Category: Misc

Last year, I made reference to the vaccination vs. Autism controversy, which is probably a misnomer, since controversy indicates that there is a difference of opinion. Science is not like that, scientific theory eventually becomes fact through rigorous testing and evidence based analysis.
But parents are not scientists and are swayed by qwacks and disinformation as evidenced by much of what follows theMcCarthy b.s.; although with her working on The View may now be in a completely different direction.
Why not vaccinate? These out of left field approaches are very much affecting us all, not just the poor kids that have to struggle through whatever illness that could have been avoided.
Just as the Dawkins article suggests, we need to actively counter the misinformation with facts, such as the thimerosal points in his article.

Gads,

I just read something about the vaccination vs. autism crap. Please, people… will you stop with the unscientific rants about how you “think” someone is creating vaccines that will “cause” autism.

Go read for yourself, or better yet, do your own analysis. But just repeating this crap because you heard or read about it on the internet – jeez.

http://jennymccarthybodycount.com/

There is a lot of talk these days about quitting facebook, and while the humorous attempts, such as this video, suggest substituting obsessionsthe real substitute is something of value.

Today’s NYTimes article on program’s designed to thwart machine’s and software’s ability to “pretend” to be a human reminded me of the entire A.I. field of study from college and years ago when we were trying to sell companies and the government on commercial AI applications.

The article itself is about CAPTCHA and re-Captcha as well as image recognition and how these systems are used by Yahoo, Google and others to keep the “bad guys” from signing up for bogus email accounts and whatever and then spamming us to death. An admirable goal. Even the system’s themselves are going good, for example re-CAPTCHA where images that cannot be scanned and OCR’d properly are being “read” by the human populace one or two words at a time as they sign-on or sign-up and the words (actually multiple iterations of the same word from different people in order to ensure fewer errors creep in) are then substituted in the scanned books of libraries and other material and thus improving our ability to read books “at a distance” where maybe only a copy or two exists.

The point of all of these tests is to determine if it’s a human behind the “keyboard” rather than a machine cranking out sign-up requests by the thousand’s. I have heard that the spammer’s themselves were using similar human powered examination of the images to thwart these attempts, in that they rewarded viewers at their porn sites to simply solve the same problem by revealing more and more of a naked lady as the letters of the problem were typed in.

Beyond this is all of the work that has led up to this point… The CAPTCHA acronym itself stands for “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart” and is a direct reference to the British mathematician, Alan Turing. (for a fictional counterpoint to all of this, read an excellent novel by Neal Stephenson Crypotnomicon – a 1999 novel which had a side plot about the the Bletchley Park mathematicians in their attempts to crack Axis codes during WW-II.) who has contributed much to be beginning of this field.

The Hollywood machine, with another Terminator movie out, would lead us to believe that much of this is ready, available, and here already. Let’s send Jay Leno out to do another “man on the street” interview to see what Americans really know. What he would find would be humorous, because this work is all hard. Even 10 years ago with the beginning of commercialization of this kind AI technology, it’s still really hard with only now some specialized things coming out of MIT and other schools/research groups to support some very specific kinds of applications, like an autopilot for a truck or a robot “pack mule“. The most recent, big deal AI app I’m aware of was for plane refueling during Desert Storm, where AI’s constructed AI’s to schedule the mid-air tanker’s for all of those fighter jets. None were lost, and at the scale of the operation I’m told we would have been limited or had some flame-outs if the human schedules had continued.

Still, eventually this will all really be commonplace, and probably without the Terminator.

Sorry for not posting for so long, I am totally consumed with a project at work. This week, I’m taking some vacation and I promised myself I would post.

Today I just wanted to note, at the eve of the “mother of all bailouts” in the financial industry, that somehow, we need to continue to remain focused on the fact that we don’t spend enough time or energy or money working at or thinking about science or technology based projects. I amazes me that for us to have “invented” the internet, not as Al Gore has stated, but literally out of DARPA work so long ago… and the funding for major portions of the infrastructure came out of the budget for the NSF…

Today (and for many of the last 8 years) we are ignoring, as a matter of public policy, money invested in topics such as

• Stem cell research (think about growing your own bone graft for your own spine, the far right has been successful in creating FUD around this topic)
• Solar electricity generation (I just installed solar PV on my roof, but it could have been so much less expensive, because Moore’s Law effects are not being seen in this industry in spite of the fact that the manufacturing technology is the same as in CPUs and Memory)
• Solar electricity generation #2 (having read about small solar powered steam generators for the home – they generate electricity) is this worthwhile?
• Algae that make bio-diesel as a byproduct of “eating” the excrement of fish farms. Did you know that this fish poop stuff is terribly bad for the environment? This would clean it up and provide a stepping stone to getting off oil from countries that politically are not aligned with sensible policy

I am truly speaking investment, because the business climate is bad enough, particularly in solar, that you won’t find companies in this country making research decisions along these lines. Just as in sales compensation, you need to provide the incentive to the salesman to sell a product by compensating him to do so, in R&D, sometimes a kick in the pants is needed to get things moving, particularly if the R&D is in the private sector…

Surely, if we can modify the tax code to provide a tax credit for a light truck (or SUV’s classified as such) and thus provide the incentive for the small business owner to make that investment in his business, something smarter can come from Washington; like say an investment in PV manufactoring technologies, thus assuring growth rather than stagnation.

I know, the current administration is just about done, what with it’s “faith based” initiatives and all, but what are the replacements suggesting? You don’t know?

Get involved.

**update**
here are links (click here and here) to get you started, from a recent post from none other than Phil Plait on the ScienceDebate2008.

It’s hard to say if this is honesty from them, or whether we should chalk it up to pre-election empty promises. Both say some good things about science policy…

I have been listening to these Conversations Network podcasts for a series of lectures by Amory Levins while he was a visiting professor at Stanford University.

According to Amory Lovins, the way to design energy efficient buildings involves “thinking outside the box”, or simply just giving up old ways of approaching the problem.

I found this lecture series entertaining and quite informative. The link above, and here pertains to Part 1 of design elements for building or renovating energy efficiency in buildings. This is a good “listen” and I recommend it for anyone interested in helping to solve the energy issues present in our society today.