Out of curiosity, what observations would invalidate your hypothesis, Mr. "random some guy on the internet"?

If there were, for example, a rise in obesity in 6-month old babies - would that invalidate the hypothesis, or does it simple mean the 6-month old babies need to get out and exercise more?

How about lab animals? If lab animals grown with the same diet and same exercise regimens were getting progressively more obese over the last few decades, would that invalidate your views, or does it mean that the lab rats should just cut down on the calories?

A lot of people expound the virtues of this-or-that theory of obesity, there's thousands of miracle cure diets and theories of nutrition to choose from. Do I want the primitive diet? The all-meat diet? The vegetarian diet? The new fancy diet from some genuine charlatan interviewed on Oprah? (It's a diet made by a doctor... and it really works!!!)

How about basic thermodynamics? If I reduce my food intake, I'm guaranteed to lose weight... right? It's basic thermodynamics after all.

How about we all read up on the subject and look at some evidence. Nothing in people's diet - either type or amount - explains the rise of obesity in our culture, and neither does anything related to lifestyle.

If you have an alternate explanation, I'd like to hear it. Otherwise, stop shouting debunked views and commonly-held myths.

Modern obesity has nothing to do with diet, exercise, or lifestyle.

I think the fear was that if the system broke up on launch (exploded, perhaps) that it would strew radioactive materials over a wide swath of landscape.

(To be fair, we've had a couple of satellite launches screw up in the last decade, so the probability of failure isn't zero.)

You have a valid point, but I thought it was an interesting approach(*).

In his paper, Dr. PraKash notes that microfluidics requires pumps, valves, and other controlling hardware to route the chemicals to the required places.

His system moves microsamples around using magnetic fields, eliminating the need for pumps and valves.

Check out his dancing droplets video on YouTube. There's really a lot going on at the atomic level with these micro droplets.

(*) I submitted the article

And why is that?

We're supposed to be the smart crowd in the internet, and pride ourselves in having open minds and hearing both sides.

Is it important to get information that wasn't delivered by the news outlets?

Is it important to give both sides a chance to tell their story?

Is it effective to make judgements based on arrest claims, and not on convictions?

The GP has it dead-on: these posted questions are an embarrassment to our community. You could fault sock puppets and spammers, but our moderation system is supposed to let us suppress the junk and let our true natures shine forth.

I am astonished at the crass and low-born nature of the posted questions.

I thought we were better than that - I honestly did.

Um... OK. Fair point.

If it's not Google, then how about Daimler Chrysler?

Can they do it? Or am I still a drooling, panting idiot?

Oh, I agree with you and that sentiment completely.

To be specific, take a look at Manna, by Marshall Brain. It's an easy read, and it shows in frighteningly clear steps the two different ways the economy can go.

I'm all for automation, and I've worked on automation projects before. By and large, automation takes away those jobs that humans don't really want to do. Boring, repetitive, dehumanizing things like crop harvesting or long-haul driving.

While I recognize that automated production is the way of the future, I'm not quite sure how to get there. If there were some clear path, I'd be advocating it.

The best I can come up with at the moment is to point out how we're going to be in tough straits when 3 million people find themselves without a job in the next 5 years (and 2 1/2 million after that when short-haul driving is mostly automated, automated drone delivery of packages and mail and such.)

Pointing out the problems might nudge us into rethinking how economics works. That's all I can think of at the moment.

Do you have any ideas on how we can be part of that transition?

I agree with you, but not completely. For contrast, the Darpa grand challenge led to Google's self-driving car, which is poised to put 3 million truck drivers out of work.

The original grand challenge might actually be the problem - people looked at the success and tried to emulate it.

The differences might stem from problem specifications, or proper choice of problem. I remember the Darpa prize for building a machine to ascend the space elevator powered by a big searchlight at the bottom. The contest rules specifically required solar cells and electric motors, completely cutting out thermodynamic engines of various type (steam engines, stirling-cycle, other mechanical types). With so little room for innovation, it became a simple cutting-edge engineering chore.

Another prize involved a machine that can ride (and pilot) a tractor, dismount and walk into a building, find and turn a valve, and return. That doesn't quite fire the imagination as much as building a self-driving car, and the requirements are quite specific.

The Turing Test has no fundamental basis in theory, but it's led to some interesting algorithms like ELIZA, insights into human interaction (ie - that you don't actually have to be intelligent to keep up a conversation), and clarified the definition of AI a little.

So there's definitely value in having prizes, but I agree with you that it's not a 1-to-1 ratio of prize money to return.

Robert Murray Wilson, talking about transparent superconductors he's developed.

Chris, from ClickSpring, talking about building a clock.

Myfordboy showing how to cast aluminum at home.

Kevin Karsch et. al. rendering synthetic objects into legacy photographs

It's no great effort to find interesting and informative videos on the net. If you have the time to tape someone talking, you have the time to seek out things that nerds might want to see.

Also, there's really no feedback from the slashdot submission process. If a video doesn't meet your requirements, it's impossible to tell *why* they don't meet them, so that submitters could modify their selection process.

But this is beside the point. I'm not suggesting that you show other peoples' videos, I'm suggesting that *you* use the medium properly when making your own videos.

These same points were made back when Slashdot started video'ing people, to no great effect. Vinegar is needed to catch your attention. You have the perfect opportunity to use "directed practice based on feedback" which would turn you into a world-class videographer in a couple of years.

viz: The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance

Seriously. You have access to high-end feedback you could leverage to improve your technique. You should use it.

I agree with you 100%.

Ever wonder *why* these videos are bad?

It's because they don't use the medium properly. Videos of "people talking" adds nothing to the presentation of information.

Add the fact that the viewer can read and scan text much faster than the video talks, and the fact that most people don't present well in the first place (vocal disfluencies such as "ahh... um... you know..." and so forth) and it makes for a lousy experience.

For contrast, imagine an audio of the person talking while the video shows graphs and charts illustrating or bolstering the talking points, or showing the action being described (as in voiceover showing a 3-alarm fire in a datacenter), or showing an animation clarifying the speaker's voiced description.

Use video in the right way and people will love you for it.

...or continue with what you currently do.

(I need to point out that anyone can grab a camera and record someone talking for ten minutes. What makes Slashdot better than all the YouTube teenagers who do this for their HS project? You have the intent, time, and money to do this. Do it right, then learn to do it well.)

I'm just pointing things out and asking the question. Your response seems to be "In my opinion, it's not so".

I posted specific examples so that people could discuss the issues and point out problems with the conclusion. Several, in fact.

You took the most vulnerable example and framed it in a "conspiracy theorist" context, and used it to frame the entire position.

That's fine, it's a good use of rhetoric, but it adds nothing new to the conversation other than "in my opinion...".

Would you care to formulate a response with examples and/or references that explain *why* raising the question is more damaging than anything the sock puppets could do?

Because looking at the chemical plant explosion hoax and Acorn hoax would indicate ro me that sock puppets can have an enormous negative effect on public opinion and government policy.

Acorn was brought down specifically to stop its voter registration drives, which is on its face an attack against the freedom of democracy.

It's really, *really* hard for me to see how "be careful of sock puppets" can rise to that level of damage.

Care to explain?

I've often wondered about certain comment threads on slashdot. Framing certain actions as "hijacking the conversation for propaganda purposes" seems to hit the Bayesian priors higher than just "a lot of people really feel that way".

The conversations attached to Uber articles are weird, not at all what one would expect.

The recent one about California raising the minimum wage was suspect: affecting roughly 2.4% of wage earners, you would expect posts like "has no effect because costs are passed on to consumers", "raising everyone's wages make costs rise to compensate", and so on to be roundly debunked by the first person to google some numbers.

It's worse around election time. In a presidential election year, about 6 weeks beforehand we start to get framing posts - some of which are quite insidious. "I agree with him on *that* issue, but everything else he stands for is batshit crazy". It seemed like every response to a Ron Paul was that way: his immediate position is OK, but it puts the "batshit crazy" idea into people's minds with no supporting evidence.

...and it's starting to happen for Rand Paul as well.

Then there's the visibility-massaging techniques: posting an opinion that's not *quite* right just to get people to respond so that text further down gets pushed below the fold where no one can see it. Posting a definition that's not *quite* right so that people argue the definition back and forth and avoid the core issues, and of course modding things down.

I sometimes monitor certain posts and see them modded down... only to see them modded up a few hours later. That indicates to me that there are people trying to promote an agenda with the moderation system, but get overruled by the general population.

In addition to participating in the conversation, take a step back and look at the overall context of the conversation some time. Instead of just responding, think about the reasoning behind *why* the person made the post that they did.

It is sometimes quite enlightening.

Voting against the Patriot act was a good thing, but everything else Bernie Sanders he stands for is just batshit crazy.

That's a useful technique - agreeing or conceding the immediate issue, while making nebulous unsupported statements about everything else. Look to see this for the next year or so. "I agree with him on this issue, but everything else is crazy".

...problem is, that "agreeing on this one issue" seems to happen a lot. Like, for most issues.

Who do you recommend as an alternative? (And did they, by any chance, support the Patriot act?)