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Just as porn relies on math, math (or at least image compression research) relies on porn.

It's a symbiotic relationship.

What the short review seem to be saying is that the author recognizes its not just math.

How in depth the book goes I do not know, but I do know I've been on about the abstraction perspective for near two decades and communicating it to everyone I can including to those in positions at universities.

I have noticed these last few years there are others beginning to grasp the bigger picture, such as J. Wing of CMU and her "Computational Thinking" perspective http://www.cs.cmu.edu/computational_thinking.html perspective and another P. Denning of GMU and his "Great Principles of Computing" http://cs.gmu.edu/cne/pjd/GP/GP-site/welcome.html and I'm sure there are others.

Now I see this short book review "Computer Science Reconsidered: The Invocation Model of Process Expression"...yet I have not seen from any of them software or even an outline of such, that anyone can use to explore and apply the presented perspective. And we all know that to really understand something as it applies to computers requires that actual use of a computer in the learning process for verification of understanding.

So, here is mine http://threeseas.net/vicprint/Virtual_Interaction_ Configuration.html which the link I gave in the parent post points to.

Its all about Abstraction Physics no matter how you present it or what you call it. The evidence is in the inability to avoid using the mentioned action constants set, with or without computers. Know what you do, in everything you do!

Additionally, the widespread deportation of undocumented laborers and its associated increase in labor costs will likely spur development of automation technology in the agricultural, manufacturing, and service industries.

This has already started.

Most claims made about space elevators can be seen at the Wikipedia article, which includes detailed info about building one from steel and why it is impractical (but not impossible). I'll conceed that it's barely possible that the entire article is a plant by LiftPort, however there are a lot of links to other companies that are doing independent research. Of particular interest is Gizmonic Inc., who seem to have adopted space elevators as a corporate hobby, doing lots of spare time R&D and provided lots of calculators so you can check the math yourself. Hans Morovec wrote a research paper in 1978 investigating the feasibility of using Kelvar. Not related to your question but also interesting, Tethers Unlimited, Inc., aren't working on space elevators but are working on lots of related technology.

Some of the software comes from CMU, it seems. I wonder if anyone there has taken a crack at integrating CLARAty with Tekkotsu. Assuming that JPL has some pretty cracker-jack code,(which seems safe to me), then you could buy a used Aibo and a memory stick off ebay and suddenly have the makings of a world-class robotics lab in your living room.

And that's pretty spiffy.

Vat-grown, or printed, meat products are produced using the same basic techniques as other forms of printed tissue culture. Tissue engineering of this type was first developed for medical use in the production of autologous tissue for organ replacement. However this sort of tissue culture was soon found to be useful for the direct production of meat for food on spacecraft and habitats in deep space. See bioforgery.

To achieve the goal of meat production, muscle and other flesh cells are grown on a specially constructed biopolymer scaffold, which replicates the natural extracellular matrix found in living animals. This scaffold is generally printed using a rapid 3d printer device, although several other related techniques such as foaming and self-assembly are also used. Cultured cells are then implanted into the scaffolding, and these cells are induced to bind together into muscle-like or vascular tissue. Once the meat block, known as `slab', is established, the tissue is supplied with nutrients and allowed to grow by as much as 400% by volume before harvesting. To ensure the slab has a healthy texture it is stimulated into regular contractions, simulating exercise; the slab is attached at each end to strain gauges to measure the force of contraction. Each slab is connected to a generous supply of nutrient fluid often closely resembling blood.

Matter compilers in meat factories to produce foods. So, this looks like an interesting area of thought to explore further. Starting with cell culture techniques would be the smart thing to do, then confirming that we can identify particularly nutritious cells, and then working on some tissue growth techniques. Maybe this will start with burn victims?

Artificial cells, tissues, organs compilation,
Background notes on tissue engineering,
Engineering human tissue (paper),
An odd government website,
Obligatory Wikipedia article linkage,
Organ printing,
This source is claiming lab-grown meat in five years,
Fetal farming (what?),
New-Harvest.org for bringing cultivated meat closer to reality,

I found this interesting technical paper on the robot: Experimental Realization of Dynamic Walking for a Human-Riding Biped Robot, HUBO FX-1. It has lots of pretty pictures and graphs and gets in to the control-system problems they had when they developed it. Each step runs through three different balance control strategies, which they outline in detail. It's almost enough information to build your own!

To be perfectly clear here, this technology is not new. Here's a group from Carnegie Mellon university doing something similar a year ago. There are many companies that have algorithms that can generate three dimensional data from 2 dimensional pictures. What Microsoft has done here is take the existing concept, put a proprietary 3D interface around it and tie it all into photographs obtained from the internet. A nice evolution of the state of the art, but hardly revolutionary.

100% agree that there is no such thing as 100% protection. I think both SELinux and AppArmor are great things (I did my MS thesis (woefully out of date) on Domain & Type enforcement which is one of the major systems (along with RBAC & Bell-Lepadula/Biba) in Mandatory Access Control (MAC). The SELinux approach is (usually) a more 'pure' variety in that it encompasses the entire system, all of the namespaces in the system in one setup. When I say 'namespace' think of that scene in the Matrix when Neo can't open his mouth to make a phone call..... Tell me Mr. HAcker, how are you going to steal my passwords when you can't even name the /etc/shadow file? SELinux will allow policies where even the root user (under certain contexts) cannot screw with the system. This can make administration harder like in some SELinux setups you literally have to login as root from the physical console to have full access, su'ing to root or SSHing in as root will not get the same privileges. In the most extreme cases, an SELinux policy could literally require you to reboot the box off of a rescue CD to get full access to certain files. The controls are extremely fine grained and very powerful, but potentially cumbersome.
      AppArmor's main approach is somewhat less broad. It is more like putting certain applications into a MAC container to limit what an application can do, no matter who the user using the application is. A great example of this that most Slashdot readers should look into is putting the browser into a safety container. I've been using Linux since right before 2.4 came out, and I can't count the number of times I've heard 'Linux is more secure because even if your account gets hacked the system isn't hacked' While there is certainly truth to that from the perspective of the full system, it fails to mention that the only data I actually give a rat's ass about is the data in my account, I can always get the rest of the crap from CD/downloading! AppArmor can help fix this by saying: Hey Firefox, just because you are running as user CajunArson, you DON'T get to do everything CajunArson can do, we will only let you operate on some files, and you can't get full access to his data, you can't fork/exec any ol' program that CajunArson can, and in general you are limited to doing what you are supposed to do: Browse the Web. The underlying concepts are still based on the MAC used by SELinux, but the implementation, while not as air-tight theoretically, is also easier to adjust. If there is something I really need firefox to do that the profile will not allow, AppArmor makes the process of tweaking the security easier than SELinux in general (although RedHat could be working on better SELinux tools to fix that).
    Sorry for the long post, but remember: the next time someone says Linux is more secure than Windows, remember that things like SELinux and AppArmor really are what make it better, not just because it has a mean looking penguin!

Here are my attempts (the text is the Gnuplot script, which produces the graphics), what do your company's experts say?

The first problem with your gnuplot script is that you're assuming a Poisson distribution for HDD failures (which is incorrect). Statistical failure distribution follows a Weibull distribution with k roughly equivalent to 7.5. Unfortunately, because you build your argument off of a Poisson distribution approximation, the rest of the analysis doesn't make much sense.

If you are interested in HDD failure rates and failure prediction, there is a fantastic paper done by Bianca Schroeder and Garth Gibson of CMU. I think this is the link to their main research website.

Even if my calculations are wrong, I suspect, the a failure of another disk, while the RAID is recovering from an earlier disk-failure is so improbable (even if the RAID spans dozens of drives), no efforts to reduce that already minuscule risk can possibly be justified.

I think you miss the point of systems such as Starfish and other distributed clustered file systems. You have many other points of failure in a system: memory, CPU, power supply, power outage, motherboard, network switch, OS kernel, router, network cable, and the all important "oops, I tripped over the power cord". There are also times that you want to take down nodes in a highly-available cluster for maintenance without affecting your applications - to do this, you need a file system that assumes and can work around node-level failure.

There is much more to highly-available clustering than just making sure your disk sub-systems are bulletproof.

Damn, you guys know how to spin YRO articles to make everything sound apocalyptic and awful. What exactly do you think this technology is meant to be used for? Do you think that university administrators have such a vested interest in vending machine habits and profit maximization that they want to data mine their own students? Do you think they really care when and how often you go to the bathroom?

Slashdot seems to have missed the boat on the notion of Ubiquitous Computing.

Wikipedia article
CMU's Aura Project
UbiComp 2007

http://jesuspancakes.net/context.htm - A little summary paper I wrote about the field this past semester summarizing a few experimental trials of context-aware systems identical to the one described in this article.

This isn't technology designed to control and monitor people - this is technology intended to make people's lives better, provide interesting new services, utilize all the miniature computers that we carry around to make our lives easier.

I don't trust the damn government any more than the rest of you, but you don't have to implant RFID into your skin in order to try these out - most technologies are based on location badges, Wi-Fi triangulation with PDAs, and cell phone GPS. Guess what - you can turn them off, too!

So yes, blah blah, data mining, government spying, privacy, et cetera. Stop whining about it - these discussions are only useful if you actually think of useful solutions to the privacy dilemnas. If you're not, then you're just being a stubborn Luddite who can't see that it's possible for location-based computing to actually make your life better.

There's an interesting solution to this problem -- the "scientist at Carnegie Mellon" is Luis von Ahn who was recently awarded a MacArthur genius award. In optical recognition tasks like this where the "true" answer is not known, how do you verify that a human agent correctly did the recognition? Just see if a bunch of other users type the same thing. It's a clever twist on consensus voting, and was recently snatched up by Google as "Google image labeler" here.

The article is lacking some information. Here are some better links:

Official reCAPTCHA site
Hide your email address with reCAPTCHA (super easy!)
A more detailed blog post about how the system works

Disclaimer: I work with Luis von Ahn, who's the professor running the reCAPTCHA project.

1. The number #1 : Toma ya!
2. The woman's defence!
3. Clever students women with brilliant teeth!
4. 29% are women!, 2003.
5. Dangerous! Women in Black-White!
6. women as web-designers!
7. women in IT more than men because of cheap salaries!

From the US perspective, 'they' already have introduced a vastly improved game. You call it 'Soccer'.

Except that you've got the chronology wrong (deliberately, I assume), and of course we're just calling it by the name the Brits gave it in the first place

I love it when supposed fans of the sport have no clue about its history; especially when they're trying to lord it over Americans with their alleged superior sports acumen.

Scientology is dangerous, a few links for you copied from my web site: here, here, here, here, here, and here.

It doesn't really matter - it turns out that if you don't like what the IRS decides, you can get your way. All you have to do is mount a campaign of terror against the IRS until they give in.

They just kept at it, year after year. 26 years, actually. They identified and targeted individual civil servants. They sued and blackmailed and swarmed them with PIs. They harassed their friends, families and associates. They spent uncounted millions. They ruined countless lives. Eventually, in '93, it worked. Read more here.

I'm no fan of tax free religion period, but nothing should make you sicker about it than watching these wackadoos sponging off of hard working Americans.

As all great discoveries start with "gee that's weird.." we can thank the Space Shuttle Columbia for proving to us that bacteria can survive an atmosphere entry and planet impact. http://www.cmu.edu/magazine/03fall/wormsurvive.htm l

When I saw the title, I immediate though of Phoolproof.

Yeah, reminds me of the DeCSS galleries out there. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/

There are a few possibilities there..

It could be that the DVDs were not scrambled with CSS (most small scale and/or non-commercial releases for example)
It could also be that the player you use brute-forces the disk key (ie mplayer on Unix)
And of course it could be that the software you use for creating the image unscrambles it on the fly (running AnyDVD on Windows for example)

Note that the later 2 cases do involve circumventing a content access control, even if you are not aware of it.

If you want to read a technical explanation of how CSS works and why a consumer can't just make a bitwise copy of a DVD including the keys needed for descrambling it, read http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Kesden/index.html

Even if you can fool a drive into giving you a full copy of the hidden area, you still can't write it to a DVD without the proper equipment and recordable media, which aren't available to consumers.

Back in 1999 there was a big revolt over a judge ruling a piece of source code illegal under the DMCA. People started wearing it on their shirts, and asking "Is my shirt now a device that can be used to circumvent copy protection?" People started even singing the source code as a form of artistic expression.

Learn more here

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/

Professor Dave Touretzky has all the humorous DeCSS art I remember (and a lot more I don't) archived in his gallery here. It's just cute watching the MPAA try to censor internet publication of movie decryption information again. They can't really be stupid enough to think it'll work this time, can they?

Someone use CSS to encrypt the key... would be impossible to break then!

Once you decide you want a robot, you'll need a board with a processor. These are systems that have good documentation, and some even claim some degree of "openness" in publishing schematics and encouraging you to build your boards yourself.

• MIT's Gogoboard (PIC microcontroller based 30-40 to build plus PC board) http://padthai.media.mit.edu:8080/cocoon/gogosite/ home.xsp?lang=en
• CMU's $400 TerkBot (FPGA and ARM) http://www.terk.ri.cmu.edu/recipes/index.php
• (I'm sure Stanford has something here too - I just don't know what it is)
• ARM7 boards with Ethernet for around $100 - Aleph1 claims some openness, but their site is down
• FPGA 'education' boards for $100-$150 w/ VGA and PC features http://www.digilentinc.com/

Ironically, the commercial and military software development industries have recently been heavily promoting a methodology that could enable this sort of specification without requiring a central authority. Software Product Lines is a formalization of hundreds of "good practices" of encapsulation and interoperability into a single methodology that is transforming the way some software is written. I see this as the next step in software development evolution, and one that the open source community might get more benefit from than others.

I contributed to TeRK while working on my MS at CMU.

The idea is to provide as simple of an interface to programming the robot as possible. You can write your own stuff directly on the hardware if you like (it's got a serial connection so it's easy to connect to). Or, you can take advantage of the layers of code and write something which runs on your PC... but still has access to things like values from the analog inputs and moving the motors -- all via 802.11. The project uses a lot of open source and the source code for all of the components is available. There is a lot of framework code written in C that runs on the Qwerk board itself, and it uses ICE to connect from the board to either a relay server or your PC. Then, for the people who don't like to program at all (or are just starting out), there is a lot of software, including a basic emulator of the board, mostly written in Java, that they can just run on Windows, Mac OS, or Linux.

During development, we took our PC app and a couple of Qwerks to a group of robotics hobbyists and they were floored by the kind of capability you can get for free with the Qwerk and all of the software that's already been written. Most of them wanted to find a way to incorporate the board into their own projects.

Anyway, the goal of the project is to have a wide appeal. I hope it can get a lot more people excited about what they can do, and all at a very low cost compared to other kits.

Bouillabaisse is absolutly not of US origin.

http://www.cliffordawright.com/history/bouillabais se.html
http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/food/ la-fo-bouillabaisse29sep29,1,5890509.story?coll=la -headlines-pe-food

General Tso's Chicken is in doubt. Nobody knows for sure.

http://pressurecooker.phil.cmu.edu/tso/

Robot Universal Remote (RUR) == Rossums Universal Robots

You can also uniquely identify someone without using a name at all. This paper (pdf warning) from 1997 found what percentages of voters in Cambridge, Massachusetts could be identified using seemingly innocent data:

birth date alone: 12%
birth date and gender: 29%
birth date and 5-digit ZIP: 69%
birth date and full postal code: 97%

If you're interested by this topic, have a look at http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~reiter/papers/2002/IJIS.pd f It explains the learning process, and will tell you more specifically how it modify the password file to match the progress of the user.

Original Carnegie Mellon press release: http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2007/April/april17 _genes.shtml
The actual journal article: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2202/8/20

This is not simply a proposal, though you have to go to the actual journal article to determine that. The press release is so hyped up though that it's hard to see that basically all they're doing is applying two well-known bioinformatics techniques to the problem of finding previously unknown/unstudied genes related to learning and memory.

The first technique is simply to see what interacts with known genes (CREB and zif268); since proteins function by interacting with each other, you'd expect that most - not all - of the proteins that CREB and zif268 interact with will be related to memory and learning. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_interaction

The second technique is just an application of the fact that similar proteins from different organisms (i.e. homologs) usually have the same function. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homology_modeling

These computational techniques can be very useful in hypothesizing which genes may be involved, so that you can then go to the lab and either confirm or reject your hypothesis. The authors did not do so, but they did do a search of the experimental literature, which gives a partial confirmation. But the fact remains that this work is simply the application of known computational techniques. In all, I'd say it's a nice bit of work and worth my time (as a PhD student with an emphasis in bioinformatics) ... but not worth a press release or getting excited about.

This past year, I was accepted into Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science. It has been a remarkable experience that I would like to share with the community. Here's an account of my experience.

Week 1, Sunday: I moved in today. My roommate, a sophomore CS student, had already moved in two days before me. The floor is already completely covered with garbage. He also smells. I think he might be gay too. He's already asked me if I like the color he painted his toenails. This should be interesting. I am almost completely settled in. Techno music is playing in every room in every floor of my dorm. There are computers and other types of trash out in the common areas. What a mess. Tomorrow, I am going to go sign up to get my network connection.

Week 1, Monday: I got hooked up to the CMU network today! I jacked into the network, only to find that the hostname and address assigned to me were colliding with another system. I'll just increment the network numbers a few times. I am really eager to get on.

Week 1, Tuesday: I am still looking for a free IP address. Can't anybody here properly configure their systems?

Week 1, Friday: I finally found a free IP! It's mine! You sons of bitches can't have it, I found it, I keep it, it's mine! To hell with all of you! Head hurts really bad. I've slowly been developing a headache since I first arrived. Everywhere I look there are these Lucent Technologies wireless access points. I wonder if that's the problem.

Week 1, Saturday: I sat down at my computer today. My desktop wall paper is now the goatse.cx guy. Pleasant. Scattered over every directory on my C: drive are thousands, possibly millions, of files titled "J00AR30WN3DBITCH-phj33r-" and then some random hacker's name. Don't these people have lives? Maybe they need laid or something. It'd take days to clean this out. I mentioned to my roommate that I needed to reinstall Windows, and immediately he jumped up and shouted: "NO! Do NOT use Windows!" Suddenly, two dozen other guys (all of them possibly homosexuals) appeared at the door, each touting an operating system called Linux. Half of them got into a fight over which was better, Debian, RedHat, Slackware, and a bunch of others I couldn't recognize. Some kid who appeared to not have showered since he was born was touting "Linux From Scratch," saying that only losers used pre-made distros. A crowd of people in the back kept quiet about how I'd be sorry if I used Linux instead of BSD on the network. Who the fuck are these people? Classes start next week. Hope I have my computer working so I can do my assignments.

Week 3, Friday: People are still trying to get Linux to work on my system. They keep telling my that my hardware sucks. We go through about four or five distributions a day. Every now and then, I notice a little devil on my screen. Stickers for every of these distributions have been plastered on my case. Suddenly, my room stinks a lot more with these people in here. I ask them why they never shower, and the usual response is something along the lines of "showering is like rebooting" and "I don't want to lose my uptime."

Week 3, Saturday: There's a troop of men running naked in a circle around McGill Hall. I am not even going to ask.

Week 4, Wednesday: Linux is FINALLY working on my computer! I have a pretty slick desktop too. I think I might like this. I can finally work in my room instead of the labs, although considering the every increasing layer of garbage on the floor...

Week 4, Thursday: My computer flashes messages about how I am "0WNX0RED" and how I should "PHJ33R" whoever and how "L4MEX0R" I am for having an insecure box. A kid suggests we reinstall Linux after discovering about 17 rootkits.

Week 5, Friday: Someone got BSD working on my computer. I wonder if this will last. The stress has been building and I forgot to

This past year, I was accepted into Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science. It has been a remarkable experience that I would like to share with the community. Here's an account of my experience.

Week 1, Sunday: I moved in today. My roommate, a sophomore CS student, had already moved in two days before me. The floor is already completely covered with garbage. He also smells. I think he might be gay too. He's already asked me if I like the color he painted his toenails. This should be interesting. I am almost completely settled in. Techno music is playing in every room in every floor of my dorm. There are computers and other types of trash out in the common areas. What a mess. Tomorrow, I am going to go sign up to get my network connection.

Week 1, Monday: I got hooked up to the CMU network today! I jacked into the network, only to find that the hostname and address assigned to me were colliding with another system. I'll just increment the network numbers a few times. I am really eager to get on.

Week 1, Tuesday: I am still looking for a free IP address. Can't anybody here properly configure their systems?

Week 1, Friday: I finally found a free IP! It's mine! You sons of bitches can't have it, I found it, I keep it, it's mine! To hell with all of you! Head hurts really bad. I've slowly been developing a headache since I first arrived. Everywhere I look there are these Lucent Technologies wireless access points. I wonder if that's the problem.

Week 1, Saturday: I sat down at my computer today. My desktop wall paper is now the goatse.cx guy. Pleasant. Scattered over every directory on my C: drive are thousands, possibly millions, of files titled "J00AR30WN3DBITCH-phj33r-" and then some random hacker's name. Don't these people have lives? Maybe they need laid or something. It'd take days to clean this out. I mentioned to my roommate that I needed to reinstall Windows, and immediately he jumped up and shouted: "NO! Do NOT use Windows!" Suddenly, two dozen other guys (all of them possibly homosexuals) appeared at the door, each touting an operating system called Linux. Half of them got into a fight over which was better, Debian, RedHat, Slackware, and a bunch of others I couldn't recognize. Some kid who appeared to not have showered since he was born was touting "Linux From Scratch," saying that only losers used pre-made distros. A crowd of people in the back kept quiet about how I'd be sorry if I used Linux instead of BSD on the network. Who the fuck are these people? Classes start next week. Hope I have my computer working so I can do my assignments.

Week 3, Friday: People are still trying to get Linux to work on my system. They keep telling my that my hardware sucks. We go through about four or five distributions a day. Every now and then, I notice a little devil on my screen. Stickers for every of these distributions have been plastered on my case. Suddenly, my room stinks a lot more with these people in here. I ask them why they never shower, and the usual response is something along the lines of "showering is like rebooting" and "I don't want to lose my uptime."

Week 3, Saturday: There's a troop of men running naked in a circle around McGill Hall. I am not even going to ask.

Week 4, Wednesday: Linux is FINALLY working on my computer! I have a pretty slick desktop too. I think I might like this. I can finally work in my room instead of the labs, although considering the every increasing layer of garbage on the floor...

Week 4, Thursday: My computer flashes messages about how I am "0WNX0RED" and how I should "PHJ33R" whoever and how "L4MEX0R" I am for having an insecure box. A kid suggests we reinstall Linux after discovering about 17 rootkits.

Week 5, Friday: Someone got BSD working on my computer. I wonder if this will last. The stress has been building and I forgot to

I take drugs for bipolar tendency and have had 5 nervous breakdowns, so I have some ideas about how the brain goes wrong, I am afraid that the search for a perfect machine learning device may be a side track compared to explaining the mistakes the brain makes.

I have an engineering degree and a masters specialising in machine learning - but that was 13 years ago, I would be delighted in more pointers of the state of the art

http://www.cnbc.cmu.edu/Resources/disordermodels/ , on bipolar and neural networks, seemed promising at one stage but I had not the time, energy or rights to read the latest papers. [The web page is dated 1996]

Ok, I can't resist...
Couldn't java make be a solution?
The JVM can hide the details of multiple CPU's. And since it knows the flow of the program, it can optimize the code automagically for the amount of processors / threads available.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jch/java/speed.html/

Take a peek at the paper - it actually does work, and we demonstrated it. The intuition: people make small changes to files like changing the artist or title in the MP3 header, and then BitTorrent and other systems treat this as a "different" file, when in fact it's 99.9% similar.
(Yes, I'm one of the authors.)

Isn't this Luis von Ahn's thesis work?

I find it interesting which ones of the object-recognition and scene categorization algorithms make it to Slashdot.
Why does this one make it?
This is a very hot research topic at the moment.
to name a couple of groups:

http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/
http://lear.inrialpes.fr/
http://www.vision.caltech.edu/
http://www.science.uva.nl/research/isla/
http://www.cdvp.dcu.ie/
http://www.informedia.cs.cmu.edu/
http://www.research.ibm.com/slam/
http://www.ee.columbia.edu/ln/dvmm/newResearch.htm

oh, and people should not stare themselves blind on the claimed results.
Research papers *always* have to present good results, or else you do not get published.
Furthermore, these images are of a very high quality, make by professional photographers.
Many algorithms perform very well on these ('corel'-like) sets, while utterly failing if applied on real-world data:
http://www-nlpir.nist.gov/projects/trecvid/

a robot challenge that will test robots' vision and language understanding.
the robots/sobots must be able to recognise objects automatically and perform tasks like: get the "star trek" poster or get the blue dry erase marker. the final event will be held at the twenty-second AAAI conference on artificial intelligence in vancouver, canada july 22-26 '07 [taken from ofpblog]

The Cthurch of Scientology routinely sent out mass DMCA claims against web sites which included material that belonged to someone else or were in the public domain. (They seem to be running out of steam on those; worn down by the Internet and rotation of their people through their "ethics" re-education camps. Now they robotically notify Google to remove posts to ARS with Hubbard's OT-III story.) They got an Avagram!

Odd. Do all the MLB teams play three times as many away games than home ones?

(Yes, i'm sure I deserve the -1 mod point for explaining I was counting home games)

I'm not an expert in MLB, to get the approximation of more than 40-45 I was refered to wiki and noted how many home games some team played. Seemed a reasonable reference point, and my opinion is based on living near Seattle where there was a big deal about replacing the King Dome, and whether to build two stadiums. Given 1 stadium was enough for both football and baseball, and given the number of home games for baseball is far greater than the number of home games for baseball... I like others felt that one stadium was sufficent and priority should have been for baseball. I could care less about most organized sports, but just because I don't enjoy them doesn't mean they are not important.

this essay illistrates my point a tad better even if i'm in disagreement with the author assertion that football is more of a national sport than baseball. According to this essay, I approximate that MLB has 10 times as many games as the NFL with a ticket price being about 2.5 times as much for an NFL ticket as a MLB ticket, where attndance is 4.41 times higher for MLB than the NFL in 2000. While without a doubt TV ratings for NFL are higher, and television income is also higher, and cost to attend a season of football is more reasonable than Baseball, I have to disagree with the author that 1/2 the average attendance per game for baseball is outweighed by the fact that there are clearly at least 10times as many games per season for MLB.

This is rather why I consider baseball to be America's national sport, and not football... as without a doubt more time is dedicated to baseball than football, and it's not just because games tend to be ultra long.

If you are interested in schedualing info, see this page
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ACO/dimacs/trick.html

Again, the only reason why I cared at all about the subject was the question which sport was most likely to generate the largest income.

OF COURSE there's caves on the Red Planet. Doesn't anybody read Chapter 8 of The Warlord of Mars anymore?.

I began my undergraduate days in 1986 and the entire university was a mix of Macs and UNIX workstations. I do recall a few stray IBM (and yes they were IBM) machines in the computer center, but those were more of an oddity than anything else.
My first response to sitting down in front of an MS environment was, "What the hell is this and why would someone use something so clumsy?"
Hopefully we're heading back to those days, albeit slowly.

Rather then just repeating what I said the last time the subject of IP Address Management came up on slashdot, I'll just link to it.

(I'm not him although I know his work and his ex-supervisor)

Also consider CImage, by the same author. CImage is a C++ image processing template library (cue to how much C++ sucks compared to the language du jour and/or LISP/Python/Haskell/OCaml, etc ;-)

Concerning the inpainting algorithms that many here find impressive, there has been lots of work in this area. One of the seminal works is the paper at ICCV'99 by Efros and Leung. Many CS people will love that one since it is a fairly straightforward extention of the 1948 Markov model proposed by Shannon himself for the automated production of pseudo-english text (i.e. texts that look and sound english but really aren't). The Practice of Programming book by Kernighan and Pike makes use of that algorithm to compare various languages in a fun way.

The Tschumperlé algorithm works on different principles and is much faster, but their particular Markov model shows the impainting problem is not that difficult in practice.

... from removing the Moire pattern often seen in scanned photographs, to interpolated image upsampling that doesn't seem blurred or pixelised. Perhaps it will also fare well in interpolating old 256-color dithered GIFs into full-color JPEGs with decent quality. [This is also a nice sumarry for those who don't want to read TFA...]

Most of the research this library uses as a basis has been known for quite some time; see the image upsampling link above. But it's nice to see this implemented as an actual library.