dannyb

While I agree with the general thrust of your comment, the machines used by the TSA are not "focused" in the same way. It would take much greater effort to create hazardous conditions like these patients experienced.

I think that article was essentially a propaganda piece, albeit unintentionally. My guess is that Newsweek puts out blurbs like that in order to reach out to a targeted demographic, in this case women.

The whole question of media bias really comes down to the bottom line. If a format of words plus carefully chosen images favored traditionally conservative causes (which for the most part they don't) there would be widespread complaints about right wing media bias. AS it is, I think there is very little remanent of journalistic ethics in mass media.

Sometimes life is unfair, but I hold as an article of faith that almost anything can be made better by getting off your butt and working hard. For me personally, there's almost nothing of value in that study. It wouldn't change my approach to life.

I agree and I remember the days of being a grad student and scouring the pages of High Tc Update looking for the next super-material. It seemed like every other quarter there was a hint of room T superconductivity and it was always dashed by the next quarter.

It sounds like you're asking asking whether some regions of a sample could be superconducting while others are normal phase. This can occur in heterogeneous materials as in a Josephson's junction. Pretty cool stuff when you look at it. An unknown 23 yr old grad student faced down a two-time Nobel prize winner and was right!

I think you're completely misunderstanding the thrust of the article. This ability goes far beyond memorizing knowledge in one specialized area. These people go through hours (up to 8 at a time) of testing about the everyday mundane events that have happened as well as the extraordinary things - there is no way for them to trick their testers. In the 60 minute piece, they could recall amazing detail about days from 20 years ago. This goes far beyond memorizing weather patterns and reconstructing information according to the regularity of a work schedule, etc.

I think what a lot of people are noticing here is that this extraordinary ability has not been commensurate with extraordinary accomplishments and it leads them to downplay the significance...

A model of an atom can be likened to a solar system

Um, no. Electrons do not have well-defined trajectories. Quantum particles should not in any way be compared to classical macroscopic objects.

I love fractals and finding examples of them in nature and science, but posts like these annoy me a bit. Saying that there are fractals everywhere is a bit like saying that we don't live in the Platonic plane.

I agree with the sentiment of your point, but this does represent "normal mental faculties" in any way. They are clearly extraordinary in this one sense and that alone doesn't allow them to be classified as normal.

I watched this spot on 60 minutes and I am not convinced that these people are normal with respect to mental health. They had a very odd affect at times. Still, it was amazing to watch people recall things that happened over 20 years ago with clarity and precision.

Hey Mr. Policeman, if you're not doing anything wrong, then you have nothing to worry about.

Seriously, what would you expect from Obama at this point? All talk and platitudes and no backbone.

My only beef with his interesting post is that he uses graphics of completely understandable stuff like diagonalizing a matrix or the map of the phase space map of the logistic equation and then talks about current developments in math. Anything new is almost completely incomprehensible to me - a couple of years ago, I got a book about fractional calculus. I read about 5 pages away and gave it to a mathematician friend of mine...

Good. Hopefully this is the beginning of restoration of some common sense in these matters. It would be even nicer if we could get rid of the Patriot Act and the crotch-grabby TSA POSs while we're at it, but I know better than to dream.

so they're not evil?

I guess it didn't affect everyone since I was able to use it on the day in question to make a Ticketmaster purchase on 12/8.

Excellent post. Take responsibility for your own intellectual development and you will do much better than if someone were to show you the exact solution to a problem you're working on.

I see this a lot with students in introductory physics. If they come to me and say "I don't get it" or "I can't get started" I actually invest less time than if I get a good student who has hit a wall and can't get through. The student who won't/can't start will get sent to the tutoring center and I will spend the time with the kid who works hard. There's only so much of me to go around and I want to make it count.

It made for an interesting read, but I think there are too many generalizations in that type of writing. The truth is, we have just experienced and extraordinary explosion in the amount of valuable data and information that it available to almost everybody. I think that we have not yet come to grips with this and that it has caused some disciplinary boundaries to be rewritten. There will still be heroes after the revolution!

As others have commented here, I find it very telling that maximum publicity was sought when the article was first published, but the lead author seems to dislike the scrutiny brought about by these claims. Due diligence was not done and this paper is not up to Science's usual standards. The shame of it is that this will wind up being another black eye for NASA.

There's a big difference between "saying spectacularly naive things" and publishing in a supposedly respectable journal.

Plus, the guy deserves an academic weggie for naming a method after himself...

Yes, we could make reactors much more efficient than they were in the past, but there still will be waste to deal with.

Here's the problem that I see that few people discuss. Why should China and India care? The vast majority of their combined population, about 30% of the world's total, live under miserable circumstances by western standards. Move 100 million people off the coastline? No big deal. More typhoons? Oh well, we'll just rebuild the shacks.

China has a far greater problem in balancing the needs and wants of the haves and have-nots and they are going to address those issues first. They have everything to gain by continuing to industrialize and I think that anyone who believes that they will actually cut their emissions is kidding themselves.

I think we could take a huge step towards energy independence by building nuclear plants and driving hydrogen cars. Instead of dozens of smaller problems to solve, we could focus on just one: what to do with nuclear waste.

I agree, I don't think the guy is really in it for altruistic reasons.

That being said, the US doesn't look so great in complaining about the consequences of released sensitive information. If it is so important and people's lives depend on it, then why not invest more in information assurance?

this is exactly what I thought, too

I think we all labor under certain types of illusions on a daily basis - i.e. we ignore the dangers of driving because we have the illusion of control. If we thought about all of the permutations and repercussions of every action it might paralyze us. The mechanisms that we use to allow us to function day-to-day probably dull our senses.

In the US, there is a lot of emphasis placed on "closing achievement gaps"

It's easier to slow the smart kids down than make the slow/non-responsive kids perform better.

I don't think there is an active conspiracy or anything, just neglect. In the state of NJ, the only categories on standardized tests given to all K-12 students are Advanced Proficient, Proficient, and Partially Proficient. Advanced Proficient is really what you would just call normal. There is no recognition for high performers. Schools spend almost all of their time on getting kids above the Proficient mark because this is ultimately how funding will be allocated. Also, if you have too many kids below Proficient, the state can take over administration of your district.

As someone who has struggled with some of the same things, I can sympathize. However, I really think you need to toughen up a bit. Not everything that you do will be laden with meaning or will feel terribly fulfilling. It seems like you want to feel something deep and meaningful as a sign that you're on the right track in life. I've only had that feeling after putting in years of work and dealing with uncertainty, periods of depression and frustration, and generally just hanging in there.

Speaking for myself, those times that I have dropped out of things, I've felt regret and it hasn't helped my confidence. It probably would have been better to hunker down for five more weeks and deal with the discomfort.

Chances are you do know what you're passionate about and you're simply not listening or you've tamped that part of yourself down. You're obviously bright and introspective, when's the last time that you really felt excited about learning something in class or starting a project? Do you daydream about music, art, or architecture?

Anyway, good luck.

Let's see: false dichotomy - check. Overly argumentative - check. Strawman argument - check. Yup, I'm on the internet...

Are you really that literal?

My one sentence response contains a comma. The "No" is a response to your query. The rest of the sentence does not in any way contradict what I said before.

No, I think that Assange is a scumbag because he's a hypocrite.

Assange is a real scumbag for risking people's lives. He claims his real purpose is to protect against threats against democracy. Isn't it interesting how he behaves when he gets a little bit of power - autocratic, capricious, and meglomaniacal? I wonder what sort of behavior that he could rationalize in the name of the greater good.

A scientific theory is a self-contained description of a natural phenomena starting from first principles. My interpretation of a theoretical construct is something which is predicted to exist but has not been observed (or cannot be observed due to physical limitations). It can also be a set of results derived from thought experiments but not yet observed experimentally.

I apologize if anyone else has mentioned this, but I think most working scientists are uncomfortable with purely computational work and "theories" because they don't appear to be falsifiable within the framework developed by Popper. Current global climate models (GCM) are only subject to verifiability and this relegates them to a lower status then, say, Maxwell's equations. Maxwell's equations are capable of being used to explain almost all macroscopic electrodynamic phenomena, at least within the confines of classical physics. OTOH, there is no proper theory of the climate than can be treated with equal footing. There are only computational models and input data. There is a large amount of parameterization and data treatment (cynics would say massaging) that need to be done to get the models to converge.

I think that this is somewhat disingenuous for the reasons noted by others, but also the failure of the writer to acknowledge that colleges and universities have embraced business models and focused on revenue generation in ways that distract from the core mission.

I hate to say this but while most of the guilt should be borne by fat-cat administrators, faculty are greedy whores who are easily divided and conquered.