Welcome

Welcome to my blog http://www.skegley.blogspot.com/ . CAVEAT LECTOR- Let the reader beware. This is a Christian Conservative blog. It is not meant to offend anyone. Please feel free to ignore this blog, but also feel free to browse and comment on my posts! You may also scroll down to respond to any post.

For Christian American readers of this blog:


I wish to incite all Christians to rise up and take back the United States of America with all of God's manifold blessings. We want the free allowance of the Bible and prayers allowed again in schools, halls of justice, and all governing bodies. We don't seek a theocracy until Jesus returns to earth because all men are weak and power corrupts the very best of them.
We want to be a kinder and gentler people without slavery or condescension to any.

The world seems to be in a time of discontent among the populace. Christians should not fear. God is Love, shown best through Jesus Christ. God is still in control. All Glory to our Creator and to our God!


A favorite quote from my good friend, Jack Plymale, which I appreciate:

"Wars are planned by old men,in council rooms apart. They plan for greater armament, they map the battle chart, but: where sightless eyes stare out, beyond life's vanished joys, I've noticed,somehow, all the dead and mamed are hardly more than boys(Grantland Rice per our mutual friend, Sarah Rapp)."

Thanks Jack!

I must admit that I do not check authenticity of my posts. If anyone can tell me of a non-biased arbitrator, I will attempt to do so more regularly. I know of no such arbitrator for the internet.











Friday, September 12, 2014

Cartoons ahead of the news media ... Thx Judi C!

Subject: New Cartoons
It's sad when you get more accurate news from cartoons than the media.






Brain to brain communoication ... Thx good friend Jason S!


A man wears an EEG cap and stares into a computer screen as part of an experiment with brain-computer interfacing.

Actual Telepathy Is One Step Closer to the Battlefield

Forget battlefield smartphones; the future of soldier-to-soldier communication may be electronic telepathy. A group of researchers in Europe have developed what they are calling the first “human brain-to-brain interface,” allowing people to communicate telepathically through the Internet without a surgical implant, bringing us closer to the day when soldiers behind enemy lines exchange information via sensors reading their thoughts.
The primarily Spanish researchers, who published their findings in the journal PLOS ONE, started with four participants between the ages of 28 and 50. One subject, called the emitter, was located in Thiruvananthapuram, India, and wore an electroencephalography (EEG) cap that could pick up the electromagnetic activity in his brain. The subject was asked to concentrate on moving an object on a screen vertically and horizontally. A computer picked up the signals and turned them into code to represent ones or zeroes. The subject was able, after training, to achieve 90 percent accuracy in creating these signals. The message was sent in email form to three blindfolded subjects in Strasbourg, France, via transcranial magnetic stimulation or TMS.
This second group of subjects received a subtle jolt to the occipital lobe, a portion of the brain associated with sight, which caused them to experience phospenes, the sensation of perceiving light when none is present.
The end result was that a coded message was transferred, via a computer interface, between two brains without surgical implant – a historic first.
“In both cases, the transmitted pseudo-random sequences carried encrypted messages encoding a wordhola’ (‘hello’ in Catalan or Spanish) in the first transmission, ‘ciao’ (‘hello’ or ‘goodbye’ in Italian) in the second,” the researchers write in the paper. They also report that the achieved an accuracy rate of 85 percent.
The European Commission’s Future and Emerging Technology, or FET, program, funded the research, in part, out of a 2.7 million grant. FET is sometimes referred to as the European version of the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. It’s a program to support moonshot research at the earliest stages with a time horizon beyond what would be practical for a venture capitalist or a private investor. The current research certainly falls within the category of ambitious beyond practical. But synthetic telepathy has, in fact, been part of the right-around-the-corner future for decades.
It’s also an area that the United States military has been researching for years, beginning in 1967 when Edmond M. Dewan, affiliated with the defunct Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories, published this paper in the journal Nature showing that human subjects could train themselves to emit Alpha waves (electromagnetic brain waves between 8 and 12 hz) in Morse code.
In 2008, the U.S. Army gave researchers from UC Irvine, the University of Maryland and Carnegie Mellon University a $4 million grant to create what was then dubbed “synthetic telepathy,” or a system to translate brain signals configured as code between the helmets of soldiers.
The Spanish researchers’ breakthrough moves that concept much closer to reality but the method that the researchers describe in their paper is extremely slow. The electronic pops and cackles that your brain emits when you visualize movement aren’t really speech, after all, and don’t lend themselves easily to the exchange of words or ideas, and certainly not complex ones. It’s something that University of Wisconsin researcher Adam Wilson discovered in April of 2009 when he used EEG to post an update to Twitter. “You have to press a button four times to get the character you want… So this is kind of a slow process at first,” he remarked.
“I think that in practical terms the main obstacles for non-invasive [brain-to-brain communication] technology is we still don’t understand where the limit is, how far beyond the simple, slow transmission of sensations we can go. It is hard to give a window, but if obstacles are overcome, something practical could be achieved around in 30 years,” Giulio Ruffini, one of the PLOS ONE study’s co-authors told Defense One.
In the meantime, the military could achieve a similar effect with so-called invasive implants, or sensors that have been surgically implanted in a subject. The closer the sensor is to the source of the electromagnetic activitythe brainthe clearer the signal will be.
“Invasive solutions can in principle be much more powerful. But their nature precludes wide applications. You’d have to introduce implants in people’s brains,” said Ruffini. He puts the arrival date for synthetic telepathy via surgical means closer to twenty years away.
But recent research suggests he may be under-estimating the speed of progress.
The proof of concept for surgically-embedded communication implants extends back to 2002, when artificial intelligence and cybernetics researcher Kevin Warwick spent three months with an implant connected to his peripheral nervous system via his arm. In one experiment, he hooked his implant to the Internet and then sent signals to electrodes that he had implanted in his wife’s arm. He described the experiment to ITWALES.com in 2006. “[W]hen she moved her hand three times, I felt in my brain three pulses, and my brain recognized that my wife was communicating with me. It was the world’s first purely electronic communication from brain to brain, and therefore the basis for thought communication.”
Ruffini says that Warwick’s experiment is not brain-to-brain communication because it’s mediated by the peripheral nervous systems with the hand serving as an intermediary.
Brain-to-brain communication over the Internet may never be the best solution for the battlefield, despite the millions of dollars of Pentagon research money that’s gone into exploring it. But the military may achieve interesting results with direct brain control over machinery, as several German researchers recently demonstrated via an experiment where subjects successfully steered simulated aircraft via an EEG interface. The commercial market for brain-based gaming systems, such as the NeuroSky console, while still small, has grown quickly enough to support multiple conferences and Kickstarter campaigns in just the last three years. Today, these systems are faddish at best but if their makers can overcome the frustration factor and design some fun into them, then the body of useful data about EEG signaling may take off as quickly as the Nintendo 64 in 1996.
Brain-to-brain communication interfaces could arrive before many researchers’ expectations. So keeping your thoughts to yourself just got a little harder. 

Claude Sullivan-Cawood Ledford-Jim Host ... Thx Mark S of the LHL!

Mark Story: Son's book aims to keep alive memory of UK radio announcer Claude Sullivan

 

skegley.blogspot.com 

 

Herald-Leader Sports ColumnistSeptember 11, 2014 Updated 12 hours ago
  • Book signing

    What: Alan Sullivan and co-author Joe Cox will sign Voice of the Wildcats: Claude Sullivan and the Rise of Modern Sportscasting
    When: 2 p.m. Sunday
    Where: The Morris Book Shop, 882 East High Street, Lexington.
Even now, Jim Host describes the events of Dec. 6, 1967, "as one of the hardest things I've ever had to do in my life."
With regular play-by-play man Claude Sullivan in Minnesota being treated for cancer, Host was in Memorial Coliseum that night calling the game between Adolph Rupp's Kentucky Wildcats and the Xavier Musketeers for the Standard Oil Radio Network.
During the game, a note was passed to Host.
He read it, fought to collect his emotions, then shared it over the air.
"One of the greatest announcers of all time, Claude Sullivan, has just died," Host told the listeners.
Left unsaid were two tragic elements of the story.
When he passed, Claude Sullivan was at the height of his career — the radio play-by-play voice of the Cincinnati Reds as well as calling UK football and basketball games.
He was 42 years old.
Essentially, Alan Sullivan, 63, gave 11 years of his life to one goal — preserving in book form the legacy of his late father, the iconic Kentucky radio sports broadcaster Claude Sullivan.
On Sunday, Alan Sullivan and his co-author, attorney Joe Cox, will be signing copies of Voice of the Wildcats: Claude Sullivan and the Rise of Modern Sportscasting (University Press of Kentucky) at Lexington's Morris Book Shop.
"For people under, say, 60, they never heard Claude Sullivan," Alan Sullivan says. "So this was something I wanted to do to give people a chance to know my dad's work."
In the 1950s and into the '60s, the structure for the broadcasting of UK sports over the radio was radically different than now. Back then, there was not an official "UK Radio Network." Instead, myriad radio stations or radio networks carried the Wildcats.
Over time, two of the many play-by-play men calling the Cats rose to the greatest prominence. One was Cawood Ledford, who broadcast over the massive megaphone provided by WHAS radio's 50,000-watt signal. Claude Sullivan, who called the Wildcats games for WVLK and the 17 stations of the Standard Oil radio network, was the other.
The native Kentuckians, Sullivan from Clark County, Ledford from Harlan County, were friendly rivals. They were roughly the same age, Sullivan having been born in 1924, Ledford two years later.
While Ledford built a nationwide following for both UK and himself thanks to the vast reach of WHAS, Sullivan was the better known of the two in and around Lexington.
"I remember we'd see him out driving, and it would be like 'Hey, there's Claude Sullivan,'" says Tom Hammond, the NBC sports broadcaster from Lexington. "I played in some high school games that Claude called on the radio. When you saw him show up to do your game, it was exciting."
Alan Sullivan said his dad's first UK broadcast was the famous 1948 basketball exhibition between Kentucky's "Fabulous Five" and the AAU champions, the Phillips Oilers, held in Stoll Field.
From there, Claude was at the mike for the golden age of Kentucky Wildcats sports. He called three of Rupp's four NCAA titles (1949, '51 and '58) as well as Bear Bryant coaching the Wildcats football team to appearances in the Orange, Sugar and Cotton bowls (1949-51).
Unlike Ledford, who seemed content to work inside Kentucky, Sullivan had aspirations beyond the commonwealth.
"Claude loved baseball," said Host, who became a nationally prominent college sports marketer. "I remember he would say his goal was to be a major-league baseball announcer."
After being turned down for a job with the Cincinnati Reds in 1962, Sullivan was asked to join Waite Hoyt in the Reds radio booth for the 1964 season. By 1966, Hoyt had retired and Sullivan was "the Voice of the Reds."
Yet by mid-summer of that year, Sullivan's voice began to fail him.
"He was in Los Angeles for a series with the Dodgers, and Vin Scully recognized something was wrong," Alan Sullivan said. "Vin told him he needed to get to a doctor and get checked out."
Eventually, doctors at the Mayo Clinic told Claude Sullivan he had throat cancer.
Over what was left of his life, Sullivan's voice became a screechy squawk.
"It was the cruelest thing that could happen to a broadcaster," Hammond says, "just horrible."
According to lore, long after UK had realized the business rationale in consolidating its radio broadcasts into a single network, it did not do so. The reason was the university and its athletics director at the time, Bernie Shively, did not want to pick between Sullivan and Ledford.
"By the end, Bernie Shively had finally decided they would have Cawood call the football games and Claude the basketball games over one network," Host said. "Then Claude died."
Ledford became the radio voice of the unified UK Network and "called the Cats" through the 1991-92 school year. Far too soon, Sullivan's name and his work began to slip into the mists of history.
"Claude Sullivan was much more a 'story teller' than Cawood," Host said. "Cawood didn't really tell stories, he stuck with the game at hand. But Claude worked (stories) into his broadcasts. And I always thought Claude was the master of the telling statistic, that one stat that was vital that you couldn't find anywhere else."
Said Hammond: "There was a dignity in the way Claude Sullivan, and Cawood for that matter, called games. They weren't screamers. You knew, certainly, they were for Kentucky, but they weren't homers in the way lots of announcers are now. I think my own style benefitted from the fact I grew up listening to Claude, then Cawood."
In its e-book version of Voice of the Wildcats, the University Press of Kentucky has embedded audio clips of Claude Sullivan play-by-play calls.
"I'm really hoping," Alan Sullivan says, "this gives people a chance to hear my dad."

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