While I agree with the general thrust of your comment, the machines used by the TSA are not "focused" in the same way. It would take much greater effort to create hazardous conditions like these patients experienced.
I think that article was essentially a propaganda piece, albeit unintentionally. My guess is that Newsweek puts out blurbs like that in order to reach out to a targeted demographic, in this case women.
The whole question of media bias really comes down to the bottom line. If a format of words plus carefully chosen images favored traditionally conservative causes (which for the most part they don't) there would be widespread complaints about right wing media bias. AS it is, I think there is very little remanent of journalistic ethics in mass media.
Sometimes life is unfair, but I hold as an article of faith that almost anything can be made better by getting off your butt and working hard. For me personally, there's almost nothing of value in that study. It wouldn't change my approach to life.
I agree and I remember the days of being a grad student and scouring the pages of High Tc Update looking for the next super-material. It seemed like every other quarter there was a hint of room T superconductivity and it was always dashed by the next quarter.
It sounds like you're asking asking whether some regions of a sample could be superconducting while others are normal phase. This can occur in heterogeneous materials as in a Josephson's junction. Pretty cool stuff when you look at it. An unknown 23 yr old grad student faced down a two-time Nobel prize winner and was right!
I think you're completely misunderstanding the thrust of the article. This ability goes far beyond memorizing knowledge in one specialized area. These people go through hours (up to 8 at a time) of testing about the everyday mundane events that have happened as well as the extraordinary things - there is no way for them to trick their testers. In the 60 minute piece, they could recall amazing detail about days from 20 years ago. This goes far beyond memorizing weather patterns and reconstructing information according to the regularity of a work schedule, etc.
I think what a lot of people are noticing here is that this extraordinary ability has not been commensurate with extraordinary accomplishments and it leads them to downplay the significance...
A model of an atom can be likened to a solar system
Um, no. Electrons do not have well-defined trajectories. Quantum particles should not in any way be compared to classical macroscopic objects.
I love fractals and finding examples of them in nature and science, but posts like these annoy me a bit. Saying that there are fractals everywhere is a bit like saying that we don't live in the Platonic plane.
I agree with the sentiment of your point, but this does represent "normal mental faculties" in any way. They are clearly extraordinary in this one sense and that alone doesn't allow them to be classified as normal.
I watched this spot on 60 minutes and I am not convinced that these people are normal with respect to mental health. They had a very odd affect at times. Still, it was amazing to watch people recall things that happened over 20 years ago with clarity and precision.
My only beef with his interesting post is that he uses graphics of completely understandable stuff like diagonalizing a matrix or the map of the phase space map of the logistic equation and then talks about current developments in math. Anything new is almost completely incomprehensible to me - a couple of years ago, I got a book about fractional calculus. I read about 5 pages away and gave it to a mathematician friend of mine...
Good. Hopefully this is the beginning of restoration of some common sense in these matters. It would be even nicer if we could get rid of the Patriot Act and the crotch-grabby TSA POSs while we're at it, but I know better than to dream.
Excellent post. Take responsibility for your own intellectual development and you will do much better than if someone were to show you the exact solution to a problem you're working on.
I see this a lot with students in introductory physics. If they come to me and say "I don't get it" or "I can't get started" I actually invest less time than if I get a good student who has hit a wall and can't get through. The student who won't/can't start will get sent to the tutoring center and I will spend the time with the kid who works hard. There's only so much of me to go around and I want to make it count.
It made for an interesting read, but I think there are too many generalizations in that type of writing. The truth is, we have just experienced and extraordinary explosion in the amount of valuable data and information that it available to almost everybody. I think that we have not yet come to grips with this and that it has caused some disciplinary boundaries to be rewritten. There will still be heroes after the revolution!
As others have commented here, I find it very telling that maximum publicity was sought when the article was first published, but the lead author seems to dislike the scrutiny brought about by these claims. Due diligence was not done and this paper is not up to Science's usual standards. The shame of it is that this will wind up being another black eye for NASA.
Here's the problem that I see that few people discuss. Why should China and India care? The vast majority of their combined population, about 30% of the world's total, live under miserable circumstances by western standards. Move 100 million people off the coastline? No big deal. More typhoons? Oh well, we'll just rebuild the shacks.
China has a far greater problem in balancing the needs and wants of the haves and have-nots and they are going to address those issues first. They have everything to gain by continuing to industrialize and I think that anyone who believes that they will actually cut their emissions is kidding themselves.
I think we could take a huge step towards energy independence by building nuclear plants and driving hydrogen cars. Instead of dozens of smaller problems to solve, we could focus on just one: what to do with nuclear waste.