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... and why it was designed the way it was. What was their intentions (flight every two weeks) but what resulted (astronomical operating costs). Cannot really blame those that made the decisions as Shuttle was the ***first*** attempt for a lowcost reusable spaceship. It was a huge effort requiring lots of work and tough decisions, the kind that mentally cripples most folks*. Consider the first "reusable" airplanes for transport of multiple passengers and cargo had their host of problems (i.e. Tri-motors).

Here it from the guys that made the decisions in these MIT lectures (there are many, below just a few). What moved me the most is much of talent, infrastructure and companies that designed, built, and tested items of the Shuttle no longer exists. I say give it up on trying to revive Shuttle. First rebuilt the industrial base, otherwise we will struggling like Korolev trying to get resources.

MIT 16.885J Aircraft Systems Engineering, Fall 2005
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and-astronautics/16-885j-aircraft-systems-engineering-fall-2005/lecture-notes/

Lecture 1: The Origins of the Space Shuttle by Dale Myers
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and-astronautics/16-885j-aircraft-systems-engineering-fall-2005/lecture-notes/lecture-1/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiYhQtGpRhc

Lecture 2: Space Shuttle History by Aaron Cohen
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and-astronautics/16-885j-aircraft-systems-engineering-fall-2005/lecture-notes/lecture-2/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJ2H06sseLM

Lecture 3: Orbiter Sub-System Design by Aaron Cohen
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and-astronautics/16-885j-aircraft-systems-engineering-fall-2005/lecture-notes/lecture-3/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDMbBjH8ZSs

Lecture 4: The Decision to Build the Shuttle by John Logsdon
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and-astronautics/16-885j-aircraft-systems-engineering-fall-2005/lecture-notes/lecture-4/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOAyzURugaw

*I talked to someone that worked on wind tunnel tests of various Shuttle configurations in the early 70s (his work was dynamic pressure measurements from shockwaves). There was a period when people were working double shifts in the wind tunnel facility (16 hours on, 8 hours off instead of usual day, swing, grave shift crews) while people at NASA HQ were arguing with the OMB. Idea of SRBs meant they drilled holes and mounted SRB segments on the ET portion of wind tunnel model (didn't bother to remove it from test section for work in machine shop). This double-shift work went on and on. Finally after (I think it was months) and on a Friday, they said "alright, we can go back to regular single shifts and will see you Monday." This person I spoke with said him and another guy he worked with went to have some pizza and beer. The other guy died the next day, he was only 49 years old.

"I'm sure someone will figure out a way to reflect (mirror?) back to the source."

I guess this means mirrored sunglasses are going to make a comeback. Or did they already? I don't pay attention to fashion.

Why, they'll be banned like the hoody!

'ere, e's wearin' mirrors an' a hoody. Bloody terrorist is what 'e is!

eh, it's a fair cop...

More info here:
        http://web.media.mit.edu/~raskar//trillionfps/

The work is based on 'streak camera' technology, which measures the change in the flow of a stream of photons. Raskar is extending the work from 1D to 2D and adding multi-point reflectance data to infer the 3D shape of objects that are otherwise occluded from view.

Clearly the image's spatial resolution will be limited by the smoothness of the reflected surface, the rate of motion of the target, additional noise sources (e.g. ambient light), perhaps even variations in temperature in the air (refractive noise), etc

AFAIK, all streak cameras are currently used only in very structured environments (particle accelerators, flow mass spectrometers, etc). The prospect of using a streak camera to render 2D objects is ambitious. Doing so in an unstructured setting like the battlefield (where do you think his funding is coming from?) is implausible. The prospect of combining such technology with computational photography techniques to practically 'look around corners' degenerates to hopeless hyperbole.

IMHO, the MIT Media Lab's reality distortion field is alive and well.

Oh, can I try?

Evangelos Georgiadis of MIT and Doron Zeilberger of Rutgers, along with Zeiberger's computer Shalosh B. Ekhad, have written a paper entitled, "How to Gamble If You're In a Hurry," in which they propose new ways of studying gambling from a mathematical perspective. They criticize previous scholarship following the Kolmogorov measure-theoretic paradigm, including Kelly (1956), Breiman (1961), and Dubins and Savage (1976), on the grounds that the mechanisms they provide for winning do not take into account real-life constraints such as the finite divisibility of money, the finite duration of the game, the finite resources of the opponents, and the possibility of uneven payoff in the game. Rather than proposing a single strategy that provides an optimal outcome to an unrealistic scenario, Georgiadis and Zeilberger provide a Maple package that calculates the best strategy given a set of real-world criteria, including the probability of winning a game, the amount of money you have, and the time within which you must complete your gambling. The paper thus represents a movement from using mathematics to derive single solutions to highly abstract problems to using algorithms that can generate optimal solutions for more concrete problems. Also, Zeiberger advances an attempt at cuteness by putting condescending words about humanity in his computer's mouth, the irony of which is heightened by the realization that Shalosh B. Ekhad is nothing more than Zeiberger's ventriloquist dummy.

The paper I've linked to below shows how non-random screening allows an adversary to probe the screening system for types of people that don't get screened. Next, the adversary takes one of these people that doesn't meet the profile, and asks them to quietly carry a package on board, in exchange for letting their kidnapped grandchild live.

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/student-papers/spring02-papers/caps.htm

"programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute"

Looks like some Brits need to try out the Mystery Hunt

The paper is here, and it gives ROC curves. They used two approaches, a hidden Markov model and a support vector machine Bayesian filter.

Link

Virginia Tech developed the data acquisition hardware that the CICAS-V project used to collect the dataset. That probably influenced the choice of location. The MIT paper apparently used the data because it was convenient, and did not mention any interaction with Virginia Tech researchers.

Any debate on privacy always draws me to The Right to Privacy, by Warren and Brandeis Harvard Law Review. Vol. IV December 15, 1890 No. 5:

Of the desirability -- indeed of the necessity -- of some such protection [for privacy], there can, it is believed, be no doubt. The press is overstepping in every direction the obvious bounds of propriety and of decency. Gossip is no longer the resource of the idle and of the vicious, but has become a trade, which is pursued with industry as well as effrontery. To satisfy a prurient taste the details of sexual relations are spread broadcast in the columns of the daily papers. To occupy the indolent, column upon column is filled with idle gossip, which can only be procured by intrusion upon the domestic circle. The intensity and complexity of life, attendant upon advancing civilization, have rendered necessary some retreat from the world, and man, under the refining influence of culture, has become more sensitive to publicity, so that solitude and privacy have become more essential to the individual; but modern enterprise and invention have, through invasions upon his privacy, subjected him to mental pain and distress, far greater than could be inflicted by mere bodily injury. Nor is the harm wrought by such invasions confined to the suffering of those who may be the subjects of journalistic or other enterprise. In this, as in other branches of commerce, the supply creates the demand. Each crop of unseemly gossip, thus harvested, becomes the seed of more, and, in direct proportion to its circulation, results in the lowering of social standards and of morality. Even gossip apparently harmless, when widely and persistently circulated, is potent for evil. It both belittles and perverts. It belittles by inverting the relative importance of things, thus dwarfing the thoughts and aspirations of a people. When personal gossip attains the dignity of print, and crowds the space available for matters of real interest to the community, what wonder that the ignorant and thoughtless mistake its relative importance. Easy of comprehension, appealing to that weak side of human nature which is never wholly cast down by the misfortunes and frailties of our neighbors, no one can be surprised that it usurps the place of interest in brains capable of other things. Triviality destroys at once robustness of thought and delicacy of feeling. No enthusiasm can flourish, no generous impulse can survive under its blighting influence.

The relationship between this 120 year old paper and modern society is illuminating.

I posted elsewhere in this thread: Scratch isn't Hypercard, but it is very (young) student friendly.

Take a look at MIT Scratch... Hypercard it is not, but it is an insanely simple parallel procedural programming system (aimed at 14 year olds). "Millions" of apps have been written and shared in Scratch. A lot of these "apps" are just kids drawing a picture with the included paint program. If that's what they want to do, more power to 'em. If they want to go further and make a flipping storyboard, or add music or sprite animation they can.

Computers should serve people as they want to be served - we should have more programming languages like Hypercard and Scratch, not less.

Online identities are not really anonymous.

Go read some Sherry Turkle.

http://www.mit.edu/~sturkle/

--
BMO

...Back in the 1980's when the programming I did caused a small robot to draw complex shapes on the floor. I crunched through an insane number of projects in four years, from mathematical problems to friezes for musical productions and outlines for stage sets.

I still remember how to program the Turtle, though the real-world applications of such a skill, I've since found, number precisely zero. It was and is still fun, though.

Triggering apoptosis in infected cells ftw

http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/jokes.cognitive.txt

Shouldn't an introduction that is supposed to excite people into learning be, you know, not boring?

Physics aren't particularly exciting either, but a while ago I watched videos of Walter Lewin's physics lectures at MIT, and they were fantastic, to the point of making me want to learn physics even though I have at most a high-school level of physics and it's completely unrelated to what I am currently doing and what I'm planning to do in the future.

MIT has videos of lectures online. But unlike Stanford it's more a "work at your own pace" style thing instead of actually signing up for a course.

This is the way education should be, available to anyone with an interest. MIT has a similar program with content freely available I believe: http://ocw.mit.edu/ . IMHO this is what libraries will eventually evolve into. This type of knowledge sharing is the root of a libraries books are about, and getting that content from the expert source in the field is hard to beat. Definitely cool stuff.

This article is just a rewording of the original article: http://www.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/optical-computing-diode-1123.html
Fortunately, the kids at ExtremeTech were good enough to at least link the original which isn't nearly as confusing.

It doesn't go off and start talking about LEDs and WDM which just confuses the issue.

http://www.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/optical-computing-diode-1123.html

A little late to the party, but a lot of schools have a policy of explicitly not admitting students who have a PhD in another field. For instance, here is MITs official stance on that:

10. If I already have a PhD, can I apply for another PhD in EECS?

No, we will not admit an applicant who already holds a PhD degree (even if it is in a different area such as Physics or Math)

look at Mr. Elite University's $100k debt and have a good chuckle.

Except schools like Stanford and MIT offer free tuition for families making less than $100k and $75k respectively. My university took 50% off my tuition for all 4 years. It ended up costing less than state school and I graduated with $15k debt for an "elite" degree.

So if you're looking for prior art to go patent busting on these big companies, a good place to start would be in the wearable computer projects in the 90's. A lot of these guys published in the journal of the ACM, too. Apple, Google and Amazon think their balls are all shiny and they're doing something new, but they're not.

http://web.mit.edu/~haldane/www/icerays/

Does Type II look familiar? There is even code for you to generate your own geometric window grille.

See also this link:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/u41779k5083148p7

actually, MIT forgoes tuition for students who can't afford it.

http://fuck-the-skull-of-jesus.mit.edu/

MIT does.

And BTW, "The environmental impacts of shale development are challenging but manageable." The study addressed groundwater contamination, noting "There has been concern that these fractures can also penetrate shallow freshwater zones and contaminate them with fracturing uid, but there is no evidence that this is occurring".

Don't forget the repeated success of SciGen, an automatic computer science BS generator.

Link to paper: http://www.rle.mit.edu/stir/documents/BilgicGA_MagResMed2011.pdf I guess the reason this shows up on slashdot is that it was on MITnews (and of course the work was done at MIT). It is nothing really groundbreaking (or novel for that matter). They use Compressive Sensing where they assume that the different scan types (T1, T2,etc) have a similar structure (same sparsity profile, enforced through shared precision hyperparameters in a Bayesian formulation).

I usually ignore your free-market trolling, but in this case I have some actual knowledge about how biomedical research works. Also, one of the authors already has the full paper available for download on his website. Guess who paid for it?

"Grant sponsor: National Institutes of Health; Grant number: NIH R01 EB007942; Grant sponsor: National Science Foundation (NSF); Grant number: 0643836; Grant sponsor: Siemens Healthcare (The Siemens-MIT Alliance)."

Still think it's great technology? (Yeah, I know - the free market would have thought of it first if the big bad government wasn't taking its money.)

I just thought I'd point thisout.

That's not true. They understood it perfectly, if by "they" you permit me to mean the smartest people around!

Here, read this

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html [mit.edu]

And search for "billions" of bits. They knew, they just didn't know how. That's manufacturing. Not the lack of understanding of the basic need.

"What we can store on a thumb drive would blow away anything they thought possible "

Don't overdramatize.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1360 [wikipedia.org]

A terabit of storage in 1967. They understood, they knew.

We also undertand and know how to get into space, if by "space" you mean low Earth orbit and immediate environs. We also know that there is NO room to improve, we're already AT the limits of physics just to achieve THAT.

My little example of the 1360 should show that with enough money and enough motivation, you can build completely fantastic things. Given that, how come we haven't moved any further out in space? It's because it's simply a vacuum, completely deadly and hostile to humans, and pretty much empty.

We had Apollo, then what? Who cares? So a few A-type test pilots get to poop in Ziplocs and bounce around a bit. The end. Nobody cared then, and no one will care now.

It's hard to believe but the complete lack of anything concrete to come out of manned space exploration makes it so difficult to argue against. It's nothing but hopes and dreams and faith. And it's impossible to use logic against faith.

"When we have a real need for flights to Mars, the asteroid belt, or Jupiter we will make the tech we need to get there and we will do it quickly."

See? That's faith. It's not backed up by a shred of technological evidence. "Tech" is not some magic thing that can pop out ever bigger and more powerful rockets. It's bound by physics.

On another level, it's bound by economics. What, precisely, do you think is "out there" that's so important? It's the same elements as on Earth. Except on Earth, we have the combined capacity to bring to bear 7 billion people in their native environment to work on it.

Space, I repeat, is an utterly hostile deadly vacuum. The logistics of it are self-defeating.

If we DID have the resources on Earth to build this vast armada of automated mining machinery and the raw oomph to bring it all back, well, why go into space? Seems like we have plenty of stuff down here already!

Any technology you can use in space, you can use 10 times cheaper on Earth, 10x faster.

Yeah, for most tech businesses, payroll ends up about 30%-40% of all expenses. This MIT/Sloan article estimates the actual cost to maintain an employee to be 2.7x the employee's salary. The $37/hr vs $100/hr you cite turns out to be exactly 2.7x.

If folks think they can run an IT contracting businesses where non-payroll expenses are less than 50% of their costs, they're welcome to try. If it's as easy as they think, why sit here on slashdot complaining about it? Go start a contracting business for yourself and make a fortune as you drive all the other contractors charging "rip-off prices" out of the market.

Since the point of this whole design is to learn kids about programming, wouldn't it be much better to actually pick an open CPU ?

Sure, this device lets you play a h.264 stream, 1080p, on your TV. Whoop-di-doo.. but there's nothing you can hack or investigate to understand how it works. Video data disappears into an undocumented black box, and a TV signal comes out the other end.

If you want kids to learn how to program, give them an ARM7 with a TFT panel, where they can call putpixel(x,y,col). Not nearly as fast and capable, but you can see how it works, and tinker with it. Or give them a laptop, and send them here: http://scratch.mit.edu/

it is ARM6, rather popular design, and you can "putpixel" in any language you want

Since the point of this whole design is to learn kids about programming, wouldn't it be much better to actually pick an open CPU ?

Sure, this device lets you play a h.264 stream, 1080p, on your TV. Whoop-di-doo.. but there's nothing you can hack or investigate to understand how it works. Video data disappears into an undocumented black box, and a TV signal comes out the other end.

If you want kids to learn how to program, give them an ARM7 with a TFT panel, where they can call putpixel(x,y,col). Not nearly as fast and capable, but you can see how it works, and tinker with it. Or give them a laptop, and send them here: http://scratch.mit.edu/

America in the 1950s was a middle-class society in a way that America in the 1990s is not. That is, it had a much flatter income distribution, so that people had much more sense of sharing a common national lifestyle. And people in that relatively equal America felt good about their lives, even though by modern standards, they were poor--poorer, if Boskin is correct, than we previously thought. Doesn't this mean, then, that having a more or less equal distribution of income makes for a happier society, even if it does not raise anyone's material standard of living? That is, you can use the fact that people did not feel poor in the 1950s as an argument for a more radical egalitarianism than even most leftists would be willing to espouse.

If you had read the second linked article you would know the answer to your question.

A number of studies have already shown that this is economically feasible. In fact, since the majority of the shallow wells is in the west, and water is the limiter, the small 50-100 KW plants are very economical (air cooling). Keep in mind that bulk of expense in geo-thermal is not the power plant, but the well. These shallow wells power plants are less expensive than coal plants to run. The issue is how to make use of the old oil wells. There are several ideas being worked on in which the base of the well is expanded and a loop thrown in. Another approach is doing vertical EGS. But the one that holds a lot of promise for the west was doing the shallow well with small units, but add a solar thermal unit to raise the heat during the daytime. That allows for higher generation, while allowing geo-thermal to work all night.

In addition, a number of studies, but one major one, have shown that this is not just feasible, but downright CHEAP. That study and others have lead to Potter Drilling as well as Foro Energy targeting DEEP geothermal and making it cheap.

Must be hard to know when to get off when they announce all stops as Harvard Square.

Or maybe that's why Charlie never returned.

See page 554 in TFA. They image a guy holding a metal rod. The name of the output file in the screenshot? StarwarsKid. Yay!

The person who designed the radar was posted before, but this was about his PhD project. Here is the link and you too can build your own SAR (as long as you can read his cat scratch of notes on his blog)

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/06/18/1350259/diy-synthetic-aperture-radar

Also on his blog, you will see similarities to what he developed for his PhD and what he is working on now.

http://www.mit.edu/~gr20603/Dr.%20Gregory%20L.%20Charvat%20Projects/Synthetic%20Aperture%20Radar%20(SAR).html

Oh, and I am not a groupie. I happen to actually know Greg.

Hang on - this case was only filed on September 30th:

http://web.mit.edu/jhawk/tmp/tz/gov.uscourts.mad.139342.2.0.pdf

Is the US District Court in Massachusetts is unusually swift, or has this not even been heard by a judge? Is there an actual opinion granting an injunction anywhere?

Rossi stands on the shoulders of giants.

There had better be an over-arching demonstrable benefit - because any invasion of privacy is just that: an _invasion_ of privacy.

c.f. http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/privacy/Privacy_brand_warr2.html

wherein Warren and Brandeis refer to 'what Judge Cooley calls the right "to be let alone"'

As for the lie told by the ISTHA, it's despicable, yet nowadays such behaviour by government and corporations has become ubiquitous and otherwise unremarkable.

Even though I'm not a big fan of cutting the NASA budget, here is some (reasonable) reading about why is it good:
http://tech.mit.edu/V130/N18/nasap.html

For fans of Neal, there was recently interview on goodreads with him (however, interviewer was, nicely said, boring):
http://www.goodreads.com/topic/video_chat/14

and the evergreen of Neal @google (a lot of interesting ideas - e.g., about wikipedia):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnq-2BJwatE

See http://chronicle.com/article/Harvard-Faculty-Adopts/40447 for Harvard adoption. See http://libraries.mit.edu/sites/scholarly/mit-open-access/open-access-at-mit/mit-open-access-policy/mit-faculty-open-access-policy-faq/ for MIT adoption.

A lot of accredited institutions offer courses that are entirely online, including the community college where I've been taking courses, City College of San Francisco; those aren't free, but they're not terribly expensive.

Several institutions offer complete course materials online for free, most notably MIT. Unlike the courses at Stanford, those aren't active courses, however, so there's are no other students with whom to interact unless you go out and find some, no record of your participation, and no assessment.

There are many tutorials for most programming languages, and some computer science theory, available online.

Some public libraries offer free access to Safari Online, which includes hundreds of tech books, including books on programming.