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According to this website on paleoclimatology, there are some long period weather oscillations such as:

the El Niño -Southern Oscillation (ENSO) - 6 to 18 months,

the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) - 20 to 30 years

the Pacific-North American Oscillation (PNA) - 3 to 10 years

the The North Atlantic Oscillation NAO - 5 to 10 years

the Artic Oscillation (AO)- 5 to 10 years

the Antartic Oscillation (AAO) - 5 to 10 years

Paleoclimatologists have the records of weather condifions going back thousands of years using information such as tree rings, snow, lava, and seed deposits.

If the researchers could develop a long timescale atmospheric simulator that could replicate this data, then maybe they could predict general trends 30 years into the
future. Although unpredictable events such as earthquakes and volcanos) make things
bit harder, although they will probably run a large number of possible scenarios
before making any conclusions.

The US is helping quite a bit with the LHC, in addition to many other non-European countries. I'm not sure how you came up with the 20-year European lead on particle physics (maybe you pulled it out of your ass), but as with any other research facility I'm sure there will be plenty of US scientists making progress there. How many European scientists do you think are working with NASA on the Mars rover data? Quite a few. The US is already putting billions behind the LHC, doesn't seem obvious that US scientists would contribute significantly to LHC research once it's fully built? Major research is largely an international affair today; most mature scientists put patriotism aside (unless you think Harvard's being pro-Bush by researching with stem cells).

"Europe and Japan are doing advanced medical research" - such as? And the US isn't? Stem cells aren't the last word in medical science. The US stem cell situation sucks to be honest, but that's not enough to pass judgment on any nation's medical progress. I wouldn't be surprised if the 2008 presidential election changed things dramatically, possibly moreso than the 2004 election did. Why couldn't it?

Yes, the Hubble is dead. That's why there are multiple replacemetns being proposed. I'm intrigued by your claim that NASA's abandoning manned space travel; I suppose this whole Project Constellation business is a great hoax, and that Lockheed and Boeing are in on it too. Yes, the US wants to militarize space, but they're doing a lot more too. And the Taikonauts are a joke compared to the routine ISS missions by NASA.

Seriously, if you don't know what the fuck you're talking about, just shut up.

IANAHM: While I agree a perforated cardiac muscle is nearly 100% fatal I would argue that a direct head shot is equally fatal (possibly more so).

"The thing we're looking for when we slash the chest open is a bullet injury to the heart where the bleeding has been only in a modest amount, but it's accumulating inside" the heart, Cornwell explains. "Then he's in cardiac arrest not because he's bled out, like most gunshot victims, but because the motor can't pump anymore."

If you're the surgeon at such a moment, what you do is simple yet sublime. You slash a hole in the human heart. You watch while the stopped-up blood spills out. Then you stick your finger over that slash like it's the proverbial hole in a dike, and you race to an operating room where you sew up the heart you just slashed, only by now it's thumping stronger and steadier with each stitch.

Which leads me to believe that a reasonably large number of cardiac perforations are not fatal. In fact there seems to be a routine, if slightly barbaric, method for restoring the hydraulic functionality of the heart and that the perforation does not, in itself, disable the heart.

"No new medicine or advance in surgical technique will ever save a patient with a direct gunshot wound to the head,"

And that leads me to believe that at least this trauma surgeon views such wounds as more hopeless. (Though his statement doesn't discriminate between the location of entry and exit points which I think might make a difference since a bullet entering the face at certain points has to travel through several layers of bone and much more soft tissue before damaging the central nervous system compared to an entry wound in the back of the head.)

This one was from a couple years back. You can read/see other Hopkins commencement speeches at http://www.jhu.edu/commencement/speeches/ including one by Al Gore from last year I believe.

it's John S Hopkins

This isn't that hard!

Goddamnit!

Marty Hall's materials and courses are fantastic. Check out http://www.apl.jhu.edu/~hall/

If Apple produced it, it wouldn't be "beige", it would be "the Color of the Universe..."

http://www.pha.jhu.edu/~kgb/cosspec/ :)

Actually it's already available, and being tested in samples at your local seven eleven in a pepsi slurpee type product.

It's called tagatose.

http://www.jhu.edu/~jhumag/1102web/sweet.html

Depending on what your current degree is in, you might want to follow it up with a degree in Computer Science with a heavy emphasis on Computer Security and Information. A while back, when I was applying to graduate schools, I found that there were very few universities, on the list that I had created, that specialized in Computer Security; albeit, I was more concerned with their EE/Computer Engineering than Computer Science.

With that said, I do know that there are a variety of courses available at places like Johns Hopkins University (http://www.cs.jhu.edu/academics_catalog_grad_cour ses.html), New York University (http://www.cs.nyu.edu/web/Academic/Graduate/cours es.html), George Washington University (http://cs.seas.gwu.edu/academics/graduate/courses /), Virginia Tech (http://www.cs.vt.edu/site_pages/courses/), and the University of Florida (http://www.cise.ufl.edu/student_services/grad/cou rses/) that might suit your needs. While computer forensics is useful for a variety of agencies and institutions, the fundamentals behind those methods are important, as it governs how new tools can be created. MIT (http://student.mit.edu/@5675354.9107/catalog/m6a. html) also has a very interesting course selection, and the techniques and research coming out of there are very top-notch. If I had the time, I'd attend more lectures there, as the content is very diverse and alluring, especially when a grade is not on the line.

If you aren't looking for network functionality, there's a filesystem called ext3cow that lets you roll back to older versions of the contents of the filesystem.

I don't know where it comes from, but I've got something called 'pcb' that I installed on my Linux box that, as far as I am aware, meets those requirements.

Oh. Here it is:
http://bach.ece.jhu.edu/~haceaton/pcb/

"Will they work as a large-scale adoption technique for schools across the nation? Never... that is, until a large-scale societal shift happens in viewpoints about how much money should be spent on education, and how much freedom teachers should be given to use it."

Which is the goal of an organization such as mine http://cte.jhu.edu/.

The main grant that I am working on is the effective use of games in the classroom. As you said in your post, the potential is there. As technology and teachers who grew up playing games become more ubiquitous in the classroom then the possibility or necessity of using games is that much closer.

You go through educational organization such as mine: http://cte.jhu.edu/

I am actually working on a Federal Grant on using games in the classroom. Most of my focus is on Math and Reading but as a former government teacher I can tell you I played your game and found it good. There are two major hurdles you will find in getting a game into an American classroom.

1. Price
2. Educational Standards

The first is a very complicated topic that isn't worth going into on Slashdot. The second is an issue I can explain briefly. Our school districts all have government standards as to what they need to teach. A game is a viable option in the classroom only if it helps students meet some of these standards. I would say that Democracy certainly does qualify but that qualification needs to be documented in order for a teacher, school, or district to even consider usage. I would be happy to explain in far more detail if you or anyone else would wish. Feel free to contact me at my work email address which you can find on our website (I won't post it here for fear of being spammed).

-Sam Abramovich
Project Manager for Emerging Technologies
Center for Technology in Education
Johns Hopkins University

VeriChip has been cracked. That's only because it didn't use cryptography. JHU researchers have cracked the Exxon Mobil Speedpass [research link] cryptographic RFID devices using brute force. It took 15 mintes per key, but this required 16 $200 FPGAs ($3200) working in parallel.

Ignoring the time taken to reverse engineer the protocol, it also requires extra equipment to do the analysis for the actual reverse engineering. To my knowledge, no code has been published publically.

At this point in time, it seems that cryptographic RFID devices, despite being cryptographically weak, are pretty secure from a practical standpoint due to a level of sophistication require to execute attacks currently.

Plus I must wonder a) how close you have to be to read/activate VeriChip devices and b) if the readers are inside of a faraday cage when they enter the facility. At the very least, this will remove the possiblity of using lost keys or ones that were left lying around unattended.

And even then, the James Webb is optimized for IR observations and doesn't completely overlap the observable spectrum available on the Hubble, which include UV. The two compliment each other.

From the James Web Space Telescope site What kind of detectors will JWST have?
JWST will have two types of detectors: visible and near-infrared arrays with 2,048 x 2,048 pixels, and mid-infrared arrays with about 1,024 x 1,024 pixels

From The Advanced Camera for Surveys site: It consists of three electronic cameras and a complement of filters and dispersers that detect light from the ultraviolet to the near infrared (1200 - 10,000 angstroms).

Recently, researchers have had a lot of success with machine translation by statistically analyzing already translated texts. If machine translation of human language can't be considered "semantic interpretation" then probably nothing can.

What I would like to see is a machine with desires. It is not difficult to create a neural network and hook it up to the internet to comb through the mounds of data, but it is not going to care what it finds. It's not going to feel peer pressure from the other computers, it's not going to care if I unplug it.

People do feel. I feel, and when I look at other people I can tell they are feeling something too. Perhaps this is just a behavioral response of programmed neurons, but at the moment we are unable to reproduce this feeling in computers.

"This is the first time a computer program could simulate a phase transition because the computers would always bog down at what's known as the 'critical slowdown.' We figured out a way to perform a kind of end-run around that critical point slowdown and the results allow us to calculate certain critical point properties for the first time."

For example, in the Ising Model or the Potts Model, one can examine system parameters arbitrarily close to the critical point, in finite time, using a Cluster Algorithm. This page gives some information on how the cluster algorithm. The page has a java applet graphically depicting the system for a variety of algorithms.

Just for completeness, here's an Ising model applet that I wrote, which doesn't just have a system animation, but allows you to calculate and plot data (specific heat, magnetization, etc) as the system passes through the critical point. This applet uses the Metropolis algorithm for time advancement, hence it is subject to critical slowdown. In that respect, the applet is flawed because close to the critical point I don't generate enough Metropolis iterations to ensure the subsequent frame is sufficiently thermally indepdent from the previous state. However, the cluster algorithm would remove these limitations. This applet has actually been used in graduate physics classes at Johns Hopkins to demonstrate magnetic phase transitions.

And also for completeness, here's a Potts model applet, but it doesn't acquire data for plotting like the Ising model. The Potts applet actually uses the Microcanonical ensemble, whereby the energy of the system is conserved, but the Ising applet uses the Canonical ensemble, where the system is in contact with a heat bath at some settable temperature.

And in case anyone's curious, these applets (except for the first one) are part of the Java Virtual Physics Lab , which contains a few different physics java simulations I wrote to help with conceptual understanding.

"This is the first time a computer program could simulate a phase transition because the computers would always bog down at what's known as the 'critical slowdown.' We figured out a way to perform a kind of end-run around that critical point slowdown and the results allow us to calculate certain critical point properties for the first time."

For example, in the Ising Model or the Potts Model, one can examine system parameters arbitrarily close to the critical point, in finite time, using a Cluster Algorithm. This page gives some information on how the cluster algorithm. The page has a java applet graphically depicting the system for a variety of algorithms.

Just for completeness, here's an Ising model applet that I wrote, which doesn't just have a system animation, but allows you to calculate and plot data (specific heat, magnetization, etc) as the system passes through the critical point. This applet uses the Metropolis algorithm for time advancement, hence it is subject to critical slowdown. In that respect, the applet is flawed because close to the critical point I don't generate enough Metropolis iterations to ensure the subsequent frame is sufficiently thermally indepdent from the previous state. However, the cluster algorithm would remove these limitations. This applet has actually been used in graduate physics classes at Johns Hopkins to demonstrate magnetic phase transitions.

And also for completeness, here's a Potts model applet, but it doesn't acquire data for plotting like the Ising model. The Potts applet actually uses the Microcanonical ensemble, whereby the energy of the system is conserved, but the Ising applet uses the Canonical ensemble, where the system is in contact with a heat bath at some settable temperature.

And in case anyone's curious, these applets (except for the first one) are part of the Java Virtual Physics Lab , which contains a few different physics java simulations I wrote to help with conceptual understanding.

"This is the first time a computer program could simulate a phase transition because the computers would always bog down at what's known as the 'critical slowdown.' We figured out a way to perform a kind of end-run around that critical point slowdown and the results allow us to calculate certain critical point properties for the first time."

For example, in the Ising Model or the Potts Model, one can examine system parameters arbitrarily close to the critical point, in finite time, using a Cluster Algorithm. This page gives some information on how the cluster algorithm. The page has a java applet graphically depicting the system for a variety of algorithms.

Just for completeness, here's an Ising model applet that I wrote, which doesn't just have a system animation, but allows you to calculate and plot data (specific heat, magnetization, etc) as the system passes through the critical point. This applet uses the Metropolis algorithm for time advancement, hence it is subject to critical slowdown. In that respect, the applet is flawed because close to the critical point I don't generate enough Metropolis iterations to ensure the subsequent frame is sufficiently thermally indepdent from the previous state. However, the cluster algorithm would remove these limitations. This applet has actually been used in graduate physics classes at Johns Hopkins to demonstrate magnetic phase transitions.

And also for completeness, here's a Potts model applet, but it doesn't acquire data for plotting like the Ising model. The Potts applet actually uses the Microcanonical ensemble, whereby the energy of the system is conserved, but the Ising applet uses the Canonical ensemble, where the system is in contact with a heat bath at some settable temperature.

And in case anyone's curious, these applets (except for the first one) are part of the Java Virtual Physics Lab , which contains a few different physics java simulations I wrote to help with conceptual understanding.

Here's one article on "health infrastructure" in developing countries.

The shuttle is not necessary, nor is the not yet designed or built robotic servicing capability. The Hubble Origins Probe could be in orbit by the time the original fails, continuing and extending the original mission while the James Webb mission design, construction, and launch is completed.

Additionally, if the US ever figures out how to put people back in space, or really does design robotic satellite repair capability the is nothing preventing the Hubble Origins Probe from having an extremely long and productive life.

Do check out this link: "Understanding the Windows EAL4 Evaluation" It is about the testing of Windows 2000 sp3, but it is still a very valid description of the problem with CAPP/EAL4. Rounded up: "The CAPP provides for a level of protection which is appropriate for an assumed non-hostile and well-managed user community requiring protection against threats of inadvertent or casual attempts to breach the system security. The profile is not intended to be applicable to circumstances in which protection is required against determined attempts by hostile and well funded attackers to breach system security. The CAPP does not fully address the threats posed by malicious system development or administrative personnel. Translating that into colloquial English: Don't hook this to the internet, don't run email, don't install software unless you can 100% trust the developer, and if anybody who works for you turns out to be out to get you you are toast. - An EAL4 rating means that you did a lot of paperwork related to the software process, but says absolutely nothing about the quality of the software itself. There are no quantifiable measurements made of the software, and essentially none of the code is inspected. Buying software with an EAL4 rating is kind of like buying a home without a home inspection, only more risky."

Breaking News

Flapping butterfly wings cause Hurricane.

http://www.pha.jhu.edu/~ldb/seminar/butterfly.html

Bush launches mass pesticide attack, in retalliation for Hurricane Katrina.

I've been struggling with setting up a mirrors server for our computing club here. I'd like to mirror all of Debian, for example, but I'm finding that storing (and, worse, updating) 80 gigs only to serve a tiny fraction of the files to our users is a dismal trade-off. I had been experimenting with ProxyPass, but since it didn't cache the results locally, it wasn't really providing a speed benefit.

mod_disk_cache plus mod_proxy's ProxyPass seems like just the ticket - I could give it a few servers to proxy for, give it a few hundred gigs of cache, and it would then automatically intelligently cache for those servers. This would be a great, easy plug-in solution.

Has anyone used mod_proxy and mod_cache in this fashion? It'd be great to hear about others' experiences or configuration examples.

1. Capability Myths Demolished
2. Darpa security review of CapDesk
3. SCOLL: A Language for Safe, Capability-based Collaboration
4. SCOLL and SCOLLAR : Safe Collaboration based on Partial Trust

Thanks for the links! ... Gotta love the Time-Travelling File Manager!

--Robert

Looks like it's time to trot out this link again:

Jonathan S. Shapiro, Ph.D: Understanding the Windows (and Red Hat) EAL4 Evaluation.

"In the case of CAPP, an EAL4 evaluation tells you everything you need to know. It tells you that Microsoft (Red Hat) spent millions of dollars producing documentation that shows that Windows 2000 (RHEL 5) meets an inadequate set of requirements, and that you can have reasonably strong confidence that this is the case."

Granted, RHEL is being evaluated for LSPP as well, but EAL4 is still weak.

All the comments about OpenBSD are missing the point: Common Criteria isn't about actual security; it's about security documentation. It's also about certain government purchasing requirements. Nothing to see here.

Whether or not we will ever colonize Mars is probably the least of the problems with this plan.

How do you generate the energy required to convert raw ores into something that is valuable enough to justify the cost of sending it off planet? You'd better have a cheap energy source.

But what will you use? Solar? There is 1/16th the solar energy at that distance (http://www.firstscience.com/site/articles/sunshin e.asp) so probably not. Besides you'd have to bring the panels with you so it would be pretty hard to build a large solar array.

  Oil or coal? Considering how little luck we've had finding signs of life on Mars, is it likely that enough bio-mass existed in the past to form these fossil fules? Even if it did how long/deep would someone have to dig to get it... and exactly what kind of mining equipment can you take with you on a trip to Mars? (It can't run on gas/diesel... at least not until you can extract and refine enough for your own mining equipment.)

Nuclear Fission? Hope there is a good supply of plutonium or uranium on Mars that is easy to access. Lets not forget the need to process it to a purity needed for a sustained reaction.

Nuclear fusion? Measurements of Mars's hydrogen levels (http://fuse.pha.jhu.edu/wpb/sci_mars.html) only show levels in the 16ppm range. Besides we'll need a fairly portable reactor or at least something that can be hauled to Mars and assembled there.

But, if you create such an energy source (portable fusion backpacks?) then why go to Mars? Surely with abundant cheap energy we could continue to mine our own planet for a very long time before costs would make going to a distant planet feasable.

The only way it pays to haul stuff into space from a planet is when the substance is extremely rare and extremely valuable. Now, if they were going to set up a spice mining colony... well then that would be different!

Check out plash, the principle of least authority shell, for a nice version of the chrooting you describe: http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~seaborn/plash/plash.html

Sounds like your problem isn't all that difficult. You don't have to communicate with a network. There are many military standards that might be acceptable. Some have mentioned security levels such as A, B, C2, and so on. Those are from an old standard which has been replaced with Common Criteria, which are Protection Profiles and Evaluation Assurance Levels (EALs). EALs go from 1 to 7. (Incredible that no one has mentioned CC, PPs, and EALs yet.) EAL7 is roughly equivalent to A. EAL5 and higher are extremely hard to get-- last time I looked, there were only 2 things approved at those levels. Luckily, you won't need more than EAL4 and perhaps much less-- EAL1 might be good enough-- and quite a few things are EAL4 approved. There are also a fair number of labs that can test for up to EAL4 compliance. For what it's worth, Windows is EAL4 certified but only for a few PPs, and SUSE Linux is EAL3+ certified.

I'm American, so you'll have to help me out a bit. I found this table that gives results for private philanthropy as %of GDP. I believe the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, France, the UK, Finland, Spain, Germany, Belgium, Ireland, Italy, Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Romania, Slovakia, and Poland are all part of Europe, and only the first 5 give more percentagewise than the US. Furthermore, the Netherlands is #1, yet its GDP is 481.1 billion, compared to America's 11.75 trillion. Make what you want about giving 4.49% vs 2.47%, but you can't argue that 21.6 billion helps those in need more than 290 billion.

Your analysis of govt is also wrong. Vocal minorities with lobbiests have a very disproportionate impact on govt policy, witness the **AA, or more positively, the 60s civil rights movement. Furthermore, someone who donates privately *chooses* to do that, whereas someone whose donatation was "given" in the form of taxes was compelled by force to do that. Which is more charitable?

Do be a good chap and stop hating America for your delusions. Hate us for being the lone economic superpower who doesn't care to listen to a continent that has only withen the past 50 years stopped waging near-constant wars with each other.

By type system I mean: the set of formal rules that define the type of an expression (e.g. in a sequent calculus, for a fonctionnal language).

Your definition is mistaken. CAML and SML have a static (what you call a type system) and dynamic type system. Java similarly has a dynamic type system (for downcasts, arrays, etc.). A dynamic type system ensures that the program is type-safe, because the static type system is not sufficient.

Your remark, "So this error in zlib would not be caught if zlib was programmed in Java because of Java type system, but because of runtime checks that are independent from its type system." again displays your faulty understanding of the dynamic type system of Java.

You claim that Java's dynamic type system is separate from the type system. That is consistent with your faulty definition of "type system", but is nevertheless incorrect. Here's something from the language spec (page 313):

"A basic principle of the design of the Java programming language is that the runtime type system cannot be subverted by code written in the language...

So what you call "runtime checks that are independent from its type system." is what the Java spec (and I) call a "dynamic type system". I would assume the same is true of CAML/SML, but those specs are not available online (and I don't have them handy).

Here's more, from Computer Science professor. Please look here -- this Professor is suitably precise to mention:

There is some dynamic typechecking that occurs in statically typed languages too. For instance, in Java, downcasts are verified at run-time and can raise exceptions. Out-of-bounds array accesses are also checked at run-time in Java and Caml, and are thus dynamically typed. Array accesses are not typed in C or C++, since no check is performed at all. Note that the type of an array (i.e. int, float) is statically checked, but the size is dynamically checked.

I worked on Virginia Tech's entries into the Grand Challenge, specifically on the vision system. We use a Bumblebee stereoscopic camera for depth perception and image processing. (http://www.ptgrey.com/products/bumblebee/)

Our entries (Cliff and Rocky, both of which are among the 40 finalists) use scanning laser rangefinders (LRFs) and the aforementioned Bumblebee stereoscopic camera. The laser rangefinder technology is nearly foolproof in many ways. The results are real (except sometimes when interacting with puddles) and the I/O interface is simple. The problems with LRFs are that they can be spoofed by dust and rain, cannot tell a piece of shrubbery from a boulder, and will miss important information like a chain link fence.

The problem with a stereoscopic camera used solely for stereo processing is the sheer intensiveness of the process. Depth perception (both range and accuracy) depend entirely on the number of pixels used in the processing. The amount of computational power a team of 40 or so engineering students can fit on a club car is limited. Better depth perception means longer refresh times, which means that boulder that was 30 meters away when you took the pictures is probably lodged in your engine by the time you send the processed data to whatever program is running your path planning. (We used a behavioral-based approach of obstacle avoidance on Cliff, and the A* algorithm (http://upe.acm.jhu.edu/websites/Benny_Tsai/Introd uction%20to%20AStar.htm) for Rocky.)

The way that our genius programmer - not me - approached the problem was to use a whole bunch of other algorithms using a single image to identify likely road areas, and then only process that area in stereo. It worked very well on a noisy test course at 10 mph, though that's still too slow to complete the challenge. Anyway, go Hokies!

since the RTFAs lacked any kind of crunchiness, i sourced some great stuff here that does a wonderful job explaining how this system works, and gives the advantages the statistical translation method has over the rules-based approach. as well as the disadvantages.

fascinating stuff:

"Currently, most machine translation technology, including consumer-oriented programs such as Systran's Babel Fish, have been "taught" the rules of language, such as verb tenses and when to use parts of speech. Programmers painstakingly hand-build systems based on such rules. "The computer is told, if you see this thing in Russian, replace it with this thing in English," explains Yarowsky.

"While somewhat effective, such systems are time-consuming to build (consider how long it takes most humans to learn a language and all its rules), and resulting translations are still marred by grammatical and other errors. Those that do work fairly well usually tackle popular Western languages, such as French, German, and Spanish; there are few translation programs developed for other important tongues, such as Chinese, Turkish, or Arabic, let alone for more obscure languages like Tajik.

"To tackle a broader range of the world's languages, and to improve on the quality of machine translation, Yarowsky and his Hopkins colleagues are developing computer programs that can be trained to figure out any language using statistical analysis, i.e., looking at the probabilities of language patterns. In what's known as automatic knowledge acquisition, the computer could "learn" Serbian well enough to translate future documents or conversation, or at the least pick out pertinent words like "bomb."

"As Yarowsky explains: "Say you want to teach a computer how to translate Chinese: You give the computer 100,000 sentences in English and the same 100,000 sentences in Chinese and run a program that can figure out which words go to which words. If in 2,000 sentences you have the word Washington, and in about the same number of sentences you have the word Huashengdun, and they occur in the same place in the sentence, these words are likely translations.

"It's all just observation," Yarowsky adds. "Children do the same thing, but they also do it through visual stimulation and feedback. They see a book and hear the word 'book,' and eventually they learn that it's a book. They see a bird with its wings flapping around and learn that is called a bird. It's the same with machines, only they have much better memories. Computers could remember exactly when and where they saw the words bird and book."

"So, instead of telling a computer how to do something -- conjugate the verb 'to be' in Spanish, for example (I am = soy) -- researchers give it tens of thousands of examples and program the computer to find repeated patterns that the computer can use to conjugate new verbs. Trained this way, the program could potentially "learn" phrase structure and the rules of translation.

"As Yarowsky notes in his 100,000-sentence example, one way to accomplish automatic knowledge acquisition is to use bilingual or parallel text. The program "reads" a document in English and then a version in a second language. Such texts used by Hopkins researchers include the Bible, which is available on the Web in more than 60 languages, the Book of Mormon (over 60 languages), and the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (240 languages).

"Aiding the computer is the fact that the English version of such texts can be annotated by hand or using another computer program -- essentially marked up to show, for example, that Jesus is a noun and pray is a verb. The translation program-in-training needs such information because it cannot translate future text just by substituting individual words in each language; it must also be able to analyze how sentences work. To do so, the computer program uses pattern recognition templates and other tools to understand sentences on a syntactic level. Simply put, the program is essentially given clues to know what to look for, notes Yarowsky: "It should figure out the subject, figure out the object, and other elements of sentence structure."

is the first research university in the United States.

They did release the .config file used to build their kernel. If you don't want to download their whole "fLinux" source tree just to look at it, I put it up on my web space. Give it a look-over; I imagine this would be the easiest component of the device to replace. Modify the kernel with e.g. Sebek and you should be able to get a good idea of what's going on under the hood.

Also, the GNU_Source_Code.zip includes fLinux.tar.gz and games.tar.gz, so if you get the zip file the other two are redundant.

Intelligent ID-ers like the ones mentioned above do bring a very critical scientific eye to areas of science that is mainstream scientists as dogmatic.

...of course, it helps when we write sentences in english instead of whatever that was that I just wrote. BRAINFART. Tangent: I got my undergrad in electrical engineering at a very conservative christian school (which also has a pretty decent engineering program). I was a devout evolutionist while I attended there. Later on, I went to a well known secular school to get a masters in applied biomedical engineering. It was there that I started buying into the ID side. When I saw how complex and beautifully intricate the inside of a single cell could be, the idea that it just kinda happened due to random mutations (almost all of which decrease genetic information, by the way) seemed impossible to me.

It seems to me that were going to spend entirely to much money on something that is old obsolete. Why not replace it with something new and better?

IMHO, we should. A copy from an old post of mine:

Hubble Origins Probe: replace instead of repair?

Astronomy Magazine reports that an international team of astronomers has proposed an alternative to sending a robotic or human repair mission to the ailing Hubble Space Telescope. Their proposal is to build a new Hubble Origins Probe, reusing the Hubble design but using lighter and more cost-effective technologies. The probe would include instruments currently waiting to be installed on Hubble, as well as a Japanese-built imager which 'will allow scientists to map the heavens more than 20 times faster than even a refurbished Hubble Space Telescope could.' It would take an estimated 65 months and under $1 billion to build and launch, less than the estimated cost of a service mission.

The use of multispectral imaging (MSI) to view ancient papyri has been going on for some years now, with the following being some of the most interesting projects:

- recovering text from a manuscript containing 10th century copies of some of Archimedes works which had been erased and over-written in the 12th century. http://www.thewalters.org/archimedes/frame.html

- similar to the project above, this is the recovery of carbonised Roman papyri found in Herculaneum (which was covered in 100 feet of lava during the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD) http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-14522 44_1,00.html

There are also lots of other artefact imaging projects, such as that being carried out by the Digital Hammurabi Project (http://www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi/), who want to digitise (make high-res 3D computer models of) ancient cuneiform tablets or the work at the University of Kentucky which may allow text to be 'read' without the artefact being touched at all - using a CT scan which can be decoded on a computer http://www.research.uky.edu/odyssey/fall04/seales. html

Awesome stuff...

also GSFC NASA

There is a duality between them. Light is a particle, you can even turn a light turbine with it. Mod me up.

As I often mention, a solution that everybody seems to be ignoring is putting up a new telescope, the Hubble Origins Probe. This new telescope would be more capable than the original Hubble and cost less than a robotic repair mission. For whatever reason, this possibility is almost never mentioned, although it's IMHO the best option by far.

Obligatory blurb:

Astronomy Magazine reports that an international team of astronomers has proposed an alternative to sending a robotic or human repair mission to the ailing Hubble Space Telescope. Their proposal is to build a new Hubble Origins Probe, reusing the Hubble design but using lighter and more cost-effective technologies. The probe would include instruments currently waiting to be installed on Hubble, as well as a Japanese-built imager which 'will allow scientists to map the heavens more than 20 times faster than even a refurbished Hubble Space Telescope could.' It would take an estimated 65 months and under $1 billion to build, less than the estimated cost of a service mission.

There is a telescope on the drawing board that is ment to be a replacement for Hubble, but it has not even been considered by NASA. it is called the HOP telescope, and would be able to perform many of the same functions as Hubble, but it would be much more sensitive, and it would also be more efficient and easier to maintain.

Not to mention, the upcoming James Webb Telescope will be able to see much farther then Hubble when it comes to the infrared spectrum. But it isn't going to even launch until 2011.

For one thing, if you visit the site, the paper that got accepted was accepted as a "non-reviewed" paper.

Even so, before you go off the deep end on this, in my field (which is EE, not CS) it is generally accepted that the conferences are for preliminary results, and the journals are for final results. As a result, conference submissions tend to receive cursory reviews, and journal submissions receive highly rigorous reviews.

At many (but not all) conferences, authors tend to be given the benefit of the doubt, so long as the paper is not obviously ridiculous or plagiarized.

I attended a recent conference at a major university where, rumor had it, 200 papers were accepted and only four were rejected. In spite of this, I found the quality of the conference quite high. You have to go into such things realizing that some crap is going to get through the filter. However, it's nice to hear what everyone is working on, even if the ideas are not completely finished and some of the work might not be going anywhere.

You give the author the benefit of the doubt in a conference submission. The time to be rigorous is at the point of submission to a journal, and in my field, acceptance to a journal is normally crucial to having an idea accepted by the entire community.

HeLa cells have an interesting history, they were derived from the cervical carcinoma of Henrietta Lacks. There is a theory that the loss of telomere length is at the root of aging. I recall reading that HeLa cells were sent up on Voyager, although I can't immediately recall the source.

I think a better option than repair would be putting together the spares on the ground, including a PERFECT mirror as opposed to the flawed one that got launched, and launch Hubble II.

I agree that this would be good, although I doubt very much that it can be done by cobbling together leftovers. Last I saw, the estimated cost of such a thing was around $4B, vs. under $2B to fix the one we've got.

Actually, the cost of a new and much improved Hubble (including launch) would be more around $1B:

http://www.pha.jhu.edu/hop/
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=16050

Nobody ever seems to mention the Hubble Origins Probe in these discussions, which is IMHO the best possible solution:

An international team led by Johns Hopkins University astronomers have proposed an alternative to sending a robotic or manned repair mission to the ailing Hubble Space Telescope. Their proposal is to build a new Hubble Origins Probe, reusing the Hubble design but using lighter and more cost-effective technologies. The probe would include instruments currently waiting to be installed on Hubble, as well as a Japanese-built imager which 'will allow scientists to map the heavens more than 20 times faster than even a refurbished Hubble Space Telescope could.' It would take an estimated 65 months and $1 billion to build and launch, approximately the same cost as a robotic service mission.

The original Hubble is great for historical and sentimental reasons, but the cost/benefit ratio is really so much better with a replacement.

I'm not sure what the big deal is about this particular rapid prototyping machine at Bath. Hod Lipson's lab at Cornell, for instance, has been able to create a solid freeform fabrication system which can print plastic, metal, circuits, actuators, and even batteries! They are, in my opinion, much further along than the referenced article. Other related projects of include Chrikjian's work at Johns Hopkins, and Jordan Pollack's DEMO Lab at Brandeis University.

But if it means losing the ability to do deep UV astronomy or anything else that Hubble I has proven to be very adept at, I don't think we should skimp out.

The parent poster didn't mention this, but the proposed Hubble Origins Probe would also add a brand new Japanese-built Very Wide Field Imager. According to their science info, on the proposed HOP "UV sensitivity reaches two magnitudes deeper than HST/STIS [original Hubble] and the number of backgrouns QSO's increases by a factor of 100 [no idea what a QSO is]." The new Very Wide Field Imager would have a 17-times-larger field of view, essentially allowing it to image 17 times as fast (I think).

Of course, I know jack about astronomy, so perhaps someone more knowledgeable than myself could check out the links and evaluate the proposal better. For whatever it's worth, their page says that "HOP offers all of the science a refurbished HST would provide in 2010, plus more."

Since much of the old design would be reused, the total program cost for all this (including launch) would be between $700 million and $1 billion, less than the cost of a robotic repair mission to Hubble. It also wouldn't require a shuttle launch, but could be launched on an Atlas 5 or Delta IV Heavy. Besides simply not knowing about the HOP, I'm really not sure why someone would want to repair Hubble instead of building a better one for less cost.

But if it means losing the ability to do deep UV astronomy or anything else that Hubble I has proven to be very adept at, I don't think we should skimp out.

The parent poster didn't mention this, but the proposed Hubble Origins Probe would also add a brand new Japanese-built Very Wide Field Imager. According to their science info, on the proposed HOP "UV sensitivity reaches two magnitudes deeper than HST/STIS [original Hubble] and the number of backgrouns QSO's increases by a factor of 100 [no idea what a QSO is]." The new Very Wide Field Imager would have a 17-times-larger field of view, essentially allowing it to image 17 times as fast (I think).

Of course, I know jack about astronomy, so perhaps someone more knowledgeable than myself could check out the links and evaluate the proposal better. For whatever it's worth, their page says that "HOP offers all of the science a refurbished HST would provide in 2010, plus more."

Since much of the old design would be reused, the total program cost for all this (including launch) would be between $700 million and $1 billion, less than the cost of a robotic repair mission to Hubble. It also wouldn't require a shuttle launch, but could be launched on an Atlas 5 or Delta IV Heavy. Besides simply not knowing about the HOP, I'm really not sure why someone would want to repair Hubble instead of building a better one for less cost.

http://www.pha.jhu.edu/hop/

The page has many more details regarding the actual science instruments and specifications.