Slashdot Mirror

You are starting with a relatively small number of people, probably better to think of it as a percentage

In the short term:
"A number of the 64 inhabitants of Rongelap experienced immediate radiation sickness including vomiting, skin damage and hair loss. By the time they were evacuated from the area two days after the detonation of Castle Bravo, some of the islanders had received 175 rads (See Chart 2) from gamma radiation and 160 rads from I-131"
http://www.ctbto.org/nuclear-t...

In the long term:
"We estimate that the nuclear testing program in the Marshall Islands will cause about 500 additional cancer cases among Marshallese exposed during the years 1946-1958, about a 9% increase over the number of cancers expected in the absence of exposure to regional fallout."
http://marshall.csu.edu.au/Mar...

So, you are probably saying, wow, just over 500 people affected, pretty small number if you consider Bhopal and Chernobyl
But if you consider that the population of the islands was 10,000 at the time, then that is 5% of their population, which is significant

There is also the persistent presence of isotopes that raise the expectation of cancer for all people to 9% over people not from the Marshall islands

They certainly have a legitimate beef with the government, whether they can leverage that to change global policy is another thing.

We would probably not be having this conversation if 5% of the general population had been exposed to isotopes that had caused cancer
I suppose that it is a matter of perspective

Google images of Turkish Wedding Rings. These traditional wedding rings are made with 4 or more interlocking rings. If the ring is taken off the finger, the ring becomes 4 interlinked rings that are difficult to reassemble.
http://csusap.csu.edu.au/~hulbah01/Pic/r4.gif

Did no one pick up the Oblivion multiplayer hack project?

When I was browsing in the store I saw some guys approach him with a copy of Oblivion and asked him if there was multiplayer in it. He told them that there was "probably some mod for it that gives online play."

My mum works at the CSU Mitchell (Bathurst) library. Just recently they caught some nutter that was cutting sections out of books. I think he was cutting out sections on poisonous animals, dunno why. The police searched his place and found lots of other pages he'd also cut out. The library workers didn't know about all of the books he'd attacked. I don't know if they're still working on these books, but my mum was saying it would take a long time to find which books the pages came from and sort out the different copies. That's right, many of the pages were from nursing textbooks, of which they have multiple copies and this nutter felt compelled to attack all of them. He might have also attacked books at the local city library. It's amazing how much of a problem can be created by a mentally-disturbed individual with a craft knife.

• support for variable width fonts. this would require some finessing tabs, and perhaps an easy way to switch to a fixed width font. while you're at it, support unicode and other fat fonts.
• ability to search for text (with a regexp, of course) in the output window.

ACT is *the capital* city of Australia, seat of federal government, part time home of australian pollies (politicians), home of australian federal public service, houses adf hq (moved from vic barracks in melbourne - my home), home of various australian intelligence agencies (asis, asio) , location for diplomatic embassies, etc. Also home of Australian National University, Andrew Tridgell of Samba and rsync fame.

Canberra is *not underfunded*. It is in a sense an *artifical* city created as a political compromise to house the australian capital - after a fight broke betweem Victoria and Sydney around federation around 1901. The solution Canberra, a territory created in the NSW outback. Its sole purpose it to house government and its associated functions.

as for being less influential ... in australia its the national capital and houses the federal government - q.e.d. As for the rest of the world ... what does it matter?

You can even do a Bachelor of Computer Science (Games Technology) at Charles Sturt University.

You can even do a Bachelor of Computer Science (Games Technology) at Charles Sturt University.

Some of the most amazing bands I've ever seen live, bands you'll probably never hear of, have crappy demo's that sound like they were recorded on a 4 track in a basement somewhere.

If you think the above comment is just a bad joke, you should have a quick read of this article...

In the abstract he states:

"In the Demographic Prisoner's Dilemma, neither assumption is made: agents with finite vision move to random sites on a lattice and play a fixed culturally-inherited zero-memory strategy of cooperate (C) or defect (D) against neighbors."

After his citation of Michael Oliphant's paper (1994) Evolving Cooperation in the Non-Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma: The Importance of Spatial Organization published in Brooks, R. and Maes, P. (eds.) Proceedings of the 4th Artificial Life Workshop, pp 349-352, The MIT Press. Epstein proceeds to attempt to justify his paper in comparison to Oliphant's genetic-algorithm paper by emphasizing his definition "culturally-inherited" as follows:

"Perhaps it is worth emphasizing that, in adopting this assumption of a fixed agent strategy, we are not claiming that human strategies are literally hard-wired genetically. Rather, for modelling purposes, we are assuming that they are culturally transmitted from parents to children--vertically transmitted--with high fidelity, like certain religious or ethnic affiliations, tastes, and native tongues. 19 Below we consider the effect of degradation (mutation) in this vertical transmission fidelity."

This definition, as well as from his other descriptions of his algorithms differ in no way from Oliphant's 'genetic' tendencies to defect or cooperate, except to make the environment 2 dimensional instead of one dimensional and to make spatial structure evolve out of variation in "sight" rather than a simple gaussian distribution of mating -- neither of which can be used to distinguish "culturally-inherited" from "genetically-inherited" traits.

While it is interesting to extend Oliphant's work on genetic algorithms to 2 dimensions, it sheds little new light on the subject.

What would have been far more interesting, especially from the Brookings Institute's charter, and from Epstein's position of responsibility for defense policy analysis there, would have been to do a genuine investigation of cultural transmission in the presence of genetic selection as well as cultural selection:

1. Use Oliphant's model for the evolution of communications given in Oliphant, M. (1996) The Dilemma of Saussurean Communication. BioSystems 37 (1-2), pp 31-38 as the basis for the genetic evolution of cultural transmission.
2. Include Oliphant's genetic evolution of tendencies toward defection vs cooperation.
3. Allow certain internal states to override the genetic predisposition toward defection or cooperation.

Then study under what conditions genotypes arise that tend to transmit 'cooperator culture' while they, themselves, transmit 'defector genes'.

The above extensions to Oliphant's one dimensional gaussian model should be sufficient to illuminate the nature of such 'meta-defection', although I'm sure variations and elaborations on his minimalist environmental model would become obviously interesting in short order.

Here is a paper (by the same author) on the simulation of the evolution of communication based on kin structure under the Prisoner's Dilemma.

Here is a paper (by the same author) on the simulation of the evolution of communication based on kin structure under the Prisoner's Dilemma.

I normally don't reply to anonymous cowards, since they aren't very credible... ;} And if you'd follow the links I provided, you'd find plenty of citations and web links to "credible" sources of information.

However, in this case, I'll make an exception.

Check out:
Complexity International (a refereed journal) Santa Fe Institute (assoc. with Los Alamos Nat. Labs) CiteSeer ResearchIndex of Scientific Papers

NOW you see that a real/good robot would be able to navigate the bank by itself, identify the tellers and speech synthesise its demands.

For those of you that are interesting in remote bank robbery An Aussie Shop includes the Intruder bot on its price list for 40,000 dollars which is designed for use by bomb squads, military etc. And lets face it, 40,000 is a drop in the ocean if you can rob a bank successfully. Maybe you could find a bank to finance the venture for you... ;)

iRobot

Indeed, it seems that software and information are the big winners for research and development at present with AI being the only discipline we can't quite master/apply. When we do perhaps things will move into the age of automation, and this is already very close.

PC's can do marvellous things but when the hardware is such that the computer will branch out from being an information device to a physically able one then we will see the real benefits shining through.

There is another issue however when you think about 'Robots' - Is it better to build of robot that is designed to a particular task, OR should robotics focus on building that monolithic multi purpose bot .. much like ourselves. I beleive the former is already beginning as our appliances become smarter and dreams of a 'robot slave' will only come to fruition when the awkward attempts at making them 'humanlike' are superceded by a design that is simply better, less expensive and useful.

IMHO a robot that is controlled completetly by RC is not a very good one. It must be capable of independant movement and exploration, problem solving (anyone that knows anything about nueral nets or AI knows it does involve randomness and a margin for error that accomodates learning), and communication with humans that can 'command' the robot in simple terms. A simple command like 'Come Here' is to be solved by the robot, not spoonfed via RC.

Yes, robots will become more prevalent in our lives the same way computers did. And we wont have to pay upwards for 40,000 dollars either. But the AI experts have hurdles to cross, the robot hardware gurus have better designs to conceive and the consumer has a lot to accept in terms of robots doing human jobs.

Indeed, robots should make our lives easier, at the cost of human jobs, the world will have to rethink its idea of the worker, and also rethink its idea of the human.

iRobot

Why doesnt someone start a mailing list for ppl that send spam??

The message could read -

Hi, someone has subscribed you to this mailing list because of all the annoying messages you send them. To unsubscribe, forward this message to 10 people by midnight....

;)

iRobot

Thus, we make computers/robots in our own.

Aside from Lego (I do love the stuff) Robotics in general is not an attempt to 'out-do' God's handiwork but if anything, to admire it.

Check out Honda's Biped and read the extensive research into human walking (about 10 years) and tell me that those engineers do not appreciate the complexity of life.

iRobot