Slashdot Mirror

I see a lot of claims with no sources or evaluations of magnitude or probability

Yeah but but pulling the claim that micro and nano plastics are completely harmless in every way out of your ass without a shred of evidence to back it up is just fine?

https://www.lunduniversity.lu....
https://www.nature.com/article...
https://www.iflscience.com/env...
https://phys.org/news/2018-02-...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/...
https://www.iflscience.com/pla...

Could you be thinking of this one? http://nucleardata.nuclear.lu....

I'll buy your bullshit but until then GMOs are just that,bullshit.

So if somersetting isn't happening naturally its bullshit? Nice fallacy.

You have Monsanto (who seems to be in a race with Goldman Sachs on who can be the most like Wolfram & Hart)

Right, they freely liscense technology to charitable GMOs like rice that could prevent blindness and disease resistant cassava, then Greenpeace and others work hard to block it (because GMOs saving lives would make their anti-GMO donation pitch look really bad), and somehow Monsanto is the evil one in that picture.

not only creating plants that frankly shouldn't even be considered plants

What? They shouldn't be considered plants because they have a transgene? Do you have any idea what a plant even is? Really, if you are proposing adding new kingdom, you really need to re-evaluate your confidence in your level of biology knowledge.

God knows what else mixed in,

Today I learned APHIS is God. But you do have an unintentional point: we don't know how many things have transgenes. Probably everything seeing as how it happens in nature. Even humans have syncytin 2 transgenes.

So please don't try to feed us that "no different than crosbreeding" horseshit

Did I ever actually say that? No, I didn't. Of course they're different, that's why we have different terms to describe them, just like the mass selection breeding method is different from the pure line breeding method. You are stating a fact in a way that makes it look as if just stating something is a valid point. Well, I can do that too: everything has DNA, which is universal.

And that isn't even addressing the elephant rotting in the corner which is how this shit seems to be able to contaminate everything from neighboring crops to weeds

That's an ignorant statement. Ban a plant because it cross pollinates? You've just banned all outcrossing crops then. Oh, you want to hold GMOs to a double standard that no crop could possibly live up to? How convenient. It's almost like making an argument that cannot be falsified.

Just wait until Roundup Ready ends up in the Kudzu and we'll see how much you like that crap.

Yeah, right after God punishes the evil evolutionists. Highly unlikely.

While birds and people are known to navigate by the stars, the discovery is the first convincing evidence for such abilities in insects, the researchers say. It is also the first known example of any animal getting around by the Milky Way as opposed to the stars.

"Even on clear moonless nights, many dung beetles still manage to orientate along straight paths," said Marie Dacke of Lund University in Sweden. "This led us to suspect that the beetles exploit the starry sky for orientation – a feat that had, to our knowledge, never before been demonstrated in an insect."

Dacke and her colleagues found that dung beetles can transport their dung balls along straight paths under a starlit sky, but lose the ability under overcast conditions. In a planetarium, the beetles stayed on track equally well under a full starlit sky and one showing only the diffuse streak of the Milky Way.

That makes sense, the researchers explained, because the night sky is sprinkled with stars, but the vast majority of those stars should be too dim for the beetles' tiny compound eyes to see.

The findings raise the possibility that other nocturnal insects also use stars to guide them at night. On the other hand, dung beetles are pretty special. Upon locating a suitable dung pile, ball-rolling dung beetles shape a piece of dung into a ball and roll it away in a straight line. That behaviour guarantees them that they will not return to the dung pile, where they risk having their ball stolen by other beetles.

"Dung beetles are known to use celestial compass cues such as the sun, the moon and the pattern of polarised light formed around these light sources to roll their balls of dung along straight paths," Dacke said. "Celestial compass cues dominate straight-line orientation in dung beetles so strongly that, to our knowledge, this is the only animal with a visual compass system that ignores the extra orientation precision that landmarks can offer.

http://www.lunduniversity.lu.se/o.o.i.s?id=24890&news_item=5999

http://www.lunduniversity.lu.se/

http://www4.lu.se/o.o.i.s/32351

OAM has been discredited in peer reviewed IEEE published paper: http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=2062936&fileOId=2339120

Look at this

Posting the same link a bazillion times isn't a "All your argumentative points are invalid forever" button. Usually we're here for, you know, conversation? Not link spam.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=6059486 PDF for those with no IEEE access: http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=2062936&fileOId=2339120 The short version: nothing new here and equivalence to traditional multiple-antenna methods, with same bandwidth limitations; move along.

That paper and OAM in general has been thoroughly discredited by a peer reviewed IEEE paper: http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=2062936&fileOId=2339120

That's a load of bullshit and peer reviewed IEEE paper proves it: http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=2062936&fileOId=2339120

Peer reviewed IEEE paper proving grandparent is correct, you a troll, and OAM a scam: http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=2062936&fileOId=2339120

Further discussion actually supports GP. Peer reviewed IEEE paper shows OAM is a scam: http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=2062936&fileOId=2339120

Mod parent up! OAM has been discredited in peer-reviewed IEEE paper: OAM has been discredited in peer reviewed IEEE published paper: http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=2062936&fileOId=2339120

OAM has been discredited in peer reviewed IEEE published paper: http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=2062936&fileOId=2339120

This is actually a subset of MIMO, which is already widely used in WiFi and other wireless networks. Thus it will, regrettably, not give access to any additional bandwidth. The details on the equivalence is in a paper from IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, titled "Is orbital angular momentum (OAM) based radio communication an unexploited area?" http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=2062936&fileOId=2339120

There are no age-old libraries when you program on cutting edge megaflop and petaflop-scale supercomputers (Bluegene/P, Bluegene/Q, QCDOC) for high performance physics applications such as lattice QCD. Also the data analysis tools we use often require fits to ~20 parameter non-linear functions which would be virtually impossible to get right in Java syntax. For example check out some of the NNLO PQChPT fit forms on Bijnen's page.

Diesel is NOT greener. The only reason it's thought of as greener is because of the lower carbon (CO2) emissions due to lower consumption. That part is greener. Diesel does however produce NOx, which reacts with water and produces Nitric Acid, which is very bad for the environment and hurts the respiratory organs. Diesel engines produce 24 times the NOx of petrol engines.

If you want to go "green" and still drive a car the best option at the moment is a CNG-car. CNG is Compressed Natural Gas. You can get it as a fossil fuel which is bad for the environment, but better than ANY of the other alternatives, or you can produce bio-methane from human waste which reduces the CO2 emissions with about 95%. A recent paper by scientists at Lund University pushes that up to 120%.

It's easy to convert a "normal" car to a CNG-car, although the ones built as CNG-cars have better efficiency.

These are the "greenest" cars you can get at the moment. Hybrids are nice, but they're not really green, and Diesel I'd classify as "red" (or whatever the opposite of green is).

Antenna design for hand-held devices at these frequencies and power levels is not exactly trivial, and minimizing the effect of the human body (hand) on the antenna characteristics is the subject of much research in the industry.

http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&fileOId=1152137

http://www.rfm.com/corp/appdata/antenna.pdf

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/120848913/articletext?DOI=10.1002%2Fmop.23715

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/11208/36089/01710996.pdf

http://e-citations.ethbib.ethz.ch/view/pub:18638

http://www.waset.org/journals/waset/v49/v49-156.pdf

http://www.amazon.com/Hands-effect-Shahla-Moradi-Shahrbabak/dp/3639175425

http://www.google.com/search?q=effect+of+hand+on+antenna&hl=en&client=safari&rls=en&ei=GbZBTOP-NIP-8Aaw_aUZ&start=10&sa=N

http://rfdesign.com/mag/505RFDF1.pdf

http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijap/2009/491262.html

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fiel5%2F4913660%2F4957855%2F04958011.pdf%3Farnumber%3D4958011&authDecision=-203

http://wireless.per.nl/wireless/articles/08_WIC_correlated_coupled_MIMO.pdf

http://www.impinj.com/WorkArea/linkit.aspx?LinkIdentifier=id&ItemID=2563>

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.66.2119&rep=rep1&type=pdf

http://202.194.20.8/proc/VTC09Spring/DATA/02-07-08.PDF

AND THAT'S IN JUST THE FIRST THREE PAGES OF MY GOOGLE SEARCH!!!!!!!!!!

Note that this "antennaphile" site called the iPhone 4's antenna design "cool", and said to expect to see other manufacturers adopting similar designs.

Note that the forum thread linked below says that your hand can affect a GHz-band antenna from as far way as 3cm. So where on a phone that is FAR less than 1cm. thick are you going to place that antenna that WON'T have "hand-effects" to some degree? Now, factor in the fact that the FCC MANDATES that the antenna be on the LOWER half of the phone (where your hand naturally grips!), and you can readily see that, as Jobs stated (and demonstrated), EVERY cellphone suffers from the presence of the user. Keep that in mind when you hear people proclaim "NO other phone has these issues." WRONG! EVERY cellphone struggles mightily with this limitation (the presence of the user), during EVERY SINGLE CALL and with EVERY SINGLE USER.

I disagree, but feel free to enlighten me.

Ok, I will.

Antenna design for hand-held devices at these frequencies and power levels is not exactly trivial, and minimizing the effect of the human body (hand) on the antenna characteristics is the subject of much research in the industry.

http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&fileOId=1152137

http://www.rfm.com/corp/appdata/antenna.pdf

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/120848913/articletext?DOI=10.1002%2Fmop.23715

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/11208/36089/01710996.pdf

http://e-citations.ethbib.ethz.ch/view/pub:18638

http://www.waset.org/journals/waset/v49/v49-156.pdf

http://www.amazon.com/Hands-effect-Shahla-Moradi-Shahrbabak/dp/3639175425

http://www.google.com/search?q=effect+of+hand+on+antenna&hl=en&client=safari&rls=en&ei=GbZBTOP-NIP-8Aaw_aUZ&start=10&sa=N

http://rfdesign.com/mag/505RFDF1.pdf

http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijap/2009/491262.html

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fiel5%2F4913660%2F4957855%2F04958011.pdf%3Farnumber%3D4958011&authDecision=-203

http://wireless.per.nl/wireless/articles/08_WIC_correlated_coupled_MIMO.pdf

http://www.impinj.com/WorkArea/linkit.aspx?LinkIdentifier=id&ItemID=2563>

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.66.2119&rep=rep1&type=pdf

http://202.194.20.8/proc/VTC09Spring/DATA/02-07-08.PDF

AND THAT'S IN JUST THE FIRST THREE PAGES OF MY GOOGLE SEARCH!!!!!!!!!!

Note that this "antennaphile" site called the iPhone 4's antenna design "cool", and said to expect to see other manufacturers adopting similar designs.

Note that the forum thread linked below says that your hand can affect a GHz-band antenna from as far way as 3cm. So where on a phone that is FAR less than 1cm. thick are you going to place that antenna that WON'T have "hand-effects" to some degree? Now, factor in the fact that the FCC MANDATES that the antenna be on the LOWER half of the phone (where your hand naturally grips!), and you can readily see that, as Jobs stated (and demonstrated), EVERY cellphone suffers from the presence of the user. Keep that in mind when you hear people proclaim "NO other phone has these issues." WRONG! EVERY cellphone struggles mightily with this limitation (the presence of the user

There's everyday tasks like plots and statistics, and then there's specialized tools that are specific to fields and, er, specialties.

For simple plotting and statistics, I'd look into Scientific Python, or Matlab/Octave/Gnuplot.

For programming concepts in general, I advocate taking a course from the CS department, preferably one of the ones that are based on SICP (Berkeley CS61A, MIT 6.001). Then supplement that with some sort of imperative language, and you'll be set for life (cough).

In High Energy Physics, most software has historically been written in FORTRAN. However there is a move toward C++. A few examples:

The main framework for analysis is called ROOT. It's C++ based and very capable. The old FORTRAN-based framework is called PAW.

PYTHIA is the primary simulator for particle physics. Past versions were in FORTRAN, but recently the first C++ version has appeared.

(FORTRAN is kinda fun, in that you have to watch your spaces... and the commonblocks...)

You might want to check your facts before stating that Mayans ever inhabited what is called USA.

You may want to check your facts. Fact is is the Mayans weren't one tribe but was more than one tribe and some lived in northern Mexico and southern US. The Tohono O'odham Nation lives on both sides of the border, in northern Mexico and in Arizona, and they have rights to cross the border anytime. Here's the wiki page on how they can cross the border. You might also want to check out the Pre-Columbian trade. Maize, corn, is native to Mexico yet when the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock the local Indians were already growing corn as a crop. That was one of the food stuffs Indians shared with the Pilgrims when they were starving, I hope you know that's what Thanksgiving Day is all about. Quite simply there was a flow of people and goods throughout the Americas in the Pre-Columbian days.

Organisms that are able to survive at cold temperatures are very interesting. From a structural point of view, these organisms contain adaptations that prevent their proteins from cold denaturation. From a food science point of view, it is these kinds of organisms that allow us to have "creamy" ice cream.

These whiskers tie in with existing research into artificial skin that can "feel." This 2005 NASA article describes mecha-skin that uses IR sensors to detect touch. Japanese researchers (2005) reported having a type that senses temperature and pressure through actual touching.

The skin research should be useful both for robotics and for replacement parts for humans, as an alternative to the clunky biological hand transplants that have been carried out. (I think I'd rather have a Luke Skywalker robot hand than a mismatched corpse's!) These artificial hand researchers will probably be interested as well, because having a prosthesis that can be sensed as well as controlled is necessary for it to be as good as the original. The big issue is how easy it will be to get these touch signals into the human nervous system in a useful way. For robots, the data can be built into existing software for making maps of a robot's surroundings. I picture a robot rat running a maze with a set of these whiskers. Won't whiskers serve as a low-energy-cost alternative to sonar and other sensing systems?

The odd thing is that here, the research is not into copying human abilities, but those of (nonhuman) animals. I wrote a silly article arguing that future robots will be made to resemble animals, not humans, and Charles Van Doren (in A History of Knowledge) predicted "warm and fuzzy" robotics. Is that where we're headed?

A couple of years ago this thesis was published at the CompSci department in Lund. It's 200 pages about component-oriented programming, segueing into almost a thousand pages about the moral and ethical ramification on computation in general. He did pass, but only just; many people thought it really was two theses in one, and that the philosophical part really should have been presented at the philosophy department, not in computer science.

As far as I know, html/css is the only option if you don't have the ability to install and run anything on the server you have access to. I have a cobbled together perl app that allows me to write posts as text with some minimal markup, and translates it to proper html with links, image scaling and thumbnail creation, rss feed generation and so on, and moves it all up to the server using scp. The only thing I'm missing is the ability to have it indexed by blox indexers, but then, I'm not really writing for a larger audience anyhow so I don't much mind.

To me this is a good compromise - it's lean, easy to manage if there's a problem, and a static page loads real fast - and I've been surprised that there doesn't seem to exist any "real" tools for managing a static webpage-type blog like this.

http://lucs.lu.se/people/jan.moren/log/current.htm l

As there's the Euro50 project (50m in diameter) that is allready in the final planing stages (ergo, past funding stage). Sure not everything is set in stone yet, lots of stuff still to be ratified upon ... thought it's progressing along quite nicely I might say.

PS. I'm biased, as I am kind of involved =)
PPS. Yes, the homepage is out-of-date, hasn't been updated since it was created .... so it doesn't quite show the progress that has been made....

[Note: I wrote about this just a day ago here; I'm paraphrasing and shortening it below]

I just bought myself a wireless router, for the price of 5100 yen (about $45). Of course, it's a real, full single-board computer that happens to have excellent connectivity to everything. Add storage ability and interfaces through USB2 and you can start thinking up some really interesting uses for this kind of gear.

With the kind of price we're starting to see, there's no reason to have only one. How about having two, three or more of them at home, in different rooms to get good wireless coverage anywhere? They could present themselves as being one single friendly system to its users, transparently talking to each other wirelessly and move data to where it's needed.

The units with hard disks could be hidden away in closets or workrooms where the noise doesn't bother anyone, while the ones out in the livingroom or bedrooms would would be small and quiet and have extra communications abilities like being able to play music or show movies stored anywhere in the home network. They would act as an external redundant storage (more convenient and much safer than backing up on CD:s or DVD:s), as backup, as household web, mail and IP telephone server, climate controller and general communications forwarder (whether you are at home, using your cellphone, or being on some conference trip halfway around the world, you can get to your email, voice mail and IM in the same way).

You need more storage or some new hardware functionality? Just get another unit. When powered on it'll join the rest of them and suddenly your home has a bit of added capacity it didn't have before.

When highly capable hardware like this is coming down into the sub-10000yen range, a whole new range of uses is becoming feasible.

But being a sound, usable design seems to be a minor concern for Apple's product strategy. The big selling point with all iMacs, starting with the original candy iMacs, is that they look cool. Once familiarity has blunted the coolness factor, an iMac design is discarded -- no matter how good it is.

Pretty sad. When the pedestal iMac came out, I rather hoped that competitors would imitate it. Not its overall appearance -- Apple is notoriously intolerant of that kind of imitation. But the more general idea of a pedestal computer. Alas, nobody did, and now even Apple has lost interest in the idea. It's all about branding these days, not usability. And though Apple's designers are the best, they only live to serve that purpose.

You can't compare species with their DNAs. This is a great misbelief. An animal is more than just a little DNA (the same as a human).

16S ribosomal DNA the standard "genetic bar code"?

However, the sequencing is not uniformly sampled: It is concentrated to the important model organisms and then patched out over the animals that some researcher has had an interest in.

A "16S-ribosome" project to complement the different genome projects could be pretty cool.

You'd think you could google.

NATO document affect on local climate human impact reference ref ref ref ref ref ref ref

No need to write one from scratch, there are plenty out there including some not on the list. Some of these are quite customizable, you can prune various servers, directories or file types from indexing. It's even possible to custom pre-processing, for example getting rid of all navigation menus identified by 'class' from the index. At the low end- there's even Swish and htdig

If you're a sucker for punishment you can even front end one of the higher end search engines with other protocols. For example, Z39.50 allows search clients like BookWhere, Procite and Endnote to do the search, something which is useful if you have a lot of research documents. Perhaps there is a use for LDAP here, too.

However, no way would it take months to install and configure an existing search engine in its basic form. If you have a machine, it takes 20 minutes to slap Debian (or your favorite Linux or BSD) on it and a few more to install the search engine and its prerequisites. Then you spend the rest of the week reading about it and tweaking it.

It can mean two things. And it does. But I see you're a radio guy, so you probably weren't to know!

I saw Steamboy a month ago, and wrote a small review for my friends on my blog. May be of interest to some here:

[Steamboy] is a new anime by Katsuhiro Otomo (of Akira fame), set in England in 1851, around the time of the world exhibition in Londons Crystal Palace.

Visually, the movie is stunning. The characters are expressive and individualistic, the backdrops are beautiful, and, of course, the movie is replete with larger-than-life nineteenth-century steam technology. There is enough dramatic machinery and unlikely "science" in this movie to sate even the most rabid steampunk fetishist.

The story is complex and varied. I'm not going to detail it here - mainly because my Japanese just isn't up to the task of actually understanding all the twist and turns. I lost track about halfway through, to be honest, and Ritsuko too had trouble follwing it, in part because the speech tended to be fast and garbled. Nevertheless, they have managed to create believable characters with at least some depth, while at the same time all the clichés we know and love are well and truly fulfilled. The villain, for example, has an partial facemask and mechanical hand - I guess that adding a white cat and a monocle would have been a little over the top.

Did I like it? Yes, with a few reservations. This is a looong movie - 2h20m to be more precise. A bathroom break before seeing it is advisable. An of course, I can't really judge the story fairly when I don't really understand it - the end seemed to me to be a little artificial (not to mention wildly contrary to any scientific intuition), but as I couldn't follow the character motivations and interactions by that time, I can't be sure I understood it correctly.

Should you see it? If you like anime or steampunk, absolutely! And even if you don't, it has enough of an Indiana Jones kind of feel to it that I think you'll be entertained in any case.

Not so fast. The hominid branch of evolution is placed within the "tree" of apes which is placed within the tree of monkeys, to be more specific on the branch of "Old World monkeys". Since hominids arose from within the monkey "tree" it is correct to call us "evolved monkeys". Our most recent common ancestor (that still is around today) is the chimps (with all the chimp speciecs on the very same branch). The most recent common ancestor to humans-chimps are the gorillas and outside that clade, the orangutangs (yes there are actually two species of orangs).

For some research: http://www.biol.lu.se/cellorgbiol/phylogeny/Resear ch/JME98_47p718-727.pdf

I'm frankly amazed this didn't come much sooner.

There are certainly more.

Linux has a lot of good stuff, but Red Hat leaves out some goodies that I like to use (some of these are available in the main third-party repositories):

I used to install yafc (best CLI FTP client out there, with good colorization and, unlike lftp, the ability to interact with local files and pipe things to shell commands), but apparently the maintainer has just decided to stop maintaining it. Ack!

I like to install atool. This is basically an intelligent (text-based) frontend to all the archive-handling tools out there. You just type aunpack <archive-name> and it checks the type and decompresses the archive. If there are multiple files in the root of the archive, it creates a new directory and puts them all in it.

WINE. WINE may not be perfect, but when you want to use a Windows program, you'll be glad that you have it set up.

mplayer. It's the most capable video player out there for Linux, even if some of the more advanced capabilities might be a bit intimidating at first.

Two tools -- one a small C program that I wrote that runs the program and arguments passed it "as a daemon" -- detached from a terminal. This is useful for running something that you want to keep
running in the background without the ability to output crud to the screen. The second is a pair of scripts that provide a version of xargs' functionality, but escape spaces and the like, so that one can use xargs on files with spaces in their names.

Valgrind. Valgrind is a very good memory debugger. Red Hat does not include it in the base distribution because of patent issues (/me hates software patents and the damage they do to the software development area). Exclusion of valgrind is a significant factor in increasing software bugginess. God, I wish the US had EU-style patent law.

If you want a simulation framework that is more flexible than a dedicated NN simulator, we are developing Ikaros, a discrete-time modular simulator. Runs on Linux, OSX and Windows. Implement your modules in C or C++ (and implementing bindings for other languages would be easy), then specify a connection matrix for inputs and outputs between modules to form a complete simulation.

The next step in development is creating some graphical visualizing tools, and to make it run multiple instances transparently across a network.

Works perfectly. Gets it patched.

Emotion and Learning

a quick look at your pic page would explain that.
The worst thing is I checked it out cause your name looked close enough to Jane for me to fantasise about your naked

Erik is probably rolling over in his grave right now.

Have you actually tried it, troll!?
Here you go at it's displayed in under 0.5 secs.

Protocols to mention besides OpenLDAP and OAI are Whois++ and Z39.50. OAI actually is transported over HTTP. You could do the same with EAD or others.

Projects which implemented Z39.50 for the purposes of interoperability are ONE and ONE-2, EUROPAGATE, Desire and Desire II, DECOMATE and DECOMATE II, and Renardus just to touch the surface. Don't forget OHIOLINK...

Another other older, but interesting, metadata activity have been SGML MARC, and the corresponding XML MARC.

The BYTE article was exciting to see again and could have benefited further from pointing out the relative ease of use of Dublic Core. OAI uses unqualified Dublic Core, SAFARI uses qualified Dublin Core to create an up to date index over academic research in Sweden. Shoot, since it already uses some META tags, you could even tweak htdig to use Dublic Core on your own site for those high precision searches.

With the interest in structured data (XML?) maybe well see some sites serving up not just HTML with Dublic Core, but maybe even Docbook or even TEI / TEI Lite. There are great tools for converting from Docbook to HTML, PDF, RTF, etc. and AbiWord and Kword already have partial support for docbook. If there were more, then we could see some real changes on searching the web. Coding for SGML is more difficult, so the obvious choice would be to start from Docbook XML.

For a larger site or for distributed harvesting then there is Combine which is an old one from 1996. It does text, HTML, and PDF. It's free, but takes a bit of time to set up and can even handle metadata (i.e. keywords). There are binaries for linux and solaris, but most is in perl.

It's about to begin some modernization to make it easier to install and operate, perhaps even use MySQL as a backend.

• LBT (Large Binocular Telescope)
  
• Swedish 50m Telescope
  

There is one here. And there are others. You just won't hear about them on Slashdot.

All the standard opt-in vs opt-out arguments apply, plus you have three hurdles to hop before it works. Specifically, sites must:

• add metadata elements (aka "tags")...
• in the correct syntax...
• and contain a recognized vocabulary...

Also, you have the problem of self-evaluation which can be troubled by different interpretations by individuals or by malicious mis-classification. ( BTW: even professional catalogers tend to overlap only about 60% on the subject of a given resource. Quality and suitability are even more subjective and thus subject to variation. ) For accuracy, third party evaluation is the way to go, which introduces the problems with staffing and other human dependencies.

The Swedish National Agency for Higher Education ran a technically similar project called SAFARI to help disseminate material, which is what the web is about. If you make the good stuff easy to find then the crap is less troublesome. You can read a a description of the methods used.

I love the Aqua interface and am running Xfree86 with Enlightment and different themes to produce the same interface. It's really nice, and looks like the original.

Check out this screenshot.
Remove the picture in the URL and you'll see how it's done.

Ciryon

i think even if you spend 1 billion $ for a 100m aperture telescope on earth, that a e.g. 20m telescope in orbit will be better. Also i think that there's too much "competition" in the huge telescope market, we've got the GTC, the LBT, the SALT, the VISTA, the LAMOST, the DMT, the CELT, the XLT, the OWL, the LSST, the GSMT, the MAXAT, the ELT. Why? why not make only one bigger/better on earth, or even in space? the 2.4m HST proved the bettest scope is in space.
--
BeDevId 15453 - Download BeOS R5 Lite free!