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And asssuming an electrical system which is twice as good as the theoretical best case.

My university engineering department were doing some work on a hybrid car.

It was their experience that a pure electric car is very inefficient; for example it's not good at low-speed acceleration. But a combination electric/chemical power system with an intelligent control system allows you to reach very high effiency levels.

The car does indeed use retarders to recharge its batteries when braking, but the majority of battery charging comes from other sources. Besides, retarders radically drop in efficiency as speed falls, so they still have conventional brakes as well.

And asssuming an electrical system which is twice as good as the theoretical best case.

My university engineering department were doing some work on a hybrid car.

It was their experience that a pure electric car is very inefficient; for example it's not good at low-speed acceleration. But a combination electric/chemical power system with an intelligent control system allows you to reach very high effiency levels.

The car does indeed use retarders to recharge its batteries when braking, but the majority of battery charging comes from other sources. Besides, retarders radically drop in efficiency as speed falls, so they still have conventional brakes as well.

Here's a video demonstrating how this works. On a macroscopic level.

Sure, they can put the entire Encyclopedia Britanica on the head of a pin, but you won't understand a damned thing.

Suppassing? Magnetical? Sphepes? WTF are they talking about?

Durham VRG

HTH

This was my final year project thesis. Just remember the golden rule unstructured 2 structured == convert 2 XML I wrote a [very bad] program in C++/Perl/tcsh IPC=pipes to add XML tags to English, and then index them into a search engine which would use the lingual data stored in the XML tags to help the search.

NIST does a MASSIVE competition on this annually. I don't want to be an XML-buzzword whore <Arnold Schwarzenegger accent> (XML commando eats Green berets, C++, Java, Perl, COBOL for breakfast)</Arnold Schwarzenegger accent> but you can't beat XML for easily converting anything that you can make sense out of into computer readable format. Real h3cKoRs use SGML, but us underlings have to stick with things we can understand like XML. As for expandability, if we want to encode something else into the document, then just tag-it-and-go

It took me 200 hours to fish out all these links (before the Google days), I don't want anyone to have to waste as much time as I did feeding the search engines exotic foods. It's a year old so pardon me for the odd broken link, armed with these you could probably turn jello into XML ;-)

My favourite bookmarx
PROJect[21 links]
Beginners' Guide[13 links]
Berkeley Linguistics Dept. Course Summaries, general stuffzzzzzzzzzzzzzzCryptic IR Vocabulary defined
Explanations of weird words like hypernym zzzzzzzzzzzzzzHow do we produce and understand speech
How Inverted Files are Created - Univeristy of Berkeley zzzzzzzzzzzzzzNLP Univ. of Indiana, very good basics e.g. word sense d
Simple langauge - useful.... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWhat is Natural Language Processing, links
What is POS tagging........ zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWord Sense Disambiguation defined
Word Sense Disambiguation in detail, scroll down far zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWord Sense Disambiguator - LOLITA (tested at MUC-7 and SENSEVAL competition as best)
XML for the absolute beginner

HTML, XML stuff + parsers[19 links]
Apache plug-in that uhhh does stuff with XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzConvert COM to XML
convert XML, HTML to Unix pipeable formats zzzzzzzzzzzzzzconverters to and from HTML
expat XML parser zzzzzzzzzzzzzzHTML Tidy - converts HTML 2 XML + source code!!
Parse DB (RDBMS, whatever) to XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPerl-XML Module List
PHP Manual XML parser functions - what the hell are they talking about, PHP Virtual M... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPublic SGML-XML Software
Pyxie - XML Processor for Python, Perl, etc. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzSGML+XML tools.org
The XML Resource Centre - massive number of links zzzzzzzzzzzzzzW4F wrapper - wrapper converts XML to HTML
XFlat - convert flat file into XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzXML Parsers and other XML stuff
XML.com - Parsers, etc. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzXML-Data Catalog System - uhhhh looks close
XTAL's general converter - convert anything 2 XML

other Background[8 links]
Is Linux ready for the Enterprise, scalable... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzLinux reliability
Linux Versus Windows NT, Mark(sysinternals bloke) zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPC reliability (pcworld)
SPEC - Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzSystems benchmarks
TPC - Transaction Processing Performance Council zzzzzzzzzzzzzzUnix Beats Back NT In EDA Workstation Arena
Proper TREC(-8) QA systems[2 links]

pg. 387 LIMSI-CNRS pretty deep parsing[2 links]
More links....
NLP, IR links - lots to corpii, etc.

pg. 575 U. of Ottawa and NRL (shit system, got 0%)[1 links]
LAKE Lab
pg. 607! University of Sheffield (crap system, but OPEN SOURCE!)[2 links]
GATE - FREE IE app w`source code
LaSIE - ER, coreference, template (cv)

pg. 617 Univ of Surrey (inconclusive matches)[2 links]
System Quirk - Or is this their search system..... Hmmmmmm
Univ of Surrey - pointers (hopefully this is their WILDER search system...)

SMU - Pg. 65[1 links]
Natural Language Processing Laboratory at SMU

Textract[2 links]
Cymfony - Technology
Textract - State of the Art Information Extraction

Xerox uhhhhh maybe[1 links]
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
(OVERVIEW) 1999 TREC-8 Q&A Track Home Page
NLP bloke, Univ Sussex


Tcl-Tk[4 links] Tcl tutorial
Tcl-Tk Contributed Programs Index
Tcl-Tk Resources, sources
TclXML - manipulating XML using Tcl-Tk
Artificial Natural Language - Is this what I'm trying to parse into...
Comparison of Indexers - Prise vs. Inquery vs. MG, etc.
Eagles - Language Engineering Standards
Language Technology Group - lots of modules!
LDC - Linguistic Data Consortium, lots of corpora
Lexical Resources
Links 2 resources, indexers.....
Lots of IR stuff, University of uhhh
Managing Gigabytes Indexer
Managing Gigabytes Manuals and stuff
Htdig search system
NLP & IR (NLPIR, NIST) Group
OVERVIEW OF MUC-7-MET-2
Perl XML Indexing - XML search engine type thing
Phrasys Language Processing Software Components (money)
QA HCI bullshit
SIGIR - TREC-type thing, resources
SMART indexer system documentation
Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) Home Page
The Natural Language Software Registry
Thunderstone IE and IR products
WordNet - FREE DOWNLOADABLE lexical English database

Page created with URL+, nice utility for working with internet shortcuts

They are also ideal for cryogenically cooled AO systems (which I'm working on). Due to the small size, it's much easier and cheaper to cool them. Generally, MEMS mirrors are also composed of only one or two materials, so coefficient of thermal expansion mis-match problems are also reduced.

See here for a longer description.

Most people can visualize a hundred or so boxen a lot easier than a thousand or so. It gets a little unreal. So the Brit site with pretty pictures of the system is a good site for those not familiar with the larger systems.

They have other pretty pictures from their work as well.

Most people can visualize a hundred or so boxen a lot easier than a thousand or so. It gets a little unreal. So the Brit site with pretty pictures of the system is a good site for those not familiar with the larger systems.

They have other pretty pictures from their work as well.

Most people can visualize a hundred or so boxen a lot easier than a thousand or so. It gets a little unreal. So the Brit site with pretty pictures of the system is a good site for those not familiar with the larger systems.

They have other pretty pictures from their work as well.

This is impressive, but the nasa machine will blow it out of the water.

If they have mass, then we must include that mass in all calculations, but for some reason they don't want to :-)

The current standard model does not predict the masses of neutrinos, but its equations are simpler if neutrinos have no mass.

That's like saying calculating the velocity of an object is easier to calcuate if we don't count friction!

Just because physically observed particles have mass, it is not necessarily required that the theory has particle masses in its bare Lagrangian form from which the perturbation theory Feynman rules are determined. (And I'm not talking about the Standard Model's Higgs Mechanism for mass generation by spontaneous symmetry breaking - which is another thing altogether...)

Non-perturbative calculations using the Schwinger-Dyson equations, Ward identities and renormalisability constraints show that masses can be generated dynamically through interactions of massless fields.

Some (8-10 year old) references can be found via this HEPDATA query. Note that this is not talking directly about neutrinos, but rather about generating masses for electrons in a simplified version of QED in which electrons start out massless.

There are almost certainly some newer papers that you could find either at HEPDATA or SPIRES.

(Full Disclosure: Mike Pennington was my Ph.D. Supervisor, although I didn't work in the non-perturbative SD equations field myself except for a short while at the start)
--

Not strictly accurate. The government (at the time) wanted to decrease unemployment amongst the young, and to be seen to be "doing something", so they made the decision to convert the polytechnics into universities. I'm not sure how to map this directly onto US education concepts, but the basic difference is that a university is an academic institution that can award its own degrees, whereas a polytechnic was more vocational, and franchised degree programmes from external authorities.

So what we ended up with is a system in which degrees from traditional universities (Oxford, Cambridge, London, a few others) have retained their elite status (as they have the resources and reputation to be very selective in admission and rigourous in examinations) and the ex-polys offering courses in "media studies" or "art history" or other vaguely-defined subjects.

Because it was so easy to get into a "university", and because education is (quite rightly) preceived as valuable, there was a huge influx of people, but the quality of the average graduate plummeted. Despite their reputation, people of ability from *all* backgrounds have always been able to get into some of the elite UK colleges, which are meritocratic in the extreme (for example, UCL) with others such as Durham admitting people based on their social background.

As the student population increased, the cost of supporting them while studying went up, also more people weren't working or paying taxes, and of those people, a smaller overall percentage of graduates were able to enter the workforce in graduate-level roles, because rather than studying engineering or whatever (UK Bachelors degrees are typically more difficult than US ones, but fewer UK grads take a Masters, so I guess it balances out) they had studied things that weren't relevant to industry.

Given this, it makes a good deal of sense to adopt the US system, where people can study whatever they please, so long as they pay for it themselves. The only economically viable alternative would be to shut all the ex-polys, and return a university education to only the most academically able. A third possibility is of course an additional tax on graduates, but the Labour government (currently in power, and responsible for dismantling the grant system and introducing tuition fees) remember the last time the UK suffered a "brain drain" under their rule.

(I completed a Mechanical Engineering degree in the UK, and worked part time during it).

I graduated the next year and joined that company, and did more of the same - SQL, C++, MFC, etc. Eventually I quit that company and went out on my own doing web development on a freelance basis, and did more fun stuff - Perl, HTML, more databases, etc.

Now I've finally come full circle. This year I started working on an implementation of the XML Path language, XPath, in Perl. Lo and behold, I became so glad that I never threw out all my old text books. I needed to go and re-learn parsing and algorithm optimisation, and all that stuff I thought was mostly irrelevant for the work I was doing. I've actually now re-read most of my old text books, and all of them are still relevant today.

So the point is two things:

1. The stuff you are learning will serve you for life. The fun stuff you learned as an intern somewhere will probably serve you for part of your career, but not likely all of it, unless you're happy to go into management!

2. Have fun while you're an undergrad. Go to parties. Get drunk. Have lots of sex if you can. Make friends. The most important part of University life is the social aspect, not the learning. The relationships you form at Uni should be ones you form for the rest of your life. Its very hard to find people on the same intelectual level as you in your home town. Thats not the case with Uni. Take advantage of that. As far as the learning goes - don't skip classes. Learn what you can but don't let your parents or peers push you too hard. Keep your textbooks and the learning can be re-done at a later stage.

I wrote a quick C program (gaps.c) to do all this for me after my uni exams finished this month: it can be downloaded from here, and example pages can be found on my Demon site: http://www.morants.demon.co.uk in the gap year section, labelled as "New Version"s. It is quite simple to use - all documentation in the source file itself!

Given lots of JPEGs in a directory, running gaps -new in the directory will make a thumb/ directory of thumbnails, and a webpage!

My question is: How likely is it that other particles lie undiscovered in accelerator events that have already been observed? Would an event that produced a particle with unexpected mass or other properties be flagged by present event-filtering algorithms?

One problem with finding these is that in a large proportion of the collider data, any signature for these particles is completely hidden, e.g. by the fact that not all the quantities required to reconstruct the underlying amplitude are measured. The amplitude is what is predicted by the theory, and to obtain the comparison with experiment, one generally has to sum several amplitudes and take the modulus squared (amplitudes are complex numbers). This means that for any given measurable angular probability distribution of particles in a reaction, there are potentially many amplitudes which will, when the modulus squared is taken, predict the same results.

Only in a few cases can enough quantities, in enough coupled reactions, be measured to attempt to reconstruct the amplitude. In fact, in reactions of interest to people seeking new QCD bound state particles (such as the diquark anti-diquark mentioned earlier) I know of only one reaction:- the proton antiproton annihilation at low energy into (exactly) two pions and even then both pi+pi- and pi0pi0 final state reactions are required to reconstruct the amplitudes, along with a set of other constraints.

I did some work in this very field about 5 years ago.

Mark
--
"I am not a nut-bag." -- Millroy the Magician

Judging from the other responses to Katz's musings, the nature of prediction hasn't changed much since Chesterton's day, and the novel's take on the fate of such prophecies is both enlightening and extremely funny.

For the book-lovers out there, here's another recommendation for Napoleon. John Crowley quotes those Introductory Remarks in his World Fantasy Award winner, Little, Big.

If you want a quick skinny on Chesterton, try G. K. Chesterton

I really wish those who keep flogging the Galileo myth of "brave Scientist persecuted by hidebound Chruch for selfless Pursuit of Knowledge" would apply some of that scientific viewpoint to actually reviewing what happened, and perhaps even (gasp!) revising their opining (in true Scientific fashion) based upon the facts of the case, rather than the received myth.

Otherwise, it certainly looks to me as if the Rational Enlightenment Scientific Geeks are the ones who are desperately clinging to their myths, while the Christians are the ones who are willing to look at the world and history as it actually is.

If there is a modern figure who shows us what Galileo would be if he were alive today, it is not IPO-enriched Internet geeks, but rather Carl Sagan. That is, the scientist who uses his scientific expertise to make himself out to be an expert authority on things religious. The proof that Galileo got himself in trouble with the Chruch over theology and not science is simply the number of Catholics ought to be the number of Catholics (including Kepler, Copernicus himself, and a whole bunch of Jesuit astronomers) who favored heliocentism (in even more accurate models than Galileo held) with no trouble at all.

Of course, stabbing a close personal friend in the back by making him out to be a fool in public was not a particularly diplomatic move, especially when that close personal friend happens to have just been elected Pope.

The Roman Catholic Church has admitted that they screwed up in handling Galileo (though not as badly as the mythmakers would have it). I am still waiting for the mythmakers to admit that they have treated the Catholic Church unfairly, or that Galileo might have been part of the problem himself. But I'm not holding my breath -- after all, what's historical accuracy and fairness, compared to a chance to flog religion in general and Christianity/Catholicism in particular?

I do profess to be impartial in the sense that I should be ashamed to talk such nonsense about the Lama of Thibet as they do about the Pope of Rome
-- G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man