Slashdot Mirror

What was the point of examining this individual animal?

It was part of research into climate change over the past 1000 years. The oxygen isotopes in carbonates in clam shells provide information about climate at the time the shell layer was formed. See: http://www.bangor.ac.uk/news/full.php.en?nid=16781&tnid=0

Prior art: the Cysgliad suite of programs (developed by Canolfan Bedwyr at the University of Wales Bangor http://www.bangor.ac.uk/ar/cb/cysgliad.php.en) do just this for Welsh and have done for some years: type in the infinitive and it declines the verb, type in a short form and it displays the infinitive with the option to decline.

Oh yeah, and I think that simple life forms will be made with this technology and some idiot scientist will think he's all bad-ass, until the damn thing morphs into some wicked, evil thing right out of hell like something in Doom II and it will turn into a three-headed huge dinosaur-like creature, about the size of Godzilla or something, and it'll go stomping around and smashing up all of human civilization until there is literally nothing left in the world except for these things fighting amongst themselves. And that day will be called Armageddon, the end of all things. Oh well. For now, all I need is another Negra Modelo.

If you didn't get what the hell I was talking about in the first paragraph, please allow me to summarize it right here:

The processors in our computers will someday consist of the following technologies, combined as outlined in the aforementioned articles:

• Gate-based logic.
• Quantum computing.
• Biological computing.
• Nanotechnology.

Some interesting information, found at the National Nanotechnology Initiative's site, at http://www.nano.gov/nsetmem.htm, which lists the member participants:

PARTICIPANTS: NSET Members

Chair: M.C. Roco, NSF
Executive Secretary: J.S. Murday, NRL

Members: OSTP: S.N. Pace
OMB: D. Radzanowski
CIA: F.D. Gac
DOA: P. Schwab
DOC: C. Campbell, S. Yun,
DOD: W. Berry, J.S. Murday, G.S. Pomrenke
DOE: I.L. Thomas, R. Price, B.G. Volintine
DOJ: D. Boyd, T. DePersia
DOS: R. Braibanti, R. McCreight
DOT: R.R. John, A. Lacombe
DoTREAS: E. Murphy
EPA: L.A. Friedl, S. Lingle
NASA: S. Venneri, M. Hirschbein, M. Dastoor
NIH: J.A. Schloss, E. Kousvelari
NRC: U.S. Bhachu
NIST: P. Casassa, C.R. Snyder, P. Looney
NSF: M.C. Roco, T.A. Weber, M.P. Henkart.

According to the Nanoindustries site at http://www.nanoindustries.com/, Nanotechnology can provide vast benefits above and beyond what is being experimented with today. For example:

Nanotechnology could save the ozone layer. Whilst experimenting with nanospheres and perfluorodecalin, a liquid used in the production of synthetic blood, researchers at Germany's University of Ulm have stumbled across a phenomenon that could ultimately help remove ozone-harming chemicals from the atmosphere. The perfluorodecalin, against all expectations, was taken up by a water-based suspension of 60 nm diameter polystyrene articles. nanotechweb 1/30/03

For those of you interested in Quantum computing, there is an interesting book by Braunstein... you can find more information about it at http://www.informatics.bangor.ac.uk/~schmuel/book/ book1.html.

With the Bush Administration streamlining services to help U.S. businesses grow, I think I can go ahead and have my Negra Modelo now.

This post has been composed of serious material, funny material, crap, and useful information. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please call us toll free by paying us the sum of One Hundred Million Dollars ($100,000,000.00 USD) to receive our toll free voice telephone number, or simply email us by using the best email application on the market, Microsoft Outlook.

• Microsoft is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation.
• "Isuzu" is a registered trademark of American Isuzu Motors Inc.
• "Chrysler" is a registered trademark of DaimlerChrysler.
• "Chevrolet" is a registered trademark of General Motors Corporation.
• "Volvo" is a registered trademark of Volvo Cars of North America, LLC.
• "Linux" is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.
• "Lotus" is a registered trademark of Lotus Development Corporation in the United States and other countries.
• "Saturn" is a registered trademark of Saturn Corporation.
• "Nestea" is a registered trademark of Soci,t, des Produits Nestl, S.A., Switzerland. "Evian" is a registered trademark of Groupe Danone.
• "Mitsubishi" is a registered trademark of Mitsubishi Motor Sales of America, Inc.
• "Oldsmobile" is a registered trademark of General Motors Corporation.
• "Nissan" is a registered trademark of Nissan North America, Inc.
• "Acura" is a registered trademark of American Honda Motor Company, Inc.
• "Jeep" is a registered trademark of DaimlerChrysler.
• "Toyota" is a registered trademark of Toyota Motor Corporation.
• "Hyundai" is a registered trademark of Hyundai Motor America.
• "Plymouth" is a registered trademark of DaimlerChrysler.
• "Mickey's Avonturen" is a trademark of Disney Enterprises, Inc.
• "Cadillac" is a registered trademark of General Motors Corporation.
• "Dodge" is a registered trademark of DaimlerChrysler.
• "Mazda" is a registered trademark of Mazda Motor Corporation.
• "Honda" is a registered trademark of American Honda Motor Company, Inc.
• "Ford" is a registered trademark of Ford Motor Company.
• "Mercury" is a registered trademark of Ford Motor Company.
• "Lincoln" is a registered trademark of Ford Motor Company.
• "Coca- Cola", "Coca-Cola light", "Cherry Coke", "Sprite", "Fanta", "Aquarius", "Bonaqua", "Kinley", "Minute Maid", "Splash", "Aquana"the design of the "Coca-Cola Contour" Bottle and the "Coca-Cola Red Disc" icon are registered trademarks of The Coca-Cola Company.
• "Subaru" is a registered trademark of Subaru of America, Inc.
• "Kia" is a registered trademark of Kia Motors America, Inc.
• "GMC" is a registered trademark of General Motors Corporation.
• "IBM," the e-business logo, eServer, iSeries, pSeries, xSeries, zSeries, Websphere, DB2, and Tivoli are trademarks or registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States and other countries.
• "Red Hat" is a registered trademark of Red Hat, Inc.
• "Red Devil Energy Drink" is a registered trademark of Futuristic Brands S.A., Luxemburg.
• All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

It's time for another beer. It's time for another beer. It's time for another beer. It's time for another beer. It's time for another beer. And I'm going to have a Negra Modelo. Or two. Or three. Or four. Or five..... I have too much time on my hands.

There are quite a few open source learning management systems. Check:

Future Learning EnvironmentZope based, probably among the more mature.

Campus source is a whole raft of GPLed online learning software, mostly PHP + MySQL/PostGreSQL. The English version of the site is a bit screwed, so it's worth hitting the "Deutsch" button if you can grok it. Thorough stuff.

The CO3 group of learning systems Again, a whole group of learning environments, each with its own strengths. Declaration: these were developed by colleagues of mine.

EduZope Only just started, but is looking very good. Zopebased. But you knew that ;)

Now a bit of shameless self-promotion. Have a look at the CETIS website for most anything to do with education tech.

Related to this is the Parry People Mover which has been developed by a small company in Wales. This is designed as a light urban tansit system using flywheel to run the "people movers". The flywheels in these lightweight cars are recharged by either onboard LPG internal combustion engines or by electric motors fed from recharging points at stations.

They have been trialed on the Welsh Highland Railway and on the island of Mauritius omngst several other schemes - a quick Google search will turn up a lot more information about some of the trials.

While not a total success it is good to see innovation in this area.

What is teleportation? A straightforward definition, inspired by science fiction series on TV would be `transportation from A to B without traversing the intermediate space'. Practically speaking, one should send the complete information of the object from A to B, where clever technicians rebuild the object. But by means of this definition, we already have lots of forms of teleportation. In a fax, a telephone and a television images and sounds are `converted into' information (electrical currents in a cable), sent and translated to comprehensive images and sounds again.

Nothing prevents us from keeping the original image and perhaps `teleport' it to yet another receiver. But then we could have called it `copying' just as well. Intuitively, we want the original object to vanish in the process of real teleportation.

Suppose Alice has an unknown superposition of horizontal and vertical polarization. She can of course send her photon directly to Bob by means of an optical fibre, but then there is the danger of altering the superposition in an unpredictable way due to interactions with the fibre. This effect is called decoherence, and causes severe difficulties when one wants to manipulate quantum states.

Alice can teleport her quantum state to Bob. The information of her state (the exact superposition) must then be dissected into classical and quantum information. It works as follows: Alice and Bob both receive a part of an EPR-pair (one photon for Alice and one for Bob). This EPR-pair will become the transmitter of the quantum information. The classical information can be sent by cable or radio. The EPR-photons are correlated in the way described above: if Alice after a measurement finds her photon in vertical polarization, then Bob's photon is in horizontal polarization and vice versa. But Alice doesn't perform her measurement yet! It is very important that the correlation remains: `the line should be left open,' and a measurement destroys the correlation

In any event, here is a decent beginner's explanation of quantum computing. It can easily be read in less time than Timeline, although arguably less entertaining, if you're into sword-fighting.

Here's a good starting point for the non-physicist:

Quantum Computation: A Tutorial

Quantum computers can facilitate perfectly secure communications (even key exchange) with man-in-the-middle detection via polarized light.

Some basic information on quantum computers is available at this link.

Basically, quantum computers could be good at cracking rsa encryption because of their exponentially smaller time-space requirements in searching for a factorization. Here is Shor's famous paper on the subject..

Quantum computers are not just "faster" computers, they are a different beast altogether. Sometimes, they may act as infinitely parallel devices, and for other operations, they may be totally worthless.
---