prat

If there was someway to manipulate the way credit is damaged by looking at individuals so that only sub-prime borrowers are punished - that would be a possible solution. Let the responsible buyers walk away without penalty. But I understand that this has a potential for regime change and is far fetched in our situation.

Its not the morality but the expectation of the housing prices bouncing back to normal like the rest of the economy that is keeping them from walking away.

But the issue with realestate is that its not as agile a market as stocks or commodities. the volatility observed in a month in the stock market is probably going to be observed in a year in real estate market. And I am not not even talking about the phase lag but the different scales of variation between the 2 types of markets.

max joy + max disgust = getting relief from constipation.

this was an ingredient., you might need a logo astrologist/consultant to get the recipe.

It was a good idea to change the 1st G's color from green to blue.

"Although it is possible that people who were already ill watched more television than those who were healthy, the researchers tried to rule that out by excluding subjects who already had heart disease.."

This is a typical same old correlation - causation confusion. There are many more "althoughs" and all of them have to be excluded before the title can be justified.

I keep my eyes open for anything that looks like a toy - and this did (http://cdixon.org/2010/01/03/the-next-big-thing-will-start-o...). But in my case it wasn't sticky enough.

So just like Ricky I ended up abandoning it. Maybe it works for really well networked and extrovert people but is not a universal utility by any means.

you just overdid it man .. :) if you were tezza, I would have advised you to "leave on a high note"

Or maybe that's how the "system idle process" naturally looks like - and as soon as mind is focused, all connections get clustered together.

That's a very strange/sad way of working. At work, I have always known the end product toward which I am building. I can't imagine working with so many firewalls.

Those are good points.. the important thing here though is, that "nothing stops" has been well established, however not only is there activity but a different kind of activity compared to the situation when mind is not at "REST"

I remember in early 2000s when two-wheeled segway by Dean Kamen was on the verge of launch, it was secretly presented to a few ultra rich guys and was declared as even bigger than the PC. The opposite was true though in this case, this toy never took off.

Your clarification was actually my next point. Many of them were in fields not remotely connected with biology.

That statement could be made about anyone contradicting any well established theory. I am not putting the ID guy on a pedestal with Galileo or some such sacrificed truth seeker. All I am saying is that beleif in ID is not like child molestation for which one should be expelled from job.

here is an example.. The movie got 3.7 on IMDB - the lowest I have seen yet. I think the movie is not badly made - it been punished for being sympathetic towards (not ID but) people who believe in ID http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1091617/

I also think that the question is no longer about which theory is true.. Its about which side do you belong to and how stupid can you be to even raise the topic of ID.

I finished watching Ben Stein's "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" documentary. I thought the documentary was good, in that it talked about otherwise reputable scientists/teachers being expelled from their institutions because their name appeared in the context of ID where they did not vehemently reject it. Even if they didn't support or believe in ID, if they wrote an article merely wondering out loud about it, they were expelled. Interesting part is that in most cases authorities denied that that was the reason for the firing - eventhough their termination letter mentioned it.

welcome Nexus One

There is no doubt that there is propaganda on both sides. First, the govt taxes a pack of cigarettes at the rate of 85% over the actual cost of production, distribution and advertising with profit margin included. Since it is harmful for you, we will make you pay more for it - but we won't ban it because we want to give you the freedom of choice. On the other hand, the article goes on great length describing studies trying to find correlation between life expectancy and smoking, debunking the govt's claim along the way; However, it steers clear from talking about the high association found between lung cancer and smoking. Even if lung cancer deducts only a few months from your life, it still is a cancer and has effects OTHER than causing early death.

Thanks.. that explains the generation of the pulse - the link I posted probably relates to fine tuning the shape to get the desired color.

Abstract: Shaping of the phase, amplitude, and polarization state of an ultrashort pulse is demonstrated using a novel arrangement of a single, linear, high-resolution liquid crystal array. Orthogonal polarization components, separated by a Wollaston prism, are manipulated independently and re-combined in a near-common path, common-optic geometry.

http://www.opticsinfobase.org/DirectPDFAccess/D685BD2D-BDB9-...

I guess that already happens.. they have fakes for everything from gold to diamonds. Electroplating was invented long back - however, the fact that this technique prevents peeling off etc., means that fakes would be more durable. In any case, I think there is probably something more cutting edge they can do with this technology.

If it wasn't just a surface effect, that could have been possible:)

Just a crazy idea, but did they try to find out if sudden change of perspective in those who experience the paranormal (like near death experience) CAUSES the digit ratio to change?

I don't think the author talks about intuitive thinking in positive vein. Whatever is not analytical is named intuitive. However, the real definition of intuitive is probably that kind of thinking that comes out of subconsciously learned patterns and not from proactive conscious thought - often cited in the usual example of Friedrich August Kekulé discovering the benzene structure from a dream of a snake biting its own tale.

Wow! the cell phone throw and grab is really cool. That's some with quick action with real time decision making.

Wow! the cell phone throw and grab is really cool. That's some with quick action with real time decision making.

I recently watched an episode of house (medical TV show) in which house used the (probably) well known mirror box method to relieve pain in the phantom limb of an amputee. That just reinforces the possibility that pain may be more of a psychosomatic symptom than we think.

This is from Wikipedia article for phantom limb http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_limb

"One particularly novel treatment for phantom limb pain is the mirror box developed by Vilayanur Ramachandran and colleagues (Ramachandran, Rogers-Ramachandran & Cobb 1995). Through the use of artificial visual feedback it becomes possible for the patient to "move" the phantom limb, and to unclench it from potentially painful positions. Repeated training in some subjects has led to long-term improvement, and in one exceptional case, even to the complete elimination of the phantom limb between the hand and the shoulder (so that the phantom hand was dangling from the shoulder)."

Here is an artical my Malcolm Gladwell that talks about predicting movie/music hits http://www.gladwell.com/2006/2006_10_16_a_formula.html

Okay, I think I should accept that I am probably outdated or misinformed about the things one can do with neural nets. Re, randomforests, I was referring to the Leo Breiman implementation on the univ berkeley website. Andy Liaw of Merck also maintains the R version of Leo Breiman's algorithm (http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/randomForest/index.ht...). I know neural nets have been successfully used for really compute intensive applications like face recognition or vehicle autopilot, but for applications like poker or predicting car sales or data mining used by walmart etc, there has been increasing use of simpler regression based / decision tree based approaches. There is an impression in the machine learning community that NN is like a black box which is probably the reason for its falling popularity if that is the case.