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and its more of the same! Its hinged but cleverly! Its a slider instead of hinges! Its glorified Nintendo DS combined with an iPhone!

Or, they pick the low hanging fruit of "It'll be faster and more efficient!"

How about stuff like what Andy Van Dam and his students are working on? MathPad lets you use a tablet to write equations and have the computer solve them for you, or draw a primitive sketch and have it animate depending on an equation you wrote. Or there's ChemPad which lets you draw chemical equations and then it generates the 3-d structure on the fly.

If we extrapolate what their research does today, 7 years from now could be brilliant. In the end wouldn't it be great open up your computer, and start writing on your desktop? And you could write anything and your computer (with more computing power 7 years from now) would be able to contextualize what you're writing and immediately know that the diagram you drew was an animation for your graphics class that was a pinwheel dependent on an equation? Or, perhaps you're a manager and you draw a lot of diagrams and write notes like "Setup meeting with Jim and Susan, 2:30 tomorrow" and your computer can figure it all out and do it for you?
Yes, designers are great when they get it correct (iPhone is brilliant) but I'm waiting for the computer to understand what I'm doing as well.

If that's not a strongly typed language then I don't know what is.

That's manifest typing.

My favorite definition of "strong typing" comes from Shriram Krishnamurthi's Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation (p. 205):

So what is "strong typing"? As best as we can tell, this is a meaningless phrase, and people often use it in a nonsensical fashion.

Benjamin Pierce (author of Types and Programming Languages) wrote something similar (see Mark Jason Dominus quoting Pierce on "____ typing"):

... the usage of these terms is so various as to render them almost useless.

You're making an interesting point. I don't think the effect is caused by lateral inhibition *only*.
As another poster said, it's basically white balance.

Now an interesting question would be : has lateral inhibition a role in white balancing ?

Lateral inhibition is at a low level in perception, but overall lightning, and 3D construction are at higher levels.

I will point to some other illusions :

White's illusion
Searching for illusions, I found the illusion at hand is due to color constancy

BTW, welcome as a Slashdot registered user !

The Ivy league prohibits athletic scholarships.

(Brown, class of 1984)

I think SICP is a good book, but some people don't think it's good as an introduction:

The Structure and Interpretation of the Computer Science Curriculum

Abstract:

Twenty years ago Abelson and Sussman's Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs radically changed the intellectual landscape of introductory computing courses. Instead of teaching some currently fashionable programming language, it employed Scheme and functional programming to teach important ideas. Introductory courses based on the book showed up around the world and made Scheme and functional programming popular. Unfortunately, these courses quickly disappeared again due to shortcomings of the book and the whimsies of Scheme. Worse, the experiment left people with a bad impression of Scheme and functional programming in general. In this pearl, we propose an alternative role for functional programming in the first-year curriculum. Specifically, we present a framework for discussing the first-year curriculum and, based on it, the design rationale for our book and course, dubbed How to Design Programs. The approach emphasizes the systematic design of programs. Experience shows that it works extremely well as a preparation for a course on object-oriented programming.

Right.. sot he first chapter goes on an on how hot it is that once you assign a value to a variable, it can no longer be changed. You see, that's super hot, since you can assign Pi = 3.14 and then you can't change it.

It's called static single assignment form. It's arguable whether requiring the programmer to write in this formal style is better than letting the compiler convert the code though -- sort of like the holy war over manifest versus inferred types.

I believe concurrency will in the end be most implemented via RAM transactions, which proves a simple and effective model for handling race conditions, while retaining the look of the separate procedures as imperative sequential code as we know it today.

Software transactional memory is nifty, and there are implementations like SXM for .Net by Maurice Herlihy, but the bizarre contortions required to get between an object and its fields at runtime (in SXM's case, wrapping all fields in properties and using a runtime-generated subclass that overrides the setters and getters to monitor the transaction) feel more unnatural to me than SSA form.

First, thanks for continuing the dialog. As it turns out, we have the same understanding of a right. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights )

However, I was just all wet about fair use. ( http://www.brown.edu/Administration/Copyright/faq. html http://www.brown.edu/Administration/Copyright/prin ciples.html http://www.nolo.com/article.cfm/objectID/C3E49F67- 1AA3-4293-9312FE5C119B5806/ )

Please check out the links above and you'll see an on-going problem, IMO. We (whether it's you and I or others) are going to shear on syntax and definition forever w.r.t. fair use because of the nature of the following in law: entitlement, privilege and exception.

Here's what I knew - fair use curtails the rights of the copyright holder. Here's what I knew - rights not specifically granted to an individual (as opposed to constitutional law) may be interpreted by the courts.

Here's what else I knew - over the years, fair use has become accepted and reasonably understood - based on that word, reasonable.

I argued with you because I thought you were wrong w.r.t. fair use - and you were (or, may be), but not for the reasons I'd thought. If I rip a song from a CD to iTunes to iPod for my exclusive use, it's legal. But fair use? Whoa! Here's something that I never RTFA on, but am surprised to discover at this late point:

http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html

Fair use isn't just a defense - as I understand you to say. Neither is it a right (anymore) but neither is it merely an exception. It's a nice and gray privilege, granted a codified state in the US Copyright Office - and an interesting only-almost curtailment of the rights of the copyright holder.

I couldn't be right for the same reason that what I took as your narrow argument couldn't be right - fair use now has a mantle of codification outside of previously-understood reasonable. IOW, we can both be right (and are) or wrong (and are) - fair use as presently formulated is nothing more than a new playing field for the litigants. It's so whacked, both sides can posture that they have the moral right on their side, and their attorneys can assure them this is so with a straight face.

Attorneys can - and probably are - continuing the argument you and I have had albeit in a more edified form in juries across the land - with the mantle of codification allowing them to do so with a straight face.

Where court decisions set the reasonableness of fair use before, this won't and can't count now as before. The codification of fair use, in its present form, is simply fucked.

Most people don't realize this - I sure didn't. I only wish we'd had time to have this debate when the subject was still topical and front-page on slashdot. I wish everyone at slashdot could learn what I've learned. I don't know how to submit this as an article (not because I can't read the FAQ) but because I don't know how to make this an article.

I don't know whether to be depressed or pissed off. I wish I'd paid more attention to this years ago, instead of simply assuming.

First, thanks for continuing the dialog. As it turns out, we have the same understanding of a right. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights )

However, I was just all wet about fair use. ( http://www.brown.edu/Administration/Copyright/faq. html http://www.brown.edu/Administration/Copyright/prin ciples.html http://www.nolo.com/article.cfm/objectID/C3E49F67- 1AA3-4293-9312FE5C119B5806/ )

Please check out the links above and you'll see an on-going problem, IMO. We (whether it's you and I or others) are going to shear on syntax and definition forever w.r.t. fair use because of the nature of the following in law: entitlement, privilege and exception.

Here's what I knew - fair use curtails the rights of the copyright holder. Here's what I knew - rights not specifically granted to an individual (as opposed to constitutional law) may be interpreted by the courts.

Here's what else I knew - over the years, fair use has become accepted and reasonably understood - based on that word, reasonable.

I argued with you because I thought you were wrong w.r.t. fair use - and you were (or, may be), but not for the reasons I'd thought. If I rip a song from a CD to iTunes to iPod for my exclusive use, it's legal. But fair use? Whoa! Here's something that I never RTFA on, but am surprised to discover at this late point:

http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html

Fair use isn't just a defense - as I understand you to say. Neither is it a right (anymore) but neither is it merely an exception. It's a nice and gray privilege, granted a codified state in the US Copyright Office - and an interesting only-almost curtailment of the rights of the copyright holder.

I couldn't be right for the same reason that what I took as your narrow argument couldn't be right - fair use now has a mantle of codification outside of previously-understood reasonable. IOW, we can both be right (and are) or wrong (and are) - fair use as presently formulated is nothing more than a new playing field for the litigants. It's so whacked, both sides can posture that they have the moral right on their side, and their attorneys can assure them this is so with a straight face.

Attorneys can - and probably are - continuing the argument you and I have had albeit in a more edified form in juries across the land - with the mantle of codification allowing them to do so with a straight face.

Where court decisions set the reasonableness of fair use before, this won't and can't count now as before. The codification of fair use, in its present form, is simply fucked.

Most people don't realize this - I sure didn't. I only wish we'd had time to have this debate when the subject was still topical and front-page on slashdot. I wish everyone at slashdot could learn what I've learned. I don't know how to submit this as an article (not because I can't read the FAQ) but because I don't know how to make this an article.

I don't know whether to be depressed or pissed off. I wish I'd paid more attention to this years ago, instead of simply assuming.

Hospice patients can benefit from physical therapy.

Simply having a terminal illness does not mean that we have to "give up" and lay down in bed and immediately die, as some may believe. Those patients who make the most of their remaining time usually experience the highest quality of life. Hospice is about improving the quality of life and providing comfort care, even if a "cure" for the disease cannot be made.

The physical therapist can evaluate your ability to move around safely in the home or facility. The therapist will determine what problems you may be experiencing in getting around: walking (if applicable), in and out of bed, transfer from chair to bed, into the bathroom, to and from a car or wheelchair. The therapist can assess {your} level of pain and provide physical therapies which can help to reduce pain. Strengthening exercises may be given if you would benefit from these, and the therapist can evaluate all the equipment or layout of your living situation to make it safe and easily accessible. Hospice Patients Alliance

The problem with hospice care is that too often it comes too late.

One in 10 hospice patients are referred "too late" for services, resulting in unmet needs such as adequate pain relief or emotional support... Even though experts recommend at least a three-month hospice stay, the average length of stay is less than two months. In fact, the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization reports that 30 percent of people served by hospice die in seven days or less.

{Researchers] expected to find that when there was a short stay, there was an unhappy family. "Quite to our surprise, we didn't see a strong association. If we did, dissatisfaction rates would have been much higher. What I think the results are telling us is that the hospice industry really knows how to rally the troops. Doctors, nurses, counselors, clergy, social workers - they come in and work almost like a SWAT team. They immediately assess the needs and expectations of a patient and their family and make sure those needs and expectations are met so that the dying experience is comfortable. They pull together services fast. And this is reflected in the satisfaction ratings. Most families felt that a hospice referral came at the right time - even if it didn't." One in 10 Hospice Patients Referred "Too Late" [June 28, 2007]

I think he pushed the term to try to get approval from the religious right in congress who were typically suspicious about funding big science.

I don't know Lederman's motivation, but it is simply not true that the religious right were particularly opposed to the SSC or to any other big science projects.

The SSC was killed in the House in 1993 by representatives who wanted an easy way to look tough on spending and whose districts did not directly benefit from SSC construction. Sad but true. A Senate vote (which the SSC survived) is here. (Pro = fund the SSC, Con = kill the SSC.) If you are familiar with the senators, you can see that the vote in toto seems unrelated to political party or religious ideology. This is consistent with the debates over the SSC, of which much text is available online in the congressional record.

I'm not exactly an expert, but I know where to find some.

False urban legend debunkings can spread just as virulently as urban legends. All it takes is gullible people who don't think to research things.

http://biomed.brown.edu/Courses/BI108/BI108_2005_G roups/10/webpages/HBOClink.htm

You can have mine. I have some ketchup for you if you'd like. Microsoft has one of the best graphics research groups in the world, probably the best. The gold standard for publishing graphics research is Siggraph, and last year they had authors on 18 of the 98 papers. In contrast, MIT faculty had 5, Intel had 2, and AMD/nVidia/ATI had 0. In the world of graphics, MS Research is a powerhouse. You can see the official list of papers here: http://www.siggraph.org/s2006/main.php?f=conferenc e&p=papers or the entire list on one page: http://www.cs.brown.edu/~tor/sig2006.html I certainly don't love MS either, but they have a lot of exceptional graphics people as MS Research.

i work for a surgical research center and minimally invasive robotic surgery will change everything. we use da vincis to do proofs of concept on cadavers and live animals, and the technology is no where near ready for prime time, but the possibilities are really cool.

the control console and the robot don't have to be in the same place, so it will be possible to perform surgery with the patient in a completely sterile field without all the people that are usually necessary in a traditional OR. the graspers are currently the size of a finger and are articulated like a wrist, so doctors have greater range of motion in smaller spaces (smaller incisions mean less risk of infections, less pain, and faster recovery times). it will also be possible to perform surgery remotely (telemedicine) which is ideal for military and disaster relief scenarios. nasa is interested in telesurgery for space missions where it's not always possible to turn around and go back. it will also be possible to have a surgery mentored remotely by an expert (telementoring) so developing countries can get better access to advanced medicine.

For the google/internet challenged among us, here's a non-wikipedia link.

Warning to AC parent: no flashy games, videos, or porn ads. Just good information. AC's may want to avoid it, as it contains intellectual content.

Heard about this on the radio and looked it up a couple months ago:

http://www.brown.edu/Administration/News_Bureau/20 06-07/06-022.html

It's a battery-capacitor hybrid that has interesting properties. It's not at the same production level, but doesn't provide quite the same strong claims as the EESTOR system. Any opinions on the Brown effort?

Josh

I'm willing to be 95% of med students were biology or chemistry majors (of all flavors)

In the Brown Medical School Class of 2010 49% majored in humanities, 45% in physical and life sciences.

http://www.cs.brown.edu/~ugur/fits_all.pdf

Brown University (to name one) would disagree with you. http://www.brown.edu/Student_Services/Health_Servi ces/Health_Education/atod/marijuana.htm#6

A spelling nitpick:

singular: datum
plural: data
alternative pluralization: datums

datas is a neologism (newly coined word).

To bring back on topic, the Nazis/Japanese were not the only ones to do research of questionable ethics. Consider the Tuskeegee Syphilis Study.

1. Why lasers? Why not just light? At the distances they're talking, does coherence and phase matter? Incoherent light is just as fast, and if you're shooting it into waveguides and it's coming out the other end, as long as you're not multiplexing data on a given waveguide what advantage does this give? (I honestly don't know: maybe there's a great reason.)

2. They're still bonding indium phosphide onto an existing chip. When they can use photolithography to build a billion lasers on the chip itself, rather than having to glue separate lasers onto a chip, that'll be really impressive. That's why so much effort is being focussed (pardon me) on developing silicon lasers rather than exotics attached to silicon.

1999? Try 1996. The computer graphics group at Brown University had software at that time that did the same thing. It was called Sketch, it rocked then, and it rocks now:

http://graphics.cs.brown.edu/research/sketch/

People complain about how this is "old news" but there's lots of great tech that has been around for decades and still hasn't been adopted. Hopefully with the rise of free software it's getting easier to keep old software, maintained, and improving.

As the headline points out, this was demoed at SIGGRAPH 1999. Umm, maybe someone could tell me why Slashdot is featuring news from 7 years ago on the front page. Igarashi's work was novel at the time (in fact, he won the Significant New Researcher Award at this year's SIGGRAPH partly because of it), but let's remember that it's 2006 and a lot has been done in the world of sketch based interfaces. SmoothSketch3D is just one example from this year alone.

A professor from my alma mater has been doing this for years - recording his lectures, then posting them to his website, on department servers. For free.

If you want a refresher course in Intro to CS, check this out. Disclaimer: I've never actually had this professor. . .

I don't know if SIGGRAPH has shrunk or not (I wasn't in graphics in '97), but I wouldn't say that the GDC has taken its place. I sympathize with Ashikhmin's frustration at the conference (but not his reaction), having been on the receiving end of a few cryptic SIGGRAPH rejections.

First of all, I don't agree that it's "mostly a rendering convention now". I'd say there were about 20 papers on rendering and compression out of 80 or 90 papers (unofficial page of papers). I also think that there's lots of "technical action" going on there.

The real problem is that SIGGRAPH hasn't grown with its field. One major conference was fine for the first 20 years or so, but graphics has grown in size and diversity so much in the last 15 years that it's ridiculous that there's still only one "top-shelf" conference. Look at the proceedings for this year's conference; there are papers on rendering, compression, ray-tracing, image processing, vision, data-driven modelling, GPGPU, procedural modelling, HDR, graphics APIs, fluid simulation, photography, mocap, light fields, pcrt, computational geometry, crowd sim, animation, and npr.

EACH of these things that are getting lumped into "GRAPHICS" is enough of a field in its own right that it deserves several journals and conferences of its own.

That's not even the meat of the problem; there ARE conferences for each of these topics, but people generally only submit SIGGRAPH rejects to them! The problem is that everyone wants the prestige that goes with a SIGGRAPH publication, and it's a vicious cycle; there are reviewers who shoot down every paper they feel is a threat to their own work and get away with it, and this forces anyone else who wants to survive there to do the same.

What needs to happen, in my bull-headed opinion, is for all of those people who write good papers that never make it to SIGGRAPH start submitting the first time around to the other conferences - I3D, Pacific Graphics, SCA, IEEE VIS, Eurographics, et cetera. These are all perfectly viable venues that will become as prestigious as people would like, if only people would take them seriously.

I say, let the small-minded dweebs have SIGGRAPH; we shouldn't gauge the quality of our work solely based on SIGGRAPH's rejection policy - even if it were a totally fair process, not every good paper can make it in. Submit your awesome paper to the other conferences, and once these other conferences are packed with impressive work, it'll mean as much as SIGGRAPH.

Just wishful (and a little bitter) thinking.

I don't think "hardware" was the right category for this...

What I'd really like to see is a game where you are in FPS mode but the entire game is Oblivion style, swords and shields, some bows, all controlled by the motion. that means you can hold the sword in one hand and swing it, but at the same time guard. And the best part would be the shield should basically cover your view, and hit detection on the shield should be spot on. So if a guy swings from the left, and your shield is on the right you can block it, but at the same time you can attack back, however it wouldn't be a strong attack in game, no matter how you swing your wiimote.

This concept was actually a project I worked on called Swordplay last year in school. Unfortunately, we didn't get to do too much with the physics (not enough time) but we did demonstrate the basic control scheme of sword-and-shield, as well as bow-and-arrow. It's played in a VR cave with two 6-DOF controllers for the left and right hand, and it worked really well. Unfortunately it's not an experience that most people can have, because most people don't have a VR cave, but we're hoping the Wii at least gives people similar experiences.

I was actaully going from memory from my chemistry days at uni - back before I made the switch from chem eng to comp sci. But a google gives:

http://chemed.chem.purdue.edu/genchem/topicreview/ bp/ch22/activate.html#rate
http://www.chem.brown.edu/chem12/catalyst/catalyst .html

and of course at some that don't state the speed must be increased:
http://wine1.sb.fsu.edu/chm1046/notes/Kinetics/Cat alyst/Catalyst.htm
http://www.purchon.com/chemistry/catalyst.htm

So yes I guess people do call inhibitors catalysts - learn something new every day I guess...

As for TEL being a catalyst, I'd still argue it isn't because it isn't the TEL that does anything, it's the products of its decomposition which would be classified as catalysts assuming the link you have is correct (I don't know the details - chem eng was about the cat cracking side of petroleum, not the burn it an engine part :)

a more modern finance textbook can be downloaded at http://welch.econ.brown.edu/book/ .

Try some *computer* science papers, for example, from the ACM / SIGGRAPH stuff:

http://www.cs.brown.edu/~tor/sig2004.html

of course, use Google to get a text/html version that you can paste into the test form.

I tried several and they all rated 90+% authentic.

All of us of a certain age remember the advent of parallax scrolling-- which is using multiple regions of scrolling graphics at varying speeds to simulate the real-world parallax effect. (ie, clouds scroll more slowly than the foreground.)

Parallax mapping, however, is something else entirely in this context. It appears to be the name for a more advanced form of bump-mapping that incorporates the sort of depth and occlusion you'd get from a real object as you panned around it. One more advance in creating the illusion of a bajillion polygons from simple surfaces.

http://graphics.cs.brown.edu/games/SteepParallax/

Disclaimer: I am absolutely not an expert on this. If I am wildly wrong, please post and explain-- i'm curious too!

Once burned, twice shy, Behe may be hoping to avoid the fate of his 1994 claim that there were no transitional fossils linking the first fossil whales with their land-dwelling Mesonychid ancestors (8). Less than a year after that prediction, the existence of not one, not two, but three transitional species between whales and land-dwelling eocine Mesonychids was confirmed.
--Kenneth R. Miller's review of "Darwin's Black Box"

You're right, though -- his ID goofiness was outpaced by science inside of a single year, and it's only been 11 years since he made such a total ass of himself over the whale fossils. I plead "casual internet posting."

Immediatly, a large range of blindness can be cured by implants, either by putting a CCD array inside the retina or, in case of damage in the optic nerve, a camera can be wired to the visual cortex. Right now, some blind people see ( with a low res, b&w image but see nonetheless) thanks to implants.

link
other link

But yes, with the technology presented in the article, I suppose one could even cure blinds that have a damaged visual cortex.

THANK YOU! I don't know who modded me 'funny', and maybe I should be embarassed for having to ask, but you made my month!

And to keep this on topic, I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned that there is no editor more powerful than vi(m). The proof is that vi can be used to emulate a turing machine.

http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/jfh/personal_other/ amusements/hitz.html/

They probably could, but why should they?

What pressing reason is there to divert a large portion of NASA's money and manpower to rushing out a lunar vehicle? What would be gained by doing it in 9 years instead of 13? What terrible thing will happen because of that extra 4 years? Why is doing it faster important for anything other than appeasing complainers? There might be a good reason, but nobody's presented it yet.

This isn't a question of "why can't NASA do this"---it's a question of "why would NASA want to do this?"

Remember how space exploration works: "faster, better, cheaper - choose two."

(Right now, it's slated to be cheaper ---0.8% of one year's GDP vs. 8-13%---and better; if you want to swap out "cheaper" for "faster", you'll need to convince someone why it's worth the money. If you want to swap out "better" for "faster", well, just build a really, really big slingshot...)

Why go plastic when you could just go with this: http://biomed.brown.edu/Courses/BI108/BI108_2003_G roups/Hand_Transplantation/default.html

On 1):

Quite a lot, actually. I've talked with Eric Schrock about his thesis work, which was implementing some lock analysis tools using DTrace. This allowed him to detect (very precisely) things like LORs, deadlocks, and the like. His thesis is available at http://www.cs.brown.edu/publications/theses/ugrad/ 2003/eschrock.pdf

On 2):

When I've seen demonstrations on this stuff, it has been Bryan Cantrill doing fun stuff with libumem, mdb, and DTrace. I suspect that, at the minimum, we'd need libumem to find and fix this stuff with the accuracy that it can be done in Solaris.

Hope this is useful information.

--Devon

The stuff you have to do to get through a mathematics course can really stretch your mind in a way that many jobs don't. But I often see places where mathematicians could do well. I work in graphics. Look that the latest SIGGRAPH proceedings to be amazed at how mathematical the subject has become. Spherical harmonics, wavelets, Markov chain monte carlo, PDEs, hidden Markov models, Fourier synthesis. This stuff is commonplace nowadays and yet the industry is having a hard time recruiting talented people who understand this stuff fast enough. Even if you don't know these subjects, as a mathematician you'll blast through a basic course faster than people trained in computer science, or even graphics.

ABC News on the worm
"CNN, breaking into regular programming, reported on air that personal computers running Windows 2000 at the cable news network were affected by a worm that caused them to restart repeatedly."

So are you saying that "pipeline data chunks" are the wrong way to think about most of our data and "objects" are?

The thing is that "pipeline data chunks" are a great UNIX invention. The thing that's wrong about them is that they need to be able to accomodate for metadata. Plain text just isn't that good, maybe.
There are deep reasons why CLI tasks aren't going away. It's called the algebra of programming languages and the hard theoretical fact that it allows infinite constructions. You can think of Unix streams as generators and as having the same compositionality as higher-order functions in languages such as Haskell. This formulation isn't mine, BTW, it's written in Shriram Krishnamurthi's book
Anything GUI-oriented to replace that would have to first establish some metadata on widget operations. The visual equivalent of Blissymbolics parsing and Expect. Still, you have a written language, because how would you transmit instruction for GUI operations "by wire"?. Written language is a major acquisition of civilization.
So anyone who is readily willing to dismiss Unixspeak/CLI hasn't really put much thought into it. Voice recognition is needed so that we can use our mouths for Unixspeak. Not that would be a cool open-source project. (I've basically repeated myself, but I wanted to throw in a few pointers).

So are you saying that "pipeline data chunks" are the wrong way to think about most of our data and "objects" are?

The thing is that "pipeline data chunks" are a great UNIX invention. The thing that's wrong about them is that they need to be able to accomodate for metadata. Plain text just isn't that good, maybe.
There are deep reasons why CLI tasks aren't going away. It's called the algebra of programming languages and the hard theoretical fact that it allows infinite constructions. You can think of Unix streams as generators and as having the same compositionality as higher-order functions in languages such as Haskell. This formulation isn't mine, BTW, it's written in Shriram Krishnamurthi's book
Anything GUI-oriented to replace that would have to first establish some metadata on widget operations. The visual equivalent of Blissymbolics parsing and Expect. Still, you have a written language, because how would you transmit instruction for GUI operations "by wire"?. Written language is a major acquisition of civilization.
So anyone who is readily willing to dismiss Unixspeak/CLI hasn't really put much thought into it. Voice recognition is needed so that we can use our mouths for Unixspeak. Not that would be a cool open-source project. (I've basically repeated myself, but I wanted to throw in a few pointers).

I'm Jay McCarthy, the maintainer of the Continue system.

Our system is primarily geared towards managing the process of deciding what papers to accept. It is designed to organize this process and enforce rules about conflict of interest and such.

We are interested in extending the software depending on use. If anyone has questions, feel free to email the address on the site.

Jay McCarthy
http://continue.cs.brown.edu/

http://continue.cs.brown.edu/

It is supposed to be pretty good

There is still no agreed on explaination for why the moon appears bigger when it's on the horizon than when it's high in the night sky."

No one agrees? What? It's a natural lense effect created by the gravitational field produced by the earth. It's called the "Gravitational Lens Effect"

http://www.physics.brown.edu/physics/demopages/Dem o/astro/demo/8c2040.htm

Look at http://www.cs.brown.edu/~tor/sig2005.html and see the number of papers by Microsoft Research. SOSP 2003 (occurs every 2 years) http://www.cs.rochester.edu/sosp2003/papers.shtml has papers by Microsoft. OSDI 2004 - http://www.usenix.org/events/osdi04/tech/ There are many other prestigious conferences that MSR puts many papers into.

Jim Gray (databases), Butler Lampson (systems), among others all work at MSR.

Your facts are incorrect.

http://www.cs.brown.edu/exploratories/freeSoftware /repository/edu/brown/cs/exploratories/applets/con volution/convolution_guide.html

"The key operation we perform, both in the theoretical development and in the implementation of filtering, is convolution. This applet allows students to understand the process of convolution. First they create a signal and a filter function to convolve. Then, they place the filter function when they see the product function of the two original signals. In a final graph below, they build up the convolution, seeing the area under the product curve correspond to the value of the convolution at that point.

This applet is useful in understanding both how convolution works and what the effects are of specific signals being convolved together."

Also, the Vision Sciences Society conference in Saratosa this May has a satellite session about virtual reality in vision research.

So quite a bit is still going on in VR. Just because it's not the buzzword du jour doesn't mean VR has gone away.

http://www.brown.edu/Administration/News_Bureau/20 04-05/04-117.html the first round just finished up today but next week there is another batch of projects to be seen. These are all products of the electronic writing/music program, there are also lots of scientific visualization projects ongoing. VR is more than just HMD's and datagloves.

http://www.cs.brown.edu/exploratories/freeSoftware /catalogs/signal_processing.html

Some "exploratories" on signal processing.

There's some other good stuff there as well.

In my considered opinion, Evolution was manufactured with a view to supporting a God-less universe

Lamarck, Darwin, Wallace and others were people who struggled for quite some time to come to terms with what they observed in nature(mutability of species). They struggled to explain this mutability within the prevailing paradigm. That paradigm was based on what they had been told by people of religion was the origin of these species as created kinds. That paradigm had to be overturned as it could not be reconciled with the observed facts.

Darwin certainly was not an atheist when he wrote "The Origin of the Species" (have you read it? or Excerpt from Kenneth Miller's "Finding Darwin's God") His faith in God lapsed in later years for completely different reasons (the reconcilliation of suffering with the idea of a just God)

Evolution was not manufactured. It happens, regardless of belief. Natural Selection is an excellent theory that can be applied to explain this observable fact and used to make predictions about other observations regarding the past as well as predictions of expected outcomes such as breeding or clinical trials for example.

1. Now it gets really fun. Turn down the light source. If light is a wave, you expect the same interference pattern, only dimmer. Err, no. What happens is that you start getting a speckled pattern. Eventually, the bands dissolve entirely and you just get a single spot. This proves that light is a particle.