Slashdot Mirror

Swedish snus sounds incredibly safe (for a tobacco product) precisely because it avoids any smoke or risk of combustion greatly reducing unwanted chemical reactions. But, as you note, a lot of tobacco has various additives for flavor (which could include nitrosamines) and there's still all the heart attack/stroke risk from the nicotine.

Oh, and I'd imagine the whole thing with MJ is precisely from the above. It's not that there's zero risk because there's zero carcinogens. It's that daily usage of the carcinogenics would tend to be markedly less, even for heavy users relatively to most other tobacco. It's similar to the point that the risk of death from radiation isn't a linear function. The body has an innate ability to heal itself from mutation damage and carcinogens (and radiation) abound in the natural environment. So, as long as you don't tend to overwork your systems from certain levels of exposure, your risk of serious negative mutation is decently low until near the end of life when humans tend to build up enough critical failures to get cancer (specifically in the uterus/ovaries/prostate*, which are home to are part of a system that goes through substantially more generations than most other parts of the body).

* Actually, I'm not sure how much the ovaries (or testes) are actually part of this and it still seems oddly bizarre the prostate is part of this as well, but then I don't know enough biology so my hypothesis is probably bullshit. Of course it also stands to reason that the parts that do produce a lot of generations (blood) have stems cells to try to compensate (and even that's not enough with leukemia being a thing) and possibly abandon the nucleus for a reason while the sex organs are useless after one's sexual prime and evolution wouldn't select against them breaking down and causing an otherwise premature death. Again, lots of hypothesis and supposition, not really a lot of proof. Like the GP. :)

http://www.mcgill.ca/centre-mo... French text 2500C , English text 4600F .... common McGill :S , in Canada it's metric in English and French.

Part of the problem is that people can't detect BS. The other part is that they don't care. Once people have chosen a side, they tend to ignore information that disproves their assumed position. How do we deal with that problem?

Start by reading chapter 5 of this book.

What is the chance the current temperature rise is just natural variation (i.e. noise) ?

0.1% http://www.physics.mcgill.ca/~gang/eprints/eprintLovejoy/neweprint/Anthro.climate.dynamics.13.3.14.pdf

Next question?

Anyone under the age of 30 who wants to make a life for themselves, in my oppinion, should live anywhere else in Canada.

Unless you go to university. Quebec has the second lowest tuition in the country. Somehow McGill classes are taught in English.

Quebec gets tons of free money from the feds to pay for this and free kindergarten, etc. If they didn't have this free money coming in from the ROC, tuition would be as high as it is everywhere.

Anyone under the age of 30 who wants to make a life for themselves, in my oppinion, should live anywhere else in Canada.

Unless you go to university. Quebec has the second lowest tuition in the country. Somehow McGill classes are taught in English.

Not Madonna

http://webpages.mcgill.ca/staff/group3/dedwar1/web/msi/musicsp.htm

No more card punches. A real screen. A real keyboard. And a real 19 kHz whine of a flyback transformer came with the territory. Memorex as I recall mine was. Or maybe that was hiss.

You know, 700 years ago the Indians were burning lots of fires to send smoke signals. Obviously they caused a climate change that brought the "Sandy" like hurricanes to their shores back then.

Anyway, it's all bullshit. Everybody knows that hurricanes are caused by gays who want to marry horses, or Protestants, take your pick...

Information about the study is here (as in listed in summary):
Documentation usage of Android Developers

Lethbridge's study about rarely consulting and updating general software documentation is available here:
How Software Engineers
Use Documentation: The State of the Practice

Robillard's study about problems with API documentation can be found here:
What Makes APIs Hard to Learn? Answers from Developers

Actually, the opposite is more likely to be true. Pop/rock is often more "difficult" to encode, as MP3 performs worse when you have greater spectral density. See e.g. Subjective Evaluation of MP3 Compression for Different Musical Genres (AES Oct 2009).

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080105140107.htm

of course 56% of those marketing dollars are "samples" according to http://www.medicine.mcgill.ca/MJM/issues/v08n01/orig_articles/barfett.pdf. Which end up being drugs for uninsured poor people at the doctor's discretion, when I was uninsured and jobless in the US the doctor gave me samples of some antibiotics, for example.
 

Link to the English version that actually works:

http://phylo.cs.mcgill.ca/eng/

This is actually a burgeoning field of research right now. There are several games that use human effort to solve NP-hard problems. The ones I know about are foldit (a protein folding simulation) and phylo (a comparative genomics engine), but I'm sure there are more.

How do you define, "chemicals"? Is CO2 one of them? Joe Schwarcz may be able to allay some of your media-induced fears. How in the hell is it illegal for you to capture rainwater? Is it related to the next environmental scare-mongering of water?

Was it indeed d'Inverno in the Introduction chapter where he writes having learned tensor calculus and the basics of general relativity by himself in high school? Not an impossible task, one only really needs a strong calculus background and after that you're pretty much set. For the simpler approaches to GR it's just about index manipulation and a couple of big, but simple, ideas, really. Having mastered calculus, the concept of manipulating indices shouldn't sound too unnatural. Just pick up a book used in basic GR classes and off you go. If you prefer free stuff, my favourite is http://www.physics.mcgill.ca/~maloney/514/. Susskind's GR lectures are also quite decent, although hurried.

This was a pretty good read with some citations. http://www.music.mcgill.ca/~sinclair/content/blog/legality_of_unsolicited_but_open_wifi_access

It does somewhat contradict some of my original post. Mostly because I made it sound like it's a "Black & White" issue, which it's apparently not. It does mention the child pornography case I was thinking of.

Contrary to TFA, there are CC licensed scores in Lilypond format available through Mutopia. As far as PDF scans and such, as other posters have mentioned, there are innumerable resources.

The big questions for me (disclaimer: I'm a professional classical pianist) is that of scholarly review. The go-to publisher for Bach today is Bärenreiter/Neue Bach Ausgabe, and by and large, any edition of Bach that I use that isn't Bärenreiter should ideally be cross referenced with it. Of course, it is very expensive to purchase, but it is one item that any university with a music program simply must have in its library. What concerns me is that TFA simply is vague who or what they mean by scholarly review, and this alone would prevent me from considering it over current alternatives.

IMHO the value in the project will be a (hopefully) excellent recording that is CC licensed, as there doesn't appear to be any decent recordings of the sort (through a cursory search), unless you include Wanda Landowska's eccentric harpsichord recordings from 1945. Genius is already easily available in recordings on piano by Gould (both 1955 and 1981), Schiff, Hewitt, Barenboim, Perahia, and Leonhardt on harpsichord.

If they bother you so much, forget the numbers for a moment.

These fossils occur below sediments deposited during the Marinoan glaciation, and therefore pre-date it. They are some of the oldest multicellular animal fossils known, although there are other pre-Marinoan glaciation fossils at a few other sites (such as these ones in the Mackenzie Mountains [PDF]), and they are much deeper in the stratigraphy than previously-known occurrences of sponges. Only in the last few years have a few Precambrian-aged sponges been found. Previously it was thought they occurred only in Cambrian strata and above (roughly from the time when the first trilobites appear and younger). So, even if you wanted to put some crazy short alternative time scale onto this find, it's still new and still older than before.

Now let's return to the numbers. You don't know what the !#%!#^! you are talking about. Cosmic rays do not "speed up ... radioactive decay". Maybe you're confused about the effect that cosmic rays can have on the abundance of C-14 in the atmosphere and the effect that can have on carbon-14 dating? Which is... completely irrelevant because carbon-14 dating isn't used for rocks older than ~500 000 years. Other isotopic systems such as K-Ar and U-Pb are used. And it is possible to know the initial isotopic composition of a mineral sample by using isochron methods.

GINI (GINI is not Internet) http://cgi.cs.mcgill.ca/~anrl/projects/gini/ is a toolkit for creating virtual micro Internets for teaching and learning computer networks. It will run on both Linux and Windows.

First, there is no proof there's a conspiracy to deny publication of dissenting papers. Several investigations have decided that there is no conspiracy. There is an outside chance that one little corner of science may have slipped into pseudoscience, but that's hardly justification for your statements about science in general.

The nondisclosure of data is a serious issue, but it's also not universal and even in this case it sounds like it's more due to the CRU not having the legal right to disclose the data in question, NOT to their unwillingness to do so. That's a problem with the law or with the commercial right-holders, not science. Again, even in the worst case scenario, it's not a justification for your statements about science in general.

Following are a few examples of large, publicly available scientific datasets that were assembled at considerable cost, entirely voluntarily (a small selection, several that I have personal experience with and others that I've included to try to give some breadth to the list):

http://physionet.org/
http://mouldy.bic.mni.mcgill.ca/brainweb/
http://www.med.harvard.edu/AANLIB/home.html
http://archive.eso.org/skycat/servers/usnoa
http://www.astrometry.net/data.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genbank/GenbankOverview.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/guide/data-software/

And some publicly available code:

http://noodles.bic.mni.mcgill.ca/ServicesSoftware/HomePage (the MINC tools are apparently available from Debian as well)
http://www.bic.mni.mcgill.ca/~ilana/diffusion/diffusion_tools.html
http://www.vlfeat.org/~vedaldi/code/sift.html
http://www.itk.org/
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~cil/v-source.html
http://iraf.noao.edu/

There's hardly an overwhelming culture of closed and proprietary secret keeping in science as you suggest. Quite the opposite. Sure, some of the non-scientific appendages to science do have issues in that area (journals, for example) but scientists are usually all too willing to do end runs around such things. If you want to read a paper, e-mail the author and he's likely to send you a PDF despite that often being technically a violation of copyright. Failing that, go to a library and they'll let you read it, free.

First, there is no proof there's a conspiracy to deny publication of dissenting papers. Several investigations have decided that there is no conspiracy. There is an outside chance that one little corner of science may have slipped into pseudoscience, but that's hardly justification for your statements about science in general.

The nondisclosure of data is a serious issue, but it's also not universal and even in this case it sounds like it's more due to the CRU not having the legal right to disclose the data in question, NOT to their unwillingness to do so. That's a problem with the law or with the commercial right-holders, not science. Again, even in the worst case scenario, it's not a justification for your statements about science in general.

Following are a few examples of large, publicly available scientific datasets that were assembled at considerable cost, entirely voluntarily (a small selection, several that I have personal experience with and others that I've included to try to give some breadth to the list):

http://physionet.org/
http://mouldy.bic.mni.mcgill.ca/brainweb/
http://www.med.harvard.edu/AANLIB/home.html
http://archive.eso.org/skycat/servers/usnoa
http://www.astrometry.net/data.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genbank/GenbankOverview.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/guide/data-software/

And some publicly available code:

http://noodles.bic.mni.mcgill.ca/ServicesSoftware/HomePage (the MINC tools are apparently available from Debian as well)
http://www.bic.mni.mcgill.ca/~ilana/diffusion/diffusion_tools.html
http://www.vlfeat.org/~vedaldi/code/sift.html
http://www.itk.org/
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~cil/v-source.html
http://iraf.noao.edu/

There's hardly an overwhelming culture of closed and proprietary secret keeping in science as you suggest. Quite the opposite. Sure, some of the non-scientific appendages to science do have issues in that area (journals, for example) but scientists are usually all too willing to do end runs around such things. If you want to read a paper, e-mail the author and he's likely to send you a PDF despite that often being technically a violation of copyright. Failing that, go to a library and they'll let you read it, free.

First, there is no proof there's a conspiracy to deny publication of dissenting papers. Several investigations have decided that there is no conspiracy. There is an outside chance that one little corner of science may have slipped into pseudoscience, but that's hardly justification for your statements about science in general.

The nondisclosure of data is a serious issue, but it's also not universal and even in this case it sounds like it's more due to the CRU not having the legal right to disclose the data in question, NOT to their unwillingness to do so. That's a problem with the law or with the commercial right-holders, not science. Again, even in the worst case scenario, it's not a justification for your statements about science in general.

Following are a few examples of large, publicly available scientific datasets that were assembled at considerable cost, entirely voluntarily (a small selection, several that I have personal experience with and others that I've included to try to give some breadth to the list):

http://physionet.org/
http://mouldy.bic.mni.mcgill.ca/brainweb/
http://www.med.harvard.edu/AANLIB/home.html
http://archive.eso.org/skycat/servers/usnoa
http://www.astrometry.net/data.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genbank/GenbankOverview.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/guide/data-software/

And some publicly available code:

http://noodles.bic.mni.mcgill.ca/ServicesSoftware/HomePage (the MINC tools are apparently available from Debian as well)
http://www.bic.mni.mcgill.ca/~ilana/diffusion/diffusion_tools.html
http://www.vlfeat.org/~vedaldi/code/sift.html
http://www.itk.org/
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~cil/v-source.html
http://iraf.noao.edu/

There's hardly an overwhelming culture of closed and proprietary secret keeping in science as you suggest. Quite the opposite. Sure, some of the non-scientific appendages to science do have issues in that area (journals, for example) but scientists are usually all too willing to do end runs around such things. If you want to read a paper, e-mail the author and he's likely to send you a PDF despite that often being technically a violation of copyright. Failing that, go to a library and they'll let you read it, free.

I took notes on my laptop extensively all through my undergraduate degree in Computer Science, and I always used OpenOffice.org Writer's equation editor. It has a nice, concise syntax, and it was, in fact, possible to enter even very complex mathematical expressions in real time, faster than my prof was able to write them on the board. This was true even for matrixes.

Here's an example of some of my notes made with OO.o: http://csus.cs.mcgill.ca/wiki/COMP-330_(Panangaden%2C_Fall_06)_Lectures

My linear algebra notes would be more impressive, because they often involved fairly large and complex matrix equations, but I never made those notes available online.

I had a colleague who also took notes in class who had quite a nice method - he wrote all of his notes in wiki markup, with latex for the mathematical expressions. He didn't have a laptop, but instead used a PDA and small, foldable keyboard.

An example of his notes are here: http://csus.cs.mcgill.ca/wiki/COMP-302_(Panangaden%2C_Pientka%2C_Winter_06)_Lectures

I think it's quite a nice result.

I took notes on my laptop extensively all through my undergraduate degree in Computer Science, and I always used OpenOffice.org Writer's equation editor. It has a nice, concise syntax, and it was, in fact, possible to enter even very complex mathematical expressions in real time, faster than my prof was able to write them on the board. This was true even for matrixes.

Here's an example of some of my notes made with OO.o: http://csus.cs.mcgill.ca/wiki/COMP-330_(Panangaden%2C_Fall_06)_Lectures

My linear algebra notes would be more impressive, because they often involved fairly large and complex matrix equations, but I never made those notes available online.

I had a colleague who also took notes in class who had quite a nice method - he wrote all of his notes in wiki markup, with latex for the mathematical expressions. He didn't have a laptop, but instead used a PDA and small, foldable keyboard.

An example of his notes are here: http://csus.cs.mcgill.ca/wiki/COMP-302_(Panangaden%2C_Pientka%2C_Winter_06)_Lectures

I think it's quite a nice result.

I think I can see where we are disagreeing here. I think you are generalizing and I am speaking to Meta/SR of RCTs in medicine. I am not sure what you do for a living, but in terms of medicine and medical education and medical research, which is what I do, the pyramid I provided from the center for evidence based medicine at Duke is the real deal. There are similar concepts from McGill in Canada who were really some of the pioneers in this. Here is a link to the pertinent paper. I don't know enough about the methodology of meta-analysis in other fields to comment on that. I can comment that, again in medicine, the Cochrane Reviews are pretty much the gold standard in medical research. You are right, it is some of the most complicated research to partake in, and you are right again, especially in the field of cancer research most trials still go unpublished. But when done well, and there are many, many, well done reviews, they are without peer.

The reason meta-analyses are often used as a gold standard is that they can (usually) command a sample size that is far beyond that of the usual primary study.

Correct, and therein lies the power....... Come on...you've gotta laugh at that one!

Here are some interesting articles that discuss your concerns.

So what is a molecule, then? At what size does it become big enough that it's easy?

This image, for example, shows individual atoms, not in much greater number than the pentacene, although they are attached to a bigger object and can't roll around. These and these, however, seem similar to the pentacene. It's still impressive and cutting edge, just not that new.

Your brain expects a connection to remain viable permanently.

Actually neurons, brain cells constantly make and break connections. Dendrites and axons form new connections through synapses. Some of these connections are temporary. Heck, new neurons even grow in the adult brain and definitely form new connections.

Falcon

My nephew studied at a top notch "foreign" University, McGill in Momtreal. McGill ranks right up there with Harvard & MIT according to the The Gourman Report. You may find the Gourman Report useful in selecting a university with rated computer science curricula.

However, in the long, run two things you may consider:
1. CS alone may be "not enough" for good jobs now or in the future. Consider a strong related minor or additional major (say science, business, etc. ) to boost you marketable skills. CS, like Math is a required skill for the vast majority of the best future jobs, Don't think what's past is prologue for the future.
2. The best philosophy is probably to study hard now (get 2 majors in the U.S,) and leave travel to later or summers. When you look for a job, I doubt that studying in a foreign country is likely to add much, if any. It may even raise questions as to your diligence and motivation toward your career rather than fun.

From the lab that did the experiment: http://www.physics.mcgill.ca/~hedbergj/labpage/projects.htm Quote: "...atomic force microscope (AFM) that will operate in a ~50 mK environment with a 16 Tesla magnet. " So this case "100 times colder than space" is ~50mK

Ack, PDF is the wrong format to use for something like that uses so much nontext information. It creates files that are too big. Which is why I took the liberty of converting it to DJVU.

I'm not surprised anymore at articles such as this one. Our DNA is basically a blue print of who we are. Our limitations, strengths, etc...

While we are also a product of our environment, it's interesting to see how as we move forward in the research of the human body and mind, many of our issues which we would have deemed "environmental", are actually genetic.

I think even more interesting than this is that the current "DNA is all" mindset has actually been proving wrong, or at best misleading. Moshe Szyf at McGill has shown that behavioural environmental factors (viz. not simply being exposed to some chemical or toxin) can alter gene expression leading to behavioural changes.

These links have OK summaries:

http://www.mcgill.ca/headway/fall2006/indepth1/
http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11326195

I won't get into the rest of your post other than to say that the evidence for "soul" and "God" as something other than ways of talking about the world and patterns of human behaviour is...scarce.

Alpha particles cause errors in memory chips - see jargon file:

Intel could not explain random bit drops in their early chips, and one hypothesis was cosmic rays. So they created the World's Largest Lead Safe, using 25 tons of the stuff, and used two identical boards for testing. One was placed in the safe, one outside. The hypothesis was that if cosmic rays were causing the bit drops, they should see a statistically significant difference between the error rates on the two boards. They did not observe such a difference. Further investigation demonstrated conclusively that the bit drops were due to alpha particle emissions from thorium (and to a much lesser degree uranium) in the encapsulation material. Since it is impossible to eliminate these radioactives (they are uniformly distributed through the earth's crust, with the statistically insignificant exception of uranium lodes) it became obvious that one has to design memories to withstand these hits.

Obviously, modern memory chips are designed to be properly shielded from those, otherwise as memory densities increase, memory errors caused by that radiation would render them useless.

See also: US patent 6531759 - Alpha particle shield for integrated circuit from IBM.

The only thing new that Intel brought to the table with this press release is the attempt to fool us into believe that {...} Intel is somehow innovating in some aspect or another.

The big innovation, according to Intel is that :
- those Intel's manycore chips actually use x86 ISA. And thus can be used standalone, as main processors. Whereas current GPU are rather special architectures. One can use them for special purpose computations. But one can't get the OS to run of them. (most of the current GPU have limited branching abilities and completely lack any function calling capabilities beside what is possible by in-lining.
- another argument from intel is that, because the x86 ISA is so much more popular, it will be easier to develop and the learn to use manicore chips (with everything looking much more like what it was on the desktop), than today's GPGPU which requires special libraries and special languages.

Whether these are right is non trivial question best left to the reader's discretion.

Face it: the age of the "CPU is the computing muscle" is long gone.

Well, at least until the next turn of the Wheel of reincarnation

Different strokes, indeed.

I know the summary mentions the program is one of two of its kind in North America, but the tagline is still a little too disingenuous when you consider that the program's canadian counterpart - the McGill Institute of Air & Space Law recently celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. Even if American law is all you want to count, someone must certainly have graduated from the IASL and gone on to pass an American Bar exam..

Are they referring to McGill's "Institute of Air and Space Law" when they say it is only the second place in north america?

As requested, documentation:

RE: killing the birds:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_sparrow_campaign

"It was decided that all the peasants in China should bang pots and pans and run around to make the sparrows fly away in fear."

Eye witness account of Great Sparrow Campaign:

http://zonaeuropa.com/20061130_1.htm

"As I recalled, my fellow students and I climbed onto some tall trees on the side of the road and banged our gongs, drums, washbasins and anything else that can make loud noises. The sparrows were forced to keep flying until they dropped dead from fatigue."

Beijing is not right next to the Gobi Desert, but it is downwind from it when the winds shift that way in the Spring. The rest of the year, it's not. But Beijing at any other time of the year, on a windy day the atmospheric effect is like being in a dust storm.

RE: Air quality in Beijing

http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:HjyJWuowpeUJ:www.usembassy-china.org.cn/sandt/estnews0915.htm+beijing+air+quality+ranking&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=21&gl=us

"Beijing ranked second-worst out of 47 Chinese cities in a 1999 SEPA air pollution ranking "

RE: Concerns with the Three Gorges:

(from 2001)
http://www.arch.mcgill.ca/prof/sijpkes/arch374/winter2001/dbiggs/three.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Gorges_Dam

For good measure, a couple links on deforestation in China:

http://www.library.utoronto.ca/pcs/state/chinaeco/forest.htm
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=19203227

China's government is not comprised of idiots, but their ideologically-driven policies and lack of free and open discussion in a robust civil society lead to actions and results that are adverse to their own interests at a rate greater than that in countries that do have the ability to contest government policy.

The point of my post was that in China under the CCP, there is a history of trampling the environment for the sake of, previously, Mao's mass campaigns, and now, for the sake of rampant economic development. There is also a concommitant pattern of wildly over-engineering the environment when common sense would do. It is within that context that the story about cloud-seeding resonated.

So the post was a bit of a hip-shot. The above links and many more could have been initially provided, but it's Slashdot and the tone of the post was meant to be wry and few, even on this site, want to wade through a dissertation in response to every article. Thus, the comments were couched under the term, "anecdote."

But as an East Asian studies scholar who's lived there for significant swathes of time over the past 18 years, the comments were not pulled entirely out of thin air. Even a casual visitor to Japan can observe that many products have humorous names or sayings in English on them, such as Calpis Water or Poccari Sweat. Most people do not demand academic citation upon hearing about such a thing--they accept them for what they are: anecdotes.

It was in that spirit that the stories were relayed.

You go over the 1G mark just by doing uncompressed HDTV, and uncompressed is good; for teleconferencing applications, codec latency is the killer, since your brain is hardwired with estimates of other people's response times. Now, you may think that HDTV is good quality, but if the future offers me 64Mpixel HDR images in stereo (or better, with full depth representation) at 100fps, I for one am not going to complain. Multiply it out; that's approaching the terabit per second, and I didn't even have to choose any outrageous numbers—2*8k*8k*3*16*100 is pretty conservative for a convincing virtual French window. Contemporary video, even HDTV, is not enough like being there, as you come to realise once you've had a chance to play with high-end systems (my stuff: http://ultravideo.mcgill.ca/activities.html; my friends': http://www.hp.com/halo; both a few years old by now).

So, yeah, what you really want the terabit network to your home for—is chatting with your mum.

I wish I could show you even current research teleconferencing systems in operation... and they suck compared to what I'd like to be doing.

(I'm not, by the way, suggesting that there are no useful low-latency techniques providing moderate compression for when you don't have gigabandwidth—of course there are. I'm just pointing out that these numbers are not unimaginable, and that if the pipe were provided, there would indeed be end-user applications for it.)

The Registry database contains ONLY .COM, .NET, .EDU domains and
Registrars.
Registrant:
  T. H. Hudson
  1200 Woodland Ave
  Verdun, QC H4L 5J8
  CA
 
  Domain name: TROLLTALK.COM
 
  Administrative Contact:
    Hudson, T. H. hudson@videotron.ca
    1200 Woodland Ave
    Verdun, QC H4L 5J8
    CA
    514 244 2433

The Registry database contains ONLY .COM, .NET, .EDU domains and
Registrars.
Registrant:
  T. H. Hudson
  1200 Woodland Ave
  Verdun, QC H4L 5J8
  CA
 
  Domain name: TROLLTALK.COM
 
  Administrative Contact:
    Hudson, T. H. hudson@videotron.ca
    1200 Woodland Ave
    Verdun, QC H4L 5J8
    CA
    514 244 2433

The Registry database contains ONLY .COM, .NET, .EDU domains and
Registrars.
Registrant:
  T. H. Hudson
  1200 Woodland Ave
  Verdun, QC H4L 5J8
  CA
 
  Domain name: TROLLTALK.COM
 
  Administrative Contact:
    Hudson, T. H. hudson@videotron.ca
    1200 Woodland Ave
    Verdun, QC H4L 5J8
    CA
    514 244 2433

Its actually not as hard as you think to detect arbitrarily encoded music/video. Checkout
http://www.music.mcgill.ca/~wes/docs/finger2.pdf for a summary.

1) This whole thing is old news (but then again, it is my school where this happened) 2) They do indeed claim to have inspired the movie: http://www.mcgill.ca/headway/spring2006/news/#4 Also on that page, my comp sci prof obsessively repeats how he did this: http://www.mcgill.ca/headway/spring2006/news/#2

1) This whole thing is old news (but then again, it is my school where this happened) 2) They do indeed claim to have inspired the movie: http://www.mcgill.ca/headway/spring2006/news/#4 Also on that page, my comp sci prof obsessively repeats how he did this: http://www.mcgill.ca/headway/spring2006/news/#2

This unfortunately isn't new... Dr. Chang at McGill has been working on this for quite a while... see artificial cells: http://www.medicine.mcgill.ca/artcell/artcell.htm
surprise surprise how old news is suddenly new news :P

According to this article in The New York Times, Abraxane is a drug for late stage breast cancer. It is paclitaxel but coated in albumin, to minimize some of the allergic reactions in patients. Apparently it is slightly more effective, but it did not prolong lives longer than Taxol did.

While I agree with your argument, the biotech/pharmaceutical/medical device companies have also found creative ways of marketing to doctors as well. And IIRC, studies have shown that doctors are also influenced by the free samples, gifts (e.g., here 3rd article down), lunches, and any other marketing from sales reps. It's not giving money to doctors, but it affects the decisions they make. Of course, many doctors are great, but the others do give them a bad name.

I was at the expo, and just got back from China today. One of the androids disappeared during the expo. Why? Supposedly, because the president of China wasn't too happy about the android looking like a popular politician.

Regardless, these androids are carnival mannequins with better fake skin. They are also victims of the "Uncanny Valley". At worst they look cheap, at best they're creepy. I got a picture taken with one. The developers refer to it as a "lover robot" and it would move its mouth while piping a Celine Dion song through a speaker. They spent way too much time adding fake nipples and revealing clothing.

The product brochure by the "Beijing Yuanda Superman Robot Science A Company of Limited Liability" states:

"The lover robots like the real beautiful woman and handsome guy are primarily for family collection and appreciation. This is a huge market, for instance, recently Japanese will spend about 27 billion yuan on person-like robots each year, and the global consumption on such commodity is about 500 billion yuan. Comparing with these unmovable puppets, the lover robots are more realistic, charming, intimate, lovely, sexy and attractive."

What amazes me is how many tools are out and available online regarding this sort of pattern recognition development. Since a lot of people know Java, I'm would encourage you to use the Java Media Framework (free from Sun). Once you have those libraries installed, it's quite easy to start editing sound, images & video. You might need to grab and install codecs if you're doing video analysis but I think almost all image codecs are supported.

I'm not going to lie, the video computation can be quite heavily but thankfully that framework is implemented such that the entire video doesn't have to be loaded into memory, just a one frame buffer analysis can be used if you want.

The last thing you would need is simply the know-how on programming these analysis algorithms. There are sites out there with a large wealth of up-to-date algorithms. An example would be the text book style site of pattern recognition or image processing. While this doesn't teach you how to do things, it does contain the raw resources and algorithms. General resources like the computer vision homepage exist that serve as links to all kinds of resources. Unfortunately, I know of no real solid books that contain everything out there because this field is so rapidly developing. My professors taught me from hand printed slides in a large compendium they had accumulated over the last couple years.

The last piece missing is the data to analyze. While you might not have the ultra high resolution Van Gogh images to do this yourself, it may be possible to visit museums with 6 MP cameras to obtain your own data. Failing that, there are repositories online that sometimes contain image information you can start with. While this may not satisfy your specific needs, it sure is great for the lazy developer like myself.

Lastly, I will mention citeseer and Google Scholar for cutting edge papers that you might want to try implementing. Distributing these algorithms and building a good GUI can be tricky but really anyone can build the backend. I heavily recommend experimenting with this if it interests you.

When I was in McGill Psychology in the mid 90s, you would pay the
Psychology student association $20 (they are more expensive now) a semester to be able to get typewritten notes of the lectures - as part of the "NTC" - Note Taking Club.(And $20 per class when you are making $5/hr in a university computer lab with 8 to 10 hours of work per week is a lot of money when you have no other income).

The lectures were tape recorded by a student, and retyped onto a computer. The notes would then be distributed in printed form or via email (text or word files).

Most (and myself) had no objections to this at the time, and I have no objections to someone, whether prof or teacher, to be paid for the work of typing a lecture verbatim or a summary of one.

When I was in McGill Psychology in the mid 90s, you would pay the
Psychology student association $20 (they are more expensive now) a semester to be able to get typewritten notes of the lectures - as part of the "NTC" - Note Taking Club.(And $20 per class when you are making $5/hr in a university computer lab with 8 to 10 hours of work per week is a lot of money when you have no other income).

The lectures were tape recorded by a student, and retyped onto a computer. The notes would then be distributed in printed form or via email (text or word files).

Most (and myself) had no objections to this at the time, and I have no objections to someone, whether prof or teacher, to be paid for the work of typing a lecture verbatim or a summary of one.