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Computational Journalism is much broader than just data-mining. At Georgia Tech I taught courses in the area in 2007 and 2008 which covered everything from mobile newsgathering, to information visualization, automatic content analysis, social computing, storytelling and authorship, aggregation, summarization, information mashups, and consumption interfaces. The bigger question is: how can computation help in every aspect of journalism: gathering, sensemaking, authoring, and dissemination, while still maintaining the values and ethics of good journalism. Anyone interested in delving deeper into this should watch the videos from the Symposium on Computation and Journalism that we organized at Georgia Tech in 2008.

I went to Georgia Tech for my BS in computer science, and spent a semester studying abroad in Barcelona. Tech has some sort of exchange program with UPC (Universidad Politecnica de Catalonia) where UPC students come to Atlanta and Tech professors and students go to Barcelona. The CS courses offered all focused on UI, HCI, and i18n-type stuff; there were also courses offered in architecture and Spanish.

It was a hell of a lot of fun, I got to do a lot of traveling around Europe by myself and with friends, and being an out-of-state student it was actually cheaper than taking courses on campus.

You don't mention where you go to school now, but check with your CS department's advisors and see if they offer any similar programs, or get in touch with UPC and see if they can help you.

As mentioned previously, Georgia Tech has a study abroad program designed for CS students which goes to Barcelona for the summer. I think they sometimes accept non-GaTech students, and I doubt that it would be much of a hassle getting the credits transfered. I didn't participate in this program, but I heard a lot of great things from people who have. Here is the webesite: http://www.oie.gatech.edu/sa/programs/show.html?id=BCN

The authors of the interactive drama Facade collaborated with some augmented-reality people to build an AR version of the game, and found that although it did make people feel more "present" in an immersive virtual world, they actually engaged less with the game as a result, which went against the assumption in the AR field that more-immersive = more-good.

There are games that plausibly serve some sort of editorializing function, and then there are games that just reference recent events, usually as a gimmick. Many of the recent Bush-shoe-throwing games are of the second sort---there is no real editorial commentary going on, it's just a generic arcade game that's been skinned with Bush and shoes. There were similarly content-free games that came out after 9/11, mostly based around revenge fantasies where you got to punch bin Laden or something.

There are some good examples of games that actually use the gameplay to make some sort of editorial point, though. From a right-wing perspective, in Al Quaidamon, you can treat a terrorist prisoner well or poorly, and a meter shows his current status. The political point is made in the balance: unless you coddle him continuously, you fall below the levels market as Geneva Convention standards (which are, incidentally, depicted as being above average U.S. living standards). From a more left-wing perspective, Airport Security satirizes the post-9/11 airport security measures through its gameplay, by depicting the changing standards of what's banned this week as absurd and impossible to follow.

(I got both of those examples from this list.)

In the academic field of game studies (analogous to film studies, though much smaller), the idea of games as rhetoric/etc. has been discussed for several years. Probably the most prominent academic who also makes games in that vein is Ian Bogost, who explicitly describes a lot of what he does as making "playable editorial cartoons". The New York Times for a while was actually publishing them on its online editorial page, strengthening the analogy (until a change of editor). He also happens to have a book on the somewhat broader subject of games as a means of commentary/expression/rhetoric, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (MIT Press, 2007).

There is also an index here of editorial-style "newsgames", i.e. games about recent news events released in a timely manner that make some editorial commentary about the event.

The websites for Georgia Tech's senior design projects can be found here:

http://www.ece.gatech.edu/academic/courses/ece4007/web/index.html

That's nice, but we already have a highly optimized, debugged, and widely deployed matrix library in Fortran. Why not just call it from our higher level languages?

Personally, I use BLAS with some C++ sugar on top. Mixing Fortran, C, and C++ is actually pretty trivial since they don't feel the need to wall themselves off from the rest of the world like Java; it's even easier to call C from Lisp the contortions Java makes you go through. Also, since Java lacks operator overloading, and realtime garbage collection isn't quite there yet, I don't see how it would be an improvement, or even a possibility for the Controls work I do.

Is the newest FORTRAN even a real language yet? ( e.g. you can't write a FORTRAN compiler using FORTRAN ).

Fortran is Turing Complete, so yes. Also, wikipedia says that Pascal was first implemented in Fortran.

Look at this http://www-stage.gatech.edu/news-room/flash/CNTpv.html and compare to image behind boys back at http://www.katu.com/news/local/28432984.html Read tomlsmith replay. P.S. sorry for my bad english

he astonishing thing is not that the kid is so bright and supported by his parents, mentors and teachers (all of these things are true, amazing and good for all of them), but that no other serious scientist pursued this sort of design yet.

While I applaud this kid, he wasn't the first to come up with 3d solar cells.

Falcon

Thank you for sharing this very interesting story. There is, however, a clarification that needs to be added. The 3D solar cell was invented several years ago at the Georgia Tech Research Institute by our team of world-class scientists and engineers. The Georgia Tech Research Institute http://www.gtri.gatech.edu/ has been making 3D solar cell prototypes of this design since 2004. You can read about the work in our April 2007 news release online at http://www.gtri.gatech.edu/casestudy/3d-solar-cells-boost-efficiency. Our work has patents pending in the US and abroad. We have also published our research widely in an number of highly regarded research journals including the Journal of Applied Physics, Journal of Materials and Carbon. The 3D Solar Cell has the potential to be breakthrough in the solar industry. The global and exclusive license to the 3D Solar Cell intellectual property is held by IP2BIZ in Atlanta http://www.ip2biz.com/Offerings/ProofCoProjects.a... The license is currently for sale to any firm that can further develop, manufacture and bring it to market. It is wonderful to see a student taking a real interest in science and math. We are also happy to hear of Williamâ(TM)s interest in 3D solar cells. We encourage him to contact the Georgia Tech Research Institute so he may be connected with our lead researcher (Dr. Jud Ready), who would love for him to visit our laboratories to see how we create our 3D solar cells. Who knows â" maybe William can contribute to our groundbreaking work.

Thank you for sharing this very interesting story. There is, however, a clarification that needs to be added. The 3D solar cell was invented several years ago at the Georgia Tech Research Institute by our team of world-class scientists and engineers. The Georgia Tech Research Institute http://www.gtri.gatech.edu/ has been making 3D solar cell prototypes of this design since 2004. You can read about the work in our April 2007 news release online at http://www.gtri.gatech.edu/casestudy/3d-solar-cells-boost-efficiency. Our work has patents pending in the US and abroad. We have also published our research widely in an number of highly regarded research journals including the Journal of Applied Physics, Journal of Materials and Carbon. The 3D Solar Cell has the potential to be breakthrough in the solar industry. The global and exclusive license to the 3D Solar Cell intellectual property is held by IP2BIZ in Atlanta http://www.ip2biz.com/Offerings/ProofCoProjects.a... The license is currently for sale to any firm that can further develop, manufacture and bring it to market. It is wonderful to see a student taking a real interest in science and math. We are also happy to hear of Williamâ(TM)s interest in 3D solar cells. We encourage him to contact the Georgia Tech Research Institute so he may be connected with our lead researcher (Dr. Jud Ready), who would love for him to visit our laboratories to see how we create our 3D solar cells. Who knows â" maybe William can contribute to our groundbreaking work.

It seemed rather familiar to me, so a quick google search came up with a similar article from last year.
Additionally, there is an Australian company that is marketing a SolarCube, which looks like it uses conventional lenses to produce the same effect. The initial design was featured on the New Inventors in 2005

I'm thinking this boy is damn good a plagiarizing more than anything else. http://www.wipo.int/pctdb/en/fetch.jsp?LANG=ENG&DBSELECT=PCT&SERVER_TYPE=19-10&SORT=41238067-KEY&TYPE_FIELD=256&IDB=0&IDOC=1349795&C=10&ELEMENT_SET=B&RESULT=1&TOTAL=1&START=1&DISP=25&FORM=SEP-0/HITNUM,B-ENG,DP,MC,AN,PA,ABSUM-ENG&SEARCH_IA=US2006007290&QUERY=(WO%2Fwo2007040594)+ http://www.ip2biz.com/Offerings/ProofCoProjects.asp#ThreeDSolarCells http://www.gatech.edu/newsroom/release.html?id=1337

I'm guessing a reporter saw 500% and accidentally read it as 500x. Even a 500% (5x) increase from the current ~10% efficiency we have now would be huge, but with the recently coined Photovoltaic Moore's Law, I'd believe it. Maybe this is done by several layers each catching 10% (or less) of the energy?

The effective surface area of an object's three-dimensional "face" vastly exceeds the surface area of another object's two-dimensional face. This means you can actually absorb more of the sun's light. However, only so much light shines in any given area, and it's still a ray from above, so shadows should start to affect this negatively at a certain point, so while this could certainly give a boost, it's not going to do much (certainly not 500x!).

I could have sworn I read something about 3-d solar panels a while ago, but nobody else seems to have. There seem to be tons of hits searching for 3-d solar cell, many of which are from 2007.

Here's some more info about 3D cells (other than the 3 powerpoint printouts in the background of the kid's headshot:
http://www.gatech.edu/newsroom/release.html?id=1337

You need to understand the difference between being a sceptic and being a dick. Asking people for citations of personal observation falls squarely into the latter category. Nevertheless, I shall humour you just this once:

Here is an example of the rate of patents being used as a surrogate for rate of innovaction

This is something I found through a few minutes googling, something you could've done if you were actually interested in finding out instead of trying to score points by demanding citations of peoples personal observation.

You are a total cockmuncher. You obviously consider yourself clever for 'questioning' things without any regard for the quality of your questsion. You actually illustrate the point quite nicely: you measure your intellectualism by gross output rather than quality, and end up coming across as a nitpicking little shit instead of a sharp minded critic.

If I have to hit more than one button per character that's going to slow me down a lot

No it won't. You hit all the buttons for the character simultaneously, not sequentially. Experts (such as the one I'm about to mention below) can type at least on a Twiddler2 as they can on a QWERTY.

what about using vi (or any other pro editor)?

Thad Starner, a pioneer of wearable computing (and on the left in the picture), practically lives in EMACS and uses a Twiddler2 to do so.

The Witty worm was specifically targeting a US Military instiution's intrusion detection systems. Do you have any comments on this incident?

Patents are here to allow the inventor to have a temporary monopoly on their idea as to give them enough time to make money on it.

If no one can make any money, why should a company innovate? The system breaks down when patent trolls manage to get stupid patents pushed through the system....or patents that probably should have expired....or overly broad patents.

If one has to worry about selling their new innovation because their afraid that it might infringe on some unknown patents, that stifles innovation. Saying that things have been fine for the last 200 years so why change it is an example of complacency and lack of innovation. Personally I think the idea of the hand print on the laptop is an interesting idea, and assuming there is no prior inventor, they should hold the patent on this....but I don't know if they should hold the patent for 20 years... See the link below for some information on patents: http://www.library.gatech.edu/search_locate/techres/patentfacts.htm

I don't think so... Ben Zinn

The summary could at least link to the paper. But then again, if we can't expect people to RTFA, I highly doubt anyone is going to RTFP...

Here is the paper describing the method: http://www2.isye.gatech.edu/people/faculty/Joel_Sokol/ncaa.pdf

There also is a group investigating this at Georgia Tech: http://www.physics.gatech.edu/npeg/index.html (site has a halfway-decent FAQ for those not familiar with graphene).

I met one of the students from the GT group recently and he mentioned the scotch tape solution and said he said his lab were investigating how to manufacture the material practically. For all it's promise, I got the impression that two or three major breakthroughs were needed to make it viable. It's definitely a few years away. (I mean, they're not even up to duct tape yet!)

Yeah, cause no one uses FTP anymore, right?

Why do I get the feeling that this was not just any bunny

...and the fact that their wing sweep angle in relation to the tip of the nose is way too low to even approach supersonic speeds. You have to be below the mach angle in order to stay away from Mach drag divergence and the resulting huge increase in drag. Check out this for more info.

The bank documents are up at http://www.prism.gatech.edu/~mflaschen3/banned/julius-baer-stalking.zip . Enjoy (or at least piss JB off).

I submitted this yesterday, it was probably already in the firehose. I saw it at New Scientist, where I followed some links to Professor Wang's press release.

Yes, that's really his name. Here is his research group's home page.

-mcgrew

Perhaps:
Pluggable WebServer
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fac/mark.guzdial/squeak/pws/
Still quite obscure..

Yup, you guessed it!

Interesting that someone has ported it to Windows. Is it being used for civil engineering applications or something else?

Yes, it's being used for civil engineering. And not only does it run on Windows, but my job is to port it to 64-bit.

The traveling salesman problem wasn't meant to be tested in real life.

Actually, travelling salesman solvers are used in all kinds of real world applications.

Some examples can be found here: http://www.tsp.gatech.edu/apps/index.html

A TSP solver on google maps would be useful to some people (such as travelling salesmen ;) )

I could imagine tourists using such a function to plan a route around all the sights they want to see

It could also be used by anyone who needs to make several deliveries

Hmm, like they say, there's no such thing as a free lunch. The article about Iceland does mention that the whole place smells of sulfur, but that's because it just pours out of the ground in big, hot, bubbly, stinky mud pits. It's already there anyway. I suppose once you tap the ground and really get the juices flowing, the sulfur could get out of hand. Can you imagine being the only one in your group of friends to work in such a place? So you're all out at a bar, and you're the one guy who reeks from head to toe like a rancid fart.. green doesn't always mean clean. =]

I'm not a huge fan of hydroelectric dams anyway. People upstream and downstream always seem to get completely screwed, and then the salt water from the ocean comes upstream and starts killing everything.. I wonder if it's worth it. Mm, article says basically the same stuff. Yep, no free lunch.

It seems like any time you capture natural energy from the earth, there will be consequences to toying with million-year-old natural balances. At least with nuclear, the fuel wasn't doing anything useful. Tidal, wind, and solar seem pretty green, but these are all part of the earth once implemented, whereas a nuclear reactor in the basement of an apartment building isn't part of anything. No fish get near it, no birds, no volcanoes, etc. The isolation factor, in my mind, does outweigh a bit of the dirtiness of it.

Personally, I'm kind of cheering for space solar power. The light is so pure and powerful in space, it seems a no brainer. Here's just one site I found on the subject, but I can't vouch for it.. it will give an idea though. http://www.sspi.gatech.edu/

Here is the link to the real article at the Georgia Institute of Technology entitled Bee Strategy Helps Servers Run More Sweetly.

It's a shame that /. posted that link from a spammer instead. That spammer always copies a story 1 - 3 months after it was fresh. Probably has something to do with Google-jamming.

>>Since I'm now the only person working on this code, there's no practical way to report the situation confidentially.
Behold:
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~yael/ringsig-book.pdf
This would allow you to leak that without reveling that you were anyone but a company person.

"Since I'm now the only person working on this code"
But of course they would immediately suspect you,

couldn't prove it though.
You'd also need the public keys of the employees.

Glad to see for once that GA Tech's research is in the news. We host one of only 2 Rotorcraft Centers of Excellence in the nation right now, which may be why there haven't been so many advances in the area compared to other technologies. Anyways, we'd all been wondering what keeps Feron around, since he's a notoriously worthless/frustrating professor. The current Flight Dynamics class has the following (uncurved) grade distribution: http://www.ae.gatech.edu/people/eferon/AE3521/quizstat.jpg Sort of looks like a middle finger, no?

There's a growing trend in math (and maybe other disciplines, for all I know) away from non-free publishing.

Prominent mathematicians have been complaining for years (more links here) about overpriced journals, and entire editorial boards of some journals have resigned in protest (see a list of mass resignations and similar changes here). There are now plenty of entirely free journals in combinatorics, topology, and other fields, and pretty much everything that gets published these days is either available on the author's website or on the arXiv.

So modern research tends to be free, but what about all the books you need to read before you understand this research? Sure, a copy of Rudin may be expensive and there's not much we can do about that, but maybe you can learn from the free analysis course notes at MIT's OCW site. You complain that EGA is out of print, but basically everything Grothendieck wrote is available for free, and you can even get them along with tons of other old French publications through NUMDAM. (There's even a project to transcribe SGA into LaTeX.) Lots of other books are free to download legally (and this is by no means a complete list), even though many are commercially published as well.

Finally, you can complain all you want about university tuition, but I really doubt that free tuition is going to open up mathematics to the masses. Ultimately the very top students who can't afford it are getting scholarships and grants to cover their education (and I do know some people who got free rides at Princeton because they couldn't afford it -- that school is definitely more generous than most), and since most other people couldn't get into Princeton anyway the tuition is never even an issue for them. The best way to make mathematics more accessible is to give everyone access to free textbooks and current research, and the "marxist university professors" you deride have been gradually moving in that direction for years now.

By the way, what do you think has been done to damage the Princeton math department's reputation? Whatever you think Shapiro and Tilghman have done to the university, nobody in their right mind would deny that it's one of the top few in the world and I doubt most people would openly proclaim any one department to be the best anyway.

The first project they discuss is using everyone's existing access points to effectively form a municipal wifi network. The paper linked from the article talks a lot about the security concerns, etc. It's an interesting concept, and I've thought about trying to use the fairly dense wifi network access outdoors in an effort to move data (GPS, etc) between my vehicle and my home.

However, based on my experience with wifi, there seem to be one major problem here: interference effects. I already have problems that I can see about 6 different access points from my desk... on four different networks and SSIDs. The 802.11 spec only allows for three non-overlapping channels (in the US frequency bands, anyway). This problem gets worse as the capacity utilization factor approaches 100%, as it's more and more likely that two packets will happen to collide. This might be a huge problem for this kind of large-scale wifi, as 802.11b/g isn't really designed to operate well when you can see so many APs at once.

In any case, I wonder if they're also overestimating the infrastructure deployment costs. One of the most amazing things to me was how, within a decade, everyone suddenly had wireless in their home and workplace. In fact, in urban areas, it wouldn't surprise me if there were 1 private access point for every 10 or 20 people. People aren't afraid to pay to get cool technology -- although it's a bit different when the government does it.

--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.

There's a professor in my building who works on constructing spatio-temporal representations of information from 2D images that allow you to see a city evolve through time. Not sure if all their demos are on the website, but the ones I've seen are pretty ridiculous. http://www.cc.gatech.edu/4d-cities/dhtml/index.html

you obviously arent from Georgia Tech. Although grade inflation is a problem in most places I dont think it is so there. The grading system is a lot tougher than the other colleges including Caltech. Ofcourse there are arguments both for and against that, which can be found at http://users.ece.gatech.edu/~mleach/myturn/makingthegrade.html and the students response http://users.ece.gatech.edu/~mleach/myturn/MyTurn2/MyTurn2.htm.

you obviously arent from Georgia Tech. Although grade inflation is a problem in most places I dont think it is so there. The grading system is a lot tougher than the other colleges including Caltech. Ofcourse there are arguments both for and against that, which can be found at http://users.ece.gatech.edu/~mleach/myturn/makingthegrade.html and the students response http://users.ece.gatech.edu/~mleach/myturn/MyTurn2/MyTurn2.htm.

The great advantage of space solar power, which is at geosynchronous orbit, is that it is in sunlight 24/7. Ground solar has the fundamental problem that even at good sites, sunshine can be collected only 25-30% of the day. Then what if its cloudy? This is discussed in the report. The massive quantities of utility scale power cannot be economically stored overnight or possibly for many days. Space solar is baseload, like coal or nuclear - 24/7 power - doesn't need storage. also check http://www.sspi.gatech.edu/

while the wall street weenies, the lawyers and the "environmental education" majors held as paragons of success?

From the article: "one popular use will be to load textbooks at 25 cents or so each on the laptops, which has a high-resolution screen for easy reading."

WHAT???? - What happened to the books at project gutenberg - http://www.gutenberg.org/ - Wikibooks at http://wikibooks.org/ from the Wikimedia project created with the mission to create a free collection of open-content textbooks.

http://www.math.gatech.edu/~cain/textbooks/onlinebooks.html- Myriads of Math Books!

To quote from the last site: "The writing of textbooks and making them freely available on the web is an idea whose time has arrived"

Please oh please - don't tell me they are attempting to monetize the OLPC by selling textbooks.

There is quality material out there - Make sure the OLPC's come with a comprehensive list of resources where to get quality textbooks and other educational material.

E.

This is quite wrong. Firstly, there is a large body of SF that does satisfy literary standards. Gene Wolfe and Ursula Le Guin leap to my mind. See here for a page of links to SF collections, and review and critical journals. Or read The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction.

when on reads a passage there is but on interpretation, and if one does not interpret the passage as such, and bubble in the correct answer, you do not graduate.

This is also quite wrong. Ironically, it's often true of most plot-driven SF, but the "Literature" you are speaking of is valued exactly because it says many, sometimes contradictory, things at once. There are many ways to interpret a Shakespeare play, for instance, and no one can say one is "valid" and another is not. If you can make a case for your position, you WILL graduate.

Ha, yes, I dug out me old post on it! Here is the tower launch archive, from a few years back, which I was pointed to by Carlton Meyer, the guy responsible for the skyramp website. He and I were thinking along the same lines - how hard would it be to build a mountain to reach space? Obviously not literally, but you get the idea. Once you are past the 11km mark, you jump out of the troposphere. I'll quote one of the responses to my long ago post here:

I also went ahead and did some quick math. 1 m/s/s acceleration over 11 km is not enough:

s = s(0) + v(0)*t + 0.5*a*t^2, where s(0)=0 and v(0) = 0 so:
t = ((2*s)/a)^0.5 = 148 seconds to traverse the 11 km

v = v(0) + a*t = 0 + 1 m/s/s * 148 s = 148 m/s = 331 mph
Woefully short of escape velocity.

So then I tried 1 G and got 1040 mph, which still doesn't cut it. Next I went for 5 G's, which is on the order of what astronauts experience during a launch, and that gave me 2,326 mph. It's still not escape velocity, but surprisingly enough, it is sufficient kinetic energy to loft an object to a height of 22,000 miles, or the altitude of a geosynchronous orbit. Unfortunately, when it gets there it doesn't have sufficient tangetial velocity to stay there, so it follows a funny elliptical path 22,000 miles to the hard ground. I ran out of scratch paper before I could quantify that, however. I did have one line left to note that a 1000 kg payload accellerating at 5 G's requires 2.4 MW of power, not accounting for losses, which is one capability we do easily have.

Tack on some engines which engage after launch and you have a winner!

As for Gs, nn important question is, how fast can we accelerate? Accelerations of short duration (under perhaps 200 milliseconds) do not involve significant fluid shifts within the body, nor do they involve the various reflex responses that can affect responses to longer duration acceleration. Depending on the time that is spend under high acceleration, people can withstand extreme g-foreces. Depending on the individual's "g-tolerance" the oxygen supply to the head stops completely at 5 to 6 g resulting in unconsciousness, G-LOC. 4 is probably okay for small time periods.

The best part about it is the economy involved. Once you get past the engineering of making sure the whole thing doesn't fall down, you could probably put it all in place for around 4 to 5 billion, a quarter of NASAs annual budget.

The peroxalate nanoparticles have several attractive properties for in vivo imaging, such as tunable wavelength emission (460-630 nm), nanomolar sensitivity for hydrogen peroxide and excellent specificity for hydrogen peroxide over other reactive oxygen species.

Sorry... Slashdot messed up my links

Printed RFIDs

Thad Starner is a Borg

Cheers!