Slashdot Mirror

Ted Nelson paper on Xanadu:

We believe that *recommendations of links*, a new way of effectively creating moderated newsgroups of content, will become an important genre.

this phrasing comes from 1999, but it's evident if you know much about Nelson's work that it comes from his earlier ideas.

i'm not saying he invented blogs, but rather that blogs were pretty much an enevitible consequence of technology.

A screen saver that fakes Windows system crashes? xscreensaver has had one of those for years. (It also simulates Linux and Solaris kernel dumps, Macintosh Bombs, Amiga Guru Meditations and others)

At my school, it is. When you take a class, only A,B, and C are passing grades. Anything less and you fail.

I expect we can also look forward to seeing many great new haptic applications being created as a result of SensAble contest that the article mentions. Being able to feel and interact with simulated objects in a very intuitive way will undoubtedly become an increasingly import part of how we use computers.

I would personally appreciate hearing from anyone out there who has an interesting haptic application in the works (or wants to hear about mine). scottgilroy2000 - a - yahoo dot com

I actually worked closely with Stan Zdonik and Mike Stonebraker on the research project Aurora which preceded Streambase, before I graduated Brown.

the reason why Streambase is considered a database is because it uses traditional database querying mechanisms to process the data. It isn't meant to store data for the purposes of later retrieval; it only needs to store "windows" of streams that may be required for certain queries such as join.

Consider it a traditional database turned upside down. Whereas traditional databases process queries in realtime and store data, a streaming database processes data in realtime and stores the queries.

http://www.cs.brown.edu/memex/ACM_HypertextTestbed /papers/60.html

http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:gdhB0XBfAdsJ: xanadu.com/+xanadu&hl=en

Sanford,
How much would you pay to extend your life an extra year? How much have you already cost the world in wasted wages and enjoyment?

I know Brown has been digitizing all journals coming in for a while...

On another note, all the Ivies except Haavad participate in interlibrary loan program. There's over 40 million bound volumes overall. Check it out here.

Whats the color of shit .... brown brown

I loved game night against brown so many great chants

Whats the color of shit .... brown brown

I loved game night against brown so many great chants

At Brown we get a CD with all the latest security patches and a copy of Firefox every year. Prevents trouble, methinks.

There's been plenty going on in the field of fusion. The first experiments which investigated sonoluminescence were thought to include fusion. These were disproven. Since then, however, sonic experiments have been conducted with heavy acetone and evidence of fusion has been certain.

And yes... people are always trying to disprove it.

The original peppered moth research was fundamentally flawed and it's one of the creation "scientists" favourite tar brushes for painting all of evolution.

It remains an example of natural selection, but not evolution.

Evolution in general requires reproduction, mutation and selection. The peppered moth story is missing the mutation element - both varieties were around before the industrial revolution.

A class I am working with at Brown University is working with 3d scanners in conjunction with 3d fabricators, such as were discussed here (ABS plastic, wax, plaster, etc). The 3d copier idea seems funny, but as we've found out it's not nearly so simple. We have a blog about our work, if you are interested, and a general webpage too.

Behe's argument is basically this:

A theory T is generally well established, but does not give a detailed explanation of a phenomenon P. Therefore T is wrong.

This is logically ill-formed.

If Behe could produce a counter-theory showing verifiably/falsifiably and in detail how an intelligent agent arranged P, and also explaining as much as T, and not contradicting anything else, then maybe he'd be getting somewhere.

Given the enormous success of mainstream biology to date, the reasonable expectation is that it will eventually explain P, but just has not done so yet. This is what happened with the eye and the wing, previously considered irreducibly complex. And apparently this is being done for blood clotting, amongst other examples.

Nature is far more fascinating than myths.

You may be interested in this guy's thoughts on the matter of Turing Completeness.

Reason One, trivial to write a parser for the core language.

Reason Two, lots of nice literature available online. Check out Shriram Krishnamurthhi's text
Programming Languages: Applications and Interpretation on his website at http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk

Reason Three, its already conceptually an AST, so you can get involved in the more interesting work sooner

http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~sequence/ http://graphics.cs.brown.edu/research/telei/home.h tml

And Internet2 has this type of technology as one of its goals. See http://www-pagines.fib.upc.es/~si/treballs-SI2001/ e4024048/Tele-immersion.htm

This is really a performance issue, not a type safety issue. If type safety is particularly important, then type checks can be done at run time. However, doing these type checks at run time has a run time performance cost. Doing these same checks at compile time means that compiled code will run that much faster since no type checks are being performed at run time.

Certain types of programs really benefit from compile time type checking - specifically, those where inputs are known at compile time, or are known to be of certain types, or are known to be safe (i.e., inputs are not coming at your program across the wire from a potentiall hostile source - think any web app that takes free form input from users).

It could be argued that in the modern GUI/networked era, many apps are going to be doing lots of run time checking anyway because they are exposed to data inputs from potentially hostile users on a WAN - i.e., the internet, and they are at the mercy of user GUI inputs (bizarre mouse clicks and drags, bogus text or numeric field entries, etc.). That being the case, being able to do type inference and compile time type checks doesn't buy one much in terms of saftey or performance for any such app, since you'll be doing lots of run time type checks on user input data anyway.

IMHO, the idea of compile time type inference and type checking is born of a model of computing that is becoming obsolete. It was how most computation was done just a few decades ago - the programmer controlled the input closely, and so could guarantee inputs of certain types in certain ranges, etc. We have now moved into an era where the most interesting inputs are essentially unknowable at compile time - these are user inputs, whether GUI, keyboard, or network in origin. Just as importantly, user choice destroys the notion of a fixed algorithm executing in a predicable fasion. We simply can't know what direction our programs will take once we allow the user sufficient choice in shaping the programs execution. This being the case, and increasingly so as we go forward, I think that compile time type checking is a backward looking paradigm for programming languages.

See Peter Wegner's home page for some related ideas on new ways of thinking about what it is that a program really does in the modern interactive GUI/network era.

I think you could really do this if you combined this which would allow you to put the dangerous spinning thing like this inside the mirrors and interact with the top part with your hands.

The phyiscs web page is not a good picture but I have seen it work. Its really 3d and you can see it from 360 degrees around the xy axis but only about 100 degrees around the xz axis.

Thank you for taking the time for your response.

Saturn's missing ring spokes.
"scientists are already puzzling over the noticeable absence of the ghostly spoke-like dark markings in the rings first seen by Voyager on its approach to the planet 23 years ago"

Oxygen on Venus
"An unexpected sign of atomic oxygen has been found in spectroscopic data of Venus' atmosphere. This comes as a major surprise since data from earlier studies had shown molecular oxygen, O2 and ozone, but not single oxygen atoms.

It wasn't just a weak trace of atomic oxygen either. The data shows a green line nearly as intense as the glow from Earth's atmosphere, even after taking that effect into account in the ground based data.

"I certainly trust those data," stated Dr. Crisp. "Something weird is going on in the upper atmosphere of Venus."

The first bottom line is that we just don't know what's going on."

Hot Io Temperatures
"In its chilly corner of the universe, Io needs to release its inner heat, just as a cup of hot coffee cools by releasing steam. Scientists have known for a while that Io is the solar system's most volcanically active planetary body. Yet scientists were surprised by the extreme temperatures.

"Given Io's intense vulcanism, we expect extreme differentiation," McEwen says. "The evidence suggests we're seeing heavy magma erupt to the surface. How do we explain that? It's harder for dense material to rise through a low-density crust, although this has occurred on Earth's moon. Perhaps some process mixes the crust back into Io's interior, so the crust has a higher density."

On Earth, the tectonic plates move slowly around the surface, forming new crust at mid-ocean ridges, for example, and recycling oceanic crust into the hot mantle where two plates collide, one diving under the other. Scientists don't know yet how to explain what's happening on Io."

I am interested in your explanation about precipitative heating, but I don't see any information on it. A quick google for "precipitative heating" "gas giants" returns zero results. I have to say I still find it hard to believe that denser elements sinking would cause greater energy radiation than the entire planet is receiving from the Sun though, or that this process is still going strong after billions of years.

Puzzling Seasons and Signs of Wind Found on Pluto
"Seasonal change on Pluto is causing the planet to warm up even as it moves away from the Sun, according to two studies that also detected the first firm signs of weather on the tiny planet.

In a deeper analysis of data first announced in October, researchers now say Pluto's atmospheric pressure doubled since 1988. They say the average global temperature must have climbed, too, by about 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius)."

Pluto is undergoing global warming, researchers find
"Pluto is undergoing global warming, as evidenced by a three-fold increase in the planet's atmospheric pressure during the past 14 years

"This is a very complex process, and we just don't know what is causing these effects" on Pluto's surface, Elliot said."

---------------

So it still appears to me, regardless of Hoagland's wild rantings, that there are indeed large scale planetary phenomena going on in the solar system which scientists are at a loss to adequately explain. The bottom line is that we seem to have a rather limited understanding of planetary climate change.

Subsequently, I am concerned that similar rapid and global change coul

One of the more interesting parts of Siggraph is actually not the exhibition, or even the conferences, but the papers being presented.
http://www.cs.brown.edu/~tor/
Has an index of the papers of Siggraph for several years (including this one), as well as for Eurographics.

A *lot* of GPU-(ab)use now that they can more easily be used for general calculations (be it scientific or off-loading rendering - lots of new dynamics, fluids, fires, fracturing, mapping methods, low-discrepancy sampling patterns, etc. etc.
You have to dig this sort of stuff to enjoy reading the papers, but if you're a programmer or just interested in CG advances - I highly recommend them.

Disclaimer : I work for a company attending Siggraph ;)

is in our mitochondria.

The most outstanding difference is the title which appears in numbers (i.e., 1984) on the title page of the proof copy but is spelled out (Nineteen Eighty-Four) as a published book.

Harcourt preferred the title "The Last Man in Europe," or at least the use of the numbers "1984", but ultimately agreed to Nineteen Eighty-Four.

As others have pointed out this is a new solution to a classic computer graphics problem. The first technique I know of to automatically reduce the poly count of meshes, while preserving the overall appearance was Garland and Heckbert's QSLIM algorithm. This was first published in SIGGRAPH 97. Or actually, hmmm, no, it looks like Hoppe's work on mesh optimization came a good bit earlier (1993).

Anyway, it's a pretty old problem in graphics. The USC press release that prompted this slashdot story is simply advertising Cohen-Steiner, Alliez, and Desbrun's paper which will appear at SIGGRAPH 2004 later this summer. That's all it is. They have a new way to do automatic poly reduction. Now it could be that it's vastly superior to anything else that's been done in the area, but even if so, this isn't likely to cause any revolutions. Why? Because the existing poly reduction algorithms already work pretty well. They work well enough that they're already in production use (as others have pointed out there are plugins for most major 3D packages already, and most game engines have had "continuous level of detail" systems for a good long while). So at best this is going to make life easier for some 3D content creators who won't have to do so much hand-tweaking of LODs (levels-of-detail, aka "optimized" meshes). So don't expect to see any huge changes in the games you play or movies or whatever because of this. Mesh optimization/LOD techniques are already being used pretty much everywhere it make sense to do so.

But here's an idea for all you Karma Whores out there: go to the list of papers on the SIGGRAPH 2004 web site (or go to Tim Rowley's easier to browse version of the list), pick something that looks interesting, and send the story to slashdot! There's at least 50 more slashdot stories there just waiting to burst! Happy hunting! There's enough Karma for everyone, so don't be greedy now.

And even earlier, as freshmeat points out:

Paul Graham kicked off a flood of mail filters implementing Bayesian filtering with his "A Plan for Spam" article in August 2002, though it was far from a new concept. In fact, ifile has used a Naive Bayes classification algorithm since August 1996 to automatically file mail into folders. In academic circles, Bayesian methods have been used in text classification for many years, and for spam detection prior to Graham, as evidenced by the 1998 workshop paper A Bayesian Approach to Filtering Junk E-Mail by Sahami, et al.

.. and I second the recommendation for Timothy Budd's "C++ for Java Programmers" (ISBN 0201612462) ... great book!

Also, this tutorial is full of useful information. However, you have to ignore the occasional bitter remarks about Java from the author, such as these gems:

Unlike Java, C++ is a fast, powerful, and flexible programming language.

Java was built as a simple-to-learn subset of C++ for set-top boxes and drooling AOL users. Now, it's time to play in the big leagues.

Tim Rowley's SIGGRAPH 2004 Index has links to available preprints or you can go straight to the SIGGRAPH 2004 program for the official program. There's a category called "Large Meshes and GPU Programming" this year, although there might be GPU related papers in some other categories too.

This attack vector has been known for years, and the TCP windowing nonsense has too. Programs like tcpkill have used the RST trick in conjunction with TCP INS windows for a while and have seen quite a bit of use. What's new with this attack that wasn't already in the wild?

As much as I'd like to support Ethanol fuels, I'm afraid that I can't. The problem isn't so much in their use or energy density, but rather the difficulties in producing them. You see, it takes a *LOT* of land to grow the grains needed for Ethanol. Some calculate as much as 137.5 million acres to produce the 103 billion gallons necessary to meet current consumption rates. Given that the number of farms is currently at 2,158,090, you'd need to add about 64 acres of land for each farm in the US.

Hmm... on second thought, that doesn't actually sound *too* bad. That's still a significant increase over current production. And all the vehicles would have to switched over. I have to wonder if we have the land for this? The amount of land farmed (~1 billion acres) has not changed since the 1930's. We'd be talking about a 14% increase in the amount of land farmed today. Not to mention that the numbers I just gave includes ALL agriculture, not just grain.

I'll have to ponder it a bit more.

Not true at all. People have been able to do this for years with tcpkill (another) and it does not require sniffing the ISN.

If you'd like to convince people of your point of view, perhaps starting out defensively with "Maybe the fact I am not as big a linux nerd as you" is not such a good idea either.

After you've had a couple of years of college, which I venture is still in your future, you may want to check out the IPCC reports here.

In the meantime, you will be happier if you stop demeaning yourself and aggrandizing your opinons. Here's a suggested alternative:

I've heard a lot about climate variations. What makes people think today's changes are anything special? Is it true that 15,000 scientists signed a petition against the Kyoto accord? Doesn't that show that all of this is nonsense?

I suspect this is all overblown fearmongering, just like Cold War rhetoric.

If you had said something like that I'd respond:

Well, both the cold war and climate change are longer stories than I care to go over right now. To be sure, there was overblown rhetoric in both cases, but notice that in the cold war, a nuclear exchange was in fact very narrowly averted on at least one occasion we know about.

The infamous 15,000 signatories, though, is a story that needs retelling. See here and herefor the whole story. Essentially if you send out a big enough bulk mailing, you'll get a few signatures, especially if you pretend to have more authoritative evidence than you have. In fact very few actual scientists are known to have signed the petition.

In fact, though, while this is a big problem for the world, it's not your problem as I see it. If your lack of self-respect even shows up in your Slashdot postings, real life must be awfully hard for you, especially if my suspicion that you're still in high school is true.

Please stop it with the "kick me" signs and try lightening up a bit on your opinions. Try to remember that life is, if not a miracle, at least a highly improbable stroke of good luck, and cheer up, okay?

The issue of funding is a difficult one, as departments are not often given the freedom to reject funding from a company if it is offered, even if there are legitimate objections to the terms (this is true of all departments, not just computer or technical, depending on the policies of the university).

These kinds of conflicts of interest are not limited to technical feilds, but to any feild which will be effecting the future of business. Law schools are compelled to teach certain interpretations of copyright, property, or civil law depending on the wishes of their donors. History departments are chastised by donors for being "too liberal" or of "emphisising the negative" when they fail to exclude certain events in American history, ecconomics and business schools are heavily influenced to promote certain theories and to exclude or denegrate others in order to please their sources of funding (a good example of this is the near deification of Donald Trump, a businessman who's record boasts several bankrupcies with at least two bailouts by the federal government as part of the remedies).

Companies recognise that the current batch of students contains the decision makers of tomorrow, and they act accordingly by investing departments that may influence the future of the company. The school administrations recognise the reality that if the donors investments do not pay off (for the donor, to hell with the student) then it is unlikely that the donor will return.

The remedies I describe are not major financial upheavals, nor are they extremely painful to the majority of society (except for the increased tuition option, that would be painful to only the majority).

The return on investment from Eisenhower's extremely expensive college grant programs has been well worth the 70% tax rate that the wealthiest Americans paid in order to support it. (It's funny how those who wish to cut taxes use the Eisenhower years as an example of American prosperity. I don't think they are supporting their arguments too well.) Increased financial aid (grants, not loans) coupled with more stringent requirements to enter full-time study creates greater progress in scientific studies, faster development of technology, and greater growth in the economy along side the inevitable batch of art students and english majors. The taxation of the rich did not have a negative impact on the economy, but the tax-cuts and a war in Viet-Nam nearly spent all the benefits that came afterwards.

Increased endowments need initial large gifts, but soon give the colleges and universities the necessary academic freedom to eductate as the departments see is best without the outside interference of the donors. Math and physics departments often operate under the radar of corporate givers, and thus often have smaller budgets than engineering, CompSci, and business, but are permitted greater freedom in how and what they teach, and in what tools they can choose to conduct their research with.

Many businesses and corporate donors hate these ideas because they wish to look as if they are giving out of kindness (but in reality it is about getting their name on a building) or out of a sense of duty to support our society and it's future, but are unwilling to give up control of how the money is spent and unable to have real faith in the institutions that they are giving to.

I grew up surrounded by academia, and discussions about academic freedom ethics and funding have always been part of that environment. These issues are nothing new, and one has only to look back to the thirties and the days of Carnegie and Morgan to know that corporate giving has always come at a high price.

Upcoming talk and demonstration on the development of Brain-Computer Interfaces: http://www.notacon.org/speakers.html#lowne (shameless plug)

Invasive, motor-cortical BCI development at Utah: http://www.bioen.utah.edu/cni/Projects/Motor.htm

Mike Gibbs' work with BCIs at Oxford University's Robotics Group: http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~mgibbs/research.html

The Neural Prostheses program at the National Institutes of Health includes calls for proposals in BCI development: http://www.ninds.nih.gov/npp/

The University of British Columbia's BCI research group: http://www.ece.ubc.ca/~garyb/BCI.htm

Results of the 2003 Brain Computer interface competition (focuses on signal processing techniques): http://ida.first.fraunhofer.de/projects/bci/compet ition/results/index.html

BCI development at the Cognitive Science and Technology group at the Helsinki University of Technology: http://www.lce.hut.fi/research/bci/

Dr. Jessica Bayliss's BCI work and extensive bibliography (very important, seminal work on BCI development): http://www.cs.rit.edu/~jdb/research/ and http://www.cs.rit.edu/~jdb/research/baylissThesis. pdf

Dr. Charles Anderson's work at Colorado State University with EEG pattern classification in BCI systems: http://www.cs.colostate.edu/eeg/index.html

Manchester University's Toby Howard has written some good articles on BCIs, mostly for Popular Science: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/aig/staff/toby/research/bc i/

Dr. Michael Black at Brown University teaches a course in BCI development: http://www.cs.brown.edu/courses/cs295-7/home.html

Cyberkinetics, Inc. makes medical-use BCIs: http://www.cyberkineticsinc.com/

That agreement was with the U.N. Are we the U.N.?

Attempt to assassinate Bush Sr.

Was that a response to us attempting to assassinate Saddam? Or, Kaddafi, or Castro, or [insert long list of U.S. successful and unsuccessful attempts to assassinate foreign leaders from South America to Asia]?

Giving aid and comfort to terrorists

Who? The U.S.? If it were that, then why not invade North Korea, or Iran, or Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia...etc? The answer is below.

Refusing to cooperate with the UN.

Again, are we the U.N.?

Being a rat-bastard tyrant

Finally, the honest answer. But, only partially honest. His daddy was made a fool by Saddam, and everyone knew that if Shrub got into office, the Iraqis would pay. Shrub's Secretary of the Treasury reports that plans for invading Iraq were in the making only within a few days of Shrub's theft of the election. If it were simply a matter of being a rat-bastard, there are plenty of others further along the road to bastard-hood: North Korea's loony leader for one. The problem is, no oil there, so no business drive to get there. Afghanistan proved a perfect, inarguable cause. Not for the one you think. True, Bin-Loonie was there, but that was simply the inescapable argument for invasion. If we could tame that country (only an asteroid dropped from space could achieve that), we could finally lay that oil pipeline we've been planning on for the past 30 years. Unfortunately, CNN and FauxNews channels don't cover this little bit of history, but we've been in a chess game with the Russians and Chinese for this bit of inhospitable land for quite a while. By the way, this is also why we're "friends" with Pakistan.

Simple failture of Washington/Baghdad diplomacy

No. Simple failure of Shrub Administration/U.N. diplomacy. His daddy was better at it, but this numbskull couldn't control his trigger finger. His only half-way feasable argument (even Powell had to excise some of the outright lies from the deceptive rhetoric he was forced to spew to the U.N.'s collective face) of Weapons of Mass Destruction have vanished into thin air, leaving a unpleasant odor that the rest of the world blames us for.

'they're trying to get nukes'

Again, why not invade Saudi Arabia, Iran, North Korea, or Pakistan? They're the biggest terrorist threats outside of Afghanistan. They've been attempting to get nuclear long before Iraq, and have actual terrorist ties. The reason is this was a personal vendetta and business agenda, and he used to this country to fulfill it. If he should force Iraq's oil wells within U.S. corporate controls in the process of taking revenge, all the better. This monkey has to go come November.

You're right in that Shrub didn't attack Iraq simply for Weapons of Mass Destruction. That's just what he used to sell it.

The truth is, the rest of the world was behind us going into Afghanistan because that's where t

It goes futher than symbiotic bacterial cells with their own genetic futures. Mitochondria may have originated as separate organisms that evolved to exist symbiotically inside a larger cell... mitochondrial DNA is separate from nuclear DNA. Mitochondria cannot be produced by cells de novo.

It would be foolish to say that only the parts of a cell which are created by genomic DNA are human. Our animal cells cannot function without mitochondria.

The bacteria are not the stonework or metalwork of our bodies' cities, though. A closer metaphor would be that a country is a body made up of humans as cells, and that the animals which support each person are the bacteria that outnumber the cells. America is a country made up of people, not cows.... but it survives by consuming dozens of cows per person every year. Rats eat our garbage.... that is, intestinal bacteria eat our digestive waste. Etc.

A body without bacteria is no more desirable than a country without non-human animals. It's beyond silly.

Don't forget about the other Brown. I wouldn't mind showing them what I could do for Brown.

And believe me, the Tablet PC is not the only thing I have been looking at. I just wanted to get a popular opinion of the subject. What I've been drooling over the past few months have been Apple computers, such as the 20" iMac or the dual 2.0 GHz PowerMac G5.

It's not that I've only thought about tablets for moblie computing. I was also considering PowerBooks, but my main gripe is flexibility and power. I want a product that I can use in a mobile setting that won't be putting a wall between myself and the environment, which I think a laptop would.

Pen and paper are great tools - I use them all the time, and constantly have a pen behind my right ear. The only problem I have is the difficulty integrating technology and my paper ideas. I want something that can convert my scribblings to something I can use on the PC, and the tablet seems to be a decent choice.

Here's some advice applicable to your question unlike the other 98% of unrelated opinions already posted:

OCW will get you started on the right foot, but I would recommend finding a suitable research field to apply those skills to.

Some of the best programmers I've worked with have been in a research lab at my alma mater's comp sci dept. And several of these grad students came from a non-computer science background such as physics, chemistry, genetics, etc. Once they found an immediate application for their programming skills, their skills progressed at an amazing rate. This does not mean that all science-based individuals are good programmers, but the purpose and foundation for learning (and learning properly) is already there.

So my advice? Use the internet to start researching some of the better computer science schools research groups and see if there is anything out there you like. Conjoining your medical background with a CS focus might lead to neuro/bio/medical -informatics, or maybe computational biology. You can also go into simulation, such as scientific visualization of specific area of medical research or even go into computer graphics. There are literally thousands of specific areas to look into.

Here's on example: Sticking with the foundation learned in OCW and applying proper programming techniques (such as learned in "Effective C++" by Scott Meyers) to fields such as computer graphics can be a great way to get immersed in the field - as long as you have an end application to apply your skills. So picking up a project like applying computer graphic visualization and simulation to a medical process or generating physical-based character animation can be extremely beneficial. You'll obviously have to learn computer graphics programming somewhere along the way, but that that'll just sharpen both your math skills and visual sense, along with having another great tool under your belt.

Go research some of the current projects going on at research labs at the top computer science schools. Here are some suggestions for you to check out:

And of course not all computer science research falls under the header of the computer science department. Research medical departments doing interdisciplinary research with both engineering and computer science.

Almost all research labs have papers of their work (even their most recent) avaialble in PDF format. Download some of the earlier papers to get a feel for the research focus and try to find something that interests you. Try to implement the same techniques and algorithms using your skills. This will bea great way for you to realize what you still need to learn and get a great foundation in a new area of research.

But always keep in mind that proper programming is of utmost importance. So while your trying to leanr a new area of research by applying your skills, also focus on the studying from the better programming books out there that teach you how to become a better programmer. Go on amazon for suggestions. Start with looking up my previous suggestion and go from there.

Good luck, and sorry about all of the hundreds of wasted postings coming from IT people bitching about their lack of applicable skills.

Martin

What do we know about that star and its surroundings? Is it likely to have inhabitable planets...

As cool as it is to find a star that's a twin to ours, it's incredibly unlikely that we'll find a planet even remotely similar to Earth.

For one thing, the article notes that 18 Sco is 4.2 billion years old, while Sol is 4.5 billion years old. If everything else were exactly equal, it would be like stepping back 300 million years back in time. A quick Google finds that one of the more complex forms of life found 300e6 years ago on this planet was the Velvet Worm -- not a species known for its technology.

But even that is unlikely, given the Earth's unusual formation. This planet has an unusual mix of minerals on its crust, plus plate tectonics to keep them mixed, and an iron core that's magnetic enough to keep out the sun's ionizing radiation. Plus, a moon big enough to stir up the oceans, and a tilt to generate asymmetrical solar heating... and all that apparently due to a one-in-a-million collision between a proto-Earth and a Mars-sized planet not long after Sol formed.

I can't find the quote, but someone calculated the odds of finding another sentient species as tiny. It's not that it doesn't develop elsewhere in the galaxy... there are billions of chances, so surely more than one came up all 7s. It's just that the distances are so vast, and the chances of favorable development so small, that entire civilizations (or species) could rise and fall by the time their transmissions reach another civilization's satellite dishes.

But still, at less than 50 light years, it would only take a few hundred years to get there and back. Are the generation ships ready yet?

...was Professor John Hughes, currently on sabbatical from Brown University. In case anyone cares. Brown's graphics group, which includes Dr. Hughes, has been doing sketch-based 3D for around a decade. I worked in that group for a time.

...was Professor John Hughes, currently on sabbatical from Brown University. In case anyone cares. Brown's graphics group, which includes Dr. Hughes, has been doing sketch-based 3D for around a decade. I worked in that group for a time.

Not much is new since this 18th century scientist investigated thin films on a pond: http://www.chem.brown.edu/chem12/Avogadro/BenFrank lin.html

What else would the image be used for again?

The "moving pieces on the board" task is a good example that "sentient AIs" can not be build inside a computer as we know it alone. This sort of tasks require more than just computation: they require interaction. That interactive process cannot be modeled by Turing machines was known by Turing himself, according to the following paper:

You may want to look at Peter Wegner's argument about Why Interaction Is More Powerful Than Algorithms, Communications of the ACM., May 1997 . (also available in the ACM digital library.)

Actually, telomerase does extend telomere length.

Also, here's a nice animation of telomerase's action(long, animated gif, may be slow on slow connections)

Why interaction is more powerful than algorithms(Peter Wegner)
Better?

Do you want engineers who don't know neither who his customers are, nor how customers use the product, to define what features go into the design?

That is a very narrow view of engineering. Certainly people like Douglas Englebart had a very strong interest in who the customers are and how they would use their technology. The fusion of this interest in human factors and sound software engineering led to a far greater leap in software than anything ever dreamed up by marketing.

The fundamental flaw in marketing methodology is that it very rarely leads to creativity in product development. All it does is identify current market needs and trends. Marketing is fundamentally incapable of producing a new product category, be it the Post-It note or the Mother of All Demos. All it is able to do is identify popular user desires based on technologies and products that the users already are familiar with.

If marketers made all product decisions, where would Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston be?

The engineer, not the marketer, can envison the breakthrough.

Sure. Some links below, found on google. I'd show you my textbook, if I could :)

http://library.thinkquest.org/26026/Science/extinc tion.html

http://biomed.brown.edu/Courses/BIO48/38.Extinctio n.HTML

http://nitro.biosci.arizona.edu/courses/EEB105/lec tures/extinction/extinction.html

http://fig.cox.miami.edu/Faculty/Tom/bil160sp98/10 _notes.html

Simon

From the article: The original work along these lines dates back to the late 1980s and early 1990s and was done by Peter F. Brown and his colleagues at IBM's Watson Research Center.

IBM's pioneering work was written up in a student-friendly workbook available online. Feel free to try coding it and see how well you do. Do remember though, the state of the art has progressed a lot since IBM's work. This workbook only covers the basics.

You will find that debugging statistical translation system is really hard. You can write test cases, but they take one hour to run each time. You can look at the result of your test cases, but since you cannot work the answer out by hand, you can never by sure if the numbers you are computing are correct. As an example of how tricky it can get, in Brown university's cs241 last fall, amongts the four teams, only two teams managed to correctly implement Model-3, and the workbook goes up to Model-5.

There are two reason why a three way translation is a bad idea. First, it is already difficult to find large amounts of text translated two-way and available in digital format. Restricting your approach to three-way translated text would reduce the amount of text you could train on so much, it would offset the advantage you would get from the three-way text.

Second, training for statistical translation is really expensive. If running one single test case can take an hour, running a full training can take a whole week. Under these conditions, you are always very careful how you spend your cpu cycles. Until better cpus come along, training three-way and cross referencing each language with the other could well take a month of processing (or two).

FACT: All of the Java platform is available on a free license for open-source developments, including the test suites. This is what the Kaffe people use. Nothing comparable exists for Dotnet whatsoever.

I wish things were as rosy as you make them sound. Kaffe is stuck in Java 1.x compatibility, because Sun Microsystems is keeping the Java 2.x specifications unfree. See section 2.3.1.5 , "Why is (some) free software not implementing Java2?", of the Debian Java FAQ.

steveha