Duane's Quick Posts

December 9, 2009

Psychologists find repeatable way to unlock fears without drugs

This looks like an important discovery in psychology:

In an exciting breakthrough for psychological science, researchers in the United States have demonstrated a drug-free way to prevent the return of a learned fear. Similar memory modification effects have been observed before, but these experiments have involved drugs such as the beta-blocker propranolol. It's hoped the new drug-free procedure will lead to improved therapeutic techniques for people with phobias or intrusive traumatic memories.

Basically, there is a very high success rate for "unlearning" a fear if the fear is recalled 10 minutes prior to a training session in which the fear stimulus does not result in the feared outcome. The amygdala essentially allows feelings surrounding the trauma to be forgotten even though the memory of the experience persists.

-- Duane

Loading mentions Retweet

Comments [2]

December 8, 2009

The Present is Future Crystallizing into Past?

I like where this theory is going. I think it deserves more discussion:

Today, Ellis and Rothman introduce a significant new type of block universe. They say the character of the block changes dramatically when quantum mechanics is thrown into the mix. All of a sudden, the past and the future take on entirely different characteristics. The future is dominated by the weird laws of quantum mechanics in which objects can exist in two places at the same time and particles can be so deeply linked that they share the same existence. By contrast, the past is dominated by the unflinching certainty of classical mechanics.
...
They point out, for example, that this crystallization process doesn't take place entirely in the present. In quantum mechanics the past can sometimes be delayed, for example in delayed choice experiments. This means the structure of the transition from future to past is more complex than a cursory thought might suggest.

The part that seems most significant is the way it ties quantum dynamics to classical or relativistic mechanics. The uncertainty that lies in the future just can't be treated like a classical model, except in very narrow cases where all of the parameters are carefully controlled. In the large majority of cases, small quantum effects trigger larger effects that go on to affect the final outcome in unpredictable ways.

Loading mentions Retweet

Comments [0]

December 2, 2009

Image-Processing Hardware for Filtering Out Porn?

Technology keeps getting faster, but I wonder if it is fast enough to do real-time image processing to filter out pornography? More on this idea soon, but let me first explain why the question came up.

My wife is studying CIPA (the Child Internet Protection Act) as part of her Marriage and Family Therapy degree. As she pointed out, it's always a tricky bit of legislation to get right since it's easy to be too lax for the sake of First Amendment rights or too strict for the sake of the children.

I suggested perhaps the solution to the ambiguity inherent in English words would be to create an open-source filtering package as part of the bill. Let concerned parents who are also programmers get together to define a specification and a software program that would be the Gold Standard. Vague words such as "obscene" would yield themselves to the specifics of an algorithm, and the software included in the bill could become a standard for libraries and schools.

So back to the idea of real-time image processing. I don't think I've ever seen a product that even attempts this, but why not create an adapter that sits in between the VGA cord of a computer monitor and the video card itself? This "adapter" would have to be a computer in its own right, of course---it would have to process the incoming image in real-time at 60 or so frames per second, and match nudity patterns in the pixels. It would then draw black boxes in place of the obscene images. The pixel buffer, in its modified form, would then be delivered to the monitor, (sans the nudity).

The benefits of such a technique would be threefold: (1) the source of the obscenity would be irrelevant---whether it came from the internet, a disk, or even a drawing, it would be filtered out; (2) there would be no need to keep a long "white" or "black" list of internet sites because all obscene images would be filtered out in an even-handed way (3) as a hardware solution, there would be no tampering with it unless physically tampered with.

Figure 1: An attempt to show a VGA cable with a black box in the middle.

Note: There is a network-based hardware solution that is similar to this idea called iBoss, but this is not the same technology. iBoss seems like it's worth a look, however, if you're looking for a hardware solution and don't need my vaporware :)

Loading mentions Retweet

Comments [0]

December 2, 2009

Numbers that Can't Say No to Time

Infinity is such a "number". The irrational numbers are too, as is π (pi), and e, and so are a whole host of "numbers" derived through functions such as sin, cos, tan.

This is probably old news to most math people, but it was just such a neat realization that I had to share it: there is a class of numbers that can be represented in space, for example, 1.0 and 10^99; and then there are a class of "numbers" that can only be described through a process that must involve time. These other "numbers" are processes---that's the key point. Their secrets cannot be revealed without the dimension of time and a repetitious loop headed toward infinity.

Loading mentions Retweet

Comments [0]

November 25, 2009

Sign the Get FISA Right Open Letter

This open letter is the product of a long and thoughtful process that I've been paying attention to, associated with a mailing list led by Jon Pincus.

Please add your name to the list of concerned Americans if you care about restoring our right to know when we're being wiretapped by the government (unless there's a warrant), and especially if you believe the "national security letters" should be done away with.

I think it's a terrible thing for a government to be able to systematically silence citizens who oppose it, and this open letter seems to be a positive action in that direction.

Loading mentions Retweet

Comments [0]

November 23, 2009

Reading a File with Node.js

I'm playing with Node.js right now for one of my side projects and found that it was a little more difficult to read a file than I had anticipated. First, I looked for an "obvious" function that would read in an entire file, but there didn't seem to be anything like Ruby's IO.read (I was wrong, however, see the posix.cat solution below).

In order to get the benefits of Node.js's event-based system, we have to use the posix utilities. Here's what I tried first:

var prepareTemplate = function(file, callback) {
  posix.open(file, posix.O_RDONLY).addCallback(function(fd) {
   if (fd) {
   posix.read(fd, 100000, 0).addCallback(function(data, bytes_read) {
   var template = jsont.fromString(data);
   callback(template);
   });
   posix.close(fd);
   } else {
   sys.puts("Unable to read file: " + file);
   }
  });
};

Node.js croaked with the following error, however:

/Users/duanejohnson/Projects/hello.js:15
posix.open(file, process.O_RDONLY);
^
TypeError: Bad argument

Contrary to these presumably out-of-date slides, the documentation shows that the O_CREAT, O_RDONLY etc. constants are to be found in the "process" namespace (not the "posix" namespace). That was easy to switch.... but same error. It turns out the "mode" parameter is not optional:

var prepareTemplate = function(file, callback) {
  posix.open(file, posix.O_RDONLY).addCallback(function(fd) {
   if (fd) {
   posix.open(file, process.O_RDONLY, 438).addCallback(function(fd) {

The "438" in there is simply octal "666" (read/write permissions) turned into decimal.

Last but not least, I found that there is a "trick" to loading files if you don't care about concurrency (for example, when the server starts up and you want to load templates):

var data = posix.cat(file).wait();

Alternatively, you can use addCallback() instead of wait() to get around the concurrency issues.

Loading mentions Retweet

Comments [0]

November 22, 2009

End the Fed Rally Chicago

Kelty and I just went for a walk in Millenium Park and happened across an End the Fed rally. It was neat to see support for Ron Paul's "Audit the Federal Reserve" bill there.

Sent from my iPhone

Loading mentions Retweet

Comments [0]

November 19, 2009

Audit the Fed Bill Approved

This is a snippet of the good news:

The House Financial Services Committee has approved Rep. Ron Paul’s measure to drastically expand the government’s power to audit the Federal Reserve.

Thank goodness Rep. Mel Watt's anti-transparency measure was given the no-go.

Loading mentions Retweet

Comments [0]

October 24, 2009

Flu Vaccine Needs Further Testing?

The Atlantic has published an interesting article about the current state of knowledge in flu vaccinations. Based on this article, it seems that we don't have any good double-blind studies to show that the vaccination actually has the effect we hope it does. This is an interesting problem, because since a majority of health professionals believe that it does help, it is unethical in their view to return to "square one" and attempt such a study:

Demonstrating the efficacy (or lack thereof) of vaccine and antivirals during flu season would not be hard to do, given the proper resources. Take a group of people who are at risk of getting the flu, and randomly assign half to get vaccine and the other half a dummy shot. Then count the people in each group who come down with flu, suffer serious illness, or die. (A similarly designed trial would suffice for the antivirals.) It might sound coldhearted, but it is the only way to know for certain whether, and for whom, current remedies actually work.

...

In the absence of such evidence, we are left with two possibilities. One is that flu vaccine is in fact highly beneficial, or at least helpful. Solid evidence to that effect would encourage more citizens—and particularly more health professionals—to get their shots and prevent the flu’s spread. As it stands, more than 50 percent of health-care workers say they do not intend to get vaccinated for swine flu and don’t routinely get their shots for seasonal flu, in part because many of them doubt the vaccines’ efficacy. The other possibility, of course, is that we’re relying heavily on vaccines and antivirals that simply don’t work, or don’t work as well as we believe. And as a result, we may be neglecting other, proven measures that could minimize the death rate during pandemics.

A very good read if you are interested in the current vaccine debate.

Loading mentions Retweet

Comments [0]

October 9, 2009

Nobel Peace Prize goes to Obama

Announced today. I definitely support Obama's direction (see his remarkable Cairo speech from last June). I'd like to see faster resolution in Iraq and Afghanistan but I know it's a difficult situation. He didn't start the wars, so I give him credibility there.

Loading mentions Retweet

Comments [0]

Tags