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The late, former head of the NSA, Lieutenant General William E. Odom, respectfully disagrees.

http://www.middlebury.edu/medi...

The number of men who actually carry out rapes is relatively small, so long as you only define rape as a violent act that occurs in dimly lit alleyways. Once you open it out it becomes substantially larger.

No, not really, as the research of people like David Lisak shows. Rape is the act of a small percentage of repeat predators.

The "rape culture" model is finally being laid by the wayside; as RAINN's recent memo to the White House task force notes, "Rape is caused not by cultural factors but by the conscious decisions, of a small percentage of the community, to commit a violent crime."

Not everything is about you. As a man, you should not be offended when those who do rape get called on it, just because they are also men.

Consider: African-American men are, statistically, far more likely to commit murder than Caucasian men are. Does an African-American man have a right to call racist bullshit if you tell him to stop murdering? Of course he does, and that in no way implies that he doesn't want those who do murder to get called on it.

In exactly the same way, men are, statistically, far more likely to commit rape than women are. Does a man have a right to call misandrist bullshit if you tell him to stop raping? Of course he does, and that in no way implies that he doesn't want those who do rape to get called on it.

I'm not saying you will, but it's possible you may surprise yourself one day.

You're just illustrated a huge part of the problem: a belief that ordinary men somehow, to their surprise, suddenly turn rapist someday. This myth is at odds with what we know about rapists: they are deliberate repeat predators with a pattern of offending from a young age and a high probably of cross-offending.

It's why the whole notion of "rape culture" around which so much of this discussion revolves is a distraction: rape is not the result of ordinary guys made confused by their culture about consent, it's the result of deliberate acts by violent assholes who know quite well what they are doing, and all the hashtags in the world won't change them.

If we actually want to stop rape, rather than have a feel-good self righteous flamewar, we need personal safety and bystander intervention training.

In a few words: if you only have a 2D video, then it is a very hard computer vision problem, that has not been solved on the research side.

There is an active benchmark of disparity estimation algorithms (full bibliography at the end of the page). Those algorithms take two pictures and estimate a depth image. From this depth image, it is possible to reconstruct the scene in 3D (but you cannot see what's behind objects). From my experience, this class of algorithms do quite a bad job with real-life images, and have not been applied to video at all.

I've been using optical flows (see a related benchmark) for the development of an Android app (3D Camera) that converts pictures from 2D to 3D, without glasses (check it out!). The optical flow is a more general version of depth estimation (i.e. in any direction, not just left to right motion motion). It has been applied 3D conversion of videos with relative success, I can search for references if you are interested.

From my knowledge & experience, optical flows are the state of the art algorithms to convert 2D pictures/videos to 3D, but they are quite computationally intensive.

In a few words: if you only have a 2D video, then it is a very hard computer vision problem, that has not been solved on the research side.

There is an active benchmark of disparity estimation algorithms (full bibliography at the end of the page). Those algorithms take two pictures and estimate a depth image. From this depth image, it is possible to reconstruct the scene in 3D (but you cannot see what's behind objects). From my experience, this class of algorithms do quite a bad job with real-life images, and have not been applied to video at all.

I've been using optical flows (see a related benchmark) for the development of an Android app (3D Camera) that converts pictures from 2D to 3D, without glasses (check it out!). The optical flow is a more general version of depth estimation (i.e. in any direction, not just left to right motion motion). It has been applied 3D conversion of videos with relative success, I can search for references if you are interested.

From my knowledge & experience, optical flows are the state of the art algorithms to convert 2D pictures/videos to 3D, but they are quite computationally intensive.

People are always willing to pay more to be entertained that to be educated.

I've never before heard this. Latin/old English pairs (people/folk, pork/pig, etc.) did not come from the Roman invasion of England. It came from the Norman Conquest of England in 1066:

http://community.middlebury.edu/~harris/EngLatGrammar.html
The Norman Invasion of the 11th century made French the court and official language of England for several centuries, during which time English as a language came under the influence of French, not only in terms of words and manners of speech, but also in the way French grammar functions.

French comes from Latin.

Greg

You do realize that the paper that really blew this is The Detroit News - a highly conservative paper. A paper that seems to criticize every single expenditure on education excepting only vouchers for religious schools.

So, it's not unlikely that there's another side to this story.

teachers podcasting lectures:
- http://www.apple.com/education/solutions/itunes_u/ profiles/umich.html

learn chinese in michigan schools - while the schools save money on teachers:
- http://education.zdnet.com/?p=934

info about ipods for educational institutions:
- http://campustechnology.com/articles/40744/
- https://segue.middlebury.edu/index.php?action=site &site=achapin-ipod

And $38m is a lot, but the benefits of the plan were conveniently left out of the editorials - and it's just possible that some of that cost will be offset by savings.

Oh, you mean like a modified version of this?

There's no reason to be frightened. The Wikipedia section you quoted does not address it. On the other hand, many easily found university style guides do address it. There are more. Feel free to browse.

Slashdot editors seem to be taking money to run public relations press releases as stories. Here's a quote from the Slashdot story: "You can't heat water up quickly enough with conventional resistance-based electric elements, as it would require huge amount of electricity." ?????

The energy to heat water is fixed. Normal electric heaters, called "resistance-based electric elements" in this story, use 100% of the energy to make heat. They are 100% efficient.

A microwave device would waste energy in making microwaves. That wasted energy would be heat, but it might be difficult to put that heat into the water. And why spend more to get another kind of 100% efficiency?

In Brazil and New Zealand, for example, shower heaters are often 220 Volts at 25 Amps. They heat cold water instantly to shower temperature. The heating elements cost less than $10 local equivalent.

Disgusting nonsense quote from the referenced article: "The technology is designed to eliminate the deadly Legionella Pneumophila, since water will not stagnate, as it does with conventional hot water heaters."

Here is accurate information: "Legionella ... requires complex nutritional requirements such as high cysteine levels and low sodium levels to grow. "

You don't get Legionaire's disease from water heaters! The high heat in water heaters kills bacteria. The linked article about Legionella says that it can live in shower heads, but that is at a cool temperature, on the outside.

That's a nice link. I did not know anyone was making and storing anti-protons. Positrons are common, happening anywhere you have lots of 1.2 MeV or greater photons interacting with matter. The problem is saving them up someplace before they get sucked up by a regular electron. You can easily see the energy of annihilation with room temperature NaI detectors and a gamma spec, like this.

Not quite as versatile, but making up for that with geek factor is:

Ukulele Mindstorms Robot

It only plays reggae since reggae usually uses only a few, simple chords, but it is still way cool. They even made it remote controllable. And of course, all the source is on their site.

Get cool 3D images of Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Everest, Uluru, etc.

Don't get too excited. The process of extracting 3d depth from a pair of 2d pictures is shockingly more difficult than one would initially expect. Given the 2d positions of the same point in both cameras, it is trvial to find the 3d depth, but in practice the problem of finding the corresponding points is extremely difficult. (It is called the 'correspondence problem' and can justifiably be called the holy grail of the field of Computer Vision.) For those who are truly interested, you can actually see how most of the current state of the art stereo algorithms run on a few (easy) stereo pairs here.

their website and associated paper are located here

Here at Middlebury College we are working on projects to use iPods as study aids in foreign-language courses:

http://segue.middlebury.edu/sites/achapin-ipod

The two uses are as follows:

1. Give students mobile access to our databases of tens of thousands of vocabulary audio files while using the rating system to sort known versus unknown vocabulary.

2. Allow students to record and hear themselves speaking vocabulary and other exercises.

Here at Middlebury College we are working on projects to use iPods as study aids in foreign-language courses:

http://segue.middlebury.edu/sites/achapin-ipod

The two uses are as follows:

1. Give students mobile access to our databases of tens of thousands of vocabulary audio files while using the rating system to sort known versus unknown vocabulary.

2. Allow students to record and hear themselves speaking vocabulary and other exercises.

I agree with you that 3D from uncalibrated images (which is basically what you're looking for) would have been cooler, but science is not quite there yet. Lots of research is done on autocalibration, and lots of research is done on reconstruction based on calibrated images (I've just finished a Master thesis in 3D vision on that topic :) ), but as far as I know no one has been able to put two and two together with convincing results yet. And even because something is stereoscopy-based doesn't mean it's worthless.

First, creating reliable stereoscopic depth maps is far from being a done deal. Researchers are still struggling with doing good stereoscopy in less-than-perfect conditions, like in presence of occlusion, specularities, large scale scenes, etc... (I'll point you to the Middlebury Stereo Page for an overview of current research in the domain).

But even if you can generate nice stereo depth maps, stitching them together to create a fully coherent 3D scene is a big challenge too. So no, unfortunately, 3D scenes from stereo is not a done deal.

They don't come out and say it, but it sounds like it's just a big ol' LSI System. It works really well for some types of searching, but I'm not sure if such a thing would out perform google for a general purpose search engine.

"Latent semantic indexing adds an important step to the document indexing process. In addition to recording which keywords a document contains, the method examines the document collection as a whole, to see which other documents contain some of those same words. LSI considers documents that have many words in common to be semantically close, and ones with few words in common to be semantically distant. This simple method correlates surprisingly well with how a human being, looking at content, might classify a document collection. Although the LSI algorithm doesn't understand anything about what the words mean, the patterns it notices can make it seem astonishingly intelligent."

During the developement of our PHP CMS, Segue, we did just what you mentioned: a rewrite, with the realization that another was needed before the first was even done. To nip this one in the bud, we spent several months researching application design, OO design, XP, and several other topics. This research left us with two products:

- A large application framework (Harmoni) written in PHP that provides implementations of the Open Knowledge Inititiative (OKI) services along with others.

- A site that is a collection of most of the articles that we read in preparation to all this work.

The documentation site title is XP, but the articles contained are more general design stuff than just XP. Speaking of XP, it is something that over time we have found to be partially useful. Unit testing can be good, though we often don't do it, while pair-programming is universally despised by our group.

Anyway, read a lot before writing.

Where's the semantic analysis? Where's the intelligence in the software? How come we can block 99.997% of email spam - but not 5% of google spam.

well, the theory goes that google implemented Latent Semantic Indexing around the start of december with it's florida update.
the problem was that it arsed the search results and created many pages of irrelevent mung. very few people (webmasters) were happy with the update, nor were the searchers.
so a few weeks ago google removed it (or lessened it's importance) and things are starting to get back to normal.
intellegent software obviously dosn't nessicerely give better results.
(disclaimer: the above isn't proven fact as google hasn't said anything about it, but it seems to be the case based on the facts availible)

And to see a video of a speed cuber, look at Dan Knight's page.

* The inventor Rubik used to solve it in about 3 minutes
* To measure your average the standard procedure is to do it 12 times, remove the smallest and largest, and take the mean of the remaining 10
* The fastest cubers have averages of about 17 secs
* The best average anyone ever got is (IIRC) 12 secs (Imagine that!!)
* Some people can solve the entire cube blindfolded!! (Study it once, get blindfolded and then solve it). Its based on group theoretic invariants of the cube. You can do certain operations without changing most of the cubies
* Some people can solve a 20x20x20 cube (a software simulation of course)
* There are some incredible videos of people speed solving it available. One by Dan Knights for instance
* The best known computer algorithm can solve random instances in 18 moves (human solutions take about 60 moves). This is optimal on average; There is a lot of work going into finding "God's algorithm", a worst case move-optimal solution

Disclaimer: I used to do it 2 or 3 yrs ago so my info might be somewhat outdated.

Here are a couple of links if you want to get better at solving it:

Lars Petrus' method for speed
Dan Knight, the world champion
Jessica Fridrich. Her method is used by many.
www.speedcubing.com
www.rubiks.dk
A solution some think is easy.

I bought my first cube 2 months ago and today I completed it in 56.98 seconds! After loads of practice of course.

agree whole-heartedly. During the past 12 months I've taken off about 9 weeks. How?

Well, first of all, some admissions:
1.I'm several years out of college with no kids to support.
2.See number 1.

Aside from the above, what I have done is made my life more important than my work. I live simply and happily on what would be peanuts for many. Basically all of my income is spent on food and rent. That's about it. I get a little gear (kayaking/computer/etc), but not too much. Part of this was forced upon me by my employer (a college) not having the funds to hire me full-time. This I found, is a blessing. It forced me to only work 30 hours per week at somewhat low wages. I spend my working hours developing open-source web-applications for putting course materials online. This work is incredibly fulfilling (as open-source development can be) and I put extreme effort into it. However, I have also made it known to my [understanding] superiors, that since they don't pay me well for the amount that I do for them, that I'll take off when I please, and do great work when I am there.

This has led to a situation in which both my productivity and happiness are maximized. I work an average of 30-35 hours per week. Since I am free to take off whenever I please (to go kayaking, travel, or just sleep in) and work late to make up the time if necessary, I don't resent my job. As I don't resent it and can sleep in if needed, I can tackle my projects with gusto and drive, without burning out. I wish for the sake of others (and myself in future employment) that more employers would realize that if they give more freedom to their workers that many will be more functional and better performing. This is not to say that some won't take advantage of their freedoms, but most won't.

As an example, look at academia. In most colleges and universities around the world, faculty (and many staff such as myself) work VERY lenient hours for average pay. Now, those with the most flexibility in their work, the faculty, generally have the greatest output of work. Most professors I know publish many articles, do much research, and teach many classes, all while having the freedom to work when they feel like it (meetings and scheduled classes aside). Basically, they don't slack - but they are happy and able to enjoy life. Granted, at this level you have "had to prove your passion" via graduate school, but so have many in the commercial sector. I guess basically what I am trying to get at is that one's benefit to an employer is not strictly tied to the number of hours that they put in. Many friends in commercial software development have basically followed the Office Space mantra of "Just Spacing Out" because they hate how their jobs take over their lives. My coworkers and I don't do this because we are given the freedom to work when and as we see fit - and we do a LOT of QUALITY work willingly because of this.

I'm crushing your star.

Dan Knight Speedsolving

I was never able to get the hang of the cube, but this this guy sure did. His web site has more info.. but the video is the coolest part. FYI need quicktime to watch the video.

I was never able to get the hang of the cube, but this this guy sure did. His web site has more info.. but the video is the coolest part. FYI need quicktime to watch the video.

Take an army of the recently-described feral hunting robots . To each robot, add a GPS chip and wireless mesh networking .

Give the people and dogs smart name tags , and have your dogs exchange your "business card" with the other smart name tags. Publish the FOAF url in it, so you can immediately check for compatibility and give the new information to the dogs.

Study the discovered FOAF files , each describing individual traits ("attributes").

Instruct the feral robots to find other people with compatible personalities , but to stay near you. They'll roam around, seeking people whose interests relate to yours.

For bonus points, add solar panels to generate power as it roams around, and electronic boundaries to keep it in safe areas, away from motor traffic.

I would whole heartedly urge getting at least a bachelor's degree in anything technical. I finished a bachelor's in physics from a small liberal arts college and found that it was the best possible course I could have taken (I currently work as an Open Source programmer and will head into alternative energy power systems engineering next year). Though liberal arts colleges have less course offerings, they do have many great opportunities. In a small (less than 3000 students) institution, there are an incredible amount of hands-on learning opportunities in research based "pure science" departments. For instance, my senior physics thesis involved designing and building the mechanical and electrical systems, then programming the computer interface to run the He3 cryostat and associated electronics I and others used to do quantum dot research. This is the kind of learning experience (along with the rest of the social thing) that is really hard to get if you don't go to college (at least for a little while). If you are one of those people (like the Willie Norris hypersound guy from a few articles back) who is just destined for bigger things, then get to them. For the rest of us however college/university is definitely a good thing if you can swing it.

As for your questions:
1. How much will a graduate/undergraduate degree affect my eventual wages as a programmer?
I can't say from experience as I have chosen to work for peanuts doing open source development for a university, (the pay isn't great, but the quality of life is through the roof!), but it definitely will help at least a little.

2. If I got an electrical engineering degree instead of a computer science degree, would I be able to make more as an embedded technology developer? In the automotive industry?
Like someone said above, "if your in it for the money, you shouldn't be here". That said, an EE, applied physics, physics, or some other well-rounded science/technical degree that involves computer work as well as knowledge of physical systems will make you much more employable (if not better paid) than a degree in computer science.

3. Is college much better than highschool course-wise?
In my experience, incredibly so. Granted, I went to an absolutely shitty high school, but in college I was able to take courses in everything from data structures to optoelectronics to "radio, microwave and coherent transmission techniques" and add in some "Modern African History" on the side.

4. Will running various website such as this [frob.us], that [mathaddicts.org], and the other one [osnippets.org] help me with admissions? With scholarships?
Probably with admissions. It could show that you have a drive to apply yourself to something that you think is important, always a good thing with admissions people. If not, it doesn't hurt. As for scholarships, no clue.

5. Definitely would redo college. The career can wait. Actually the career is on at least semi-permenant hold until I get a bit of life under my belt.

6. Know of any good tech scholarships?
Nope, but I do have many friends that were able to attend my ridiculously-priced college for free because their families didn't make much money. Granted, the cutoff is crappily low (my parents paid more in tuition than their income the year my brother and I were both in school), but if you really are poor, there is need-based aid available.

Disclaimer: I am the project manager of the software described below
Open source is just beginning to seep into academia, primarily because many institutions are balking at the absurd pricing of commercial course management systems such as BlackBoard and WebCT. MIT's Stellar and dotlrn, Stanford's Courseworks, Michegan's CHEF are various approaches to course management using open source code.

A very different approach to course management is being developed at Middlebury College based on weblogs called Segue. Segue seems to me to be far more flexible than any of the above allowing site owners to create their own navigation, organize content chronologically and allow for discussion of stories. It is modelled on Slashcode, PHPNuke, MovableType and includes a portal to class information. see: http://segue.middlebury.edu/sites/segue

I am currently working at Middlebury College developing a GPL course management system called Segue.

segue.middlebury.edu - our current version, in use by over 100 courses (double the total number of course websites from last year).

The Segue Project Page

Segue approches Course Management from the "Course Website" paradigm as oposed to "course folders" paradigm of BlackBoard and WebCT. We feel that websites as they are, are a superior way of displaying information than the idea of posting documents for download. Our goals were to make a system that is platform independent and will allow even the most technically timmid professors to quickly and easily get their course information and discussions online. On both fronts we've had much success; professors find the system easy to use (even the foreign language departments) and all functionality is availible from any platform with the exception of WYSIWYG text formatting. We are looking for a browser-independent XML WYSIWYG editor to replace our ActiveX one for PCIE. Any recomendations on this front would be welcome.

Segue is written in PHP and currently runs on a mySQL database. As of May however, we will be using ADODB to support virtually all databases. In April our development team will be heading to MIT to work out OKI interoperability.

Our code is all GPL so check it out!

I am currently working at Middlebury College developing a GPL course management system called Segue.

segue.middlebury.edu - our current version, in use by over 100 courses (double the total number of course websites from last year).

The Segue Project Page

Segue approches Course Management from the "Course Website" paradigm as oposed to "course folders" paradigm of BlackBoard and WebCT. We feel that websites as they are, are a superior way of displaying information than the idea of posting documents for download. Our goals were to make a system that is platform independent and will allow even the most technically timmid professors to quickly and easily get their course information and discussions online. On both fronts we've had much success; professors find the system easy to use (even the foreign language departments) and all functionality is availible from any platform with the exception of WYSIWYG text formatting. We are looking for a browser-independent XML WYSIWYG editor to replace our ActiveX one for PCIE. Any recomendations on this front would be welcome.

Segue is written in PHP and currently runs on a mySQL database. As of May however, we will be using ADODB to support virtually all databases. In April our development team will be heading to MIT to work out OKI interoperability.

Our code is all GPL so check it out!

hmm i suggest you all have a read of this laymen's guide to latent semantic indexing, the vector model on steriods as the author puts it.

one killer feature of this is...

Quote "Looking for articles about Tiger Woods in the same database brings up many stories about the golfer, followed by articles about major golf tournaments that don't mention his name. Constraining the search to days when no articles were written about Tiger Woods still brings up stories about golf tournaments and well-known players." -- bloody amazing and relativly simple to do.

and it seems to be scaling very well at the moment..

I'm currently writing and article that deals with your questions/ideas. You might, though, in the interim, check out what we're doing with blogs @ Middlebury

Um, hello, can you please go to this site and tell me that you still believe you are the 'only one' out there?

Fertility gods before Judaism and xtianity"

final projects for the class

Of course, this means they actually did this back in January, and "the internet" is just finding out about it now. Maybe they have a full band at this point.

I would have to agree with you on this one. I took a Russian history class at the university I attended at the same time I was taking the Russian Language course, both taught by the same professor who was head of the department. It was actually the best classes I ever took.

The professors theory for the class was that no two people can see things in exactly the same way because of the "Vast rainbow of texts" (the exposure obtained in all situations) that shapes each persons life is not going to be the same for any two people. But there is a certain amount of convergence, the more texts people have in common, the better they can understand each other.

Following this, the reading list for the Russian history class was made up entirely out of Russian Literature (translated into english) including works of fiction. It was a great way to experience a little bit of the culture you don't normally get in a history class.

Of the books we read two stick out in my mind We by Yvegeny Zamyatin, a work of science fiction that is probably mentioned a whole lot in this thread... and The Master and Margarita" A fanciful allegory of good and evil written in the 1930's by Mikial Bulgakov. The writing of "The Master and Margarita" reminded me a lot of the writing styles of Edgar Allen Poe and Mark Twain.

I know I've always kind of been a nut for all things Russian, but I don't think that was the whole reason I really enjoyed getting into these books. The literature, even translated into english, gave a feeling I don't think you could get by reading a history book. Think of the feelings and the Ideas sparked by, say, Heinlein. Now, if you read Heinlein from outside the society that generated him, (or even possibly just outside the mainstream social class he was aiming at) you probably won't get the same feeling generated in those that love his work. But, read enough of him, and you may be able to better understand a heinlein fan when he expresses himself within similar context. (And I'm not just talking Grok.)