search results matching tag: modified

» channel: learn

go advanced with your query
Search took 0.001 seconds

    Videos (213)     Sift Talk (55)     Blogs (18)     Comments (994)   

The Check In: Betsy DeVos' Rollback of Civil Rights

newtboy says...

Your assumption is incorrect. As I've stated repeatedly, I think people should be seen and assessed individually on the totality of their character. It's just that I see the inpracticality of that in institutional settings where a few people must assess tens of thousands of applicants in months. That necessitates putting people into groups and making assumptions, sometimes by necessity that's by race. Fund education better, they might screen better. Fund all education better, they might be able to abandon all criteria beyond past performance, but that just won't happen (but $12 billion for Trump's trade war's damage to soy bean farmers, no problem, who's next?).

Ahhh....but those discriminatory practices have, and still are encoded in the law against these groups in many forms. Some have been rectified, many not, and never has there been a reasonable attempt to make up the shortfalls/damages these policies have caused these groups over decades and centuries. If I beat you daily and take your lunch until 11th grade, then stop, it's still horrifically unfair of me to insist you meet weight requirements to be on my JV wrestling team and yet not offer you weight training and free lunch to help you get there. Same goes for groups, however you wish to divide them, that have been downtrodden.
Creating policies to address the damage done in order to get the long abused back to their natural ability level isn't bad unless they aren't ever modified once equality is reached. We aren't close yet.

Some won't, most do. You make a thousand little sacrifices for the greater good daily, one more won't hurt you. If your ability is actually equal to the poor kid trying to take your place, the advantages you have over them should make that point abundantly clear and your scores should be excessively higher. If they aren't, you just aren't taking advantage of your advantages, making them the better choice.

Time will tell, but I don't see this as political, I see it as rational realism vs irrational tribal wishful thinking.
My parents both worked at Stanford, and are Republicans, and both support giving less advantaged students more opportunities to excell, and both think diversity on campus benefits everyone to the extent that it merits using race and gender as points to consider during the application process if that's what it takes to get diversity.

Your main problem seems to be that it's decided purely by race. Let me again attempt dissuade you of that notion. Race is only one tiny part of the equation, and it's only part because they tried not including race and, for reasons I've been excessively sesquipedelien about, that left many races vastly underrepresented because they don't have the tools required to compete, be that education, finances, support of family, support of community, extra curricular opportunities, safety in their neighborhood, transportation, etc., much of which is caused by centuries of codified law that kept them poor, uneducated, and powerless to change that status. No white male with a 1600 and 4.0 is being turned away for a black woman with 1000 and 2.9, they might be turned away for a black woman with 1550 and 3.8 because she likely worked much harder to achieve those scores, indicating she'll do even better on a level field.

I don't see why Republicans care, they're now the proudly ignorant party of anti-intellectualism who claim all higher education is nothing but a bastion of liberal lefty PC thugs doin book lernin. Y'all don't want none of that no how. ;-)

Edit: note, according to reports I saw years ago, without racial preferencing FOR white kids, many universities would be nearly all Asian because their cultures value education above most other things so, in general, they test better than other groups.

bcglorf said:

. I get that you disagree vehemently......

The Check In: Betsy DeVos' Rollback of Civil Rights

newtboy says...

Your stance says it. Objecting to using race as one of many criteria for admission in favor of a single test that clearly benefits your group ignores "all racial discrimination and racial obstacles except that single instance you can point to where it doesn't come out in your favor, then suddenly racism IS a problem that needs eradicating...."

Short sighted tribal reasoning was electing a lying cheeto with anger issues because it wore red.

Yes, but that score must, to be honest and have any value, include a measurement of the obstacles overcome to achieve that score. Taking financial, societal, opportunistic, familial, etc obstacles they've overcome doesn't seem to bother you, race is one more obstacle for many, one that's rightly taken into account when measuring a student's efforts required to achieve their current status, especially proper when diversity is part of the desired outcome of the computation.

Include a numerical modifier that takes overcoming those multiple obstructions into account and skin color might eventually be reasonably removed, but not before.

Lower scoring candidates should be chosen over higher scoring candidates based on other factors. Race is, right now, the best way to generalize those factors when trying to create a diverse student body, something we've determined is a benefit to all students. Of course, it would be better to examine all facets of performance on an individual basis, but schools don't seem to do that anymore, it's a Herculean task. Again, fund them better and they tend to do better.

bcglorf said:

@newtboy said;
"You wish to ignore all racial discrimination and racial obstacles except that single instance you can point to where it doesn't come out in your favor, then suddenly racism IS a problem that needs eradicating...."

No I don't. I never said that, you're the one that said anyone objecting to affirmative action is like that. At least I presume that's what you meant by: "short sighted, purely tribal reasoning"

I question the process for applications for jobs, grants, university/college or other places. If one has a color blind computational method of creating a qualification score for candidates, how do we most fairly use that score to choose candidates.

My view: Sort the candidates by qualification score and take the top ones.

Tell me if I understand your view right or not.
I understand your view as: Some times or to some extent, higher scoring candidates should be disregarded for other lower scoring candidates based upon race.

Please correct me if I misunderstand that.

Also, anywhere else that race is similarly systematically used to discriminate against people should of course be equally corrected. Again, I'm not American, are there other parallel examples of law and process that check for your race and replace you with lower scoring people because of it? You accused me of only looking at "the kind that harms white guys", but the reality is I only know of this example of law and regulation written specifically addressing race as something that must be used to raise/lower the scoring of candidates. Are there other direct examples?

The Check In: Betsy DeVos' Rollback of Civil Rights

newtboy says...

1) Yes, but that's much more easily said than done, and many people disagree too. I feel that it's far cheaper to pay to educate other people's children (I have none) and have them become far more productive citizens than it is to insist (despite all evidence to the contrary) that hard work overcomes all obstacles, and everyone is capable of doing the work required for success. This theory removes responsibility to help others and puts blame squarely on those who've failed. Convenient, but just wrong.

2) In a vacuum, that makes sense, but not in real life. The refusal to acknowledge the disparities in opportunity to prepare for that singular performance is where the racism lies.
It's actually illegal to use just race over performance merit in most places as I understand it. Ethnicity/gender are usually only one small part of the equation. If they could be replaced with a numerical opportunity score, used to modify performance scores,
I would support that, but good luck figuring that one out to anyone's satisfaction.

3) Yes, people always resent being forced from a position of power. I do think it's important to constantly revisit the issue to insure policy doesn't foster inequities, particularly since that's the point of the policies, eradicating inequities.

4) Predicting the naive would be suckered by a professional con man telling them platitudes, sure, but predicting so many of the educated would go along for short sighted, purely tribal reasoning, that's tougher.

5) Certain groups of people have been claiming white men are the downtrodden powerless whipping boys since the 60's. It's getting closer to true, but we aren't near there yet, it just seems that way to those less socially powerful than their fathers. Sure, there are outliers where the white male gets the shaft due to race, but we still come out well ahead in the balance by any objective set of criteria..

bcglorf said:

1)Surely the solution should rather be to fix the real problem of unequal opportunity in primary education?

2) Even given disagreement on this, surely the left(you?) can acknowledge that reasonable good minded people could disagree? Surely it's an over-reaction to call people racist for believing that choosing students based upon performance and not race is a good thing? One has to acknowledge that the counter example, of using race before merit as a selection criteria is in fact the very definition of racism?

More importantly to the Democratic party though, allow me to gift them moral justice and rightness on the issue.
3) Even given that, practicality dictates that spending many years with a policies that choose certain people over more qualified others based upon race will create tensions. If you made that policy against say whites, or males, they might develop resentment.
4) One might predict that they may even vote against those imposing that policy, arguably even willingly voting for a kind of racist orange haired loud mouth that they hope will end the policy discriminating against them based upon their race.

5) You might even argue it's starting to happen already...

Science Moms

navlasop says...

I agree that the GMO hysteria is way overblown, and the science on it causing any ill effects are nill. Tough non-GMO supporters tend to say that there's no long enough studies.

True enough, if you want a lifetime study you'll have to wait a great deal longer, since GMO foods only went commercial in 1994, tough i'm sure the studies were going on for ages before that.

In any case, what concerns me is the patent of crops, and while today as far as i know, the strain is patented for 20 years (atleast in the US) After that they become public domain as far as its makeup\modification is concerned. Fair enough.

The only issue i fear (which is not logical ), is that if\when GMO's become the "norm", and non modified crops are basically not grown anywhere, the rulebook goes out the window, some politicians gets alot richer, and the corporations now own all the plants\seeds. Forever.

I know it's extremely unlikely, but i dare anyone not to nod and think "yep, corporations would do that in a second if they could get away with it".

The question of patenting parts of the human genome.

Sagemind says...

There are parts of this video that felt very much like Pro-Monsanto propaganda, though I think the feel was supposed to feel non-biased.

The idea that anyone should be able to patent natural living organisms is plain wrong in my opinion. It wasn't theirs to start with.

So when I hear that they can patent variations or modificatioons, then I start to worry about what happens when the Modified version overtakes and eliminates the natural organism. Using Corn as an example, It's just a matter of time before natural organisms will no longer exist. At least not the ones that we use.

So basically, it's just a waiting game that corporations with the money and technology have to play before they will, in the end, own everything.

Morally wrong in the end.

Largest Turboprop in the world Antonov AN 22 Manchester

radx says...

Counter-rotating propellers sparked my curiosity when I first saw them on a British Seafire Mk46 at a flight show in the early nineties.

So my amateur's answer would be that it's about the problem of turning the engine's power into thrust. With increasing power, you can either increase the propeller's RPM or its area. So you either a) spin it faster, b) increase its diameter, c) use a more favourable blade geometry, d) add more blades.

a) and b) both lead to blade tips moving faster, and once they approach the speed of sound, wave drag sets in and ruins your day. b) also runs into issues in terms of ground clearance. Thus the Kim Jong-un blades on planes like the An-70: short and fat.

c) is rather difficult to do in terms of manufacture -- that's why more pronounced blade shapes are a relatively recent development.

d) on a single propeller decreases the efficiency of each blade as it passes through the previous blade's vortex. That's why, for instance, German planes in WW2 almost exclusively relied on 3-bladed propellers with increasing blade size, whereas Supermarine went to four and even 5 blades rather quickly. You can work the issue to a certain degree by modifying the blade geometry, thus the 8 blade props on a modern A400M.

Adding more blades by adding another propeller gets around d), although the aft prop still loses efficiency compared to the front prop. On the other hand, counter-rotating props massively reduces problems with torque, which can be rather horrendous for single engine prop planes. The Bf 109, for instance, is (in)famous for being difficult during take-off as it pulls to the side quite violently.

moonsammy said:

I don't know enough about aerodynamics to understand how stacking the propellers like that makes any sense, so I'm just going to assume it's some sort of Soviet technomagic.

Why We Constantly Avoid Talking About Gun Control

harlequinn says...

Cars drive and kill. True. And all the regulations he mentioned didn't stop one crazy guy hopping in a truck and saying "fuck you" and mowing down a hundred people. This is an important point because he's talking about firearm regulation in the context of mass shootings, and that firearm regulation will lessen or prevent these mass shootings - which he then compares to mass murder by vehicle, and vehicle regulation - regulation which clearly failed to stop any sort of purposeful mass murder by vehicle. Vehicle regulation is to lessen the impact of accidents and provide the government with a revenue stream through taxes. If vehicle regulation was to stop mass murder by vehicle, and you were to use Australia's firearm laws as a blueprint, you wouldn't be driving to work tomorrow.

The scary thing is, cars have killed more people by accident over the last 50 years in the USA than firearms have on purpose. That's how truly dangerous they are. If people woke up and realised they are a fantastic killing machine, then you'd start to see an increase in the incidence of mass vehicle killings... oh wait.

The reality is, from a public health discourse, there are plenty of things that kill at higher rates than firearms. The difference is that firearms are sometimes used to murder people and as far as we know most medical malpractice, car crashes, etc. are accidental. They are emotively tackled very differently.

PS: I'm not arguing against some firearm regulations being introduced in America. I'd use a modified version of New Zealand legislation (which allows for semi-auto long arms, high capacity magazines, etc.). I'd add self defense as a reason to own, and add concealed carry permits for those willing to do a course (with the catch that they would become a form of quasi-deputy of the state - so there would be hurdles to jump to get this permit).

Unreal Engine's Human CGI is So Real it's Unreal

ChaosEngine says...

Yeah, the real-time aspect of it is insanely good, although I'd still like to know how much of the rendering budget it takes up, i.e. is this usable in a game or just a research project at the moment?

What do you mean by "only one modifier is being applied"? Which is my other criticism of the video; a voiceover explaining the tech would have been more interesting than the music.

I don't believe that "multiple modifiers" would make this look better, for the simple reason that if you're demoing a technology like this, you end with ALL the bells and whistles to make it look as good as possible.

ravioli said:

The reason it doesn't look quite there is because only one modifier is applied at a time, for the purpose of the demo. You must imagine the possibilities if multiple modifiers are put in altogether. Also, the rendering is done in real-time, so this is in itself pretty amazing.

Unreal Engine's Human CGI is So Real it's Unreal

ravioli says...

The reason it doesn't look quite there is because only one modifier is applied at a time, for the purpose of the demo. You must imagine the possibilities if multiple modifiers are put in altogether. Also, the rendering is done in real-time, so this is in itself pretty amazing.

ChaosEngine said:

Sorry, not quite there yet. There is no way anyone would actually look at that and think "oh, it's a video of a human".

The uncanny valley is one of those instances where the closer you get to perfection, the more obvious the flaws are.

But in terms of a video game character, this is very, very good.

I would love to know a few more details about it:
- how expensive is the rendering? We're just seeing a face on its own. If we drop it into an actual scene, will it still run?

- how well does it animate/lip sync?

Crash Test: 1998 vs 2015 Toyota Corolla

coolhund says...

You can clearly see that its a steering wheel made for an airbag (the cover flies off, but theres no airbag inside). Normally cars with option without airbag had different steering wheels that wouldnt fit an airbag.
And steering wheel cover flying off from just the impact force, most likely means they tampered with it and when you remove an airbag, its because you cant properly retighten the cover to the steering wheel.
Yes I have experience with Toyota airbags/steering wheels. Actually I am modifying 2 steering wheels right now.

spawnflagger said:

It's possible that the '98 Corolla sold in Australia did not have airbags as a default option, whereas the '98 Corolla sold in North America did include them in all models.

comrade nighthawk shows off his AR-15 so he can shoot nazis

newtboy says...

Ridiculous.
Should we start posting videos of people pretending to be completely brain dead Trump supporters incapable of dressing themselves?
I'm no fan of antifa, but I also am not a fan of dismissive right wing propaganda, especially when it pretends to be reality.

Being generous with no vote...I hate this kind of crap (I don't believe for a second that this is a real, clueless gun owner in California with a new AR-1, not AR-1,5, AR-15's are nearly impossible to get here and must be heavily modified to be owned at all, his total lack of basic knowledge is nearly impossible if he really went throughout the trouble it takes to buy one here).

Have I been Trumped by Google? (Sift Talk Post)

coffeejerk says...

This seems to be a false positive issue on chromes end for some days.
Saw some logs from admins reporting the same for the current version of chrome post 04032017. Also, there were false positives due to a bug some time ago.

It can result from taking up malformed parts of the page due to missing / unbound variables etc. and interpreting it as modified site content. Even perfectly fine content can be misinterpreted in certain circumstances.

example of older false positive bug: empty attribute in form header
<form method="POST" action=>

Try using another browser for the time being.

Do not disable protective measures. It is however possible that indeed parts of your page were modified by browser plugins and or wanted or unwanted additions to your system. If in question perform a scrubbing on your system via a bootable system if desired.

Fixperts - A Button Fastener for 82 year old Tom

transmorpher says...

What you've quoted is that's the same thing I said in my OP -JH acknowledges that changing diets helps. They specifically say meat and milk are the prime allergy suspects.

There isn't any disagreement here :-)




But..........I do have a bone to pick with Hopkins. The fish oil study they reference on the Hopkins site, is a bit sus when you dig deeper.
Everyone in the study was also given disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drugs along with the fish oil..... so Hopkins isn't really giving us the full story here, which is: Fish oil helps remission in people on RA drugs.

Great, now RA sufferers have to buy toxic liver destroying drugs, and also buckets of fish oil supplements too(the doses were 10x the daily recommended amount of fish oil).... I guess they're line of reasoning is that you make more money if you can sell them two pills for the same disease.

They even try to hide the drugs part by calling it "DMARDs" after the references (which people don't usually read). Technically it's not lying I suppose, but it's very unethical. If I didn't go all the way through and find the research it'd have never figured that out. Turns out John Hopkins is largely industry funded, which doesn't surprise me now that they're approach is to push more pills, instead of less.

Sincerely, I have to thank you for bringing that to my attention. I like to keep a list of this misleading stuff.

You weren't wrong when you said there are some scummy misleading people in the medical field.

newtboy said:

According to the JH website, it's not only wrong, the study could not show what you claim by it's design.
Excuse me...let me use their exact words....

Food Hypersensitivities and Their Link to RA

In some patients, specific foods have been shown to exacerbate the symptoms of RA.(ref 5) Avoiding these foods or food groups has been shown to have limited, short term benefits but no benefits long term. Even though different forms of dietary modification have reportedly improved symptoms in some patients, people with RA may have spontaneous temporary remissions. Therefore, it is important to perform double-blind, placebo controlled trials to differentiate diet effect from spontaneous remission. You may identify a food that is a particular trigger for you, and this phenomenon is real. However, the science is not able to reliably identify specific triggers for individuals.

Diet elimination therapy is a method of determining food hypersensitivities with patients. Elimination diets avoid a specific food or group of foods such as milk, meat or processed foods that are known to be prime allergy suspects. These foods are eliminated from the diet for a specific period of time. Foods are then gradually reintroduced one at a time, to determine whether any of them causes a reaction.

Panush and colleagues, demonstrated temporary improvement in the signs and symptoms of RA with diet elimination and modification in a controlled study where the symptoms associated with food sensitivities were studied.(ref 5) During this study when the patient was fasting or on a severely restricted diet, the patients symptoms improved significantly. However, when the patient had milk reintroduced into the diet, episodes of pain, swollen and tender joints and stiffness were experienced. Similarly, Kjeldsen-Kragh and colleagues(ref 6) noted that fasting may be effective in reducing the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis, however most patients relapsed as new foods were reintroduced into the diet. Pain and discomfort frequently returned once a patient reverted to a normal diet. These studies are few in number and should be interpreted and extrapolated to real life only with careful thought and caution.

Kurzgesagt: Are GMOs Good or Bad?

Hastur says...

I think many people don't realize how GMOs have made farmers' lives so much easier.

I'm surprised to read what you said about your family's GM seeds being modified to be sterile though; the video states that terminator seeds were never commercialized. Since you're talking about corn, maybe it was just hybrid?

Kurzgesagt: Are GMOs Good or Bad?

MilkmanDan says...

Some additional notes based on growing up in a wheat / corn farming family:

My family uses GMO herbicide/pesticide-resistant corn seed (Roundup Ready). It's a tradeoff, because:

1) Roundup Ready seed is somewhat expensive, especially compared to just holding on to a small amount of your own harvested crop as next year's seed.

2) Like the video mentioned, the GM seeds we used have been modified to be sterile, so the grain they produce can't be replanted. Part of the justification for that is not wanting the GM version to intermingle with unmodified strains. But, most is pure profit motivation -- they want you to be forced to buy that GM seed. I don't really see that as nefarious, just business -- but opinions differ.

3) My family discovered that for corn, we could us the GM Roundup Ready seed roughly once every 5 years while still benefiting from drastically reduced insect / plant pests. If corn is within pollination range of another less known crop plant called milo, the plants can hybridize and produce a plant called shattercane. Shattercane is essentially worthless as a food crop, but is very hardy, and can spread and in many cases outcompete the corn or milo that you really want.

Getting rid of it was a very difficult and intensive process -- until the GM seed came along. Now if we see shattercane starting to make incursions, we can plant the GM seeds the next year and then hit the field with a herbicide that kills the shattercane. It works so well that the field remains clear of the pest plants / insects for several years after that without having to use much if any herbicides / pesticides.

4) In our situation, we found that we used way less herbicide / pesticide per year on average once we started rotating in the GM seeds once every several years. That would be close to a wash, but still likely a net savings even if we used the GM seeds every year (seed companies will try to sell it to you every year). Factor in increased crop yields because of the reduced/eliminated pests, and it is a clear win.

5) I'm sort of worried about the potential for a "superbug" effect, similar to overusing / misusing antibiotics. If farmers buy into the GM seed thing 100% and use it every year, I think it will increase the chances / rate of the pests becoming resistant to the pesticides / herbicides used. That's a long-term concern, and in my opinion doesn't even come close to outweighing the "pro" side of the GM argument (at least from the perspective of my family's farm), but it is something to think about.



Send this Article to a Friend



Separate multiple emails with a comma (,); limit 5 recipients






Your email has been sent successfully!

Manage this Video in Your Playlists

Beggar's Canyon