This comment gave me strong cloud atlas vibes with the Una-939 storyline

When I hire contractors, if they are good at the job is the first thing I check. Then, if they are fascist sympathizers is the second thing i check. I want to know and google is stopping my from knowing.

Half the articles I needed to read couldn’t be accessed due to aws. I figured I would grade assignments in the mean time, up until I learned e-learning was down as well. Nothing came back up till about 3.

Thanks for asking. How was your day? Was it affected by the AWS outage?

EBSCO was down. Ask me how my dissertation writing progressed today…

Haha, I love audio. I used to be an audio engineer. It didn’t pay well so I went back to school with my GI bill and went for audiology. The dual doctorates actually helped bring the cost down at the expense of staying in school longer. As long as you are in the PhD program your tuition is waved and you get paid a stipend for being a TA/RA. So I planned for my GI bill to run out after my first year, then have been on PhD funding since. The only time I have paid tuition for my doctorates has been when I was on my externship. Then for the masters, it is called a “masters along the way” with no thesis required because I am in a PhD program doing a dissertation. And because neuroscience is in the same college as audiology, most of the classes overlap. I only had to take 5 more classes total. So I stacked 2 during covid (plus mt Aud/PhD classes) when everything was online and did 1 extra a semester for 3 semesters after that. Again, the only downfall of the free tuition is I am spending more time in school not making a my salary potential, but at least I have far less debt than my classmates.

So cool meeting someone in the CSD field! I did my undergrad in CSD, but went for audiology. I have my AuD and am finishing up a PhD (I also did a MS in neuro, but that was because the classes mostly lined up with the PhD and the tuition was free). I swear, finding people outside of tech on lemmy is rare. Finding someone inside of CSD is even more rare. Now I’m curious if I am going to find any other audiology people…

The more we find out about alzheimers, the harder to cure it is all we really find out. We have gotten better about identifying precursors to slow down progress or encourage prevention, but no cures in sight. There are also definitely multiple kinds with differing causes.

If I recall correctly, he also did a genetic screening for some show and it was revealed to him on camera that he (Chris) has two of the main causing genes, giving him an extremely high chance, of alzheimers. Plus he knows it runs in his family. Basically, he knows this is his future that he is seeing with his dad and wants to make the best of it.

Oh, you mean the real reason there has been a push to get us to use face ID verification on every site that depends on ads?

That’s actually pretty cool and I did not know. Also, I see people did not like my US presidency joke. Should have added the /s…

US presidency: did you know this roll can be played by a range of skin colors? But yes, the default is white.

Isn’t his brother also white?

Also a good reference. Lol. I forgot about this one.

(Movie 43- in case you were wondering if this was real)

I would argue that both are bad game/story design. Unless the skill is a plot point, it should not change the chance encounters in the world your players are in. Both of these examples are meta-gaming. The NPCs of the world didn’t know the player characters had that ability, and should not change their actions until it is known to them.

I had one DM who was huge on meta-gaming, and at first I thought it was just some peev of his, but honestly after a while and understanding it better- it made a better experience. It now makes me annoyed to see it used and I better understand his rants…

And just like Deus Ex: None of your choices up to that point mattered and the choice is made by one white guy.

At the peak of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars the national guard and reserve (but mostly guard) made up over 75% of the troops deployed. More national guard units saw more combat than active duty units simply by sheer numbers. I did 8 years and 4 months in the guard and over half that time I was activated for two tours to Afghanistan. I did more overseas time than my active duty time equivalent. National guard units were also consistently being placed in shittier places than active duty units because the active duty commanders didn’t want difficult deployments to potentially get in the way of future promotions. So the guard also took the brunt of the casualties. My first tour was in the second worst area in the country at the time and out of all the US troops (we were with the Polish), all but one was national guard. We set the regional record for longest continuous direct fire firefight at the time and a Polish truck set the record for the largest IED hit (aprox. 550 lbs, all died).

The longest continuous deployment during the Global War on Terrorism was also done by a guard unit. The 34th BCT did 22 months in Iraq.

To say the guard only helps old people and with hurricanes is beyond an understatement. We provided the bulk of the boots on the ground and did the job and big army literally couldn’t do.

Those chambers are normally only done around 2 or 2.5 atmosphere, 3 tops. Not enough to kill anyone if it cracked. A small pop and rushing sound at most depending on the crack size.

N=15 is a normal size on FMRI studies. It is about the smallest size you can have and still make your significance cut offs while still detecting decently small effects. The time and cost is so much higher than other studies. Some of the bigger FMRI studies start to reach 30-40 ppl. Getting into clinical trial sizes of subjects is unheard of.

The other thing with FMRI studies that most everyone doesn’t understand is that they aren’t actually looking at activity. They are looking at the BOLD response (blood oxygen level dependance) and that is then correlated to activity. Meaning You can only see blood oxygen uptake. You are not seeing neuron firing, just the metabolic side effect of oxygen use after increased neuron use. This is why you will never be able to see something like a “thought process”. You can only track structures/locations used.

At the same time we know that no two brains are wired the same even for the smallest of tasks, but they will “structure” their wiring the same. There have been literally hundreds of studies that indirectly see that. Soeach other. Plot out cultural differences versus individual differences would be basically two variance plots on top of eachother.

Participants 120 We analyzed fMRI data from N = 15 (2 male, 13 female) participants aged between 22 and 35 121 years (mean: 25.5) who took part in a previously published fMRI study about color vision 122 (Bannert & Bartels, 2018). The participants were the subset from the prior study for whom the 123 cortical retinotopic representations of the visual field were measured along both the polar and 124 the eccentricity axis of the visual field. All participants had normal or corrected-to-normal visual 125 acuity and were tested for normal color vision using Ishihara color plates (Ishihara, 2011). Each 126 participant gave written informed consent before the first study session. The experiment was 127 approved by the local ethics committee of the Tübingen University Hospital.

Ignore the numbers 120-127, those are line numbers.

Doesn’t say. To be fair, you normally aren’t allowed to collect biographical data or any additional identifying data without a specific purpose tied directly to your research question. If they wanted to answer your question they would have to redo the study under a different IRB application. Interesting question, but I would guess you wouldn’t see a difference in an fmri. The voxel sizes for functional are normally 2mm while what you are eluding to is the difference of a few thousand neurons wired a little differently. That difference would be extremely difficult to detect with 2mm voxels. Even at 1mm it would be difficult. When it comes to brain structures there really aren’t significant different between races or cultures more than the variance that already exists between people.

Every person eating out of a dumpster is a failure of the system. How has our economy not incentivized creating a method yet to maximize the wealth we could be extracting from these people?? We could slap a simple coin op slot onto those dumpsters and operate them like an unregulated vending machine. We could come up with a subscription model to allow monthly access to eating out of them. We could even figure out some form of alternative decentralized money system to get around FTC regulations and pesky labor laws on how we pay and receive the money from these homeless people. Capitalism is the greatest economic system ever created and we need to find a place in it for the homeless to contribute their fair share to the shareholders.