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"It offers $20 billion a year in hard Federal dollars every year for the next four years, to build an economy for the 21st century, to invest in new roads and bridges, and streets and rail systems, to develop high-speed rail and a national fiber optic network, to develop new environmental technologies to clean our waters and our air, and to recycle more of our solid wastes. In short, to do those things which we are not doing today."
Bill Clinton June 22, 1992 Campaign Speech

I remember hearing about possibly laying fiber as part of an interstate highway bill. But the plan was way too ambitious since it morphed into maintaining the equipment and doing the last mile connections, etc.. It would have put the Fed as a telecom competitor (and who would want the govt running telecom?).

Pres. Clinton created the National Information Infrastructure Initiative by Executive Order 12864. It was spurred on by then Sen. Gore in his High Performance Computing Act of 1991.

Kent Law Review
The Age of Clinton: America in the 1990s

RRK

It would be 'ethical' to find a population that's already deficient, then supplement half of them.

Okay, let me give you a few cites so that you know where I'm coming from.

https://sciencebasedmedicine.o...

There was a time when we had a pretty awful approach to medical experimentatino on humans. The Tuskegee syphilis experiment is one of the worst examples. There was another STD experiment called the Guatamalan syphilis Experiment. And by the way, given the nature of the experiments, good luck in getting cooperation from dark pigmented people as they have a well earned distrust of medical experimentation. And Black women in northern climates are probably the number one risk group.

You will probably really stand up for the experiments on children during the mid-1960's At the Willwbrook State School in Staten Island, a school for the mentally deficient, they intentionally injected children with Hepatitis in order to see if Gamma Globulin could cure it. That's pretty sweet and kindly.

http://ethics.iit.edu/eelibrar...

Anyhow, they rationalized it by declaring that since so many of the children became infected with Hep, it wasn't a big deal. Oddly enough, it was never made clear why they didn't test Gamma Globulin on the children who already contracted hepatitis.

In 1948 REsearchers gave over 800 pregnant women "vitamin drinks" that contained radioactive iron to examine the placental/ mother's blood transfer. At the Massachusetts based Walter E. Fernald State School, the AEC and Quaker Oats performed a experiment of given them oatmeal with radioactive Calcium in it to track digestion of Calcium. The students were told they were joining a science club.

There are a lot more, but when these abuses - and I seriously hope you would also consider them abuses, a lot of ethical concerns, and eventually ethics committees and regulations came into existence.

While there might be some clandestine stuff still going on, any program such as one that is aimed at studying autism causes is going to be closely studied for three reasons. One is that it's an obvious one, to possibly help children avoid becoming autistic. The second one is that it involves mothers and children at all, so it will have ahigh priority. The thirs is a bit of an embarrassment, because people who for some reason are heavily invested in the belief that vaccines cause autism, will want to debunk the experiments in any way possible. If you don't believe me, just look at what happened when they removed the original "cause of autism" th emerthiolate from vaccines, and it had no effect. So without any proof, the anti vaxxers just decided it was "something else".

Test it with existing data. If it's true, populations more likely to be vitamin D deficient (darker skins at higher latitudes) will already have higher autism rates. Do black folks in Chicago have higher autism rates than in the south? (Where we know the population migrated from, mostly less than 100 years ago.)

Data will be called racist, so compare dark skinned folks at different latitudes.

Good luck with African descent people to agree with any test like you suggest. They don't trust the medical profession in that way, and they have a good reason not to.

It is terrorism with a global reach.

Not the terrorism that breaks things the way weapons do
but terrorism against others in that these actions are above
the law and are an abuse of power.

The scary part is that the same shield that protects these
terrorists is the same shield that would protect worse.

The scary bit here is that this is all too close and parallel to the
umbrella protections that the executioners of WW2 concentration
camps operated under and behind.

These camps did not start out as death camps -- they evolved as
middle level players began to optimize the solution. The camps
did not start out as the "final solution" they were handy and without
oversight by the public eye could and were devoted to evil.

Survivors of the WW2 terror are rare and today exceedingly old so pay attention.
Listen to the tapes found in a basement of iit.edu These Holocaust tapes tell
the story in first person and in some cases how "innocent" it looked from outside.
      http://voices.iit.edu/

I am not a fan of WiKi leaks but there does need to be
some global way to let the public and other governments
exercise oversight.

With luck this posting from a coffee house in Syria
will look like it came from someplace in the West Coast
of the US.

From http://health.phys.iit.edu/extended_archive/9503/msg00074.html:

re: The Radiation Dose from a "Reference Banana."

Some time ago (when I almost had time to do such things) I calculated the dose one receives from the average banana. Here's how it goes:

On page 620 of the CRD Handbook on Rad Measurement and Protection, the concentration of K-40 in a "Reference Banana" is listed as 3520 picocuries per kilogram of banana. For those of us who are stuck in certain unit ruts, this is equivalent to 3.52E-6 microcuries of K-40 per gram of banana.

An average "Reference" banana weighs (masses) about 150 grams (I think.) So, the ICRP Reference Banana contains about 5.28E-4 microcuries of probably deadly K-40.

Federal Guidance Report #11 lists the ingestion dose (committed effective dose equivalent) for K-40 as 5.02E-9 Sv/Bq or (again, for those of us who are "unit-challenged," 1.86E-2 rem per microcurie ingested.)

Thus, the CEDE from ingestion of a Reference Banana is 5.28E-4 x 1.86E-2 = 9.82E-6 rem or about 0.01 millirem.

I have found this "Banana Equivalent Dose" very useful in attempting to explain infinitesmal doses (and corresponding infinitesmal risks) to members of the public. (Interestingly, the anti-nukes just HATE this, and severely critisize us for using such a deceptive concept.)

Would love to go into more detail, but have to get back to our DEADLY Human Radiation Experiments (i.e., eating bananas.)

The same table in the CRC Handbook lists 3400 pCi/kg for white potatoes and 4450 pCi/kg for sweet potatoes - so you could carry through the same sort of calculation for Reference Potatoes. Interestingly, raw lima beans come in at 4640 pCi/kg, "dry, sweet" coconut comes in at 6400 pCi/kg, and raw spinach (yum!) comes in at 6500 pCi/kg.

Considering the fact that the DOE has officially stated that "there is no safe dose of radiation" my advice to you all is to stop eating immediately.

Oh yes! Almost forgot. Regarding K-40, go into your local grocery store, buy some salt-substitute (there are two common brands, and the one in the white and orange labeled container works best) spread some out on a table and check it out with a GM survey instrument. There it is folks, deadly radioactivity in your grocery store!

Yours for healthful diets . . .
Captain Internal Dosimetry
aka Gary Mansfield, LLNL, (mansfield2@llnl.gov)

Disclaimer:

Neither Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the University of California, nor the Department of Energy recommends eating bananas.

-------
The point of course, is to make people realize that the notion that "there is no safe dose of radiation" isn't necessarily correct. Your granite countertops have trace particles of uranium in them. The Capital Building in Washington DC has so much granite in it that it wouldn't be qualified as a nuclear facility because it already emits too much radiation. We consume radiation all of the time from a variety of sources and our bodies rid themselves of it naturally.

It's interesting that you should mention that. We recently had a speaker from Twitter do a technical talk at our CS department, and he essentially said the same thing. Even online journals are finding it hard to do "breaking news" now. Journalists, he said, should focus on what they are supposed to be good at: analysis. He used the Mumbai attack as an example-- Twitter's "trends" engine picked up the event well before the media had any idea anything had happened, essentially because the platform itself was an intelligent intermediary for people who were witnessing the event firsthand.

My university (Illinois Institute of Technology) does this by exporting online classes to lots of remote sites around Chicagoland. I think they use some more specialized high-end videoconferencing software. I wonder if they'd be willing to share their expertise with you.

Okay, smart guy, give me an exact expression for pi expressed as a sum of powers of two.

You mean like the sum of powers of ten that you're used to?

Okay.

(You didn't forget that .1, .01, .001, and so on are powers of their base, did you?)

If you are interested in an intermediate sized data acquisition system, then you should take a look at the package that I have written called MX (found at http://mx.iit.edu/). MX currently has several hundred drivers for devices like motors, counter/timers, multichannel analyzers, 2-dimensional imaging detectors, and so forth. The core of MX and the device drivers are written in C in an object oriented style, but these days many of our user applications are written in Python, using wxPython for our GUIs. We have found Python to be an excellent language for writing scientific applications.

Is iit now?

> I don't think carbon will hold a stable tetrahedral lattice.

Tetrahedral, good call. What do you get when you put carbon atoms into a tetrahedral lattice? Surprise: diamonds!

http://www.iit.edu/~felfkri/report_files/image005.jpg

This article doesn't even say what this new-fangled structure *is*...

I suspect the grandparent post's assumption - that "same" is based on "sender IP" - is wrong. It's true that, many years ago, spammers sent a bunch of messages in a row from the same IP. These days, with fast-flux botnets being readily available, that's just not the case.

In general, determining whether two messages are "the same" is an orthogonal problem to determining whether they're spam. There are many, many ways to decide if two messages are the same. Almost a decade ago, I was working with two PhDs from Colorado who had invented ridiculously advanced ways to group messages by similarity, involving n-dimensional spaces, distance measures, clustering, neural nets, classification algorithms, and all sorts of fancy doctorate-level math that I had no hope of understanding at the time, let alone explaining now. But it worked astonishingly well at the time, and I can only assume the state of the art has advanced significantly since then.

Here's the old home page of one of those guys. I can't even understand the abstracts. A sample:

Similarities between bootstrap aggregation (bagging) and N-tuple sampling are explored to propose a retina-free data-driven version of the N-tuple network...

http://ir.iit.edu/~alek/publications.html

So it's a lot more than just "from the same IP with the same text at the same time".

It has been proven in a really convincing fashion that you can have breathtaking stylishness in an energy-positive (!!, not just zero-energy), 100% recyclable house in moderate climate (Germany):

http://www.iit.edu/~blipski/R128house.html

http://www.robbreport.com/Articles/Home/Design-Arc hitecture/Smart-House.asp

It's even in Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_R_128

If you use the right glass panels (triple-glazed with integrated IR control sheets), you can have insulation equalling many, many inches of rock wool.

Of course it helps if you a one of the leading structural engineers in the world to pull this off.

Been there, done that. :-)

The thing I find amazing about this discussion is that the Slashdot audience, often (in part if not in whole) so well-informed, appears here so utterly ignorant. Folks, to take a random example, twenty years ago I used to subscribe to a journal called Visible Language. Google tells me that it's still there, at http://www.id.iit.edu/visiblelanguage . It's far from the only source on such information. Yes, there is a research community on these topics. The research has been done. It was done, for print, centuries ago; it was done, for the screen, decades ago. It is something that matters, sure, to nerds as to anyone who reads. But how quite does it get to be news, now? Because someone at Wired recently half-remembered what he learned in a typography class at school?

So ja, sure, 'equal areas' is just an informal approximation, it's what you remember of the idea, informally, once your school days (or whatever other days they were when you read up on typography) are somewhere in the distant past. It doesn't mean there's no theory to it; it doesn't mean there's no well-researched and well-documented theory of it. It just means that it's one of those, OMG, pre-Internet topics that's tricky to Google for, and nobody, either here or at Wired, dropped by their local library recently to check it out in detail. Or, equally possibly, that it didn't seem worth the effort to explain in more depth when the purpose of tfa was, frankly, just to be cute.

As to why our on-screen typography pays little attention to such well-known ideas, I somehow suspect it's a combination of the cowboy programmer syndrome so pandemic in web technology and the distinct possibility that some corporate baboon somewhere has a patent-lock on 'text that doesn't look like crap'....

Looks like someone RTFA a bit wrong. Ben Sander works for AMD. He is one of their media presenters. Here are a few of the events he has done: http://www.cpd.iit.edu/cpd/events.htm http://www.ewh.ieee.org/r4/chicago/foxvalley/meet. thru.mid2005.html http://www.instat.com/FallMPF/06/conf1.htm http://mtv.ece.ucsb.edu/MTV/index_files/program-mt v.txt

We have a God Box (hideously old campus tour picture here) at IIT. It's the only building designed by "less is more" Ludwig Mies van der Rohe for purely religious purposes. It's not really for sale, though if someone would like to pay for the renovation, I'm sure we could work something out.

It was discussed openly at an international conference in June (InfoScale). I was one of the many academics there who asked for exactly this sort of thing -- that an anonymous set of searches be released. The vetting process (or lack there-of) is the problem in this case: The searches aren't anonymous by their very nature.

InfoScale program: http://www.infoscale.org/techprog.html
The first paper after the keynote discussed in great detail this exact information.

The full paper: http://www.ir.iit.edu/~abdur/publications/pos-info scale.pdf

It's not like this sort of thing is a regular occurence with associated well designed processes. The researchers probably talked to their supervisor, who probably said it was okay so long as it was anonymous and not for use by competitors.

-- Azaroth

Yes, AOL made a mistake by releasing that information. They've admitted to the mistake, apologized, and I doubt anyone will try to do this again.

On the other hand, one needs to recognize that they didn't release the information for the purposes of making money, or defrauding the customers, or anything else. They collected the data in order to help a researcher write an extremely informative paper[pdf] about human behavior as it relates to searches. That researcher decided that other's might benefit from the information, and convinced AOL to make it publically available. It turns out that that was a huge lapse in judgement, but nonetheless, intentions are also important and while criticizing AOL, we should also complement them for their effort to interface with the academic community.

AOL has been punished enough in the press. Given the circumstances I don't think that any legal action is necessary.

What they should have done is taken the user IDs out and semi-automatically anonymize a subset of the queries for release.

There is at least one PhD thesis that uses the AOL data (by Eric Jensen, see this link).

...for my alma mater.

Cleversafe's headquarters are located at the new University Technology Park at IIT...no, not that IIT, this one.

'As long as an invention is not clearly contrary to scientific laws - like time travel - research has no bearing on the grant of a patent.'

I think Einstein would say otherwise. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/time/think.html and http://www.iit.edu/~bosabri/time.html

I don't know how updated this ranking is, but according to it, JAIR and Artificial Intelligence" are in the same premium category.

From my ideas page.

A private-key credit/debit card.

Prevent identity theft (if you can keep your hands on your card) by using challenge-response authentication. The POS terminal sends your card a challenge, the card encrypts the challenge and sends it back, and the POS terminal checks it using your card's public key (which it fetches from the credit card company). Bonus points: put a key pad on the card, so that your key is protected with a password, and you know your password isn't going into random hostile machines.

I met Tim O'Reilly at Gnomedex in '03 (before Chris Pirillo went Hollywood on us Midwesterners and moved it to California) where he was speaking about Open Source. As he spoke I found a copy of a previous Powerpoint from a similar but not identical talk he had previously given, and updated to exactly match his Gnomedex talk. He graciously gave me permission to post the presentation on my blog and was a real pleasure to meet and talk to. He's a real down-to-earth guy. I'm told the other famous Tim in IT, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, is much the same way but I have not had the pleasure of meeting him. Anyway, I love O'Reilly's books, and their books by Jennifer Niederst, Web Design in a Nutshell and Learning Web Design, are the perfect books for my basic Web Design course.

The real difference between software engineers and other types of engineers is that software engineering is not a profession. There is no general certification to enter software engineering, and there is no required professional organization with a fixed code of ethics.

Of course, does anybody here really think government regulation would make software engineering better?

You can use all the Wikipedia references you want in our classes: http://www.itm.iit.edu/!

The members of my Linux Users Group (http://lug.iit.edu/bb/viewtopic.php?t=240) got spammed by a Microsoft Recruiter. They even personalized the message for the more active members. I think a few may have replied with a resume but I sure as hell won't.
-Evan

The Northern Illinois Conference of the United Methodist Church spent $19,000 last year for a Microsoft Exchange email system, which could easily have been done in OSS (Linux, Postfix, SquirrelMail and Mailman) for a grand total of $0.00, using a system which would have been otherwise obsolete for use as a desktop. Guess I need to write a sermon on OSS and social consciousness. At least I know at the non-profit where I work, Illinois Institute of Technology's Center for Professional Development, has all open-source production servers--at least all the ones I am responsible for!

With the number-sequence that this system creates, I cannot reconstruct your fingerprint at all.

That's not the problem. The problem comes when my bank installs the same fingerprint scanner - now the library record and my bank record have the same database key, the same "account number" if you will.

they can even print a fake barcode on any old library card since barcode techology is open and freely available to anyone and everyone. Then, they can surf for child porn on your account.

And how long do you think it will be before fake fingerprints are available to anyone and everyone?

I went through a period of fascination with detective-stuff when I was a kid (too many Hardy Boys books) and learned how to lift latent prints using nothing more complicated than Scotch Tape. Getting ahold of someone else's prints is child's play.

Isn't Magneto the EVIL one?

Isn't the picture on pg 8 of the 1971 edition actually an IBM 360? I operated one as a student and this sure looks like a 360 without the power supply cabinet or tape drives. That would not have been considered a small system even in the early 70's. Looks like a 1403 line printer with it too.

Having signaled that I am ancient, I may not surprise a few of you to note that the quaint and amusing quality of the book in the article is a misleading offering if you take it as history. The development of computing is both a technical and a human story of considerable depth and much more interesting reading is available.

Anybody who actually finds this stuff interesting need not confess. Just quietly make your way to the libraray and look up Paul Ceruzzi's A History of Computing [MIT PRESS] which gets all the facts and personalities straight as well as properly labeling the pictures. If you are in a hurry to waste time, there are tons of documents on line re the history of computing, for instance such as this page of links from an IIT prof.

a quick googling (not for porn) reveals this has been done on the entire AOL log for many categories: porn 10%, shopping 13%, entertainment 13%, computing 9%, etc.

research paper here.

Early space related centrifuge tests performed at WADC

In 1952, E. R. Ballinger, leader of the research program at Wright-Patterson, conducted one of the earliest series of centrifuge tests directed expressly toward the problem of g forces in space flight. Ballinger found that 3 g applied transversely would be the ideal takeoff pattern from the physiological standpoint, but he realized that the rocket burning time and velocity for such a pattern would be insufficient to propel a spacecraft out of the atmosphere. Consequently he and his associates subjected men to gradually increasing g loads, building to peaks of 10 g for something over two minutes. Chest pain, shortness of breath, and occasional loss of consciousness were the symptoms of those subjected to the higher g loads. The tests led Ballinger to the conclusion that 8 g represented the acceleration safety limit for a space passenger.

They will have to spread the acceleration and deceleration down over a few miles

This is better then any alternative java or javascript crap I have seen.

Those would be called Crapplets .

...Therefore I wouldn't expect to see the middle finger much, but I would expect to see all the standard manga/anime visual icons.
There's a good list of them here, along with all the appropriate emoticons, although they left out a bunch of other less common stuff (bloody nose for sexual overstimulation, snot bubble for sleeping, escaping spirit for half dead, completely white from shock, puking looks kind of like a waterfall), and certain mouth patterns (aggressive fangs).

In particular, expect to see sweat drops, popping veins, and funny eyes. ^_^;

I regularly use the LDAP Browser, which is written in Java, since it's the best free LDAP browser/editor I know of.

these guys work in the guidance and navigation laboratory at IIT, conveniently located down the hall from the wind tunnel lab where I work (hence my sig below). Beware though, designs such as this may inspire some sarcastic and mocking comments from the more machine shops techs who put it together for you.

these guys work in the guidance and navigation laboratory at IIT, conveniently located down the hall from the wind tunnel lab where I work (hence my sig below). Beware though, designs such as this may inspire some sarcastic and mocking comments from the more machine shops techs who put it together for you.

these guys work in the guidance and navigation laboratory at IIT, conveniently located down the hall from the wind tunnel lab where I work (hence my sig below). Beware though, designs such as this may inspire some sarcastic and mocking comments from the more machine shops techs who put it together for you.

Ironically, people thought that Troy were just figments of the imagination 150 years ago, and now they have pretty good proof of where it is.

I don't think that everybody should be so closed-minded about such things, just because a religious text mentions it.

If they do find real proof, that's pretty cool. If not, no big deal. I mean, there was and are millions of hours of research that pretty much amount to nothing, yet I wouldn't call that all wasted time. Science should not be afraid to explore, period.

I guess Acer has been cross-branding all along, this time with Ford.

a nice little article on ergonomics of working at home with a modular setup using a laptop, and the ergonomic benefits of it. Seems to suggest it's the variation. So, that wouldn't directly answer this original post--but it's an interesting ergo bit of info.

http://www.id.iit.edu/profile/gallery/workathome_s pring02/

This reminds me of several incidents with my university.

1.) One fraternity on campus decided to have a "fros and 40s party." The party-goers were encouraged to obtain 'fro wigs and drink malt liquor from 40oz bottles. Such parties have been banned because they have been labeled as racist.

2.) The school required that a student remove or cover a poltical cartoon posted on his door. The cartoon is a swastika whose arms are made from the words "political correctness." The idea behind the cartoon is that succumbing to political correctness breeds fascism. The school does not own the structure (a fraternity house) in which the cartoon was hung. They requested it be taken down before my fraternity provide accomodations for 5 or 6 high school seniors for a school-sponsored scholarship weekend. We respected their right to ask us to comply if we were going to participate in their preview weekend. Instead of compromising our values and allowing our liberty to be chipped away piece by piece by meeting their demands, we attempted to choose not to provide accomodations for the students. (knowing full well that the school had several other places to house the students.) The administration official started making threats of sanctions, contacting our national office, and informing our jewish university president of the racist activities happening inside our house.

They never called our national.

But we called the ACLU.

lightbenders nasa optics optical computer with crystal

No, Triangle Man is Robert Mitchum. Nice try.

I have found LDAP Browser/Editor to work pretty good. Java app.

LDAP Explorer is a decent web interface.

see: Lights and Windows are the Deadliest Hazards for Birds
The Fatal Light Awareness Program (FLAP)
BIRD STRIKE
"A study from the Danish Ministry of the Environment says that power lines, including power lines leading to wind farms, are a much greater danger to birds than the wind turbines themselves."

re: point #1 "in a highly-populated area"
huh? they are over FIVE MILES away from the nearest house. How is that "highly populated"?

re: point #3, these are PRIVATE resources. It's not our money, so whether it's a stupid dot com biz, a third summer home, or a wind farm, we have no right to complain about how money is spent. Besides, it will produce more power than not doing anything, and I've not seen any arguments that total energy cost of manufacture exceeds expected lifetime return.

re point #4, their website lists 7 different goverment agencies that have a say on the environmental impact. Just where did you "hear" about the problems?

Tools are only as good as the people who use them. Manual systems are flawed too. I have to make sure that the receptionist at my doctor's office (using a paper and colored folder system) does not yet again miss my file and pull the file of the six year old that has the same first and last name as me. She has done it twice. The solution is to improve the system by training the staff to confirm birthdates.

Computerized systems allow mistakes to be made more easily and quickly.

N-Gram algorithms are being rediscovered as a superior methodology and research into adding N-Grams to Soundex is being done.

My favourite implementation of dates in Java (among other languages, of course; first preference is LISP) is the Calendrica package. Note that the code has not been released under (L)GPL though.

> Granted, they need to be in compliance with the law as they take swipes at pirates...but c'mon, they're still pirates.

Exactly! And there are existing laws to deal with piracy.