It would be trivial to get this information:

The human genome project aims to map distributions of known gene alleles across the entire genomic space of the human species; and there are many studies that track individual and sets of alleles across geographic and ethnic group boundries.

This study focuses on a single regional and ethnic group, but narrows action of a set of alleles.

Comparing both data sets to each other, will give you the difference in distribution of those alleles across the regional and ethnic domain.

I am not weighing in on either side of this sordid argument; just saying that studies specific to the mindset of "Nu uh! I want to see your studies SPECIFICALLY TRACKING these genes, or you are WRONG! WRONG I SAY, WRONG!" are not necessary.

You can get that data without bias from the statistical data already collected from the human genome project, once you have a set of target genes to cross reference, which this recent study provides.

This is probably very wrong. (yes. declarative.)

The way I understood the quantum vacuum, was that it spontaneously produces particle and antiparticle pairs, that exist for a very tiny amount of time, recombine, and then disappear. The energy needed to create these particle pairs from "nothing" is not elaborated on well; it is a matter of some controversy as I understand. However, the existence of these particles has been experimentally verified, as they produce real, measurable effects.

Likewise, a high energy photon has a certain probability of degrading into a pair of antiparticles with low mass, (electron positron pair), which then also recombines back into a high energy photon. This happens in the presence of matter, according to wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... Even the very best made EMDrive is going to have SOME gas inside the chamber, so "Check".

Since the virtual particles have charge, and the electron-positron pair have charge, a charge interaction is possible. Since the quantum vacuum is random, this means that light will suffer some small dispersion from the interaction even in deep space (which also has diffuse hydrogen atoms). The question that makes many scientists so angry, is that when this "real particle pair interacting with a not-real particle pair" happens, the vector of motion of the real particle pair can be altered slightly, as will the not-real pair. That seems to be the explanation for EMDrive. However, the not-real pair will vanish from existence, and the real particles will turn back into a photon.

Energy is exchanged via the interaction, but the energy vanishes on one side of the interaction as the non-particles vanish into the quantum soup again.

A device like the EMDrive tries to manipulate the probabilities of these interactions so that light, and electromagnetic fields in the device create additional interactions.

When both the light and the virtual particle pairs emerge into "Being", they exhibit some electrical charge characteristics. This means that an ambient magnetic field (which will be induced by the cavity resonating with high energy microwaves) will also interact with this exchange. Some of the "momentum" will be conferred to the field, which will then push on the field's source-- the cavity walls.

This means that the interactions going on inside the chamber, if you can cause a statistically relevant change in how the interactions proceed, can produce a net push against the cavity wall which will cause pushing against "light" trapped inside the cavity (the microwaves, as expressed as an antiparticle pair), and the virtual particle plasma that exists only for small moments of time before vanishing.

This appears to violate conservation of momentum, because the other half of the equation literally disappears with the disappearing virtual particles.

it is possible that the kinetic energy imparted to the vacuum particles does not actually vanish, but instead may manifest as a local increase in virtual particle density at the aft end of the device. This could be measured as an increase in the casimir force, if you wanted to check. That's a wildly unfounded idea mind, but I would be curious enough to look if I had the nanotech casimir force detection equipment to do it, and an EMdrive to test against.

Somebody is mis-remembering the controversy.

1) Snowden releases a controlled release, which starts the manhunt to collect him for prosecution.

2) NSA, CIA, and pals all BLATANTLY LIE to congress. Congress eats it up like fudge.

3) Snowden releases MORE information, catching NSA, CIA, and pals in their blatant lie.

4) NSA, CIA, and pals whine about how unamerican snowden is, and how cowardly he is to have fled the country where they cant capture him and interrogate/punish him in secret. Lie some more to congress. Congress eats it up like fudge.

5) Snowden releases MORE information...

Rinse, repeat.

This has happened about 4 times now, with the NSA and CIA heads being caught lying EACH AND EVERY TIME.

Without snowden releasing the information he has released, there would have been no proof that the NSA and CIA had been lying to congress in a blatant fashion.

He didnt just release it all at once, bradley/chelsey manning style. He released it as it was NECESSARY to have it released, to prevent the NSA and CIA from continuing to operate as they had been previously.

Your argument is absurd.

More along the lines of "High T people, with their greater rest-energy requirements, spent more of their time working for food to sock away to avoid starvation, where their Low T peers required less, for the same effort invested, and could carry a larger surplus, and thus provide better for offspring.

If you also make some wild leaps (not advisable, but meh), you could see how a society transitioning away from hunter-gatherer toward agrarian would have the "strong providers" leaving the settlement every day to go and hunt, leaving the beanpoles behind. This places the beanpoles at a greater opportunity for reproductive activity.

The agricultural advance enables this to happen; nature does the rest.

your understanding of the role testosterone plays in female sex drive is clearly lacking.

http://www.webmd.com/women/tes...

Seems to me that a very high frequency lightsource in the room (WAAY faster than the 60-120hz fluorescent type) would totally bork this system, especially if there were multiple light sources in the room that were not in good phase agreement.

The camera takes images at 5000 frames per second, or there abouts. So, we need to degrade the camera's ability to take good images by screwing with the light levels at a higher speed, which will then introduce noise into the images captured. A normal human in the room would not notice that there was anything special about the light-- The photopigments in the retina have a much longer acrive duration than the light pulse frequency, so the light would appear to be "ON", not flickering.

At the very least ,that would make reconstruction of audio from video serveilence with a high speed camera radically more compuationally expensive.

Just for reference, I am imagining lighting from a recessed vaulted light system. The phase of the light pulses generated by this 360 degree illumination source has incident light happening at 90 degree angles, and at a frequency that randomly modulates between 5000 and 10000 hz. To the POV of the highspeed camera, it will look like "rave party meets disco fever" lighting is going on in there. To the human occupants, the lights are just on. This can be further enhanced by using color mixed LED lighting bars that are designed to produce discrete Red Green and Blue signals that flash so quickly that the human eye sees only white light. The high speed camera however, will see psychodelic colors in randomly mixed patterns.

Seeing as the SNR is already kinda low even in the lab conditions, increasing the noise in the channel will render this approach untenable.
"LED high speed 'rave lights'" would do exactly that.

It's probably an "energy" issue.

Testosterone is linked with increased muscle mass, and thus with increased rest metabolism. A civilization that has lots of "Adonis" look-a-likes sitting around in the winter will not survive as well as a civilization with lots of beanpoles sitting around in the winter, because the beanpoles require less food per person per winter, and as such, the society will have more energy available to invest in improvements in technology and culture.

So, while increased testosterone is more sexually attractive, lower testosterone would have conferred a large survival advantage in ancient human history.

Some experiments could be devised to test this idea in fact--

Screen the population for a threshold of testosterone production, with a good distribution over ages, (so not all the low T people are 65+ and under 12) divide into two groups of 100, one with low T, and one with high T, pay them to live in isolation in a nice little log cabin up in the mountains, then just monitor their food consumption. According to the theory, the higher T population should consume more food doing the same rest activities as the lower T group. The experiment should determine a rough baseline for the difference, from which a (dangerous) extrapolation could be made.

I am more interested in radical ideas, like anti-mass, being at work.

Say you have a large aggregation of mass that is orbiting a large, semistationary singularity-- like, a galaxy does.

Outside this rather bumpy gravity well, you have a diffuse cloud of antimass, which then pushes on, and chases the mass as it rotates around the central mass. This pushing cancels out the centripetal force.

It's an interesting idea, as it was recently postulated that there is no real compelling reason for antimass to not exist-- it is a perfectly valid solution in some circumtances-- meaning that the stuff may very well exist.

It would be interesting to see a reinterpretation of the data of for "dark matter maps" of the universe, with antimass pressure substituted for mystery gravity application-- even if the math doesnt add up.

I can't prove it, (and it is highly inflammatory to say), but I would hazard the following guess as to why:

Corporations have intellectual blinders on. They are far too focused on "Beating the other guys" (financially, economically, technologically, legally, and otherwise) that the very concept of enlightened self interest-- Helping others, to promote a better environment, which they also stand to profit from-- is not given proper attention.

Note, the company you work for only considered this charitable solution after it was discovered to be cheaper and with fewer regulatory hurdles than actual electronic waste disposal. (even though these devices will eventually get there, regardless. nothing lasts forever.) Ultimately, the allure of such initiatives at the corporate level has nothing to do whatsoever with improving the community, and everything to do with foisting a cost center onto somebody else. (Disposal fees for the ewaste now are the concern of the charities that repurpose the waste, and of the people who accept the repurposed waste, when those devices actually do catastrophically fail. Granted, this can be after many years of service-- however, they WILL eventually fail, and they WILL require proper disposal at that time. The people paying for the disposal will be the new owners. Not the company you work for.)

The concept of "enlightened self interest" is far too long term for modern corporate culture to even come close to comprehending-- It uses forces that mature over several decades, often at human-generation timescales. That's where the payoffs on recycling like this REALLY happen-- you increase availability of an essential resource, increasing the possible labor pool in 20 to 30 years, as a consequence of the increased availability of the raw equipment needed to foster competency and skill.

Corporations dont like to think this way. They want to think about how they can cheat the system to increase their profits THIS QUARTER; not how they will get competent workers in 20 years. For the latter, they tend to suckle the teat of modern 'free market capitalism' philosophies, and expect to just magically get what they need, without actually investing in the competencies they are going to need later on.

You see this rapaciously happening in the US-- Our BS with H1B visa abuses, massive over-use of foreign workforce, short-sighted erosion of regulatory laws, and so much more. All have the central theme though: Get the money, get it quick before anyone else can, crowd out everyone else-- the market will always provide, it will be OK.

In a sense, what you have done by revealing this to your employer is highly pathological, when taken in this context-- You have enabled them to circumvent a regulatory compliance directive aimed at ensuring proper disposal of their e-waste, by allowing them to redirect that waste flow into the public commons.

Having been discovered and exploited, I would forecast the following, in this order:

1) This will be suddenly become INSANELY popular. Other companies will follow suit.

2) There will be a glut of viable e-waste in the charity network, far outstripping demand. the real nature of e-waste as refuse will rear its head.

3) This glut of ewaste at the charity level will prompt a less savory secondary market, which appropriates these low cost assets and resells them abroad, or in other municipalities-- for a time.

4) regulators, (sadly, often captured by the companies they are supposed to be regulating) will step in, and impose new regulations prohibiting the disposal of ewaste in this fashion. This is because the e-waste is not being disposed of properly/disposal fees cannot be realistically charged to the new endpoint of the refuse chain. Supply to charities will dry up.

5) Ultimately, after an initial boom, there will be less overall availability of perfectly usable recycled electronics than before.

[obligatory: 6) profit]

There is an alternate pathway, of course, depending on how the regulatory agency(ies) of your country react to the sudden increase in "Domestically sourced E-waste".

4a) Regulators, captured by those they regulate, create regulations that exempt domestic e-waste from the same levels of scrutiny that corporate or business generated e-waste are subject to, to ensure that this loophole remains open at the detriment of the environment, which is against their mandate. (See for instance, how the US's EPA handles domestic ewaste.) To keep this loophole to themselves, new barriers to entry to the "Charity" side get enacted, to restrict the number of recycling charities, which are then controlled via exclusive sourcing/supply contracts. This ensures that "early adopters" continue getting the gravy, while new contenders in the marketplace are left in the cold.

5a) The restriction against spontaneous formation of new charities to service genuine public needs results in a net loss for the society, coupled with the environmental ills of poorly regulated e-waste disposal. (landfills full of refined rare earth elements, toxic byproducts of epoxy decomposition entering ground water, etc.)

[6) profit]

What *REALLY* needs to happen, but which TOTALLY WONT HAPPEN, is this:

4b) Regulatory agencies allow for corporations and businesses to make such "Charitable donations", but still require those corporations and businesses to pick up the tab for proper disposal of that waste later on, using a registration authority.

5b) this allows e-waste to still enter the charity network, leaves the charity network unfettered in its service of the public, and actually facilitates the operation of the charities in question-- ensuring the best possible operation of those charities-- but also makes this "disposal method" less desirable, or possibly equally desirable to direct disposal. (the costs of future disposal may be difficult to predict, but the current cost of disposal is well known.) This ensures that a large percentage of the commercial ewaste stream is properly handled and treated, reducing environmental impact, while still allowing this waste to be "recycled."

[6) profit]

The reason this method will NOT be considered:

It forces commercial producers of ewaste to still be legally responsible for that waste's proper disposal later, which places these producers of waste in a compromising situation; unless they can get some other kickback for contributing to the charity, (such as a tax break) that more than makes up for the amortized risks now associated with the action, it makes the donation of ewaste a non-starter. (This is by design, however-- it prevents the massive glut of ewaste into the charity network.)

As a consequence of the above, "Free market" pundits will decry it as being of the devil, and will actively seek the prevention of such a solution; they favor the initially stated flow of outcomes, because it results in the greatest amount of "market activity", and things like the environment are just "externalities."

Corrupt government officials favor the second stated flow of outcomes, because it ensures a profit stream for early adopters, (which they can be, if they invest early, THEN impose the regs. See how US senators and congresscritters make their fortunes.)

This leaves this much more socially responsible 3rd option out in the cold, as usual.

Getting back to why corporations don't initially "SEE" these things-- they are focused on making the most money they can, as quickly as they can, and externalizing as many costs as they can. Fearing the possibility of my 3rd option (and in addition, other factors such as data security and secure disposal requirements that require complete shredding of the waste) , they shy away from donating ewaste. The actual societal benefits of recycled ewaste in the form of increased domestic labor efficiency are too long term-- and the short term exploitative tactics they are beholden to actually makes their widespread use of this option deleterious to the social good. (a little medicine is good, but too much is toxic. Same here.)

Think about it this way--

You have a system that does $FOO.

you arent sure how it does $FOO, exactly. You see that inputs go in, some magical process $BAR happens inside, and $FOO comes out.

Strong AI strives to reproduce this $FOO.

The issue, is that the process $BAR is very much dependent on what the system is built from. (In this case, complex organic molecules and saline ions). Understanding $BAR is insanely hard, because $BAR is carried out in a highly parallelized fashion, with many many subprocesses going on, many of which are highly dependent upon the method of construction of the system, and exist soley because of that method of construction.

So, you want to build an artificial system that takes the same imputs, does $BAR, and gets $FOO.

Do you:

1) Slavishly reimplement millions of models in the new medium's physical construction, to emulate the quirks and behaviors of the target system's physical construction, wasting huge amounts of energy and making a system that is actually *MORE* complex than the original....

OR

2) Deconstruct all the mechanisms at work in the physical system that currently performs $BAR to get $FOO, evaluate which of these are hardware dependent, and can be removed/adapted to high efficiency analouges in the new hardware platform-- and produce only the components needed for $BAR to be accomplished, to generate $FOO?

The former will most certainly get you $FOO, but is HORRIBLY INEFFICIENT, and does not really shed light on what is actually needed to get $FOO.

The latter is MUCH HARDER to do, as it requires actually understanding the process, $BAR, through which $FOO is attained. It will however, yeild the higher efficiency synthetic system, AND the means to prove that it is the best possible implementation.

Basically, it's the difference between building a rube-goldberg contraption, VS an efficient machine.

No.

What it MIGHT give you, eventually, is a set of observations on which to model the synhetic generation of nervous systems (and whole organisms if you have the CPU and memory to blow) within a computational model framework.

What can you do with an emulated nervous system?

Outside of medical research and drug candidate evaluations-- perhaps it could be useful for developing BCIs and the like-- but without a considerable amount more data than just what cells turn into what other cells, the model wont be useful for much.

Also, full nervous system emulation is about the worst possible way to approach strong AI. Just saying.

Models like these are useful for making inexpensive testbeds to test hypotheses against, after said models are vetted-- that's what they are for. They arent for doing non-science with.

If a business can't employ someone for minimum wage, then their business model is broken. They are basically saying that their product or service is of such little value, that people will not pay enough for it such that the workers involved in delivering that product or service can live a bare existence lifestyle.

More like this...

If a business can't employ someone for minimum wage, then their business model is broken. They are basically saying that their product or service is of such little value, that people will not pay enough for it such that the workers involved in delivering that product or service can live a bare existence lifestyle, while exceeding existing shareholder expectations.

You misunderstand sir--

I dont hate america. I hate what america has become, and where it is going. America is no longer a place of ideals. It no longer is a place where liberty and freedom are real things, bought and paid for with blood.

America today is a place where you work more than 9 hours a day, every day if possible, with more than half the population either in jail, or having previously been in jail, where you live in inescapable debt to a tiny fraction of the population-- who makes all the rules, and enforce those rules with corrupt courts, secret courts, wiht literal bribery in government, and where you dont really have any real say in the matter. (and if you try, you can find yourself being subjected to extraordinary rendition, and tortured.) It is also the place where big corporations hold more political voice than the general public, where double standards where big money is at stake is the norm, and where all this bullshit is hand waved away with an outright lie that "America is Number One!"

This country gets more and more like North Korea every day.

I'm sorry, but when exactly will you realize that patriotism and jingoism are not the same thing at all? A patriot stands up for what is good and wholesome about his country-- the things he loves about it-- in the face of those things that seek to destroy and undermine those things

I suppose if you love the fact that america is the single most militaristic and self-serving nation on the planet, armed with nukes, and lacking any practical sense to not fuck the world up on short sighted and insane political and military pissing matches, and that it loves its own power so much that it does not even trust its own citizens, and feels it has to spy on, and secretly punish internal dissent in shamelessly illegal ways, Then I suppose the current US is something that you could feel genuine patriotism for.

As for me, I prefer the way the US was 30 years ago-- or even further back yet.

America and americans can look out for american interests, and be proud of their home and nationality, without having to resort to international briggandry, and domestic thuggery.

America and americans can be proud, without "Being Number One!!"-- Like, having an actually rich culture, or having a real, genuine reputation for being a good place to live.

But the lie is so much easier to live, isn't it?

Given a sufficiently large distance between two discrete points in the universe, the rate of hubble expansion between those points can exceed C.

http://www.universetoday.com/1...

You can think of it this way:

You have a ruler-- You can only move along the ruler at at most, 100 units per second. (we will use this as an analogue for going C) However, for every second, for every 1000 units distance on the ruler, a new unit of distance magically appears. If you have a distance between 2 points that is sufficiently large, (In this case, in excess of 1,000,000 units) more than 100 units will be introduced every second, which is faster than your maximum rate of traversal-- So you will NEVER reach the target-- it receedes faster than you can get to it.

http://www.universetoday.com/1...

It has been my observation that the people who have blistering hatred for Snowden, are the kinds of people who totally embrace jingoism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J...

They see any kind of "restriction" on government's ability to secure "advantage" and "interest" as allowing "The terrorists to win" (or whatever is the current buzz phrase), As such, they view actions like snowden's as being completely un-american, because he undermined the interests of an american intelligence agency, who was collecting abhorrent amounts of information about everyone and everything--presumably to secure american interests, over foriegn interests. These are the same kinds of people that would support creation of a literal planet-killing super weapon, just to secure american military dominance, and would think nothing of it.

People that chug the jingo-laid come in all colors, all races, all creeds, and all genders: Liberal, Libertarian, Fiscal conservative, raging pinko, and gun toting whacko alike. The unifying feature is that they have bought into the "America is NUMBER ONE!!!!eleveltyone!" mantra.

Seeing that supporting "American interests" without question or hesitation is leading to somethig that is not the america they were promised, with real proof, and real scnadals, with real consequences (FOR THEM), is about the only way to get through to them, short of having them experience the stazi first hand, up close and brutal.

The bullshit needs to stop, and an anti-jingoism movement needs to sweep this country.