Slashdot Mirror

I suppose it was a quote. Then the use of the brackets would be quite customary. They are used to indicate a word that originally wasn't in a quoted statement, but was implied by context and added to the quote to restore the meaning of the statement. For example, see the Harvard style guide for quotations for reference.

"declaring that "at 400 parts per million, all our food crops, forests, and natural ecosystems are still on a starvation diet for carbon dioxide."

Yeah but it seems there may be some unintended consequences...

http://www.leeds.ac.uk/news/ar...

Lead author Dr Roel Brienen, from the School of Geography at the University of Leeds, said: “Tree mortality rates have increased by more than a third since the mid-1980s, and this is affecting the Amazon’s capacity to store carbon.” Initially, an increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – a key ingredient for photosynthesis – led to a growth spurt for the Amazon’s trees, the researchers say. But the extra carbon appears to have had unexpected consequences. Study co-author Professor Oliver Phillips, also from the University’s School of Geography, said: “With time, the growth stimulation feeds through the system, causing trees to live faster, and so die younger.”

"The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long - and you have burned so very, very brightly Roy"

Having actually worked with uranium, just disposable gloves are enough (although you wear two pairs to avoid whipping stuff off and poking through). My lab's policy is not online, but you can find plenty of other instructions around from labs. It quite clearly says gloves and lab coat are appropriate, and that shielding is needed for storage, but not even in the case of depleted uranium. Since you have some bone to pick with Americans, you can find similar documents from plenty of other countries too.

Fast neutrons are very rare in uranium (less than 50 ppm of decays in U238, on the order of ppb for U235) unless you have a source of slow neutrons to induce fission (e.g. a lot of uranium plus a moderator). And as the previous poster quite clearly said, gloves do not shield you from fast neutrons.

You will also see those procedures warning you of the reactivity of uranium, that dust is pyrophoric and will burn on contact with air. Uranium will oxidize quickly even in the precess of cold water.

You tell people to read a book, yet show absolutely no signs of you having read a book on the topic, or even showing any effort to look things up from any source, since you are getting things wrong that take 10 seconds to look up.

You might enjoy reading http://www.ast.leeds.ac.uk/Aug... for an introduction. But to answer your question, the incoming cosmic rays usually (always?) begin interacting in the upper atmosphere, I don't know the cross sections particularly well, but it is possible that only very rarely do they make it to the ground. What we detect down here is the cascade of particles - like an avalanche - initiated in the upper atmosphere. The resultant cascade can affect detectors across hundreds of square kms.

emergent property

"My thoughts exactly."

Computability and Emergence, by S. Barry Cooper, University of Leeds

Really? And who gets to draw the line, you?

The survivors of the resulting genocide have a valid claim here, as might those who conduct the war crimes trial in the aftermath of the genocide

The Serbian military did it more recently. The success rate differs depending on who reports it (reference):

* DoD estimated 120 Serb tanks, 220 APCs destroyed; Clark stated that reports about NATO warplanes striking decoys and failing to destroy tanks and personnel carriers was a concerted disinformation campaign
* Reporters on the ground estimated 13 Serb tanks and < 100 armored personnel carriers destroyed, but noted the ruins of many different types of decoys hit by NATO forces (e.g., rusted tanks with broken parts, wood or canvas mock-ups). Other reports talk about microwave ovens being used inside decoys to generate cheap electronic signatures.

Research seems to support such a claim. For example, a trial where 75 out of 256 workers at a large retail company were issued with personal stereos to wear at work for four weeks showed a 10% increase in productivity for the headphone wearers. Other similar research conducted by researchers at the University of Illinois found a 6.3% increase when compared with the no music control group.

And it also works for students, Can listening to background music improve children's behaviour and performance in mathematics?

There was a significant improvement in the behaviour of the EBD children when background music was playing. Observers also noted improved co-operation and a reduction in aggression in the lessons immediately following the intervention. Significant improvement in mathematics performance was found for all the children.

The spirit is will but the flesh is weak.

Other systems in the past has translated this English idiom into all sorts of laughable text but my favorite is

The vodka is tempting, but the meat's a bit suspect

There are many other famously wrong translations of idioms Admittedly, idioms are difficult to translate, but its not like the users will understand this or care. They just want a reasonable translation so they don't end up looking like an idiot to the cute foreign girl they are trying to bed.

new news is always old news when you look for science in everyday magazines/newspapers. Anyway, I remember knowing from somewhere (school, discovery, whatever) that Africa is due for another splitting in some millions of years (the great lakes are just rifts filled with water from what I remember) I found this webpage http://www.see.leeds.ac.uk/afar/ the new news is at least a few months old. maybe the news is just that they published an article about it.

Negligence only really came into existence in 1932, so by this point the case law wouldn't apply to the US.

See Donoghue (or McAlister) v Stevenson, [1932] All ER Rep 1; [1932] AC 562; House of Lords

How to Think like a Mathematician:
http://www.amazon.com/How-Think-Like-Mathematician-Undergraduate/dp/0521895464
Online here (for how much longer?):
http://www.maths.leeds.ac.uk/~khouston/httlam.html

I bought this in the discount bin for $1 somewhere, I think it's (Playthinks) really good to develop logic and just try a little bit of every mathematical discipline:
http://www.amazon.com/Big-Book-Brain-Games-Mathematics/dp/0761134662

This isn't pure math, but lisp, but since Lisp is inspired by lambda calculus, perhaps it'll inspire more programming (shrugs):
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/LispBook/index.html

It's the same in the UK I'm afraid. I'm studying for a PhD and anything that I devise is wholly owned by the university. However there is a clause in my contract saying that the university will essentially share the love if they exploit my ideas. The Policy on Intellectual Property Rights for Leeds University can be found here: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/research/hbook/ipr3.htm

I second the recommendation for Python.

Python will let you focus on the fun and interesting parts. Compare "Hello, world!" in C vs. in Python; in Python you jump right in and print something, whereas in C you need to declare your main() function and import before you can do anything.

I recommend you grab Python 3.0 and use that to teach the kids. It's Python 2.x with a few sharp corners knocked off. For example, integer division is now unsurprising:

print(1 / 2) # prints "0.5"

In older versions of Python, (1 / 2) evaluates to 0 (just like C, C++, Pascal, Ruby, etc.). In recent 2.x versions you can get the new behavior if you want it, but it is not the default.

Here is an essay about why Python 3.0 is better than Python 2.x for teaching.

http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/nde/papers/teachpy3.html

P.S. I know that Ruby fans probably think Ruby would be a good choice for teaching. IMHO Python would be a better first language. However it would not be unreasonable to offer Ruby in an advanced class. IMHO, Ruby is not as straightforward and tidy as Python, and it would be needlessly harder for an introductory class. No flames intended, YMMV.

steveha

Shock, horror! London-based newspaper misunderstands the way that the legal system works north of Gretna!

Confusing England with the UK would be like confusing California with the USA, if there were no federal laws, but most of the power was still at the federal level, and it tried to make state laws not conflict with each other too much.

Insomniacs can read an example of how a law is framed (at UK level, by the UK government) to take into account the differences between the Scottish and Anglowelsh legal systems here:
http://www.opsi.gov.uk/si/si2000/20002334.htm

To further confuse matters, devolution has given some (different levels of) legal powers to assemblies/governments in Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland, and the ratification of European treaties means that European law can trump national law (not just the EU - see http://www.leeds.ac.uk/law/hamlyn/european.htm)

If this makes any sense I'm not telling it right.

For more information, you can try the Afar Rift Home Page for the Afar Rift Project.

Here's the procedure for demonstrating the reaction

http://www.chem.leeds.ac.uk/delights/texts/expt_11.html

The wired article itself does not provide much information, but one of its' links, more specifically this one explains a lot (including the reactions). It does say that is does not go on for ever, but repeats for "just" 15 cycles or more. It would have been cool if it went on forever, but no such luck.

Thibodeau and the rest of the people at NARA have been thinking about this problem for awhile, as have other researchers around the world. If you're interested in such things, there are a few places to start looking.

CAMiLEON http://www.si.umich.edu/CAMILEON/
Cedars http://www.leeds.ac.uk/cedars/
InterPARES http://www.interpares.org/
DSPace http://www.dspace.org/

Lockheed Martin won the NARA contract to develop the Electronic Records Archives.
http://www.archives.gov/era/acquisition/option-awa rd.html

After hearing them talk about it at the Managing Electronic Records conference (http://www.merconference.com/), I'd say they have a few things to work out yet... but these are important questions for the preservation of history, culture, and more. These questions also involve authenticity, the value of evidence, and more...

I see you still are not aware of what an ad hominem attack is. My young child, please do all of us a favour and read up on it. This basic introduction to informal logic from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy will help you understand the flaw in your argument, and how your use of an ad hominem attack proves you immediately wrong.

Your inexperience with real-world server and network administration shines through yet again! The problem is not being able to filter out spam originating from Joe Schmoe's compromised PC. That is the easy part! The costly part is that it takes significant computing resources to perform spam checks properly. Do not forget that computing resources consume power, and power costs money. It's even more costly when a genuine email gets filtered incorrectly, and a client is lost. Simple business, my child. Simple business.

When you have grown up, attended university and obtained several years experience dealing with real-world problems, I do wish to continue this dicussion with you. I think it would go quite differently. You would not resort to ad hominem attacks every other sentence, you'd have a better idea of how the business world works, your understanding of technology would be slightly improved, and you might be able to carry on a civilized conversation. Do keep me updated on your progress, my young child.

I think you misunderstood the meaning of the statement 'the need to keep things cool'. Or, at least, I'll assume Scarlet X knew what he was talking about. Currently most 'spintronics' in the R&D lab need to be cryogenically cooled (like superconductors). Thus, their off-state temperature needs to be dropped way low (think liquid nitrogen or less), so that when operating their total temp range stays within the regime where the proper properties exist. By room temperature, it would mean no supercooled temperature bias, and operation within normal 'room temp' limits. (10-50C temp rise, etc.)

although, with the other posts in this thread, spintronics is usually associated with lower heat production than current transistor-based technologies. I think this is related to the fact that it's typically performed with cooled superconductors, which will naturally have very low (near zero) electrical resistance. Not sure if that would apply with the green paint at room temp, though. Also, maybe fundamental to spin flipping is a reduced Joule heating effect. Not sure.

Here's a UK group looking into room temp spintronics. The page has a somewhat watered down description of what's going on:
Spin@RT

The event is calles the Messinian Salinity Crisis.

No it isn't.

"The mantle is not liquid. It is solid - we know this because the full range of seismic waves can pass through the mantle (so-called shear waves cannot pass through liquids - which is how we know that the outer core is in this state)."

And half a brain is what you might have after the bomb goes off.

For those wanting to experiment you will find many delights on my site.

Click here.

It took me a little while before I realized that the fact it's computer equipment didn't exempt us nerds from the laws of biology and physics.

1) The energies of the protons hitting the top of the atmosphere are very very high. The muons themselves at the ground have energies of a few GeV, and they themselves have lost 2 GeV just getting down through the atmosphere. The primary particles (mostly protons) creating the detectable ground-level showers have energies from tens of GeV's on up (TeV's, PeV's, etc.) The fluxes of these particles drop off as a power law with energy.

Incidentially, the highest energy cosmic ray detected was over 10^20 eV! I believe the flux for particles at that energy are something like one event per square kilometer per century or something like that.

2) Muons are leptons, so they are not affected by the strong force, as you mention.

For charged particles another source of energy loss is through radiation as they accelerate (or decelerate). When a charged particle passes close to a nucleus it can have its trajectory altered resulting in radiation emission. This is bremsstrahlung. If the radiated photons have enough energy (greater than 1.02 MeV), they can pair produce into electron/postitrons and thus an electromagnetic cascade is born. It turns out that the energy radiated has a 1/m^2 dependence, which makes it very important for electrons, but basically nothing else (the muon being 207 times the mass of the electron, I believe). This is why muons don't create showers, or conversely why basically only electrons and photons do.

Because charged muons don't strongly interact, and they don't create showers, their dominant energy loss mechanism is due to ionization and atomic excitation (because they have charge), which is well described by the Bethe-Bloch equation.

Hadronic showers, by the way, are a little bit tricky because the shower profile and composition fluctuates so much (electromagnetic showers are very well behaved and easy to identify). To design them you need to take care to put an electromagnetic calorimeter in front of them so you can tell the difference between electromagnetic and hadronic showers. The material that makes up the EM part has to be something that will ensure a good EM shower, but with low enough Z so that the hadrons will not start their shower there. Occasionally hadrons will knock off an electron in the EM part, which will cause a EM shower and make it look like a EM event, but this is just part of the background that you need to take statistically into account by making good computer models (along with other things like getting a handle on how what percentage of hadrons at a given energy will be entirely contained in the calorimeter and what will leak out the back). You can't construct and analyze a particle detector these days without a very good physical model of it.

In the ... section, he is accessing the 2d array.
Depending if your language stores arrays in column major order (like fortran) or row major order (like c/c++), the next accessed element of the array is either the very next element in memory or some element much farther away. Reading the elements in the same order they are stored in memory is much faster than skipping all over memory.

Search for accessing memory here.

magnificent Aurora australiensis, even if it is horribly misnamed.

I hate to be a Grammar Nazis (Hell i'm not even a native english speaker) but shouldn't that be aurora australis ?

And if you don't like the name just say it's a Polar Aurora
:)

Or even Carlill v. Carbolic Smoke Ball Co.

At my former university, they had a corridor with a glass wall which went past the machine room full of supercomputers, many with flashy-looking blinkenlights arranged into grids or in the form of graphical processor-monitoring screens. There were often some weird and wonderful smaller machines, like some Linux-running, Itanium-powered (according to the labels) SGI workstations - this was late 2000, early 2001 or so, and I haven't seen a single Itanic since...

The biggest machine was a huge Cray T3E - I don't recall any blinkenlights on it, but it didn't need them! I recently heard that turing.mcc.ac.uk has since been dismantled, presumably because it was no longer cost-effective for its mere few hundred Gflops. I've no idea what was done with it and its parts, or what (if anything) it has been replaced with, but it's what I thought of when I saw this article. :-)

Company spokesman William Perry says use of the auto data recorder will not be mandatory for Progressive customers.

"The key thing for us regarding the privacy aspect is the program is completely voluntary. It's not imposed on anybody," he said.
Ha... How much longer will it take before it becomes compulsory?

Regardless, this is still not as bad as Intelligent Speed Adaptation (ISA), where we could one day see full control of speed on our vehicles:
ISA info

As a 21 year old male who loves cars and driving, the future looks bleak.

Lots of people have thought of this.

See this guy for example.

Does anyone else read this and have visions of the HAL 9000? Here's another picture in case the first one gets Slashdotted.

Perhaps they'll use the octopus from the Japanese edition (click on Japan, then "Illus." in the resulting pop-up)[1]. I think the fact the Japanese artist had obviously never actually seen Doctor Who is an obvious boon (his Daleks are rather interesting as well).

[1] Gosh, it's redesigned itself since I last looked, and isn't it sucky!

• ValueTypes (structs) are not supported in Java, which is a source of major pressure on the GC, an issue solved completely by the availability of it on .NET

Since you know something about JIT compilation and GC, I'd like to ask you about the actual benefit of value types. At first I thought they were great but now I'm not so sure. There appears to be a couple ways to solve the GC and performance issues without creating a user-visible partition of the type hierarchy (and the potentially error-inducing difference between copying references vs. copying values).

Escape analysis can be used to figure out when an object stays within the bounds of a single thread's stack. That way, many objects can be allocated on the stack automatically.

Also, if the compiler can detect that a class is immutable, then the it would be free to copy instances around when they're sufficiently small (instead of passing a pointer).

Those two optimizations seem to be feasible, though the first probably requires intra-procedural analysis to perform well. Are there benefits to value types that these two optimizations don't nullify?

On the topic of Generics, the CLR implementation has a lot of advantages over the Java implementation (I especially like the runtime specialization for value types). However, currently Java has the convenient notion of covariance and contravariance of type parameters (though they chose really, really bloated syntax). This is one of those features that I expect will make it into the CLR pretty soon (or maybe it'll stop at the langauge level) because MS seems to have no problem adding features, which, as a side benefit, also pushed Sun to start adding stuff!

I'm a big fan of POV-Ray. I've been using it for years to illustrate chemistry through on-line animations.

I've got a bit of experience of this having a publication list of my own.

Perversely after I've had papers accepted in journals I can't leave the PDFs of the papers on my web site as I don't own them anymore, the journals do.

I mean shifted as a unit, not like in the movement of the plates, but shifted all together like if the peel of an orange moved around the inside. This means that at some point antartica (part of it anyway) was in a more tropical like climate.

What? The standard theory of continential drift has Antarctica positioned somewhere around the latitude of central Peru and Argentina, which is far north enough to have a tropical climate. You don't need these additional theories of shifting to explain this.

Indeed, Antarctica is believed to have had a rich and varied mammal population, and until they all became extinct, it was probably quite distinct from those on other continents because of its isolation.

Mars would be colder than Antarctica most of the time.

And Antarctica does better in the oxygen and water availability stakes.

"Let us ADD our INCOME to our CAPITAL, as the squirrel adds to its autumn horde. Aye, there's the SUM that makes a TOTAL WEALTH. 3000 DUCATS? Is this an EXPENDITURE I see before me? Marry 'tis best 'twere TAKEN AWAY, like as the magpie taketh away the jewel of great price. But hist! Here cometh the INTEREST, and 'tis of no mean interest, i' faith! I had lief ADD a percentage of this, than clasp my fair Rosalind's spleen."

In all reality, as many people have pointed out, there is a large chunk of poetry written in various programming languages, and the inverse is true as well; many human languages are used in forms that are human "programs". Instead of being stored on harddrives, they are published in cookbooks and engineering texts.

--
Evan

JEP - Java equation parser jep.sourceforge.net just a simple parser for equations, but can be used as the first steps for a CA program.

SingSurf - Draws singular algrbraic and other surface. SingSurf.

Javaview - JavaView a platform for 3D mathematical graphic.

It would be really nice to see a good open source framework, which allows easy extension into domain specific areas. I can't really see it happening. Maybe the best thing is to work on interopability of the packages, say through the OpenMath or MathML systems.

Intelligent Speed Adaptation (ISA) is a general term for Intelligent Transport Systems that serve to limit the speed of a vehicle. By restricting the vehicle to the posted speed limit, ISA potentially provides one of the most effective strategies for reducing inappropriate speeds.

As a toy to demonstrate how badly you can change the outcome of an election, I wrote a toy demo a few years ago which still seems to be up and running - you can try it out here It only implements simple population-based measures, but it does get the point over.

My comment was in context of communication between people and other people, and encompasses more things than just instructional.

I don't mean to denigrate images as a means of communication -- after all, we do have paintings, sculpture -- objects that speak when words fail us.

However, as a way of disseminating news, images suck. What do you make of this image? Is this a guy inspecting a bunch of tanks? Or this? Is this some kind of pervy kiddie porn?

Actually both these pictures are classics, communicating outrage, shock and sorrow -- but they wouldn't if words didn't accompany them and provide context.

Also, letters communicate sparingly and that is why they are used in programming. But there are a lot of people who prefer the GUI IDE even for programming

GUI IDEs make extensive use of text. Perhaps I'm biased towards text because I'm a programmer, but I'd like you to make me a make-like tool using only visual manipulation. IMO, GUIs are useful for tasks involving spatial orientation, but the power of text to communicate complex instructions cannot be beat.

At my old uni they had a very similar project doing 3D laser scans of building and meshing them with the visible pictures. Have a look at Resolve Project.

BTW: Did anyone notice ?
Nikos Drakos - one of the Gartner consultants who is the author of that report is the writer of the famous latex2html tool.

In 2002, no federal wiretap reports indicated that encryption was encountered

One point to note is that the Russian mobile network uses GSM, which is (IIRC) encrypted by default. I think I'm correct in saying that in 2002, the US was predominantly using unencrypted analogue mobile phones. If they were in Russia (or indeed Europe), every mobile communication they tapped would be encrypted.

Then again, I get the impression that the NSA wouldn't have much trouble with GSM "encryption".

First they take an unproven theory, that high-charged particles create low-level clouds, then they put another theory on top of it, that the fluctuations in high-charged particle concentrations, and the (unproven) low-level clouding, and that ALWAYS results in climatic cooling.

Ever hear of a cloud chamber? It works by looking at the condensation trails that form as charged particles move through a water vapor. Charles Wilson won the nobel prize for its invention.

From http://www.nobel.se/physics/educational/observing/ cloud-1.html

The Cloud Chamber

The Wilson Expansion Chamber
Charles Wilson saw tracks of single charged particles in his cloud chamber the first time in 1910. Having studied meteorology and the formation of water droplets that make clouds, he started his research on cloud formation in 1894. He made a chamber filled with water and air where the temperature could rapidly be lowered by pulling a piston that caused the air to expand. The water vapour would condense into droplets along a track of a charged particle that traverses the chamber at the right moment. The tracks could be photographed and with his invention Wilson visualised for the first time tracks of atomic particles. He received the Nobel Prize for his invention in 1927.

The Wilson cloud chamber was used to study different kinds of particles and interactions for more than 40 years and many discoveries were made.


Note the part about Wilson being influenced by his study of meteorology.

As far a comsic rays creating low-level clouds, there is a pretty strong correlation between the two.

I just don't cosmic ray variation would account for more than half of the 20th century's climatic change. The variation just wouldn't be that great given the fact that the solar system simply hasn't moved very far in 100 years.

You're missing a lot.

One is that the sun's own cycles modulate cosmic rays. We see a decrease in neutron detections during peaks of the solar cycle, for example. This is 11 years (22 total for full pole reversal and return).

Another thing is that comic ray levels don't smoothly move up and down with the motion of the sun through the galaxy. There are large fluctuations.

What these scientists show is a possible link with large, but very long term changes in cosmic rays and large, long-term climate change.

The point about short-term global warming is that a correlation has been found between cosmic ray flux (down 20% over the past 100 year) and low-level, and generally cooling clouds.

You're right about the patent thing. Ipix aparently has a patent that they are using on Quicktime QTVR and panotools. more info warning - these links seem a bit old; I wonder what the progress has been. These are pretty simple algorithms (not trivial to implement, though) and are exactly the type of patents I hate... argh...