Gold Prospecting & Panning | Gold Mining & Metallurgy at 8:07 PM

We are going to show you the basic theory and methodology you need to find where gold is present, how to identify it and what alternatives there are for the extraction of gold via panning or other. In short, this site will show you everything you need to know about gold prospecting. Although we'll explain to great extend the "how to" of searching for mineral deposits within ore veins, this guide considers free gold ( Gold Placers of various types ) as the main source of this precious metal. Also learn how to invest in gold via our other detailed guide.

Mining extraction and metallurgy of gold has been pursued with great interest since it developed intrinsic value as a result of its economic and physical properties, its decorative appeal and its scarcity. During much time gold has been the most attractive metal on the world, and still to this day is one the ones most fever and many developments and new ideas have appeared as a consequence of its huge value as an economic metal.

The gold mining industry has grown considerably, and it appeared to the writer that the present would be a propitious time to bring out some guides in order to understand gold prospecting and gold mining. What has been goal of the site is to make "Prospecting for Gold" a compendium, in especially concrete form, of useful information respecting the processes of winning from the soil and the after- treatment of gold and gold ores, including some original suggestions. Practical information, original and selected, mining jobs are given to mining company directors, mine managers, mill operators, and prospectors. In each part, will be found a large number of useful hints on subjects directly and indirectly connected with the gold mining.

All the information should be very useful and surely is original, and each reader will be able to understand the difficult task of processing gold ores found in the veins that bear it. You'll learn the art of extracting valuable metals from gravel placers.

Here, you can learn about metal detecting as well as gold panning. You get to learn why gold placers will form where they form. You'll learn how to look and how to find gold placers (that's prospecting!) and analyze it.

Those unfamiliar with prospecting and mining will find a great Glossary of the Mining Trade's Terms. The characteristics of an ore deposit and its minerals assemblages (mineralization) determine mining methods, extraction process (recovery methods & equipment needed), and the performance of all chemical processes involved in gold extraction. Thus, a good knowledge of an ore is required to develop a gold extraction and the efficiency of the process.

The gold mineralogy can offer the following variations:

• Gold occurrence, showings.
• Gold particle size and distribution.
• Type of gangue.
• Mineralogical association.
• Changes in mineral.
• Changes during the time.

The Quest For Human Level Artificial Intelligence: AGI-09 and Ben Goertzel at 11:39 PM

The second conference on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is set to convene in Arlington, Virginia on March 6-9, 2009. The conference stands uniquely as one of the few (only?) conferences that focuses solely on the ambitious goal of creating true human level artificial intelligence.

The conference, dubbed AGI-09, comes on the heels of last year’s successful conference in 2008, AGI-08. The schedule for the conference is intense, offering attendees a three day lineup of keynote speeches, workshops, moderated discussions, and presentations.

Singularity Hub has negotiated a 10% discount on admission to the conference to the first five readers that signup. The discount only applies to regular price admission (it cannot be added on top of an AAAI discount or student discount). To take advantage of this discount, simply be one of the first 5 people to mention Singularity Hub when you register.

The Hub’s Keith Kleiner recently had a chance to speak with AGI-09 creator and conference chair Ben Goertzel to ask him about the conference and the field of AI in general. Below is a short bio on Goertzel, followed by a summary of Kleiner’s discussion with Goertzel:

Goertzel is the founder and CEO of Novamente, a company that supplies software productsand services to power intelligent virtual agents for virtual worlds, computer games, and simulations. Goertzel has been showing up everywhere, presenting at the Singularity Summit in 2007 and 2008 and also presenting this tech talk at Google. Goertzel is the driving force behind opencog.org, a collaborative website for the open source development of human level artificial intelligence, reported on earlier at Singularity Hub.

I asked Goertzel if he was aware of any conference other than AGI-09 that was focused solely on the creation of human level artificial intelligence. I was surprised to hear that although there are small workshops within other conferences, AGI-09 is the only full-scale conference that focuses on the topic. The AAAI and IEEE conferences dedicate small portions of their conference schedules to human level artificial intelligence, but mostly focus on solving what is called narrow AI, which are problems directed at solving a single particular problem, such as credit card fraud. Conferences like AGI-09 that are finally getting researchers to again attempt to tackle the problem of creating human level artificial intelligence (known as strong AI) after more than a decade of practically ignoring the challenge because it was seen as too hard.

Goertzel pointed out that narrow AI is becoming significantly more advanced and is showing up everywhere in our lives. A few examples: credit card fraud detection, chess-playing, scientific data analysis, scheduling military operations, and controlling non-player characters in games. With the relentless advance of Moore’s law and accelerating technology, interest and confidence in our ability to create human level artificial intelligence is slowly on the rise. Goertzel is hopeful that someone in the next few years (perhaps even one of his efforts) will achieve a major success that will alter the landscape and cause others to join the cause in greater numbers.

A major focus for Goertzel at the moment is the creation of a virtual animal, such as a dog or a parrot, whose language skills improve over time as it interacts with humans. Were such a virtual animal to achieve a respectable level of language competence, it could serve as the lightning rod that would evangelize others to more seriously take on the problem of developing human level AI. I suggested Goertzel make a virtual person instead of a virtual animal, but to this he responded that his decision to focus on virtual animals instead of virtual humans is for a specific reason. Goertzel says that people change their expectations when approaching a virtual animal vs approaching a virtual human. Even if the software is really, really good, if it does not exactly match human ability then people will quickly disregard the achievements of the software when emulating a human. However, when people see the same software powering a virtual animal, they are more willing to credit and appreciate the achievements of the software.

When asked what he would really like to see from the AI community in the near term, Goertzel stated he would like to see us develop and converge on a detailed roadmap for the creation of human level artificial intelligence. Such a roadmap could follow in the footsteps of theMetaverse Roadmap, a successful initiative that the virtual world community is using for the creation of advanced, immersive online 3D worlds within the next ten years. Sounds like a good idea to me! If Goertzel or someone reading this blog post doesn’t beat us to it, perhaps Singularity Hub will lead the beginning of such a roadmap.

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DHS invests in mind-reading anti-terrorist technology -- and staff phrenologists to interpret the results at 3:51 PM

Hurrah -- the DHS is buying mind-reading machines that can tell you're a terrorist by examining the terrorist-thought-center of your brain. People with failing brains will be sent for corrective surgery.

MALINTENT, the brainchild of the cutting-edge Human Factors division in Homeland Security's directorate for Science and Technology, searches your body for non-verbal cues that predict whether you mean harm to your fellow passengers.

It has a series of sensors and imagers that read your body temperature, heart rate and respiration for unconscious tells invisible to the naked eye — signals terrorists and criminals may display in advance of an attack.

U.S. Developing Mind Reading Technology at 3:47 PM

The use of scan­ners to read brain sig­nals allowed the researchers to cor rectly deter mine which of two images their guinea pigs were look ing at 80 per cent of the time. The test is one in a series in which sci en tists have read minds using Mag netic Res o nance Imag ing (MRI) scan ners, which are nor mally used in hos pi tals to detect the flow of blood around the brain using a radio mag netic field and radio waves.

Dr Stephanie Har ri son, who led the study at Van der bilt Uni ver sity in Nashville, asked six vol un teers to look at dif fer ent images on a screen – one of a cir cle with almost hor i zon tal lines across it and one of a cir cle with almost ver ti cal lines across it.

As they were shown the images, mon i tor ing showed that dif fer ent sides of their brains had lit up.

They were then asked to remem ber one par tic u lar cir cle and, from look ing at the pat tern of brain activ ity, the researchers were able to tell with con sid er able accu racy which one they were think­ing of.

Writ ing in the jour nal Nature, Dr Har ri son said: “Decod ing accu­racy greatly exceeded chance-level per for mance of 50 per cent and proved highly reli able in the six par tic i pants.”

While the study does not unlock the secrets of mind-reading or thought pre dic tion, it does allow sci en tists to deter mine which parts of the brain are involved in short-term visual mem ory.

Pre vi ously, sci en tists in Cal i for nia asked vol un teers to look at 1,750 images then used MRI scans to cor rectly judge, in nine out of ten cases, which one they were think ing of.

Lead researcher Dr Jack Gal lant warned after the results were pub lished last year: “It is pos si ble decod ing brain activ ity could have seri ous eth i cal and pri vacy impli ca tions. We believe that no one should be sub jected to any form of brain-reading invol un tar­ily, covertly, or with out informed con sent.”