I've used recurrence plot analysis and surrogate data testing for this. Both are more suited to time series analysis, but can be used with any data. In principle these examine compressibility, and any form of compression could be adapted and give you a yes/no), but these give you meaningful statistical analyses (if yes, then how much). Be aware that your random isn't rally, and so will give you a non-zero result. But you'll get very close to the same very small result, whereas with surrogate it'll be different and some data set will acutually improve with scrambling. But you should bw ablew to trell yes/no ns how diferent dfrom random

"We are inundated with warnings that social media is systematically stripping away our privacy."

We are inundated with hair-on-fire cliches being used to preface a forced association between someone's inconsequential issue and some hot button topics and trigger words, in order to convince us that the association is valid and the issue is significant. Needing to use these is a good sign that the ensuing issue is too insubstantial to stand on its own.

Fear, uncertainty and uh-huh.

"...that will capture stuff..."

I've got one of those. It's called a keyboard, but its primary function seems to be to capture stuff. Cookie crumbs, coffee spills, cigarette ashes...

Does anyone else find the prospect of running Windows on a window to be a bit surreal? What's next, wearable computers so you could have a Macintosh on your rain coat?

"I'm a college physics professor."

Then your job is to teach physics, not to insure that everyone who gets a grade from you earns it honestly. Your students' job is to learn. If they decide to do a poor job of it, it's their loss. Stop wasting the time that should go to your job, chasing around after security issues. Let them use anything they want.

Then write your final exam so that rather than solving problems, they instead have to state how they would set up the problem to solve it. No need for devices, thus no devices allowed.

For a long time children were the future. Last week it was self-powered parts. Now, algae. Elsewhere we find the future is variously Africa, robots, iPad, intelligence and Ashton Kucher. All of them THE future. Maybe I'm old fashioned but I'd rather stick with the traditional future comprised of the indefinite span of time that has not yet occurred.

You are what you eat: pond scum.

> How can I prove it's not me?

You don't. You can't without producing the culprit and proof they did it.

You sue for wrongful termination. Then it's up to them to go on the defense and try to prove that you did it. They can't, they lose, you gain, they pay your lawyer.

You say you're not terminated yet? If you are, your reputation is shot, so you do it pre-emptively, based on suspension and the fact that you're facing a shiny new right-to-work law (actually, a right-to-fire-for-no-reason) in Indiana with the assumption THEY will use it to finish the termination. Check out badforindiana.org and see if they have recommendations for a lawyer.

Don't defend yourself, don't just fight back. They're firing a warning shot so fire back point blank with both barrels.

Worried about the job should you win? Or whether you'd even want to stay? An untenable employment situation after an action like this is common. So you make your settlement be that they continue to pay you or else accept an injunction preventing them from firing you (even after r-t-w passes) without going before the judge and justifying it. And, make their continuing to pay you apply to termination by either party. Thus, they'll want to keep you happy (and you'd have to show just cause to leave without foregoing the settlement money).

Kick ass, or they will walk all over you.

There's little worse than speaking for someone without their permission. Doing so while inventing a problem to solve for them is worse. So's presenting as evidence an unpublished, unreviewed "paper".

The "nascent space tourism industry" presently consists of Virgin Galactic and a handful of sites wanting to be spaceports. The Rutan Clan has been doing fine so far, and landing sites don't need it. ITAR goods are too expensive, unnecessary, and frequently overly complex in and of themselves as well as with respect to the subsystems that feed and operate them.

And just what class of, um, entities makes a habit of speaking for others? Lawyers. Guess what. TFA is a sales pitch for what he wants people to need him for.

Discovery "News" scoops the field with this exercise in weasel words. No science was harmed in the making of this story. And besides, the pig might learn to fly.

> and generally provides a dynamic environment
> for advantageous life forms.

Well of course. It's well known that following any global scale catastrophe there's a surge in speciation. Turns out this happens because the environment is dynamic, rather than the old scientists' wives tale about a few survivors taking over the available niches since pretty much everything else that might have been competition was wiped out.

... suggests that Carl Sagan said exactly the same thing over three decades ago.

The current cumulative impact probability of all objects tracked by SENTRY now exceeds 1.5% for the next 100 years. This is from ~300 known bodies with non-zero impact probability. They estimate that they've discovered 10% of such potential planetary post hole diggers.

The technology is 100+ years old and has been used for 80 on human brain waves.

Almost 20 years ago, work at Radford was able to guess with 70 to 80 percent accuracy which of three possibilities within three parameters (size, shape and color) was being looked at, or being imagined with and without there being an attempt to verbalize it. They used a standard 16 channel external EEG. And a dozen different subjects.

Which "speech center(s)"? There's two main regions, neither of which can do the job alone. There's the areas where the material to be translated into speech get placed, and they can be read without having to try to work around linguistic encoding. Then there's people who lose their entire speech area, but come out being able to speak anyway because of backup/trainable areas taking over the job, or simply doing it in parallel all along.

You've got to have a damn good reason to carve open a skull. Surgical correction for epilepsy is a good reason, but the brain being tested before and after the surgery is hardly one to draw generalizations from. Given that previous work bested this without cutting into anyone, this is a dead end stunt.

There is also existing technology that would do the vocalizing job, also without surgery. Adapting it to an input based on a neural net 'best guess' output after training on an individual would be trivial compared to cutting open heads. Millions of people have heard it work, on a Pink Floyd album: "For millions of years mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened to unleash the powers of his imagination -- he learned to talk." Many millions more have heard the same person/voice narrating the video version of his book "A Brief History Of Time".

TFA is some scary shit. With all the alternatives available, safer, better AND cheaper, there's no reason to do stuff like this, and none at all to suggest that it should be used as a basis to develop a technology.

Then I wasted two decades shoveling raw material in front of and into a couple of them, as well a spending half my waking life acquiring the means to obtain those raw materials?

Mine must be defective. They seemed to operate more on the principle of maximizing local entropy.

And here I've been hearing 'children are the future'. Those little bastards make noise, eat food, get sick and all kinds of annoyances. So good to know we'll have parts instead of children.

Wait a second. These wouldn't happen to be *children* parts, would they? Low maintenance is great, but self-assembly? It'd take away the only fun part about them -- making 'em.

How come all these semi-science articles have to quote someone else saying 'needs more proof' etc.? The primary researchers almost invariably say the same themselves. Is the science not worth wasting the ink if it can't be made to appear as if it's an argument? Being skeptical yourself is good. Someone else being skeptical is trivial. It's one thing to interview someone else if they have something to add, but to do it just to hang a name on the preplanned 'controversial' portion is st00pid to the point of insulting to bother interviewee and reader. As for the 'science' 'writers', most obviously aren't very good at either.

In fact it has been solved for some time. The basic process involved are well understood. But most people can't or don't think large enough to consider the entire contents of the solar system, or the huge number of different processes and resultants involved. Harold Morowitz has been doing so for years. His Energy Flow In Biology is a deceptively small book describing how life could have arisen (in fact probably had to) from the elements and energy available in this region of the solar system, which became this planet. All the specifics of the physical chemistry involved are in there, formulae and all. Anyone with a serious interest in the subject has either read this or needs to. Anyone who intends to argue the points should be given this book and asked to point out just where it's wrong, because it's far more a collection of known facts than any speculation. As if to prove his point prior to criticism, the back of the book contains a list of biochemicals that should be expected to arise given the conditions and contents.

This is not to say TFA is entirely wrong. A hydrothermal vent could serve as an energy source/sink and chemical environment every bit as well as the entire planet. The complex dynamics could just as easily give rise to compounds and emergent properties just as Morowitz describes. And heavy metals may be involved. But they don't *need* to be. Morowitz's book happens to describe a general principle that applies by its own nature. It can get applied to any similar situation or collection of chemicals capable of ectothermic complexification. It works for this planet, almost certainly does for hydrothermal vents, can be used to project whether of what should happen on any other planet or moon or even deep space itself. When one sees how results can be obtained from such a wide range of environments and can guess from the results what characteristics are likely to apply, one can get a realistic assessment of how narrow our definition of life is and how broad it ought to be when our arbitrary, unnecessary, Earth-centric specifics are removed.

Of all the people who've tried to argue this with me, only 4 have ever taken up the challenge to read the book. Of those, there have been exactly zero to come back with any criticism of the specifics in the book, including the conclusions drawn. One of them then went to study at George Mason, not directly under Morowitz, but in the same department.

Sure, I've seen criticisms of his stuff. I've also seen that he doesn't respond to them, and I know why: they don't understand what he said or the basic science behind it, they pay him lip service in an effort to 'respond' with their own unrelated agenda, or they don't bother to try and simply attack his publication with formulaic restrictions they think are requirements. Morowitz writes books. People make whiny noises about a lack of "peer review". They fail to grasp that this requires peers. Morowitz has a few peers, but mostly in his understanding of complex dynamic systems, not in his erstwhile 'field'. Those peers have little to say, and those with the most to say can't think large enough to enter the same realm. Nor do they seem to notice that the actual science being used is undergrad textbook level so well accepted that few reference the origin (except in historical background) and nobody dare criticize for fear of ridicule. Laws of thermodynamics, ideal gas law, that sort of stuff. They can't, won't or don't read and understand what he wrote. I wouldn't respond to that either.

Get the book and try it. It's not that difficult to follow. Check his material against textbook contents. He's not making up anything except how its put to use, and his one example -- the whole Earth -- is obviously not the only one it can apply to.