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There's enough math and computational expertise required in advanced economics to keep any math geek satisfied. It's not a coincidence that large numbers of Physics PhD's are working on Wall Street these days. The cookbook economics you hear on the tube is not the economics being done in research today; it's the economics that politicians and TV newshosts can understand, and communicate in soundbites.

As you alluded, much of basic Econ can be described as a bunch of rules-of-thumb and ad hoc arguments, of the sort, "If we ignore all these things here, and assume that they are constant, we can pretend that this here happens." The problem is that economic systems are complex systems (analogous to the brain's neural network), and can't be modeled well using "billiard ball" physics models. Until recently the only alternative has been to use statistical, "gas law" models and other simplifications of the systems.

Example: a small town may have 1000 citizens, 200 businesses, and perhaps 500 formal and informal groups/organizations. Each of those individuals and organizations has over 1000 'inputs' and 1000 'outputs' - relations with each other and outside entities, that may be considered as economic factors. (Relations may be financial or other.) You have a social network with something like 10^13 relations/interconnections. And that's just a small town or neighborhood.

I'm embarking on a PhD in Econ shortly, after many years in computing, and my math skills are being stretched like they haven't in a long time. Differential equations is a prerequisite for several of the introductory graduate level courses, along with linear algebra and a bunch of statistics and game theory. Thomas Bayes' much appreciated Bayesian Theorem probability is a tool of economists. Vilfredo Pareto (Pareto-optimal" game outcomes) was an economist. Many elements of modern statistics, probability and game theory were developed by economists.

The problem faced by economists has been not that it was too simple, but that the systems under study have been too complex to delve into very deeply until both the mathematical tools and the computational power became available. It was necessary to drastically simplify the models in order to get any sense at all. And, of course, there is a strong philosophical and social-studies thread throughout economics.

Nowadays there is a strong thrust into new approaches to Economics, including complex adaptive systems, agent based systems, Neuroeconomics, Experimental Economics (vis. Vernon Smith, 2002 Bank of Sweden "Nobel" and social network economics.

Often in addition to training and/or experience in biology, physics, systems theory and other disciplines, these approaches require a good understanding of differential equations, comfort in manipulating long chains of partial derivatives, and working with multi-layered irregular networks. Interestingly, even fluid dynamics equations are applicable in some cases.

I don't know if you've ever eaten insects or other creepy crawlies, but they are actually quite tasty!

LS

Does Chris Langton know about this? It appears that his cellular automata self-reproduction structures may have been right on the money!

Useful tool: http://www.complex.iastate.edu/information/downloa d/Trend/examples/langton.html

I believe it was from Stalin. And I think it's referenced in one of Orwell's books.

Yeah, the originator was from Iowa State not U of Houston.

Us cyclone fans do crazy things like that! :)

Accoring to this site from the university where he did his work, Atanasoff is the inventor of the digital electronic computer:

On October 19, 1973, US Federal Judge Earl R. Larson signed his decision following a lengthy court trial which declared the ENIAC patent of Mauchly and Eckert invalid and named Atanasoff the inventor of the electronic digital computer -- the Atanasoff-Berry Computer or the ABC.

Intrabody Signalling 1995

Can touch this 1996

What someone needs to do is set up a site where people can help fight this crap by supplying references to prior art for bogus patents.

According to the Smithsonian, U.S. Patent Office, U.S. Courts and many others, the honor goes to John Victor Atanasoff

According to the Smithsonian, U.S. Patent Office, U.S. Courts and many others, the honor goes to John Victor Atanasoff

The ABC Computer at Iowa State University, by John Antasoff and Clifford Berry.

• Harvard Mark 1 (1939 - 1944) - semi-programmable electromechanical computing machine.
• Zuse Z3 (1938-1941) - small general purpose relay computer. Good architecture, but limited by relay speeds to a 5Hz (yes, Hz) clock. First floating point unit. No jump instruction, due to a low budget. The later Z4 (1945-1949) had jumps and conditional branches.
• Atanasoff-Berry (1937-1942) Programmable, electronic arithmetic, binary, but memory was a rotating drum of capacitors.
• Colossus (1944?) Special-purpose key-testing machine.
• ENIAC (1943-1946) - plugboard-programmed tube machine. No general purpose memory, just registers. Tube ALU.
• IBM 603 Electronic Multiplier (1946) - first commercial electronic computing product. Punched card I/O, not truly programmable, but electronic multiplication and division.

Most of these machines had electronic arithmetic units. The big problem was memory. There were no good memory technologies yet, and none of those machines had much memory. They all basically had a few registers, like a calculator. Each bit of memory required a relay, a tube, or a discrite capacitor and switchgear.

Finally, the memory problem was solved. EDVAC, (1947-1952), had 1K of mercury-tank delay line memory. This was a lousy main memory technology (you had to wait for the word you wanted to come around, like a disk), but allowed reasonable memory sizes. It was clunky, but at last, there was memory.

With the memory problem partially solved, various groups started building machines. Pilot ACE, ACE, and IAS date from this period.

The UNIVAC I (1948-1951) had it all - memory (1K words, in mercury tanks), console, tape drives, console typewriter, programmability, electronic arithmetic, a reasonable instruction set, and self-checking. It was built, sold, and used. UNIVAC I was the first of these machines that a modern programmer would consider usable.

[off-topic]

I suppose it depends on whether you accept a ruling by the United States District Court, District of Minnesota, Fourth Division or not. The trial, "declared the ENIAC patent of Mauchly and Eckert invalid and named Atanasoff the inventor of the electronic digital computer...." If I remember correctly, the judge stopped just short of accusing Mauchly of blatantly copying Atanasoff's ideas in his final decision.

The book I referred to in my original post does a very thorough job of explaining the details. You could only gather more by reading the court decision itself, along with all of the evidence presented during the trial.

The article mentions ENIAC, but not the Atanasoff-Berry Computer which pre-dated it, and which ENIAC was largely based upon.

For more information, read "Atanasoff: Forgotten Father of the Computer".

Yes, I saw that one. We are not talking about crosswalks, so it's pretty much entirely irrelevant.

The FHWA did sponsor a study on the subject, but the results do not seem to be published on the web. Nor do I see anyone referencing that study in support of the safety benefits of raised reflective pavement markings, as they are sometimes called.

This 1999 presentation considers the question, and decides that it is not adequately addressed by then-current research. It states:

- some studies have indicated an increase in crashes - possibly because drivers tend to drive faster when presented a clear delineation of the roadway edge

- Finland - "reflector posts on narrow, curvy, and hilly roads can significantly increase driving speeds and accidents in darkness"

- New Jersey - statistically significant reduction for various night time crashes

- Ohio - "a dollar spent on raised reflective highway markers has returned $6.50 in savings due to accident reduction"

No actual sources for those quotes are provided. My suspicion, based on seeing a few similar unsubstantiated claims of various levels of credibility, is that the NJ and OH quotes may well be counting reduction in "drift off the road" accidents; and that either the roads in question are of a nature that encourages that type of accident over all others (ie. they don't see much traffic or other hazards), or they're just ignoring other types of crashes.

So for now, I will continue to believe that Bott's Dots probably do more harm than good.

John Vincent Atanasoff was credited with the invention of the computer, following a lengthy court battle, built 1939 to 1942, predating the Colossus by at least one year. The Z3 was begun the year before the ABC was finished per this page, so if the court decision is to be believed, America gets credit for the computer.

One of the other guys hosts it, so I can't change anything, but all the appropriate files are here.

With a bit of Lex and Yacc, it should be pretty simple to come up with a C++ variant in any given language. When I was in college, some friends of mine and I wrote a compiler in ebonics, called Eubonicode. Granted, I don't know how well lex/yacc cover non-ascii character sets, but it wouldn't be hard to whip up a compiler for a French, Spanish, or German version of C++.

The maintainer, steel300 is great and tries to satisfy as many requests as possible.

More information
Link to the patch and ebuild

Regardless of how I feel about this particular app, Doug's a great guy - I took a networking class from him at ISU a few years ago.

Regardless of how I feel about this particular app, Doug's a great guy - I took a networking class from him at ISU a few years ago.

Please direct all fan mail to the head of Palisade, Doug Jacobson. dougj@iastate.edu

Check out his senate testimony(Google Cache). This guy makes a living spooking the spooks.

I normally don't use a laptop in class, as most of my coursework (Electrical Engineering) requires the good ol' pencil and paper. But in my singular business class, I take notes on it and of course, browse /.

However, it is nice to go to the library or sit outside, do some homework, and google things on the fly.

B and M got a Nobel Prize the following year and the field turned into a fevered frenzy in making new discoveries. Once you cracked the concept it was easy to get started which meant that an entire world started at more or less the same starting point.

At this insane tempo nobody had the time to wait for Nature, Science, PhysRevB or the like to run the entire peer review process and (this is the first point I am building up to): much of the publication process was basically short circuited.

People realised that the Berkeley-Stanford environment had an advantage in circulating preprints but it was soon realised it amounted to an unfair advantage. And here is my second point: it was the Physics community that deciced it was unfair and also did something with it.

The result was a zine called High Tc Update that listed title and authors of upcoming publications as well as highlights of some submissions. And it was amazingly effective, cutting lead time with months, allowing for an even higher tempo.

So it has been done and can be done and I applaud Nature for staying ahead of the curverather than waiting to be outdated like the music industry.

Regarding the Independent Game Festival contest, I actually know and work with the guys who worked on Treefort Wars - one of the games accepted into the finalists - beating out teams from DigiPen and FullSail, among others.

We're all from Iowa State University (I know, a heavy-hitter in the short list of universities that have a game development curriculum ::wink::), and it actually was their success in the festival that sparked a small movement in our computer science and art departments to create the first (possibly, of many?) game development course. Before then, during which Treefort Wars was being developed, it was simply an independent study course overseen by a professor. Now.. well, it's still basically a rather independent study course, but it's much more formalized. As a result of Treefort, we may get funding for studio space, giving artists and programmers a permanent meeting/work place.

In case you haven't guessed, I'm also in this afformentioned class, but our design is still in its infancy. However, thanks to the effort put forth by the Treefort Wars team, Iowa State might just turn a few heads in the coming years when it comes to universities who are friendly to us programmers who don't necessarily wish to deal with TPS reports on a daily basis.

I *highly* recommend to anyone interested in playing independently-designed games: go to the Treefort Wars website and take a look. It really is quite astonishing what non-professionals can do. Kudos to the ISU team, and (I suppose) to all the finalists!

So they a) lived there and b) gave the place its name. Seems like a good enough pair of reasons to call it an "Aztec site" to me. Would you prefer "mysterious Teotihuacan culture" on all references?

Actually, they didn't live there. They lived nearby, and considered the enormous ruins a holy site. They thought that that city was where humans came into being ("Teotihuacan" means "City of the Gods" in the Aztec language, Nahuatl.) In the literature, it really is referred to as a Mysterious Teotihuacan Culture (also called "Toltec" because this is what the Aztec called the Mysterious Teotihuacano Culture.) They had an enormous empire, conquering and trading with groups as far as 1500 km to the south, and Teotihuacan was the FIRST major urban center in the New World. It was enormous, with big, government-issue apartment complexes, sewage systems, and public market places.

Aztecs thought it a high compliment to be considered Toltec-ish, since when they established themselves in the area a thousand years after the place had peaked they claimed legitimacy by claiming to be at least the spiritual descendents of the Toltec (hey, look, they were fierce warriors and so are we!) even though they and everyone else acknowledged that they were entirely different peoples.

And this really is just about the extent of what we do know about the truly Mysterious Teotihuacano Culture (with some other random speculations about how they came to be the only big culture in the New World without someone like a king, how and why the city of hundreds of thousands came to be burned to the ground and abandoned within about 50 years, et cetera.) We know a hell of a lot about the Aztec. They were separated by time, space and culture. Saying 'what's the difference' between Aztec and Teotihuacano is like saying 'what's the difference' between you and an Ancient Greek.

Content-delivery ain't what it used to be. Joe Bob Basement Studio can put his mp3's in the same pipeline that Mega-Record Pimp Corp can.

The difference is, whether people will pay attention to you or not - not whether they -can- through whatever means are available, but whether they will.

At ampfea.org we've been gathering together, as a crew of Artists, to present a united front and stable base of operations for use by our individual members to use for promoting their artistic efforts.

This is the future. There's no -need- any more for media giants banded together to share/consume resources for promotion, there is now the need for Content Producers to cut through the dreck and get good material online, and deliverable. It costs nothing to promote an .mp3 track these days, far and wide, to all and sundry, and it can be done very, very, effectively.

I see the day when those 80's Golden Dreams of media control in the hands of the people is actually feasible. Lets hope we avoid some of those other predictions ...

"superconductors, for example, have revolutionized sensor technology for medical scanners and such (though we still don't have them for power lines)"

Where I live we do.

Back in college, I once told my (at the time, future) roommate how to recursively remove the "dot files" and "dot file directories" in a subdirectory under his home directory, with "rm -rf .*". Under most modern Unices, this isn't an issue. Under the old SVR4 system we were on, it globbed ".." and recursively removed that directory (his home directory) also.

Oops.

Part of the irony of this is what the SunOS 4.x man page had to say about this behavior: (emphasis added)

WARNING

It is forbidden to remove the file `..' to avoid the antisocial consequences of inadvertently doing something like `rm -r .*'.

I guess someone in BSD or SunOS land committed the same boo-boo. I consulted the above man-page after the incident had happened, since I had accounts both on an AT&T StarServer and a Sparc 2.

It appears that this page holds a man page similar to the one on the AT&T box. Notice that it says: "It is an error to specify . (dot) or .. (dot dot) as the final path name component of file, although these entries may be removed with the -r or -R flags."

Sorry... I gotta call bullsh!t on this one. Electron microscopy can not give you "real-time" images. The cells have to be fixed thus dead thus not real time.

Shows a mounted sample on the stage

Likewise, I do not believe that Bausch & Lomb makes EM equipment either.

Now, I may be wrong... if so, no offense taken, but this just seems incorrect to me.

Ac

Also we should mention John Atanasoff, which together with Clifford Berry built the first electronic digital computer
Here is his biography
And some more info and links here
And of course John Atanasoff is Bulgarian :)

Oh, you mean a room like this old beast we've got in our lab?

If it was "built at the same time during the second world war," then they weren't built any sooner than 1939. If they weren't built any sooner than 1939, then one John Vincent Atanasoff had been working on a computer for two years. According to this page, the Colussus was built in 1943-1945, which means it was started a year after the Atanasoff-Berry Computer was finished.

And before anyone brings up the ENIAC, Honeywell Inc. vs. Sperry Rand Corp. overturned the patent due to prior art from the ABC.

Tragically, both the Colussus and Atanasoff-Berry computer have been destroyed. The Colussus because it was top secret, and the Atanasoff-Berry because Atanasoff was convinced the standard door size was 36", when they're actually 33". It was dismantled to free up office space.

Here's a bit more regarding ITunes and patents. Even "double click" is considered an invention and was issued a U.S. patent. It doesn't matter if you don't agree. One of the reasons for computers rapid growth is that no one had a patent on them as the court ruled Dr. Atanasoff was clearly the inventor and he claimed no patent.

Where I work we got this thing called the "Graphics station 12" which was like 6 2U rackmounted Linux boxes running as a graphics cluster. It was so useless that we unracked the machines and set them up as workstations (dual 1ghz Xeons)

Apperantly they were all diffrent inside, and had signs of manual re-wireing. We may very well have the only one in existance :P

...thanks to a nearly $500,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Justice, Jacobson and several ISU colleagues are poised to establish the nation's first-of-its-kind cyber defense laboratory. In short, they're ready to build their own virtual battlefield...

ISU is launching a similar project. I wonder if they will connect their non-outside connected qwasi internets?

http://www.iastate.edu/~nscentral/releases/03/oct/ cptrsecurity.shtml

Iowa State has a similar project funded with a $500,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Justice.
Iowa State Computer Security Lab

The ~NOLs are inventions of the Naval Ordinance Lab, curiously located out there in the corn fields; famously NiTiNOL and TerFeNOL, not exactly the the most overwhelmingly original names, they do sound techy.

The "latest" material, terfenol, exploits the giant magnetostrictive effect, which sounds even more brand new, but it isn't, having been discovered in the 1840s.

The high strain versions of this (and the thermally actuated "shape memory alloys") were developed in the 1940s for use in high powered sonar. They are generally used as replacements for voice coils and for the same reason. If you want to actuate your domestic structure, you can use a big one and keep it cool with LN2.

These materials are far too old to be covered by existing patents, so they're fabricated all over the world. Indeed, chinese manufacturers are in production.

Check google. I used that to find this site here in Iowa.

Bullshit. My mentioning floods wasn't an attempt to "proove" anything in itself, it was just an example for damages caused by global warming. That GW does cause increased flooding is something most
experts
on climate
will
tell you.

The dynamics of heat/mass transfer on the globe are far from trivial, and it should not be too surprising that some mechanisms that moderate the extent of trends and changes are part of the deal.

If the poles get warm enough on the surface (atmosphere gets warm enough) to melt significant quantities of ice, the slow deep-water currents that are largely driven by density gradients from saline water will be weakened, with indications that surface (atmosphere) warming would be suppressed. Whether such a "regulation" system is stable against a significant spike in CO2 concentrations remains to be seen, I guess.

Some references here.

ack, I meant the 917.

I agree that Iowa may not be the most glamorous state, but you have to give our Universities a little credit. Iowa State University is a leading school for engineering and sciences. Iowa State is the birthplace of Computer Science, not some "no name school in Iowa". The first digital computer, the ABC or Atanasoff Berry Computer, was invented there after all, and its design concepts were used in the first programmable computer, the Eniac (not invented there).

Iowa State is also leading the way with VR technologies such as the Cave (or C6) technologies the Army and many other universities have today. It is a current ISU professor that invented the techology, not while she was at Iowa State, but she is a professor there in charge of the technology now.

And to give another of Iowa's universities some credit, the University of Iowa is one of the top medical schools in the states. However, I don't know as much about that school since I am a tech person, not a med person.

Yes, as a CS graduate of ISU I may be a little biased, but I get sick of everyone stereotyping Iowa's universities because they weren't worldy enough to ever travel to Iowa and visit any of its several universities (ISU, UofI, UNI, Drake, ...) to straighten out the stereotypes they have of the state from what they saw in The Bridges of Madison County.

tractor

trailer.

In case you're confused, this is called a "truck" or "lorry" or "arctic" (as in "articulated vehicle").

Explain how the Millennium Falcon made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs then. ;-P

Ooops! The link for the Atanasoff Berry Computer is really http://www.cs.iastate.edu/jva/jva-archive.shtml.

Shameless plug for my alma mater: Go Team PrISUm!

"[snip a paragraph of text] Are you sure? This is a great program! If you're certain that you don't want our software, click "Yes" to confirm that you don't want it installed. Click "No" if you've changed your mind!". I almost clicked "No" the second time; it was only after reading the (very!) fine print that I realized what I would've been agreeing to.

Well, it wouldn't have mattered. You eventualy would have gotten one of the Microsoft ActiveX install diologs. They look like this. If unless you click yes on one of those, it won't install.

Having more then a 'yes' button stopping you would be a good idea.

The USB group has about 900 members. I don't really know how they decide things, but you can't really blame intel and Microsoft for this.

I was going to post these all on a seperate line, but slashdot came up with this totaly resonable error: Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 18.5).

Okay, now I got Your comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition. Comment aborted.

Fuck slashdot and it's insipid lameness filter.

anyway, the list is here. There are hundreds of members. I recognize lots of american companies and see lots of asian looking ones. Who knows.