I don't understand how this works. I read the articles and I am a little skeptical. I've designed fMRI and DTI algorithms for years and I don't see why they keep talking about fMRI and brain waves. fMRI is an activity map that is related to the hot spots in the brain where the hydrogen protons aligned by the magnetic field resonate to the frequency of the emitter (TR/Echo Time) and only show consumption of glucose (hydrogen protons motility) during a designed paradigm, which in this case would be having the subject watch a video. Diffuse Tensor Imaging will help map the neurons going there in case a surgical procedure is necessary, and that's about it. Extrapolating fMRI (a very coarse k-space reconstruction) to brainwaves (an EEG signal) and images sounds very suspicious to me, and nothing published so far explains how this is technically done. I understand the excitement and it certainly would be possible in the future, but under the current state of the art, I don't see how this is possible, especially with fMRI or Fractional Anisotropy.

Your video, Scientists Scan Movie Clips From Your Brain, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Your assumption is that the government will create jobs. I don't expect the government to create jobs - that's socialism. Just so you get this straight. I am not a democrat - I am a libertarian. I don't care about Obama; he is a failed president - just like Bush Jr., Carter, and Reagan. I'd rather have Ron Paul in the office, but you have to understand that we DO need a government. You have to understand that conservatives are not helping the situation either - two years in congress and nothing to show for. On top of all this, the hoards of Tea Party drama queens have been a horrible addition to our economic climate. They are not happy with anything, and are not offering any solutions. They give a bad name to the rest of the libertarians.

I don't like pensions, I don't like entitlements, and I don't like big government. However, everybody bitches about not having any money, yet nobody is willing to give up their benefits, pensions, and social security. Nobody is boycotting Chinese products at Wallmart/ToysRUs or outsourced manufactured goods. Nobody is willing to send their kids to private schools, yet they want to put a tourniquet on the education system. It's total hypocrisy. I hope the movement will die soon so we can go back to reconstruction.

The key word in this whole debate is "deficit." The money is already gone, and no amount of budget balancing alone will pay back the ridiculous amount the government already owes. I call on all these house representatives and government officials to take a 15% salary cut and pay for their own private health care. Let's see how patriotic they are. That'd be a good start; if that's not enough, then we can revisit the talks about taxing the rich.

As they say "Those who make the rules don't play the game."

>> ^quantumushroom:

His Earness has burned through 4 trillion dollars already. Why didn't he put any of it towards "paying off" the wars?
The logic here is astounding. When the wealthy keep more of what they earn, the left claims they don't use it to create jobs, but when the wealthy are taxed at a higher rate, the government (which creates nothing) can't use the "extra" revenue create jobs. Repeating: 4 trillions dollars already down the shitter, no jobs created.

>> ^MonkeySpank:
It's going to start paying back for the two useless wars that some idiot president started about 8 years ago. One thing is for sure though, not taxing them did not create jobs!
>> ^quantumushroom:
Federal government wastes half of every tax dollar.
So what's this magic millionaire money going to do that the spending addicts haven't done already?

I wonder how good the reconstructions would look if the computer had every video on youtube in its library?

Here is a link to the article:
http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822%2811%2900937-7#Summary
also, this video has a breakdown of how the process works:
http://videosift.com/video/Brain-Scan-Movies-reconstruction-methodology

>> ^lucky760:

Holy crap. Of all the science fiction technology I've ever seen, this is near the bottom of the list of things I thought would ever be a reality.
promote


Anything is possible at Zombo.com!

>> ^rottenseed:

I was referring to ascii coding and the understanding a reconstruction of Sagan's image>> ^Stormsinger:
>> ^rottenseed:
This has got to be the best hoax ever...not in the enormity of how many people it fooled, or in the entertainment value gathered, but from the amount of knowledge the pranksters needed to have in order to pull it off. Not to mention, crop circles look badass...

It's much the same as all the tricks we were taught in grade school, about solving geometric problems with a compass and ruler. Crop circles just take a board and some rope.



Oh...I took it for commenting on the more general case. You're right, there is a distinct bit of geek background there.

I was referring to ascii coding and the understanding a reconstruction of Sagan's image>> ^Stormsinger:

>> ^rottenseed:
This has got to be the best hoax ever...not in the enormity of how many people it fooled, or in the entertainment value gathered, but from the amount of knowledge the pranksters needed to have in order to pull it off. Not to mention, crop circles look badass...

It's much the same as all the tricks we were taught in grade school, about solving geometric problems with a compass and ruler. Crop circles just take a board and some rope.

I never was satisfied with the NTSB's report on the super pancaking explanation for the speed of the towers collapse. Perhaps it is emotional, but it is less convincing than many other of their findings from plane crashes and the like. What always puzzled me is why the building was so quick to be disposed of instead of what they do on planes; reconstruct it and examine. Perhaps the scale was to great or the fall and subsequent stack of it made reconstruction impossible, but it always left a bad taste in my mouth. Perhaps all the misgivings that I have they share as well, and instead of letting that foster a share of doubt and mystery, they have gone the other direction and made positive assertions of conspiracy. My guess is people don't like doubt, at all. It drives the theist to make claims of a God, it drives some atheists to make the claim of no God. People can't say, "I don't know and I don't know that the truth is ever knowable" doesn't sit well with the bulk of humanity, even those who would consider themselves the elite of intellectuals, perhaps even them the most.

At any rate, I would watch this once. Depending on the tone of the first 20 mins would determine if I watched it the whole way through. I was forced to watch that Ben Stine movie about creationism, and I hated it, but not nearly as much as I hated the show by Bill Maher (see elite of intellectuals above) about how dumb people that don't think like him are.

Will this be our generations Gulf of Tonkin, doubtful. Will it contain some meaningful doubts on a hasty and politically mired investigation, hopefully. Will there be more crazies than you can tolerate in one sitting, time will tell.

@dystopianfuturetoday, you know I'm in your camp, but that reads like a tea-party manifesto. It emphasizes deconstruction without worrying about our lack of agreement on the subsequent reconstruction. In some ways, I'm with @raverman. We need to sort out the ideological differences we've laid bare particularly over these past few years. That's why I think publicized presidential debates between Ron Paul and Barack Obama could be good for the country. IMO, you'd get some good, honest, civil discussion. It would give Paul the opportunity to bring Obama to task on some of the issues where he even loses the left; and it would give Obama an opportunity to talk to the rightwing frankly about the mapping between economics and reality.

Plus, I don't think Paul can win the general anyway. I'll concede that it would be disastrous if he did. Who could he take as a running mate?

Ultimately, I think the crux of the ideological issue is the absoluteness of private property "rights," and the mechanism of common ownership.

Ted is a great scientist. His life work as revolved around materials perception. He's also the guy behind this baddassery: http://www.gelsight.com/videos/

As many of you probably realize, almost every visual illusion was designed to illustrate some mechanism, or function of the visual system. This illusion is one of my favorites. It illustrates that the purpose of the visual system is not to directly "read out" luminance values from your retina, but instead to correctly interpret the reflectance properties of materials in the environment. Most often it's the properties of the materials themselves, not the properties of their illuminant which are important. However, the signals reaching your brain will depend drastically on both, and it is actually a relatively complicated process of 3d-scene reconstruction in order to parse out the reflectance properties you are interested in. Of course, the point of the illusion is to demonstrate just how automatic and subconscious this process is despite the obvious complexity.

Such a nice sound- the paper shuffle at the end of the clip. they must set that mic up strategically. :]

Dont borrow sugar from the neighbors, we have foodstamps...
Dont help the family business, we mustn't disqualify our unemployment..
Dont do yardwork for the oldlady down the street, she can afford lawnservice w/ her gov checks

Increasing this "social safety net" seems to be a tad counter-productive towards the reconstruction of this lack of community Keith talks of. How can we learn and really understand how to share unconditionally, when we are obligated to share through our money. Without so many checks from the gov., this disconnection between ourselves will be forced to mend together.

how can I learn to connect with the "extras" in my life, when they are just being indirectly fed by me.

Kieth says we don't care about each other. But I believe we are setting ourselves up for it. Why not take some physical step to fixing this instead of throwing money at it. Baby steps. -Ofcourse there our some bigger things the social safety net should catch. But overspending can widdle away the little things which make us who we are as a whole. He's right, we grew up sharing and caring in our childhoods. How can we set ourselves to share and care about eachother in our adulthood?

>> ^quantumushroom:

You know even those numbers are lies, NR. For chrissakes, the liars switched from "jobs created" to "lives touched" late last year.

Hey, you're the one that put that article forward, not me.

I think it's impossible to actually track specific jobs created by the stimulus. You can make estimates based on theory, but that's not really evidence, either for or against.

What's a bit easier to measure is the overall employment trend. You'll love that these are Nancy Pelosi's charts, but they're based on BLS statistics (what the whole economic world uses as the source for data on employment, BTW).

Here's the chart of the recession through to May's jobs report (June's report will probably come out this week). The stimulus bill was passed in February of 2009. The trend changed immediately, with the job losses slowing, and then turning into gains.

>> ^quantumushroom:
Government jobs are not real jobs as they do not reflect market needs.

That's my point, the stimulus wasn't about creating "government" jobs, it was an attempt to reverse the unemployment trend in the private sector. Right now the biggest drag on the jobs reports coming out is job losses in the public sector.

Here's a chart showing the last year in the ongoing march of Obama's supposed socialist revival. Private sector jobs up, public sector jobs down.

>> ^quantumushroom:
Here's a RADICAL idea: let people keep more of their own money, across the board.

I know it was another thread, but that idea's been tried. Hell, it's still being done to a greater degree than it's been done since well before I was born. That idea has clearly and unambiguously been tried, and has utterly failed to produce anything like what Republicans from Reagan forward have claimed it would.

>> ^quantumushroom:
And lay off Herb Hoover, moonbats, he was an unwilling or ignorant ally of yours.
wiki:
<long quote about things FDR said on the campaign trail>

A couple paragraphs above that, you find a description of Hoover's actual policies:

Calls for greater government assistance increased as the U.S. economy continued to decline. Hoover rejected direct federal relief payments to individuals, as he believed that a dole would be addictive, and reduce the incentive to work. He was also a firm believer in balanced budgets, and was unwilling to run a budget deficit to fund welfare programs.[45] However, Hoover did pursue many policies in an attempt to pull the country out of depression. In 1929, Hoover authorized the Mexican Repatriation program to combat rampant unemployment, reduce the burden on municipal aid services, and remove people seen as usurpers of American jobs. The program was largely a forced migration of approximately 500,000 Mexicans and Mexican Americans to Mexico, and continued until 1937. In June 1930, over the objection of many economists, Congress approved and Hoover signed into law the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. The legislation raised tariffs on thousands of imported items. The intent of the Act was to encourage the purchase of American-made products by increasing the cost of imported goods, while raising revenue for the federal government and protecting farmers. However, economic depression now spread through much of the world, and other nations increased tariffs on American-made goods in retaliation, reducing international trade, and worsening the Depression.[46]

In 1931, Hoover issued the Hoover Moratorium, calling for a one-year halt in reparation payments by Germany to France and in the payment of Allied war debts to the United States. The plan was met with much opposition, especially from France, who saw significant losses to Germany during World War I. The Moratorium did little to ease economic declines. As the moratorium neared its expiration the following year, an attempt to find a permanent solution was made at the Lausanne Conference of 1932. A working compromise was never established, and by the start of World War II, reparations payments had stopped completely.[47][48] Hoover in 1931 urged the major banks in the country to form a consortium known as the National Credit Corporation (NCC).[49] The NCC was an example of Hoover's belief in volunteerism as a mechanism in aiding the economy. Hoover encouraged NCC member banks to provide loans to smaller banks to prevent them from collapsing. The banks within the NCC were often reluctant to provide loans, usually requiring banks to provide their largest assets as collateral. It quickly became apparent that the NCC would be incapable of fixing the problems it was designed to solve, and it was replaced by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.

That all sounds very familiar to me as modern-day Republican policy proposals -- eschew direct assistance to the unemployed, try to boost employment by deporting Mexicans, attempt to defer interest payments on foreign debts, and ask banks to put in place their own policies to fix their own shortcomings rather than resort to regulation, and stick to preserving the gold standard at all costs. The only thing out of place is tariffs, but I've seen those mentioned from the conservative rank and file in discussions about what our response to China's ascendance should be.

In the election year of 1932, with unemployment at 25% and with people throwing things at his motorcade everywhere he went, he did start engaging in a little attempt at mortgage loan stabilization and fiscal stimulus, and they did seem to make a positive impact, but were too little too late, but they weren't policies that were the centerpiece of his administration, they were things he tried to do out of desperation.

It's also quite true that FDR in 1932 ran on a platform that included promises to balance the budget, but that's because it'd been the Democratic that had always been scolds on that topic up to that point. Besides, FDR was no student of Keynes; General Theory wasn't even published until 1936. I don't really know where the ideas for FDR's New Deal came from. I'm guessing just simple populism, and maybe some Keynesian influence amongst his economic advisers.

>> ^Longswd:

British Doctor Faked Data Linking Vaccines to Autism, and Aimed to Profit From It
I only have one thing to say to people who directly trade the lives of children for profit - Bowels in or bowels out?


Documents emerge proving Dr Andrew Wakefield innocent; BMJ and Brian Deer caught misrepresenting the facts

Dr Wakefield demands retraction from BMJ after documents prove innocence from allegations of vaccine autism data fraud

Interview with Dr Andrew Wakefield about the British Medical Journal, science and vaccines (Part 1)

Interview with Dr Andrew Wakefield - the structure of scientific revolutions (Part 2)

Edit:
Dr Wakefield:
"Will the mainstream media now take this real story, the real facts, and actually do their job as journalists and report the facts? Will they report the truth? I doubt it. Why? Because they're owned. Their salaries are paid, albeit indirectly, in large part by pharmaceutical revenues. And the first thing that will happen when they try and do a story which deconstructs these arguments, the BMJ's arguments, and actually reconstructs them in light of the truth, [is that] there will be a call from their advertisers, saying [no]. So what will the mainstream media do? Will it live up to its job, its duty to the people to report the truth, or will it show complete disinterest? Anderson Cooper has been presented with the same nine questions. What was your story based upon? Show us the facts. Did you do your homework? Now are you going to pay similar attention to these documented historical facts? We shall see."

over 6 billion missing in iraqi reconstruction cash.

vs

peepee