joeyo

Residents, interns and fellows are unionized in some states: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_of_Interns_%26_Resid...

> And I am not too sure if they are scrambling at their one child policy, there are simply far too many people in china.

It's not the absolute number that's the issue it's the age distribution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#/media/F...

I ... think you might have misunderstood the story.

MediFor - https://www.darpa.mil/program/media-forensics

Looks like the BAA came out in 2015: https://www.fbo.gov/spg/ODA/DARPA/CMO/DARPA-BAA-15-58/listin...

I've noticed this as well. My working hypothesis is that one is for high(er) bandwidth and the other for low bandwidth situations.

Look no further than Mission Bay ...

I agree the authors should have used the improved odds calculation you mention. However, doing so would only explain the missing 10% if two photons hitting a single rod led to 100% correct response rate, and it seems unlikely for the response to be so nonlinear. Anyway with such an experiment, we don't know why the subjects are above chance, and can only make inferences. As I point out above, you really need single photon emission to know for sure.

I went back to the original paper [1] and the authors' conclusions are much more measured than précis we are all discussing. From page 838:

  ... the range of 54 to 148 quanta at the cornea
  becomes an upper limit of 5 to 14 quanta actually 
  absorbed by the retinal rods. [ed: I presume this 
  is where the figure of 9 comes from]
    3. This small number of quanta, in comparison to
  the number of rods (500) involved, precludes any
  significant two quantum absorptions per rod [ed: oops],
  and means that in order to produce a visual effect,
  one quantum must be absorbed by each of 5 to 14 rods
  in the retina.
    4. Because this number of individual events is so
  small, it may be derived from an independent statistical
  study of the relation between the intensity of a light
  flash and the frequency with which it is seen. Such
  experiments give values  of 5 to 8 for the number of
  critical events involved at the threshold of vision. 

1. http://www.cns.nyu.edu/~david/courses/perceptionGrad/Reading...

  > "until the subjects guesses were no better than random"

Crucially, no: They analyzed performance at 60% and made their argument based on the photons delivered at that light intensity. If your objection is about that statistical argument (" ... the photons would have been spread over about 350 rods"), such an indirect method was necessary because the experimenters didn't have an apparatus that could emit single photons in 1942. The 2016 article mentioned upthread [1] improves on this by providing the simple and direct experiment: emit single photons and check if the subjects can beat a coin-toss over large numbers of trials.

1. https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms12172

  > This experiments seems to make no attempt to eliminate
  > the possibility that this is completely random.

Psychophysicists use two-alternate forced-choice experiments precisely to eliminate the possibility of the result being "completely random". Indeed, for this experimental design it---given sufficient trials---is quite easy to do hypothesis testing and compute confidence intervals for the hypothesis that the subjects can perform the task better than chance.

You are correct, of course, that this doesn't prove that they see the photons. Maybe the experimental apparatus was poorly made and accidentally a noise when the photons were flashed. Or maybe someone cheated and told them which trials the photons would be delivered. Or perhaps they simply have ESP. But the one thing that we can easily have confidence about is when an effect differs from random chance.

I'm a fan of Lombardo's:

  Speak, Memory –
                               Of the cunning hero
  
  The wanderer, blown off course time and again
  After he plundered Troy's sacred heights.
                                                       
  Speak
  Of all the cities he saw, the minds he grasped,
  The suffering deep in his heart at sea
  As he struggled to survive and bring his men home
  But could not save them, hard as he tried –
  The fools – destroyed by their own recklessness
  When they ate the oxen of Hyperion the Sun,
  And that god snuffed out their day of return.
                              Of these things,
   Speak, Immortal One,
  And tell the tale once more in our time.

His Iliad is excellent too.

  > Today, it's on Google to maintain dead kernels that it is 
  > still supporting. The 2016 Google Pixel shipped with 
  > Linux kernel 3.18, which was first released in 2014 and 
  > hit end-of-life in January 2017.

This is good. If it is going to take so long to go from kernel to shipped phone, that kernel should be supported for a reasonable amount of time.

Why should Google expect funding a non-profit would benefit them? They get the tax-write-off precisely because it benefits The People first and Google second, if at all.

Except Lynn wasn't a Google employee, so the at-will employment analysis doesn't apply.

Why will the machines need to be located in Bangladesh? Cheaper repairmen?

Tup is really great. I wish it were more widely used. Tup can effortlessly handle a lot of situations that Make chokes on or requires deep magic to get right. A good example is the clean handling of automatically generated header files. This is all it takes to integrate protobufs into a Tupfile:

  : foreach *.proto |> !protoc |> %g.pb.cc | %g.pb.h
  : foreach *.pb.cc | *.pb.h |> !cpp |> %g.pb.o

The "|>" is the pipe operator and I've elided the definitions of the "!protoc" and "!cpp" macros (but they're about what you'd expect). Tup detects whenever a .proto file is changed and does the right thing. Getting this to work with Make requires advanced tricks like .PHONY and .PRECIOUS.

Ah, sorry, I meant two codes in two languages that implemented the same functionality. I was thinking of a NN version of say, python 2to3.

That gives me a kind of funny idea: train a sequence-to-sequence LSTM network on code written in two (or more) programming languages that implement the same functionality. You'd need a big corpus, and the could would probably would have to be a little more complicated than "hello world, but I don't see why it wouldn't work, in principle.

It's a bit of a special case, but I am huge fan of Kaitai [1] for generating parsers for reading binary data formats. You declaratively describe the format in a YAML-based DSL, and "compile" it into a parser that can target a variety of languages (C++, Java, Python, etc).

1. http://kaitai.io/

In the US, the typical circuit max is 15 A. Some outlets provide more (e.g. 20 A for an electric clothes dryer, though those usually run on 240 V).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEMA_connector#/media/File:NEM...

50 us, you mean.

They claim a nicely low input referred noise (~4 uV), so 19 kHz should be great for spike detection, though as you note upthread it's a little low for spike sorting: it's nice to have at least 30 kHz.

I wonder how much weight savings they got over combining a wireless chip and a bare-die Intan [1].

1. http://intantech.com/products_RHD2000.html

You may be right that thinning during maturation could serve a purpose, but if so you have the effect backwards: thinner myelin should mean higher capacitance (C ~ A/d) and slower conduction velocity. One would expect, if anything, that the myelin would need to get thicker as the limb lengthens. Perhaps nerve fiber diameter also increases with maturation---which also results in faster conduction velocity---and the myelin sheath thins to compensate.

Path dependency. Insect eyes and vertebrate eyes presumably each occupy their own unique minima in the energy landscape. Even if we could describe a cost function that picked one of them as more globally optimal, moving from one to another would be hideously expensive.

It's also possible that compound eyes have an advantage at smaller eye sizes---or maybe a better way to put it: their disadvantage relative to vertebrate eyes is less pronounced for equally small eyes. Pure speculation on my part though.

  > Most languages developed a word for the color red before
  > any other colors. Probably because blood is red and
  > uniquely present at the most dramatic times of life.

Red has high contrast against the backgrounds of natural scenes (greens, blues, browns, etc) and is distinguishable in a variety of lighting conditions. For this reason it is one of the standard "warning" colors used by the natural world. Moreover, plants have co-opted red for positive signaling, too: many fruits and berries are red. If that weren't enough, many mammals (including humans) use red hues for signaling emotional and sexual states. Discriminating red hues was apparently important enough that primates "re-evolved" a red-detecting cone in the retina, despite ancestral mammals losing a similar one earlier in evolutionary history.

  > basically the _lingua franca_ of the Western world. [emphasis mine]

You're not wrong, but for some reason I always find it hilarious to refer to English as the language of the Franks.

That's right, but note that the replacement rate depends on mortality rates and any gender-bias for either birth or mortality. Generally birth rates below 2.1 are consider "sub-replacement", but it can be much higher in some locales (due to disease, war, etc). Here are some per-continent population projections:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:World_population_(UN...

(Interestingly, the above chart was created about 10 years ago; I do wonder how accurate it's been.)

  > Pensions aren't portable - in the modern labor market   
  > where people are expected to have multiple emplyers and 
  > possibly even career arcs, that's a pretty limiting.

Which is the cause and which is the effect? Do workers want to have multiple employers and career arcs?

Mister Rogers says:

  But the very same people who are good sometimes
  Are the very same people who are bad sometimes.

If the food poisoning was due to negligence, I don't see why not.

Grade separated bike lanes.

That's actually one of the reasons why the electromagnetic catapult became so important: it can adjust launch force with a lot more precision so it can provide the smaller forces needed for lighter planes and UAVs. The steam catapults (apparently) cannot do that.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_Aircraft_Launc...