, but there are people who legitimately suffer from major crushing behavioral deficits which can make properly learning difficult. Sloppy historical analogy with 'famous people would totally be ADD' is a terrible marginalization of this disorder and it's sufferers.
Also, lots of people are mentioning the Rosenhan experiment and claiming that psychology hasn't changed at all since then. This is largely inaccurate. I would direct them to this askscience thread http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/orf88/how_has_ps... about changes that have occurred including the rise of counseling and patient bill of rights.
1. They are planning to get rid of it. Google has way too many non-removable elements as is, even using so called compact mode. Right now they have two or three bars that could be smashed together with a few modifications. This is doubly true if they get rid of a giant useless logo that stalks you throughout your pages.
2. People were clicking it by accident. As a heavy net user, I don't feel this, but perhaps older or tablet users (but then why not fix it for them) were clicking it and pulling themselves out of Gmail. I could see this being extremely frustrating for a user trying to click the mail or search button.
3. They wanted to shift the functionality to the black bar. This is sort of a combination of the above two. The Google logo is pretty ambiguous. When I click it do I want to reload the page? Do I want to go to the Google homepage? Do I want iGoogle (why did they ruin Reader temporarily but not fix the mess that is iGoogle)? Do I want to search with the bar next to the logo? This is compounded by the fact that it has a context based search bar next to it. I know what that bar does but the context search UI is pretty ambiguous for a first time user.