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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.

Check this out if you want high-bandwidth, hi-fi, hi-res video conferencing:
http://ultravideo.mcgill.ca/
The software runs on Linux and can be downloaded by anyone interested.

I do believe that the medial forebrain bundle is what people mean when they talk about a "pleasure center." If you stick a stimulating electrode into a rat's MFB and let it lever press to get stimulation, it will do so to its heart's desire, until it dies of dehydration from refusing to eat or drink or do anything except hit that lever. This may be a more informative site than wikipedia (wikipedia is very bad at neuroscience--I really ought to work on that).

I've tried to get kids interested in some of the old games I was interested in (IF, MUDs, etc.) but usually without much luck (which is a shame, some of those IF games were excellent). However, recently I was surprised how interested my cousin's kids were when I showed them one of those old games where you "program your own robot".

You're missing an important point, and one of the main reasons Macs took off in the design arena. In typography and layout, there are 6 points per pica and 12 picas per inch. This also works out to 72 points per inch. The display on the first few Macs were also 72dpi/ppi, which meant that there was a nice simple 1:1 mapping between points and pixels.

Not to be a pedant here, but it's actually a bit more complicated than that. The typographic point has had various definitions. The standard American printer's point was actually 72.27000072 to the inch. When they developed PostScript, Warnock and Geschke decided that was overly computationally intensive and rounded it to 72 to the inch. As I recall this caused some traditionalist grumbling and problems in the early PostScript days of the mid-to-late '80s, but the new standard seems to be fully accepted now.

That, of course requires the obligatory link.

But neither does "viability" carry any moral weight. It is a function of the state of medical science; what was impossible fifty years ago (lifesaving treatment for preemies, for example) is now commonplace. Suppose that, over the next fifty years, uterine replicators leave the world of science fiction, so that from the time of conception and barring life-threatening and incurable congenital birth defects, any foetus was "viable." As medical technology improves, the question of viability is less "Can we save it?" and more "Do we WANT to save it?" Before you argue that what is in the future has no bearing on what is happening now--understand that we are in the middle of this process, right now.

Also consider this: An infant is, itself, "nonviable" after birth. Babies are helpless and rather stupid. So, why then do its rights assert themselves over the mother's, when before birth, they do not?

McGill University also has a great series of lectures -- "Bringing you yesterday's lectures, today" -- at http://cool.mcgill.ca/

I've keept my SuperPET (old photo) for years at the risk of divorce, and this comes out a week after I toss it

It's a shame they don't have all their archives online; the only links I could find to Study Reveals: Babies Are Stupid seem to be missing some funny pictures and captions.

I wholeheartedly agree. The biggest strengths of Java are its cross-platform compatibility, its garbage collection, and its multithreading support (since the introduction of version 1.5). It's also useful as a research platform for computer scientists/engineers, because it allows for full control over both software and the (virtual) machine that it's running on. You can't get that in any other production software environment.

Some people (including me, soon) are taking advantage of this flexibility to try to improve Java's speed: Sable Lab

I think that "not so super" product you're referring to was the Sparc-based system, which became the Starfire E10K. SGI/Cray couldn't make money on it, but Sun used it to eat their lunch.

Like the old IBM, Microsoft is now big enough that various pieces are running their own projects, and it will be interesting to see how this plays out. Windows that seamlessly clusters, where you could just add machines transparently in a manner similar to a Condor flock, would be an interesting competitor. They may be a lumbering, http://www.eps.mcgill.ca/jargon/jargon.html#evil%2 0and%20rude/ Evil and Rude corporation, but there are some really bright people in there working on more than Office.

You don't get it, do you? It's a joke. If you're looking for an algorithm that can factor large prime numbers, grandparent has a constant time algorithm. It's up to you to keep your end of the bargain and run the algorithm only on prime numbers. Otherwise, well, Garbage In Garbage Out. ;-)

By the way, the time to check whether a number is prime is known to be polynomial in the logarithm of the number. The hard part is finding the factors when you know the number isn't prime.

I found a related paper:

http://www.physics.mcgill.ca/~peter/publications/N OT.pdf

All the original papers from the group mentioned in the article are too pricey.
Unfortunately I can't make neither heads nor tails out of this, somebody care to explain?

Have fun!

Affilias (which runs the .org TLD) employs Jan Wiek (sp?) who is a member of the core development team. They paid for him to develop a Master-Slave async replication system which is called Slony-I (released under a BSD-style license). Also under development is a synchronous replication solution called Slony-II.

Now as for multimaster replication, it is possible to partition tables using PostgreSQL's inheritance features and then have each system be the master of one partition of the table.

Sigh
And agin.
And again.

Significance is simply a value judgment that our thalami and amygdalae use to sort sensory data. If you find that your life experiences are insignificant, my advice is to find something that stimulates your serotonin an dopamine receptors with a more rewarding schedule.

There are a few:
Font Agent Pro
Font Finagler (a cache manager)
And others

I hit just shy of 6,000 fonts, and my system was heading for the wall before I started with Font Agent. It takes all fonts, gives you a preview of your typefaces, then you can opt to turn them off, so that Font Book isn't working with so much baggage for general tasks. It isn't quite like uninstalling fonts, they auto-activate as required. But it's a makeshift solution to getting a slightly improved functionality on a Mac with a lot of fonts.

I have got rid of all except the basic fonts I need after filenames and other things left my browser looking like something in Klingon, so I don't screw with them anymore.

However, I shouldn't offer false hope. Microsoft Word has it's own software to scan your font library, so even if the fonts are deactivated, Word will still throw a tantrum for whatever reason, and take hours to load on first instance with huge numbers of fonts. Sorry.

reminds me of this:
http://www.physics.mcgill.ca/~arobic/funny/Gillett e.html

Adapted from an onion article: http://www.physics.mcgill.ca/~arobic/funny/Gillett e.html

Would someone tell me how this happened? We were the fucking vanguard of gaming in this country. The Sony Playstation3 was the razor to own. Then the other guy came out with a three-blade razor. Were we scared? Hell, no. Because we hit back with a little thing called the Playstation3Turbo. That's three Controllers and an aloe strip. For moisture. But you know what happened next? Shut up, I'm telling you what happened - the bastards went to four Controllers. Now we're standing around with our cocks in our hands, selling three Controllers and a strip. Moisture or no, suddenly we're the chumps. Well, fuck it. We're going to Seven Controllers.

James M. Kilts CEO and President, The Sony Company

Sure, we could go to four Controllers next, like the competition. That seems like the logical thing to do. After all, three worked out pretty well, and four is the next number after three. So let's play it safe. Let's make a thicker aloe strip and call it the Playstation3 SuperTurbo. Why innovate when we can follow? Oh, I know why: Because we're a business, that's why!

You think it's crazy? It is crazy. But I don't give a shit. From now on, we're the ones who have the edge in the multi-blade game. Are they the best a man can get? Fuck, no. Sony is the best a man can get.

What part of this don't you understand? If two Controllers is good, and three Controllers is better, obviously Seven Controllers would make us the best fucking gaming that ever existed. Comprende? We didn't claw our way to the top of the gaming game by clinging to the two-blade industry standard. We got here by taking chances. Well, Seven Controllers is the biggest chance of all.

Here's the report from Engineering. Someone put it in the bathroom: I want to wipe my ass with it. They don't tell me what to invent - I tell them. And I'm telling them to stick two more Controllers in there. I don't care how. Make the Controllers so thin they're invisible. Put some on the handle. I don't care if they have to cram the fifth blade in perpendicular to the other four, just do it!

You're taking the "safety" part of "safety razor" too literally, grandma. Cut the strings and soar. Let's hit it. Let's roll. This is our chance to make gaming history. Let's dream big. All you have to do is say that Seven Controllers can happen, and it will happen. If you aren't on board, then fuck you. And if you're on the board, then fuck you and your father. Hey, if I'm the only one who'll take risks, I'm sure as hell happy to hog all the glory when the Seven-blade console becomes the gaming tool for the U.S. of "this is how we shave now" A.

People said we couldn't go to three. It'll cost a fortune to manufacture, they said. Well, we did it. Now some egghead in a lab is screaming "Seven's crazy?" Well, perhaps he'd be more comfortable in the labs at Norelco, working on fucking electrics. Rotary Controllers, my white ass!

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we should just ride in Bic's wake and make pens. Ha! Not on your fucking life! The day I shadow a penny-ante outfit like Bic is the day I leave the console game for good, and that won't happen until the day I die!

The market? Listen, we make the market. All we have to do is put her out there with a little jingle. It's as easy as, "Hey, gaming with anything less than Seven Controllers is like scraping your beard off with a dull hatchet." Or "You'll be so smooth, I could snort lines off of your chin." Try "Your neck is going to be so friggin' soft, someone's gonna walk up and tie a goddamn Cub Scout kerchief under it."

I know what you're thinking now: What'll people say? Mew mew mew. Oh, no, what will people say?! Grow the fuck up. When you're on top, people talk. That's the price you pay for being on top. Which Sony is, always has been, and forever shall be, Amen, Seven Controllers, sweet Jesus in h

Plus, without a table how will you ever be able to shoot Greedo first?

If you read the article you'd notice that its mentioned in the first paragraph.

Here is the referenced Onion story. Its one of the funniest fake articles I have read.

Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades

- wk

James M. Kilts has new plans.

Couldn't resist http://www.physics.mcgill.ca/~arobic/funny/Gillett e.html I hope their server holds

BIS is actually scale that psychologists use to measure ones behavior. BIS stands for Behavioral Inhibition System which is often times coupled with BAS which stands for Behavorial Approach System.

High on BIS basically means you focus on the negative surroundings/environment. Take skydiving for example, a person high on BIS would be focusing on what if the parachutes don't deploy, what if I go into shock, etc. etc. Someone high on BAS would be skydiving gives a rush of energy that I can't really experience anywhere else.

I'm not saying high on BIS is bad. In fact, a person can be both high on BIS and high on BAS simultaneously since these 2 scales are not necessarily contradictory. High on BIS are good for situations which need it and knowing how weak computer security can be today, it might be a good thing.

You can read more about it here: The Behavioral Approach System & The Behavioral Inhibition System

Breed for taste? Oh, like those awful Flavr Savr tomatoes? Which turned out to be low yield as well?

Which of course, would have to be in the Shatner Building.

"That is not the legal name of the building, and the administration will never call it that," said Drummond of the University Centre, a.k.a. the Shatner building. Showing no appreciation for the myriad times that William Shatner saved humankind from Klingon invasions, Drummond said: "He's hardly our most famous graduate, and there are McGill graduates that are more significant contributors to the world than Shatner."

speaking of triumph...

check out triumph in quebec! Bloody hilarious.

A constitution says where the laws come from. It does not decide, but rather describes. Otherwise the constitution would not be well-founded.

The French one (see article 34) says that rights come from statue. The American says the rights belong to the people. Our tradition says the rights come from natural law (God), not statue.

In France, it is more simple -- rights come from statute, only. The French state doesn't get them from anywhere, so the state is supreme.

That's far more autocratic.

My point about States Rights is that since the end of the Civil War, the federal government has increasingly intruded on matters that were previously decided by states. Hence, state law matters less and less -- you can't see the effects of Lousiana law as clearly as you could before.

here is an example, from Quebec: a slip of the pen by Quebec lawmakers and your only hope is relief from the feds. If that happened in California, you'd argue that your rights were being taken away, by the state -- no limited for some good purpose, but removed. If the court agrees you're home free.

So Civil Code countries don't have the concept of divine-enshrined or individual liberty. In the US, people consider it their God-given right to associate as they wish, speak their mind and so on. If the government chose to take it away (constitutional amendment), many would argue that that was illegal according to natural law. This would be "extra-judicial", but entirely in keeping with the spirit of Anlgo American law. You can't make that argument if you believe in Civil Law -- if the government takes it away, then that's the law.

So people from civil code countries have a more compliant mentality. When the Germans took away the right for a merchant to cut his prices, people accepted it. Here, people would talk about freedom of contract (which the state may limit, with good reason -- but the right still exists). The mere fact that you can argue about whether the law is legal or not means that Americans are a lot less compliant.

There is no conspiracy theory here, merely an attempt to explain the attitudes that inform the French actions.

I got to see a demo of a bunch of QRIO robots in Japan last Fall. There was a team of Sony engineers/programmers set up around the perimeter of the demo platform ready to catch the robots when they fell over... good thing because during the 15 minute demo they had to catch the robots a number of times. Contrast this to the RHex robots: tumbling down rock piles.

Neither the surface nor the subsurface of the moon, nor any part thereof or natural resources in place, shall become property of any State, international intergovernmental or non-governmental organization, national organization or non-governmental entity or of any natural person. The placement of personnel, space vehicles, equipment, facilities, stations and installations on or below the surface of the moon, including structures connected with its surface or subsurface, shall not create a right of ownership over the surface or the subsurface of the moon or any areas thereof. The foregoing provisions are without prejudice to the international regime referred to in paragraph 5 of this article.

The establishment of military bases, installations and fortifications, the testing of any type of weapons and the conduct of military manoeuvres on the moon shall be forbidden. The use of military personnel for scientific research or for any other peaceful purposes shall not be prohibited. The use of any equipment or facility necessary for peaceful exploration and use of the moon shall also not be prohibited.

The exploration and use of the moon shall be the province of all mankind and shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries, irrespective of their degree of economic or scientific development. Due regard shall be paid to interests of present and future generations as well as to the need to promote higher standards of living conditions of economic and social progress and development in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.

The previous link came from this one

Random Paragraph: It takes the average seagull two years to learn how to successfully scavange at the local tip. To survive the learning curve it has the assistance of two devoted and well educated parents to guide it.

Hey look what I found at the tip

I know my own language, whether I'm a "stupid" American or not, thank you.

Well, technically, it's not "your" language, it's ours (England's) :).

I do regularly break a few grammar rules that I know about (when writing informally, like now).

Oh, absolutely - me too. But that's a lot different to simply sprinkling apostrophes all over the place because you don't know what they're for.

Most of them relate to the use of quotation marks, because I find their proper usage to be unintuitive.

Move to England, we do quotation marks properly (if you're referring to the placement of punctuation inside/outside them, which I'm guessing you are). The Jargon file actually mentions this.

Fuck everything, we're doing 5 lightsabers.

Simply put - economics is about predicting the future,

Or explaining the past, and the present.

which is so hard to do that the economists current cute little linear models didn't hurt.

You mean cute little linear as in Stochastic Dynamic General Equilibrium

you can't trust complex models

So you disapprove of both "cute little" as well as "complex" models?

Why non-Java IDEs haven't caught up, I don't know. I think Java hit the academics by storm. It is probably the favorite language out there for static (and dynamic) analysis. Some folks out there are looking at .net but for all intents and purposes, .net came too late.

For an example of the kind of stuff I'm talking about, check out the really cool soot framework.

The "metadata" is in a LIST INFO chunk following the data chunk. To my knowledge, this is not part of the WAV standard. I don't find it in the Microsoft multimedia Standards Update. I think that such LIST INFO data may be a holdover from the Electronic Arts IFF format on which RIFF (of which WAV is a subpart) is based.

Ethanol is just a tax give away to corn growing states.

Wrong. According to this Minnesota Business Journal article:

"the total economic impact of the Minnesota ethanol industry was estimated at $588 million in 2002. In comparison, the state's ethanol subsidy for the year was $33.7 million that means the economic impact was 17 times the subsidy payment."

And remember, you're talking about ethanol as opposed to gasoline, which we get from terrorist nations, which costs over twice as much as E85 fuels (E85 sells for $0.90/gallon) and pollutes substantially more.

It takes more energy to make ethanol than you get out of it.

Wrong. Even in 1988 energy generated by the ethanol exceeded energy inputs by 16%. Nowadays that number is closer to 34%, according to a USDA study.

The author is Canadian -- born and raised -- even though she bears a Chinese ancestral name. She is (or, at least, was) a columnist with the Globe and Mail, Canada's national newspaper and was based in Toronto, so I should think she knows a thing or two about conditions there.

Here's an article which relates a bit about her and her weekly feature in the Globe.

I don't know what requirements you need for Win32/WinCE, but this page should help you find what you need: http://cgm.cs.mcgill.ca/~luc/china.html.

Very true, Try compiling Linux with ICC and we'll compare :) .. I have a program which runs 30% faster on GCC due to just one reason - Computed GOTO. Computed GOTO is sooo much faster than a switch loop for most performance intensive switches . You could use function pointers to achieve something similar, but method call overhead outweighs switch loop costs (where it would be inlined anyway).

> Better that other compiler makers mimic GCC's behavior. Better still is for the standards groups to adopt GCC as the reference standard for C and C++ compilers.

GCC rocks ... (sdcc's good too.. but it's a niche compiler).

That's my girlfriends lab, I posted that yesterday!

Why did I get a +2 comment rating, and have someone else get a full frickin' article post? Argh. (here's me being disgruntled)

By the way, they have already been slashdotted in the past http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/06/1 2/0156220&tid=126&tid=14, and you didn't mention that it's built at McGill. You could also have included the McGill ARL website link http://www.cim.mcgill.ca/~arlweb/Welcome.html. They love getting slashdotted ;) [not quite true]. Poor Danny (the sysadmin).

Read my comment from yesterday! http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=122038&cid=102 66261

The Ambulatory Robotics Lab at McGill develops several robots, including a series based on cockroaches. They work really well... I'm biased, my girlfriend is doing her masters about one (aqua).

I think they have been slashdotted once already... They've got video of the robots online.

If interested, try: http://www.cim.mcgill.ca/~arlweb/Welcome.html

IMHO, these are damned cool!

Explanation.

Peer review is already done on volunteer basis anyways. I was briefly in a master/PhD program, all the grad students had to do some article reviewing, and they are not paid to do this.

In my field, only PhD's are typically invited by journals to review. I find it surprising that grad students were asked to do it. That seem counter to the process a little.

In any case, yes, we do it for free. However, the system for the reviews at some of the top Astronomy journals includes a number of scientific editors who are essentially paid peers from the field who farm out the reviews on a specific subtopic, typically related to their speciality. These editors aren't on-site for the publishers, it's a side job for a well-established scientist. The hope, then, is that this editor picks good (i.e. appropriate) reviewers for each paper.

From my experience so far, the matching has been pretty good both for my submitted and reviewed papers. The thing you can't do anything about even with this model is controlling the slice of attention the reviewer gives the article.

Another example is arxiv.org the preprint archive. their article is peer reviewed as well, but since they operate entirely without fee, except a small grant that keeps the database and servers running. Their reviewers are volunteers as well. So peer review never been a bottle neck to open journals.

I don't know where you got that, but AFAIK, arXiv articles (at least those for astro-ph) are only skimmed for appropriateness. They are not reviewed in the least. Unfortunately, there are wildly different uses of the service that have resulted in a few problems.

Many (too many, IMHO) publish there before the reviewing process has completed. Nowadays it's not too uncommon to see references to arXiv right in a published paper. But, in some cases that paper (or its conclusions) have changed substantially since it was used as that reference (say, after the refereeing process).

Others argue that it's a great model to expose their research to a wider audience to get early feedback on a project, especially if they are at small institutions. I guess I can see that, but I would think e-mailing to a smaller list of interested colleagues would be just as good. I'm just not sure a 'pre-print' system is the way to go since the state of the pre-print is not a required element of the submission (right now).

I'm personally a little leery of a completely open publishing model like this for the 'standard'. Although I can judge papers in my own speciality just fine whether they have been officially reviewed or not, when I need a good reference for material outside of that zone, I like to feel that it has been through at least some critical filter.

Someone is trying to set up a system for astro-ph (the astronomy part of arXiv) that is like peer review, but it hasn't quite gained any significant mass quite yet.

You could add support to your script to many file formats by using some of the many PostScript converters that already exist. Pipe their output to an application that extracts plaintext from the PostScript file, then pipe to grep.

You could add support to your script to many file formats by using some of the many PostScript converters that already exist. Pipe their output to an application that extracts plaintext from the PostScript file , then pipe to grep.

While I agree some of the added scenes do add to the movies, some of them are simply unacceptable. Greedo shooting first for example.

Indeed. All this weird stuff around Greedo is more proof than we need to justify that it is a conspiracy!

For anyone with old dos games, don't bother dual booting or trying to use dos sound drivers.

Just emulate the hardware!

http://www.ece.mcgill.ca/~vromas/vdmsound/