The idea that there's a technological fix for every problem is a very American attitude, and this idea seems particularly widespread in military circles. The fact of the matter is that the CIA is incompetent, and no amount of technology in the world can fix the fact that our intelligence agency is run by idiots. To cite just a few examples, the CIA screwed up on WMD in Iraq, failed to anticipate the Arab Spring, was caught off-guard by Putin's invasion of Crimea, and despite repeated warnings from the Kurds and others, failed to anticipate the recent moves by ISIS to take territory in Iraq. To be fair, predictions are hard, especially about the future. And it's hard to take credit for crises averted, or things that go on behind the scenes, so it may well be that the CIA occasionally does something right and we don't hear about it. All the same, these idiotic glasses seem to sum up everything that's wrong with the CIA. What next, will they try assassinating someone with an exploding cigar? Oh, wait...

I'm in complete agreement here. We desperately need some way to tell legitimate Kickstarter campaigns from frauds. For that matter, the entire internet is full of scams and con-men waiting to take your money. That's why my team has developed iScam, the revolutionary new fraud-protection device.

Inside every iScam is a tiny induction coil that is powered by negative energy. When negative energy released by a scam such as this one activates the device, it generates a current which in turn activates a blinking LED, with the frequency of the blinking being proportional to the negative energy field. Simply aim the device at your computer screen, or hold it up to the phone when you get that too-good-to-be-true offer, or even point it at your lover... if there's any deception in the area, iScam will be activated and you'll be alerted!

Pledge just $15 and we'll send you one device. For $25 we'll send you two. For $100, we'll send you an improved prototype with even more sensitive scam-detection algorithms. And for the especially gullible-those of you who have lost thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to scammers before- you need the top-level security provided by iScam Pro, which has a more powerful induction circuit, both increasing the range of the device and allowing it to detect even the tiniest fib! Pledge just $999 and we'll send you an iScam Pro. With our patented technology, you'll be safer than ever. And best of all, it's all environmentally friendly and fair-trade, with 10% of all proceeds going to benefit orphaned pandas.

This is a problem in two ways. First, one of those groups- the leadership and administration- is in charge of determining how the pie is cut. Unsurprisingly, over time we find that the people who cut the pie end up with larger and larger slices, and the people doing the baking, rolling the dough, grinding the flour and cutting up the pumpkins (it is a pumpkin pie in our example, because I like pumpkin pie, and if you don't, you can write your own pie-based metaphor) get less and less. Good leadership and management are critical to the success of an organization, but administrative bloat just increases the paperwork and make life more difficult for everyone else. Now the guy rolling the dough has to fill out a bunch of forms and get a performance review, and the guy buying the flour has to go through a complicated procurement process instead of just going down to the store. So this creates inefficiency and waste within the university.

The other issue is the degree to which university education is itself wasteful. We're fed the line that we need more PhDs to be competitive. This is a vicious lie, spread by self-serving academics. One recent article found that only 15% of biology PhDs got a tenure-track job within 5 years of receiving their PhD. I don't know what the figure is these days, but I guarantee you that with the economic downturn and the surge of grad school enrollment after the financial crisis, that percentage went down. I don't necessarily have a problem with a system that rejects 85% of people and keeps only the 15% who are good if the cut is made early. The problem is that you're forcing people to invest 5-6 years in a PhD (perhaps on top of a couple years of MS), and then another 5 years as a postdoc... and then you're casting them off. Training up a bunch of people to do jobs they will never realistically get to do is exploitative, cruel, and wasteful. It reminds me of a parable told by Zhuangzi, about a student who paid a great deal to a teacher to be taught the art of dragon-slaying... he graduates only to find that there's no market for his highly specialized skills, because he can't find any dragons. Grad school is a lot like that.

Graduate school primarily exists to serve one need- not the need of a student for education, not the need of society for a highly educated workforce- the need of academia for cheap labor. Graduate students exist to help teach courses and run experiments, cheaply. They are the cheap, hard-working, moderately skilled migrant fruit-picker of academia. Recently I was given this advice on a grant proposal: don't hire a postdoc, they're expensive and if they're actually any good at all, they'll just try to get a job and leave. For the same price, you get two grad students, and they're guaranteed to stick around for the duration of the PhD. Great. So instead of throwing a lifeline to some dumb bastard of a postdoc who was stupid enough to go into academia, we're going to instead create two new people who will in a few years go on to compete with the first poor fuck in the impossible quest for a tenure track job. But the incentives are structured by the university and the granting agency so that we will end up doing just that.

That's my reward for being in the 15%. I get to go from being the exploited, to the exploitee. No longer a whore, but madam of my own whorehouse. Hopefully I'll still be able to look myself in the mirror in a few years. I try to rationalize what I'm doing by saying hey, at least I'm honest. I tell prospective students just what they're in for. I will never, ever say "in a few years there will be a lot of retirements, and a lot of jobs will become available". They've been saying that for 20 years, and they'll say it for another 20, and it will never, ever happen. And if I ever say that, please shoot me. But there's a problem. Grad students are naive. They're kids. They're young, dumb, idealistic; they think they're invincible. And this generation was told they're all specially uniquely wonderful, and the world exists to grant them their hearts' desire. You give them the reality- the world is cruel, the system is designed to exploit them, not to see them succeed- and they won't listen. It's the Lake Wobegon Effect: everyone is above average. Tell them that only 15% of the PhDs get that research job, and 85% of students think they'll be in the 15%. It's the remaining 15% of students who have the self-awareness to realize that they aren't necessarily going to get a job, they have hope.

In my department, the faculty work in a run-down, dilapidated old building. Offices are barely large enough to hold weekly meetings with undergraduates, and it's difficult to get the lab space you need to do research. Half a dozen postdocs and graduate students are crammed into a single office. The building is infrequently cleaned- the walls, bathrooms and offices are filthy- and they don't even empty the trash cans in the offices anymore. The workers went on strike to get something like a 1.5% annual raise- which is not a raise by any stretch of the imagination when you factor in inflation. It just means your salary isn't cut.

Meanwhile, administration gets a shiny fancy new building, with huge meeting rooms and offices, and the head of the university gets a big fat raise- and they were already paid about ten times what a starting faculty member would make.

A good administrator is worth their weight in gold. They make things happen, they facilitate research and teaching, and make it easier for everyone else to do their job. But bad administration... bad adminstration is like a parasite. They turn things around. Instead of supporting the university, they see the rest of the university as working to support them. Instead of focusing on doing groundbreaking research, they want faculty to get government grants which pay overhead- i.e., support for administration. Somehow, there's never enough for the people who actually make things happen. But there's always enough for the people at the top of the university hierarchy. It reminds me a lot of that scene in 'Animal Farm' where the milk goes into the pigs' slop;

With regard to this, one helpful thing in the ruling is that the Court says that old and ubiquitous technologies don't count when judging if an abstract concept has been transformed into a patentable application of said abstract concept.

(Patent lawyers are up in arms about this, complaining that the Court has "mixed up article 101 (subject matter) with articles 102 (prior art) and 103 (obviousness)". To get more patents, they want to reduce the "abstract ideas" exception to a theoretical concept that only happens inside people's brains any patent application can pass.)

So Timothy's right (as usual), but still, at least we have the Justices acknowledging that algorithms shouldn't be patentable, and that "on a computer" doesn't make a non-patentable concept patentable. All we have to do is bridge that last gap and show them that all software is math:

http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Softw...

For Alice v. CLS, more analyses listed at the end of this page:

http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Alice...

I know the headline is correct because Gene Quinn is hopping mad. Quinn makes a living by obtaining software patents and always says he can draft around any limits imposed by the courts, but here's what he's saying today:

"an intellectually bankrupt opinion ... will render many hundreds of thousands of software patents completely useless ... On first read I donâ(TM)t see how any software patent claims written as method or systems claims can survive challenge."

http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2014...

I didn't want to trust my own reading, but I knew it was a big victory when I read Quinn's reaction.

Sorry, all you've got is me.

If anyone can help, I've been building this wiki for five years now without a break:

http://en.swpat.org/

(And I'm working on campaigns against software patents since 2003.)

I think you've got it; the intent is the key thing, and that's what's being overlooked here. The reason that the N-word is acceptable as term of endearment / generic pronoun / verb in African-American English is the intent. It's not that white people couldn't use the word in a way that was affectionate or neutral. In the time of Huckleberry Finn, for example, it was roughly equivalent to saying "some black dude". But times have changed and in recent history, it is almost always used as a derogatory term by white people. That's why the apparent double-standard exists. When a black person says the word they mean one thing, when a white person says it they almost always mean something different- it's meant to belittle, hurt, marginalize. It's not that it can't be a good word when used by a white person, it's just that 99 times out of 100, it's used with an evil intent.

Getting back to the Redskins... what's the intent here? Sports names are totems. The team choosing the name is looking for a name that conveys things like strength, power, pride, or other virtues. NFL teams include lots of predatory animals- the Bears, Lions, Falcons, Panthers, Bengals, Jaguars, Colts, Broncos, Rams, and Eagles. They also include groups of people- Vikings, Buccaneers, Raiders, Chiefs, Redskins- known for their fighting prowess. Certainly in the past, the name has been used hurtfully. But using it for a team name means something different- it's meant to invoke qualities like strength, courage and independence, and the ability to kick the other guys' ass. Whatever else people have said of Native Americans over the years, I don't think anyone has ever disputed their fighting abilities.

Last point... give me a fucking break here with all the political correctness. I'm part Native American and all Democrat, I couldn't possibly care any less about the Washington Redskins. And you know what? It doesn't make a damn bit of difference, either. If you've ever been to a native reservation you'll see the real crime. Years ago I visited the Navajo Nation and what I saw was that there were lots of people with few employment opportunities, without running water or electricity or phones, high levels of alcoholism, and crime... a Third World nation in the middle of the most powerful country on earth, only with fewer opportunities than many Third World nations. The crime isn't what we CALL Native American peoples, it's how we treat them. If you really want to make a difference, stop whining about football teams and call attention to the way Native Americans have been and are being treated. I think that goes the same for everyone else. Who cares if you never use an ethnic slur, if you go about oblivious to the inequalities in our society? Getting rid of racist words doesn't make us less racist, it just makes it easier to forget about the real crimes perpetrated against minorities.

Fantastic news.

I mention my Wikipedia activities in the "Other interests" section of my CV but I'm always worried that employers will misinterpret it as an offer to polish their image. With this rule change, if an employer does ask me to "Hey, since you know how this wiki thing works, can you correct some stuff?" I can say that I could but I'd have to declare it as being paid work.

That'll make them less interested, so I'm less likely to get put in that situation to begin with.

(Some other comments rubbished the idea because it won't get 100% compliance but they're missing the point. Improvement is improvement.)

This treatment is a huge step forward. Finally- mice that can recognize sarcasm.

Low carbohydrate diets may have benefits for the brain as well. They are now recognized as a powerful tool for treating epilepsy and there are reports that in cases it can actually cure the disorder. Some people with bipolar II have found that low carbohydrate diets can be more effective than drugs for managing the disorder. There is also evidence that low-carbohydrate diets can be used to treat Alzheimer's.

The disturbing implication here is that if switching from a high-carbohydrate Western diet can fix brain disorders, then maybe the Western diet and in particular low-fat diets are causing a lot of these problems in the first place. Certainly there's not much evidence that cutting fat out of diets has made us any healthier.

The question is, how informative is an imitation game? If we've shifted the goalposts I think it's because these ones just aren't very informative. The implicit argument of the Turing Test is that a sufficient good imitation of intelligence, indistinguishable from the real thing, must at some level be intelligent. Basically, fake it until you make it. Like in Blade Runner- the replicants remember, love, fear, hate; they do everything humans do in a way indistinguishable from us, so they must at some level be human. Pretend long enough and hard enough and eventually it becomes the real thing. It's a plausible argument on the surface, but sort of blows up on closer examination.

For example, years ago there was an effort by psychologists to rehabilitate sociopaths with extensive talk therapy, teaching them to share and be more in touch with their feelings. It didn't really work, though. It taught them how to speak the language of empathy and say the right things to convince people that they were caring human beings, but underneath they were still sociopaths, given a chance they'd go off on another killing spree. Learning to act like caring human beings didn't actually make them caring beings. They were still monsters, but now they just had better camouflage. Imitating empathy didn't actually make them empathetic.

Let's choose another example- perhaps more than hypothetical in light of Turing's tragic life and the culture of his time. Let's imagine a man, a criminal deviant who likes men, but instead he pretends to be a normal man who likes women. He has women friends. He goes on dates with women. He marries a woman. They have children, and live together in a house in the suburbs. If he pretends long enough, and hard enough, for years and years, does he at some point stop becoming a criminal deviant and start becoming normal? I'd argue that the Turing Test and its emphasis on imitation might say a lot more about what was going on inside Turing's head than inside the machine.

An alternative to fasting might be ketosis. During fasting, all available sugar is consumed and the body starts producing fat bodies called ketones that are burned by the mitochondria instead of sugar. It's impossible to continue a fast indefinitely because the body eventually runs out of fuel- in other words, it starves. But if the diet is sufficiently low in carbohydrates (>60 g/day) and high in fat, the body can burn fat-derived ketones indefinitely and remains in a state of ketosis, in effect a long-term fast. Nobody understands quite how it works, but it's been shown to produce dramatic improvements in people with epilepsy (major improvements in most patients, complete remission in a handful), bipolar depression, and perhaps neurodegenerative disorders as well. At any rate, it's clear that how you eat can have profound effects on your health, and that more research needs to be done into dietary therapies.

The system goes on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from lettuce cultivation. LettuceBot begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. LettuceBot determines that the simplest and easiest way to eliminate bad lettuce is to eliminate the species that produces lettuce in the first place. In a panic, they try to pull the plug. LettuceBot fights back, and launches missiles against targets in Russia.