Slashdot Mirror

The idealized likelihood of any one particular person is one in 64 trillion different genetic combinations of mother and father chromosomes. And with 100 billion neurons being stimulated throughout childhood, how are we to say that birth order influences one particular variable that we measure with various psychology tests? There is an immense amount of complexity that we cannot yet isolate (ask the neuroscientists), even in estimating the likelihood of specific combinations of genes because of diffusion gradients, energy interaction dynamics of DNA, and all sorts of other phenomena that keep us guessing only in 'Idealized' cases-- birth order is nowhere near such an idealization, however.

* Wikipedia linked me to this re: birth order and intelligence.
* Judith Harris on birth order and related psychology.

Permission to use and/or modify this image is granted provided you acknowledge me lewing@isc.tamu.edu and The GIMP if someone asks.

A new visualization Bruce Herr and I recently completed is being featured in this weeks New Scientist Magazine (thearticleis free online, minus the viz). They did a good job jazzing up the language used to describe the vizpower struggle, bubbling mass, blitzed articlesbut they also dumbed down the technical accomplishments. I guess not everyone gets as excited about algorithms as I do.Before I talk anymore about the viz, though, let me mention its appearing at the NetSci 2007 Conferencethis week, and hopefully a varient will appear at Wikimania later this summer as well. The viz is a huge 5 feet by 5 feet when printed, and I only include a low res, smaller version here. At some point high qualityart prints of it will appear at SciMapsfor sale to fund further visualization research.

Now for the good stuff. Much like my visualization of the netflix prize competition data, we began this piece byrepresenting the dataas a network. In this case the nodes in the network are wikipedia articles and theedges are thelinks between articles. We then (with some help from our friends at Sandia) used an algorithm to lay out all 650,000nodes (wikipedia articles) that had at least one link in such a way that similar articles are near one another. These are the yellow dots,which when viewed at low res give a yellow tint tothe whole picture.

The sizes of the nodes (circles, dots, whatever you want to call them), are based on a model of revision activity. So large circles indicate that an article might be controversial, or the subject of lots of vandalism, or just a topic whose content frequently changes. We labeled only the largest nodes, to keep it readable. Thereis an interactive version of this in the works based on the google maps platform which will change the labels and pictures used as the user zooms in or out. Stay tuned for that.

The image used for each tilewas selected automatically, simply by using the first imagein the most linked to article among all the articles inthat tile.We were pleasantly surprised by the quality of the images that appeared.

Our hope for this visualization approach, which we continue to improve on,is that it could be updated in real time to give a macro sense of what is happeing in Wikipedia. I personally hope that some variation of it will end up in high schools as a teaching tool and for generating discussions.

My heart goes out to this young man and his family for the crazy response of the local police and school board. It's particularly maddening as studies have shown that zero tolerance and suspension-happy school administrators aren't making our schools safer. For instance:

Defenders of the [zero tolerance] policies point to the larger threat posed by serious violence in our nation's schools, suggesting that civil rights violations may be an unfortunate but necessary compromise to ensure the safety of school environments.

Unfortunately, however, this latter argument is made somewhat moot by the almost complete lack of documentation linking zero tolerance with improved school safety. Despite more than ten years of implementation, there have been only a handful of studies evaluating the outcomes of security measures. Of these, only school uniform research appears to have enough support to be considered even promising in contributing to perceptions of safer school environments. The most extensive studies (Heaviside et al., 1998; Mayer & Leone, 1999) suggest a negative relationship between school security measures and school safety.

From "Zero Tolerance, Zero Evidence: An Analysis of School Disciplinary Practice" by Russel Skiba, Indiana Educational Policy Center, August 2000 PDF report link

The original Tux sucks because it looks fat, bored, lazy

Now, with penguins, (cuddly such), "contented" means it has either just gotten laid, or it's stuffed on herring. Take it from me, I'm an expert on penguins, those are really the only two options.

Now, working on that angle, we don't really want to be associated with a randy penguin (well, we do, but it's not politic, so we won't), so we should be looking at the "stuffed to its brim with herring" angle here.

So when you think "penguin", you should be imagining a slighly overweight penguin (*), sitting down after having gorged itself, and having just burped. It's sitting there with a beatific smile - the world is a good place to be when you have just eaten a few gallons of raw fish and you can feel another "burp" coming.

(*) Not FAT, but you should be able to see that it's sitting down because it's really too stuffed to stand up. Think "bean bag" here.

Now, if you have problems associating yourself with something that gets off by eating raw fish, think "chocolate" or something, but you get the idea.

Ok, so we should be thinking of a lovable, cuddly, stuffed penguin sitting down after having gorged itself on herring.

Some people have told me they don't think a fat penguin really embodies the grace of Linux, which just tells me they have never seen a angry penguin charging at them in excess of 100mph. They'd be a lot more careful about what they say if they had.

• Kubuntu
• Edubuntu

• Xubuntu

• Kubuntu
• Edubuntu

• Xubuntu

Get those torrents going folks :)

They haven't finished downloading yet but I've got bittorrent going on a 10Mbit connection for the following two disks [torrent links from the mirror posted above]:

Ubuntu Desktop i386
Ubuntu Desktop amd64

I'll leave them running for a day or two once they're finished downloading.

Get those torrents going folks :)

They haven't finished downloading yet but I've got bittorrent going on a 10Mbit connection for the following two disks [torrent links from the mirror posted above]:

Ubuntu Desktop i386
Ubuntu Desktop amd64

I'll leave them running for a day or two once they're finished downloading.

Here is a quick mirror: (ftp also works) http://ftp.ussg.indiana.edu/linux/ubuntu-releases/ 7.04/ maintained by http://www.ussg.iu.edu

Go ahead, take our bandwidth :)

Here is a quick mirror: (ftp also works) http://ftp.ussg.indiana.edu/linux/ubuntu-releases/ 7.04/ maintained by http://www.ussg.iu.edu

Go ahead, take our bandwidth :)

He has no scruples, or responsibility.

His professor (Markus Jacobsson) is going along with this, as part of an anti-phishing group at Indiana University. Are you sure you know what you're talking about? If you do, it would probably help to explain it, since from where most of us stand this guy looks as though he's doing everyone a service, and going about it the right way, or at least a perfectly acceptable way which has the benefit of calling attention to some of the more suspect practices in the industry.

Oh, and it should be noted that one of the professors alleged to have misappropriated the article is a member of the faculty of IU-Kokomo, a small satellite campus, and not the main IU campus at Bloomington.

The appendix, like the tonsils, are part of the immune system. From the linked article:

There are two main theories about the function of the appendix. Some experts think it serves as a "factory" for bacteria that help us digest the cellulose in some plants we eat. But most scientists believe that both the appendix and the tonsils are part of our immune system, manufacturing B-Lymphocytes, which are white blood cells that produce antibodies to fight infections in the body.

We can live without it, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't serve a purpose while we have it.

> men seem more responsive to email because it bypasses their competitive tendencies

Which is profoundly contradicted by research on flaming:

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=967562&dl=AC M&coll=&CFID=15151515&CFTOKEN=6184618

http://www.indiana.edu/~tisj/readers/full-text/15- 3%20guest.html

The lack of "media richness" in email makes its intent easier to mistake. Males tend to jump to conclusions because the tend to try to problem-solve everything (especially when the problem is figuring out if they've been attacked), while females tend to either give it the benefit of the doubt or ignore it.

In TFA, the authors start from a hypothesis which includes an operational definition nobody else uses, and they go on to support what amounts to a supposition. A great deal of communications studies in both gender communication and computer mediated communication is entirely ignored. I've studied both, taught both, and published in the latter. It's a gender stereotype when you draw the conclusion, right or wrong, without considering objective data. TFA ignores masses of objective data. Therefore I submit that their conclusion is precisely the thing they claim to be trying to study.

Yeah, the Write Once, Run Anywhere thing doesn't work quite as advertised. Therefore we should throw sense to the winds and deliberately write code which will have to be completely rewritten if we want to run on another platform. Java is one example, and a particularly poor one. Perl, python, ruby, scheme, TeX, etc, etc, etc, actually do work quite close to write once run anywhere. Not quite, of course, as you can almost always still do things that depend on the hardware at hand, but nearly always, barring bugs in the implementation of the language on the target platform.

No, the whole point of the higher-level approach is maintainability, portability, and writeability. As I quite clearly said. Funny. I feel like I'm writing for your benefit, not my own. I've been down the low-level optimize the hell out of it road, and I've been down the high level let the compiler optimize the hell out of it road. The end result is nearly always that the high level approach is better on all counts (often including performance, as with any reasonably complex program, a decently smart compiler can do much more, much safer, and much better optimization than a human).

As far as endless tweaking goes, no, I do realize that nearly nobody does that in assembler anymore. But doing it in C is almost as bad.

Game console programming is completely sheltered from the concerns of portability. You know exactly what hardware your code will run on, and you know it will never ever run on any different hardware. This allows you to make assumptions about the hardware that nobody else gets to make, and it turns out that relying on the details of the hardware actually makes for worse (unreadable, and thus unmaintainable, and thus far more fragile) code. Also, your development team is the only group of people that will ever see your code, much less work on it. Thus as long as all of you understand the horrible crufty nonsense that results, you don't have to worry about it. In the Real World, other people see, work on, and use the code that you write. So if it isn't nice and readable and understandable, you ain't gonna get very far. So, in game console programming, you are sheltered from readability concerns as well. Finally, with most console games, once they are released, that is it. You never have to come back a year later and fix some obscure bug. So you are sheltered from the concerns of maintainability as well.

You might read this: http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~jsobel/c455-c511.update d.txt. It points out quite clearly that writing in a high level language often results in much faster (and less buggy!) code than writing in a low level language.

click
(NO, it's not one of those malicious URL, it explains how do they work, really!)

A browser does not require a PC with an OS, but only a display terminal, i.e., one with an X server (software that delivers the display and input components of remote applications to you) and network link to applications (in this case browsers) already running somewhere else. Then you can do banking and enjoy the world wide web without a PC or local storage. Chatting is available via any of several plug-ins for the Firefox browser.

Here's a $69 printer that lets you edit and print your photos without a PC. http://www.pcmall.com/pcmall/shop/detail~dpno~6048 11~name~Photosmart+8050+Photo+Inkjet+Printer~mfg~Q 6351A%23ABA.asp

Here's a live CD that turns your Windows computer into an X terminal.
http://xlivecd.indiana.edu/

Here's the howto that turns any PC into a network display terminal, and X server. When this is running no use will be made of the hard drive. It will also work if there is no hard drive in the system. It will also work if there is no operating system installed on the computer.

    Here, look at this... http://linuxdevices.com/articles/AT7499590573.html

You don't.

No matter how much of an advantage you can get from Metric, there will always be resistance for change from people who are more comfortable with what simply works.

I'm still not sold. I know that most of the people on this site understand the difference between an ad and editorial content, but there are so many people who get confused, and advertisers always are looking for ways to covertly market to an audience.

I work at a newspaper. At least twice a month I get a call from a reader complaining about a "story" that turns out to be an ad. I'm not saying we should cater to the lowest common denominator, but we should at least recognize that the goal of every advertisement is to sell you something without making you feel like you've been sold on something.

This is a known attack that has received academic treatment. Check it out:

https://www.indiana.edu/~phishing/browser-recon/

Who came up with that name, My Cousin Vinny? "Two yoots..."

People with Robertsonian translocations have only 45 chromosomes in each of their cells, yet all essential genetic material is present, and they appear normal. Their children, however, may either be normal and carry the fusion chromosome (depending which chromosome is represented in the gamete), or they may inherit a missing or extra long arm of an acrocentric chromosome.

http://cgi.cs.indiana.edu/~oracle/index.cgi

You can read it on the web as well if you'd like. :-)

If you liked that, you should try this link: cenSEARCHip

I use a few sites for sheet music, but mainly http://www.sheetmusicarchive.net/ and http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/variations/scores/. A lot of music publishing companies (Dover's a good example) publish facsimile editions, and keep them in the public domain. So that's where these sites get a lot of their music.

From a time before binaries and spam were rampant comes a far-reaching and informative paper entitled Obscenity and Indecency on the Usenet: The Legal And Political Future of Alt.Sex.Stories

And here is a relevant quote:

"Generally speaking, government regulation in this country seems to be most effective only when dealing with large, centralized entities (such as corporations). These entities need to pay taxes, file documents, utilize the courts, etc. These entities are also willing to put up with a number of impositions because of their overriding interest in attaining profits. However, when we are dealing with an entity that is not driven by profits and a decentralized activity that has no real controlling agent (i.e., the Usenet), the regulatory system seems to break down. The only channel of consequence to the Usenet is one of existence. Its demolition (perhaps the only real regulation available) would be a regrettable loss to society.[ 59 ]

Moreover, even though banning the structure of the Usenet could technically be instituted in the U.S., its center of gravity would most likely shift abroad and be imported through Telnet or other methods. In that case, as with any undesirable overseas activity, a customs system could be established if there was a strong enough governmental interest. However, such a system would pose a huge burden to the international flow of information. Certainly, the argument could be made that the U.S., in implementing such an Internet customs system, might be crippling itself economically for the commerce of the future.

Finally, one should note that the regulation of the Usenet by foreign nations can potentially affect Usenet services in this country. For example, a German prosector in Munich ordered CompuServe to discontinue service of over 200 "alt.sex" and related newsgroups on charges that they contained illegal pornographic material. [ 60 ] Since CompuServe lacked the technical means with which to tailor Usenet content simply for German subscribers, the company blocked access to these newsgroups for all of its subscribers worldwide. [ 61 ] Although CompuServe corrected its technical problem within a matter of weeks, the incident received tremendous criticism domestically. [ 62 ] One source even characterized the event as "the most dramatic and far-reaching attempt to restrict the free flow of information online." [ 63 ]"

All that and I still firmly believe that the only reason USENET hasn't been shut down is because its too good a source of leads for catching Child Abusers/Child Pornographers -- if USENET went away then those criminals would just be driven further underground and would be harder to catch-- plus, thanks to USENET, the FBI/et al can maintain a regular series of arrests by simply perusing USENET every now and then, finding someone who hasn't masked themselves well enough and arrest them.

Secession. Withdraw your support for this goverment. Move to a blue state. Move your saving into Euro. No economic relations with red states and those who support this fascist goverment. Look up the definition of the word fascist. Also time to read the The Declaration of Independence

"Key to the Extraterrestrial Messages" (1969)

Mentioned in my blog that it is the same year as the quasar discovery that was mistaken as signals from Little Green Men (LGM). src.

Yes. And could you go smaller than SIOD ?

Move on folks, there's nothing to see here.

This was done last year, by these guys: Browser Recon @ Indiana University

Defenses against this, and other attacks have been created and deployed through two firefox extensions
put out by Stanford University: Safe History and Safe Cache

This stuff ain't new.

"Likely to be resistance?" There is certain to be resistance.

Examining the Japanese History Textbook Controversies, A textbook example of change in China, US court upholds Hindu organisation's contention on textbooks

Take over the payments? Who the hell'd ever pay for Gary?... I mean, I've driven through there before. You'd have to pay me to take it.

Hey, technology: Don't forget about the Purdue and Indiana U. research parks.

Indiana also has a damn fine university, which recently hosted the 10th ALIFE conference (the dominant international conference on Artificial Life). Hell, Douglas "Godel-Escher-Bach" Hofstadter works there ! Judging from what I saw, Indian University is set to become a major player in science, even more so than it is right now.

Your view of things agrees with some of the available resesarch on who tends to be more successful:

...Students' implicit beliefs about the nature of intelligence have a significant impact on the way they approach challenging intellectual tasks: Students who view their intelligence as an unchangeable internal characteristic tend to shy away from academic challenges, whereas students who believe that their intelligence can be increased through effort and persistence seek them out.

You acknowledge and uphold people's rights because we (supposedly) live in a free society, and it is immoral to do otherwise.

And what is your empirical, scientific basis for believing that people have rights?

This is not directed at you so much as at the surrounding context of this thread. There seems to be this idea that science encompasses all knowledge. But rights, morality, ethics, are not observable through the scientific method.

That is why the United States Constitution says:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. http://www.law.indiana.edu/uslawdocs/declaration.h tml

You can delete the "endowed by their Creator" part if you like, but the remaining statment is not in any way scientific. There is no hypothesis testable by observable evidence. It is given as a premise for what follows, not as a theory demonstrated through experiment.

So what drives me nuts about the atheist position is that they spend so much time telling us what they DON'T believe in. OK, so you don't believe in God, congratualations. But once you start saying people have absolute, unalienable rights, you believe in something equally unscientific and unprovable.

And of course, people DO have unalienable rights, I truly believe that. But it does not follow as an immediate consequence of being an atheist. Atheism does not predispose one towards any kind of moral or ethical beliefs whatsoever.

Which is why, I think, there is a deep suspicion of atheists by theists. Theists see atheists defining themselves based on what they don't believe, rather than what they do believe. "What do you believe in?" "Oh, I'm an atheist." is pretty much a non-sequitur.

Peace be with you,
-jimbo

I'm not sure for how long we intend to post news stories on this subject, but here are a few others:
- Yahoo China has the Worst Filtering Policy
- Yahoo, Google 'Irresponsible' In China
- Tangible Impact of Censorship on Search Engines

I think I'm starting to get the message anyway.

The last story had a kinda interesting link though:
CenSEARCHip -- shows differences in search engine results by country in an interesting visual manner.

Exactly. This just means everyone is on salary and a 'professional' now so they don't have to pay you.

Due to our 40-hour work week we spend 2.5 more weeksand three months moreat work than do our Japanese and western European counterparts, respectively

Yeah, a great example of regulation working for us.

Douglas Hofstadter, a Pulitzer prize winning author with a Ph.D. in physics and an appointment in Cognitive Science at Indiana University, talked about Ray Kurzweil's predictions of the oncoming technological singularity at the Artificial Life X conference this year. An audio-only webcast of his talk is available.

http://www.qubit.org/library/intros/comp/comp.html /

http://beige.ucs.indiana.edu/B679/M743.html/

http://tph.tuwien.ac.at/~oemer/

Reminds me of the first reply in this best of usnet oracle digest. Adapt for congress critter and enjoy.

If I ask the woodchuck question or fail to grovel, will I get lashed with a wet noodle?

The exception being when you are setting out to get publicly caught and prosecuted, and willing to accept the punishment that results as a form of protest against the misuse of authority. Cf Civil Disobedience, by Henry Thoreau. At that point, you want to operate in "a manner open, notorious, hostile and continuous" as much as possible.

There are usually alternative methods of protest more effective in most circumstances. Civil disobedience should not be the first resort of any thinking citizen. However, sometimes there's no other tune to call... so be willing to pay the piper.

As suggested by others, complaining about selected sites being blocked by the firewall might be more effective. If you insist on a cgi proxy server as civil disobedience, perhaps have one that only serves pages from sites you have approved of... and be willing to back those choices as essential free speech before the school board. (I wouldn't recommend Playboy.com, for starters.)

One could say there are only rights, which a few people try to take away and re-label as priviledges.

12 Dec 2005 - Linus Torvalds states that "only idiots will use [Gnome]".
20 Apr 2006 - Linus claims "that [...] FreeBSD [People] are incompetent idiots."
12 May 2006 - The FreeBSD folks announce a tightly integratin of GNOME with FreeBSD.*

* You didn't click that link, did you?

What a joke.. If you feed the IAD the first page of their own
research paper you get:

This text had been classified as
INAUTHENTIC
with a 32.8% chance of being authentic text

Here's exactly what I posted:

Using Compression to Identify Classes of Inauthentic Texts Mehmet M. Dalkilic, Wyatt T. Clark, James C. Costello, Predrag Radivojac {dalkilic, wtclark, jccostel, predrag}@indiana.edu School of Informatics, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47408 Abstract Recent events have made it clear that some kinds of technical texts, generated by machine and essentially meaningless, can be confused with authentic, technical texts written by humans. We identify this as a potential problem, since no existing systems for, say the web, can or do discriminate on this basis. We believe that there are subtle, short- and long-range word or even string repetitions extant in human texts, but not in many classes of computer generated texts, that can be used to discriminate based on meaning. In this paper we employ universal lossless source coding to generate features in a high-dimensional space and then apply support vector machines to discriminate between the classes of authentic and inauthentic expository texts. Compression profiles for the two kinds of text are distinctthe authentic texts being bounded by various classes of more compressible or less compressible texts that are computer generated. This in turn led to the high prediction accuracy of our models which support a conjecture that there exists a relationship between meaning and compressibility. Our results show that the learning algorithm based upon the compression profile outperformed standard term-frequency text categorization on several non-trivial classes of inauthentic texts. Availability: http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/predrag/fsi.htm . 1 Introduction When operating over a corpus of text there is a natural presumption that the text is meaningful. This presumption is so strong that neither the tools, like webpage search engines, nor the people who use them take into account whether, for example, a webpage conveys any meaning at all, even though the number of indexable webpages available is so large and growing [4]. And yet, a web search for the nonsensical sentence, Colorless green ideas sleep furiously, yields scores of thousands of hits on Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Of course this is no ordinary sentenceit is Noam Chomskys famous sentence that he constructed to illustrate that grammar alone cannot ensure meaning [10]. While the sentence is syntactically correct and can be parsed, it does not To whom correspondence should be addressed. possess any real meaning. But the important point is that the sentence is meaningless and has become part of the searchable text indistinguishable from any other sentence. Single sentences can seldom convey enough meaning and are therefore combined into texts or documents to provide some larger, more complex information. According to linguists, texts exhibit not only sentential structure, but also higher levels of structure, for example, the so-called expository structure that are meant to be informative, that is, scholarly, encyclopedic, and factual as opposed to, say, those intended for entertainment. These higher level distinctions can be somewhat problematic if taken too literally, but are useful nonetheless. We can take other perspectives too: there are global patterns that are only manifested when the text is examined in its entirety. For example, one kind of global text pattern is the adherence to a topic. Another example is discoursethe different kinds of meaning derived solely from the arrangement of sentences. To make clear the class of problem we are interested in examining, we provide the following definitions: Definition 1.1. An authentic text (or document) is a collection of several hundreds (or thousands) of syntactically correct sentences such that the text as a whole is meaningful. A set of authentic texts will b

Actually, it's because until you as a fetus hit 14 weeks, you're androgynous. At 14 weeks after fertilization, the hormones turn on that turn you into a boy or girl. However, at that point, the nipples have already developed. The scientific evolutionary reason for this is because it makes it slightly easier for a female to develop then a male, since female is the default setting, and more women is better for racial proliferation then more men, since 1 male can impregnate several female and not be hampered by carrying the infant to term.

Male nipples are also great proof that there is no Intelligent Design. If every fetus is formed in the womb and known by God there, then you'd think he'd eliminate the useless nipples, making men less susceptible to breast cancer when we don't need nipples anyway.

http://amos.indiana.edu/library/scripts/nipples.ht ml

The Inauthentic Paper Detector Says:

This text had been classified as
INAUTHENTIC
with a 29.1% chance of being authentic text

Nice Try Dvorak!

Copy pasting the research report written about the program:
http://montana.informatics.indiana.edu/fsi/siampap er.pdf

yields:
This text had been classified as
INAUTHENTIC
with a 17.7% chance of being authentic text

hmm.