Slashdot Mirror

You might have a look at http://groups.csail.mit.edu/uid/sikuli/ - I've had some luck with it on similar tasks

Instead of a weekly paycheck, RMS should work for free and accept donations....

While I agree with you, the fact of the matter is that Stallman is so famous and he's at the top of the movement, which puts him in a far better position to get paid than other people. For example:

"Software pioneer and MIT research affiliate Richard M. Stallman has been named as a co-winner of the 2001 Takeda Award for Techno-Entrepreneurial Achievement for Social/Economic Well-Being. Stallman shares this award with Linux inventor Linus Torvalds and TRON open architecture developer Ken Sakamura. Each of the winners will be awarded 100 million yen, currently about $830,000, at a ceremony in Tokyo on December 4."

Stallman said he plans to keep the prize money and “invest it one way or another.” He said his primary goal is to live off the prize money so that he can devote his time to continue his not-for-profit work...

In 1990, Stallman was awarded a $240,000 fellowship by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, often known as a “genius grant.”
http://tech.mit.edu/V121/N59/59stallman.59n.html

His work with free software has made him rich - far richer than the average Joe doing the same thing. I wonder if Stallman is a millionaire at this point. I wouldn't be surprised. I'm sure it's that much easier for him to believe in his own ideas when they make him rich.

In one video, I saw Stallman saying that copyrighted software might make you rich, but it was morally wrong. Given that most copyrighted software won't make you rich (it will only give developers sufficient money to survive) plus Stallman's claim that copyrighted software earns a lot more than open-source, the message that I took away from his little speech was that open-source was a really bad way to earn a living. Funny, how Stallman confirmed my thoughts about open-source.

MIT Scrabble Champ

online videos: algebra + calculus
http://justmathtutoring.com/
http://www.mathtutor.ac.uk/
http://www.khanacademy.org/
http://www.graderocket.tv/index.php

Uni Maths Videos
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Mathematics/
http://press.princeton.edu/video/banner/
http://academicearth.org/subjects/mathematics
http://freescienceonline.blogspot.com/2009/01/calculus-video-lectures-bonus-basic.html
http://www.apple.com/education/itunes-u/ (requires iTunes download)

Resources from Universities
http://www.germanna.edu/tutor/helpful_handouts.asp?menuchoice=Helpful%20Handouts (wow)
http://mathforum.org/

Free online books:
http://www.jamesbrennan.org/algebra/systems/solution_set.htm
http://cnx.org/content/m18205/latest/?collection=col10624
http://www.jirka.org/diffyqs/ (Differential eqns)
http://www.purplemath.com/
http://tutorial.math.lamar.edu/

PowerPoints
http://www.online.math.uh.edu/HoustonACT/

Tutoring services
http://www.nutshellmath.com/

Collections of Links
http://math.about.com/od/mathhelpandtutorials/Math_Help_and_Tutorials_by_Subject_and_or_Topic.htm
http://pathstoknowledge.net/

Problems
http://projecteuler.net/

Some computer Resources
http://www.graphmatica.com/
http://archives.math.utk.edu/visual.calculus/

This is a response to my own post. Sometimes after uncorking a minor screed, I note to myself "that was more obnoxious than normal" and then my subconscious goes "ding!" and I get what's grinding me.

The secret of x86 longevity is to have been so coyote-ugly that it turns into pablum the brain of any x86-hater who tries to make a chip to rid the planet of the scourge once and for all.

For three decades right-thinking chip designers have *wanted* x86 to prove as bad in reality as ugliness ought to dictate.

Instead of having a balanced perspective on beauty, the x86-haters succumb to the rule of thumb that the less like x86, the better. And almost always, that lead to a mistake, because x86 was never in fact rotten to the gore. You need a big design team, and it bleeds heat, but all other respects, it proved salvageable over and over and over again.

On the empirical evidence, high standards of beauty in CPU design are overrated. Instead, we should have been employing high standards of pragmatic compromise.

If any design team had aimed merely for "a hell of lot less ugly", instead of becoming mired in some beauty-driven conceptual over-reaction, maybe x86 might have died already.

Maybe instruction sets aren't meant to be beautiful. Of course, viewed that way, this is an age-old debate.

The Rise of ``Worse is Better''

Empirically, x86 won.

The lingering question is this: is less worse less better, or was there a way out, and all the beauty mongers failed to find it?

I believe the OP is working towards college level and this is college level. Courses from a wide array of subjects taught at MIT. I've been looking at the Physics I and II and Calculus I and II courses myself.

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm

why I switched majors from CompSci - being in a hurry to get a degree in a science and too much bullshit math I'd never use

Wow. Don't hate on it just because you thought "hey I'm 'good with computers' and this major says Computer in it" and got burned by math expectations. If you don't love math, you have no business being in CS. Computer Science is a of field mathematics, not an engineering program where you learn to fix and build computers!

For (potential) CS freshmen, I recommend going through the classic SICP video lectures. It's very appropriate how Sussman says over and over things to the effect of "we don't care how this would actually work, we're studying the theory." If that doesn't excite you, or you think functional programming is stupid and inconvenient, or if you can't follow a word he's saying, for your own good switch to a different major because it only gets harder and more theoretical. That course was given to freshmen. Clearly you weren't a good fit for CS, but that's because you couldn't handle the math, not because it was bullshit you'd never use.

It's really alarming to me how hostile a lot of posters are to academia. A bachelor's degree isn't a fast-track to get into a career, it's a period of academic study. You really have no business claiming that you completed four years of post-secondary study without some basic understanding of math- and calculus is really, really basic.

You're in luck, there are tons of options. Use online courses, cheap textbooks (look for teacher editions), and community college courses.

If you were an AP student in high school and enjoy math, you'll do fine the second time around in college. I had to work a lot harder at calculus than I expected during my first undergrad degree. Five years later I returned for another degree and found it much easier and more enjoyable. Suffer through Calc I, II, III, they're basically computation. The fun comes with applied calculus, linear algebra, and finite topics.

Dunno about college placement tests, but to start thinking about maths in general there's nothing like just buying a couple of books and going at it (but make sure you have the answer booklet/solutions are in the back of the book). If you're feeling a little panicky you might even want to start with something really un-threatening ('Statistics for dummies' exists for that). You might want to see what the standard textbooks would be for the courses that are prerequisites for the ones you're looking to study, and perhaps ask which areas you would be expected to be comfortable with.

Also, the MIT opencourseware site is probably your friend: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Mathematics/

As regards an online tutor, depending on whether you currently live near a college/university/miscellaneous site of higher learning, you might want to see if there are any postgrads in applicable subjects who are willing to tutor. In my experience online tutors are seldom worth half as much as talking to a real live actual human being, and they are usually more expensive. YMMV - especially if you are extremely busy an online tutor may actually suit you better than scheduling another real live person into your week.

Finally - good luck :)

You might like:

Khan Academy http://www.khanacademy.org/

(Get an account for the review software if you have forgotten college algebra skills as well.)

MIT's Open Courseware http://ocw.mit.edu/

Many of these courses now have full video libraries of lectures, homework and exam solutions, etc. You can buy a text and take the course.

I am interested to see other finds out there, though.

This material could conceivably be studied by a student on his or her own, but this seldom works out. Students tend to get stuck on something, and, having no goad to keep them going, they try to get past it with decreasing energy, and ultimately develop mental blocks against going on. Having an organized course prevents this by forcing them to face obstacles like exams and assignments.

If you attempt this and get stuck, as is almost inevitable, you could try emailing us and we can try to unstick you.

Did you catch that last part? You're going to need help. Whether it's bribing your nerdy friends with cases of beer or Star Wars Galaxy Series Five collectible card packs (*cough* *cough*) you are going to need guidance at certain points in time. Don't be afraid to ask those around you or -- and I recommend this only in dire cases -- dressing up like a student and rolling into your local university asking to see the precalc professor for help.

Your codex might be Wikipedia. Your codex might be Wolfram's MathWorld. My codex sits three feet in front of my face as I type this. My codex (and this is purely personal) Bronshtein et al's Handbook of Mathematics. The binding is acceptable. The paper is not the greatest. The content is priceless. This is not a teaching device. This is my starting point. If I were you my ending point would be at my college's library pouring over all calculus textbooks. The great thing about this starting point is that I like how it lays out all the starting points leading up to that starting point in case I need to start backwards. Another great thing about this particular resource is that it has nearly everything imaginable and is well organized. The bad thing is that it costs $71.97. I think I paid $60 for mine but either way it's not free like Wikipedia.

I don't know where you are comfortable starting from but if I were you I would simply research what your learning institutions pre requisites are and spend your free time now acquiring their books and notes in order to make sure you have them covered. All of my old University of Minnesota syllabuses are online although I cannot find the Math department equivalent (aside from the registration listings).

If you could name your courses, I'd suggest books like The Annotated Turing which has been a page turner for me and actually starts with basic set theory to work up to automata. I'm guessing you're aiming for more Multivariable and Diff Eq type stuff. Let us know what the courses are and perhaps more human readable works can be suggested that aren't as laboriously mind numbing as reading a codex would be.

Calc II, Calc III, Diff Eq, I II or III. Linear Algebra, Statistics,

There's a huge difference.

There's always MIT's Open Courseware.

This page (which is referenced by Wikipedia, so it must be correct) only shows ten states as being "left lane for passing only" (and some of those are only on roads with specific speed limits of 65 or 70MPH).

Interestingly though, this doesn't show Wisconsin as a "passing only" state. I started to take a look at the Wisconsin law to figure out what was going on and got bored (and distracted by the parts having to do what one should do when "Passing or meeting frightened animal").

We have rule based reasoning systems now for 40 years and we also have neural nets and other probabilistic systems as well. We even have systems which can work with time. And no wonder there have been hundreds when not thousands attempts to combine these three techniques. They have also a paper on the Church language http://www.mit.edu/~ndg/papers/churchUAI08_rev2.pdf

It is definitely nice, but it is not new and it is not the unified theory of thought (or AI). They don't know really how humans think. Nobody really knows. And honestly it is not really important as long as these machines are able to help me finding my data faster or got the the supermarket and by some stuff. A major problem in AI is, that something called I is present in humans it allows them to understand the world, computer systems do not have such an understanding. Which is no wonder, as we don't know what this I is. All rule sets and probabilistic trainings cannot answer the question. One thing can be said about this I, it is very subjective and it is not completely described as the knowledge of self existence and the ability to differentiate between I and the rest of the world. It is assumed that children learn this concept in their first year. The problem with that is, that they cannot be asked when and how they came up with this idea of I.

To make a long story short: We (humans) do not know enough about knowledge and decision processes that we can model them as effective as the processes work in human. And the MIT developed something others had build before. Maybe their language is a little bit better, than others. However, I doubt that, the AI community is not screaming loudly. And as long as other researchers are not running around telling us the MIT approach is the best since sliced bread, I wont buy it.

For actual details check TFA: http://web.mit.edu/droy/www/papers/GooManRoyBonTenUAI2008.pdf http://projects.csail.mit.edu/church/wiki/Papers

For actual details check TFA: http://web.mit.edu/droy/www/papers/GooManRoyBonTenUAI2008.pdf http://projects.csail.mit.edu/church/wiki/Papers

Quite a few papers at his site.

This UAI 2008 paper is a good overview of the language.

Quite a few papers at his site.

This UAI 2008 paper is a good overview of the language.

You kind of have to feel sorry for the guy, he just got a new job as a researcher studying human cognition, so he's under pressure to come up with something. Secondly it's not an easy field to come up with something. It's not like nutritional science where you can easily design an experiment to measure the effects of high-vitamin-C diets, and suddenly you have a publishable paper, even if the result is "absolutely no effect." To add to the difficulty, group he is with seems to think that Bayesian statistics are the key to human cognition. So he has to do something based on bayesian statistics. Despite the fact that bayesian statistics have been used in AI research since the 50s, by smart people, who've taken all the easy ideas.

Given all the pressures he was under, and the requirements he had to meet, I'd say he's actually did a pretty good job. Not particularly useful from a practical standpoint, but it will allow him to get another research grant for next year (wow, I sound cynical).

You kind of have to feel sorry for the guy, he just got a new job as a researcher studying human cognition, so he's under pressure to come up with something. Secondly it's not an easy field to come up with something. It's not like nutritional science where you can easily design an experiment to measure the effects of high-vitamin-C diets, and suddenly you have a publishable paper, even if the result is "absolutely no effect." To add to the difficulty, group he is with seems to think that Bayesian statistics are the key to human cognition. So he has to do something based on bayesian statistics. Despite the fact that bayesian statistics have been used in AI research since the 50s, by smart people, who've taken all the easy ideas.

Given all the pressures he was under, and the requirements he had to meet, I'd say he's actually did a pretty good job. Not particularly useful from a practical standpoint, but it will allow him to get another research grant for next year (wow, I sound cynical).

I tried to Google about Church programming language, and results were rather poor as one might imagine.

Then I found out the MIT wiki link where the code is stashed. It seems to be Scheme with some twist I'm not yet aware of though. The wiki seems to be a good introduction to Scheme also, as it starts from basics.

"noah goodman ai church syntax" gives http://www.mit.edu/~ndg/ as the first result. There is a link near the top to http://projects.csail.mit.edu/church/wiki/Church

"noah goodman ai church syntax" gives http://www.mit.edu/~ndg/ as the first result. There is a link near the top to http://projects.csail.mit.edu/church/wiki/Church

My broken url should read: http://www.mit.edu/~ndg/papers/churchUAI08_rev2.pdf
Google quick view didn't work for some reason.

The BBC article seems to characterize these test subjects as unable to correctly assess risk.

That's cognitively quite different from assessing risk but not caring. On the basis of what's been presented here, I don't see any data which support the claim that moral reasoning is diminished in these subjects.

It turns out that the problem is not in the research, but in oversimplification by the news media. If you want a more accurate idea of what's going on, take a look at the original papers by Young et al. For example:

Participants even judged attempted harms
(e.g., attempting, but failing to poison someone) as more permissible than accidental harms (e.g.,
accidentally poisoning someone).

In that example, risk is quite accurately assessed. In the first case, no one was harmed, thus, no risk. In the second case, accidental though it was, someone was harmed and there was obviously risk.

I'd call that a failure of moral reasoning. Young even uses the phrase 'moral reasoning' multiple times for names of his papers, on the very page you link to.

Participants even judged attempted harms (e.g., attempting, but failing to poison someone) as more permissible than accidental harms (e.g., accidentally poisoning someone).

I've found this site from MIT really helpful http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Mathematics/

For those of you not in the know, the courses are here and free:

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm

Calculus is a foundational skill for analysis of algorithms, which is a bare minimum requirement if you want to work with Google-sized datasets.

As I read through the comments I see a lot of interest and debate about hardware -- screen readability, battery life, size and weight -- and to a lessor extent e-book file formats and publishing. These are important, and they miss essential points.

1. An e-book reader treats the student as a passive consumer. This is a model we have become all too familiar with, conditioned by being raised on a diet of printed books, movies and television. It fails because so much more is possible. A computer offers the opportunity for interactive learning, starting with social media and going straight into software development. Slashdot readers should known this. A key component is an on-going relationship with teachers, with interaction taking place entirely on-line, or as an enhancement to "brick and mortar" classroom activity.

2. The information contained in textbooks does not need to be published for profit. It is time for the textbook industry to follow the telegraph industry into the halls of our museums. Better still, to be reduced to a Wikipedia page. MIT has shown the way with their OpenCourseWare. Slashdot readers appreciate the value of free software. It should be obvious the same thing applies to textbooks.

3. It is not enough to fill a classroom with iMacs, or to offer an e-book reader in place of printed textbooks. What is needed is a larger infrastructure, something like a physical school and something akin to the Internet, the place where education takes place.

If you are interested in contributing to the development of such a place, come and join the Open Slate Project.

Yeah, but she hates men. That's hot.

It is just a toy program that returns 42 to the OS, but he gets it down to 45 bytes.

Since computer science tends to be such a male dominated field, I think it's worth pointing out that the author is a woman.

You can already get this for email. Encrypt. Put your public key on a popular keyserver (e.g. http://pgp.mit.edu/ and give some simple indication (e.g. in your email signature or business card) that you accept PGP encrypted email and your key is available, key ID 1A2B3C4D. If you have a little more room, include the PGP fingerprint (40 hex digits).

Then anyone who wants to send you email in an "envelope" can do so, and nobody else will be able to read it. Anyone who doesn't care will continue to send "postcard" style email that is essentially public.

Presumably for these beginners, you're teaching programming concepts: symbolic logic, input, output etc.

So while you could dive right into programming languages as we know them, or give them something like Turtle/Logo

My kids' primary school uses Scratch for this. Of course, you could just give 'em actual Logo via KTurtle.

What is it that you're programming that can't be done with scratch ?

I can look for you, but it would be on one of a half dozen drives sitting on my shelf.

I was surprised they took it out of public circulation. Now you have to pay for it, or be associated with an institute that has access of the above IEEE digital library.

You should check if you have a document delivery service at your college or university, since they tend to be able to find most anything.

In regards to your comment, divergence is only a problem for ray tracing due to branching with SIMD. But the upcoming GTX 300 is going to have a MIMD hardware architecture, and we will then enter the world of photorealism. There may be some issues for CUDA at first, but I gather OpenCL is more than sufficient for the task at hand.

Here are some good papers on the subject by NVidia:
http://www.tml.tkk.fi/~timo/publications/aila2009hpg_paper.pdf
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1413968

The second link requires access through a university network or personal account.

In regards to your last comment, I believe light fields are more significant for volumetric displays. The day I get to play with an interactive volumetric display is the day I die a happy man.

If you are interested in light fields, check out:
http://gl.ict.usc.edu/Research/3DDisplay/
http://scripts.mit.edu/~raskar/lightfields

"Impossible to test", but that does not mean that it's impossible to write bug-free software. It requires a substantially different approach to specification and construction than most people/companies currently use. Model Checking (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_checking) and SPARK (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARK_(programming_language) ) are two approaches that work. It's worth looking at what the commercial avionics industry requires for its embedded software, where 10 ^ -9 is the requirement for safety-critical avionics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DO-178B )

Note though, that no amount of 'construction by correctness' approach for software will make up in deficiencies in specifications. See the work of Nancy Leveson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Leveson or http://sunnyday.mit.edu/ ) and John Knight (http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~jck/ ) for both discussions and analysis of safety-critical software approaches and analysis of how some of these approaches have not worked as well as expected (e.g. Leveson's critique of N-version programming.)

Probably, but a good learning experience. I urge you to pick up a copy of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.. They use exactly the same method to explain how Lisp (Scheme) implements list structures.

Next will probably be an application that records audio from the cell phone microphone and tells what you're typing from the sound of the keys. Or even what you're seeing on the screen.

If you want to teach kids programming I recommend Scratch, Alice, or Greenfoot kids want to make games that's why me and all my friends learned basic on our 8 bits was to write games. These environments enable quick game making successes which increases interest.

I would recommend that your son try to pick up Scratch as an introductory programming language. It offers a GUI development environment and adding multi-media features such as animation and sound tracks is like breathing air in that language. He is probably interested in making his own "shot 'em up" type of game anyway, and that is a perfect language to get started with those kind of concepts.... and it teaches object oriented design right from the start as well.

There are also thousands of example programs to download from the main website, most of which are written by middle school/junior high kids as well. There is also a surprisingly large group of professional software developers like myself who are closet Scratch developers and have "pushed" the language to some interesting extremes. The language is also sandboxed in a way that keeps most of the major problem issues with software development away.

The only thing that I find lacking with the language is that it was purposely built to avoid any kind of access to external data storage devices like a hard drive (other than to load and save the programs themselves). I personally think this was a mistake, but it is a part of the philosophy of the language and something that allows it to be used in most public schools where it is being used.

I really wonder what your demography was, and the profession of your father/mother...

For me personally, I cannot envision myself programming at 7.

I've been teaching my 7 year old how to program, and they think it is a really cool thing to do. Yes, it isn't something that easily comes to them, but it is something they are certainly capable of doing.

I don't know if you've seen it or not, but Scratch is a programming language that fairly easy to pick up and extremely powerful. 7 years old is still a little bit young even for this language, but not impossible, and certainly you don't have to be a pure genus to be using this language at that age. I'll admit, however, that even this language is more geared toward middle-school aged kids (10-14 years old) where kids that age seem to have the patience necessary to grok the concepts and be able to make something useful that goes beyond the simple examples.

It doesn't, however, take a college degree to learn at least the basics of computer programming. I started to write my first programs when I was 10, and that was several decades ago.

I'm curious about what kind of "bad habits" can be learned using modern dialects of BASIC today?

Then again, the current incarnation of Visual BASIC and other similar implementations of the language are such an abomination that you can hardly call them BASIC either. Well, I should note it isn't the earlier implementations of Visual BASIC, but rather when some C programmers got ahold of the language and threw out some of the exceptional power that BASIC holds over other languages.

I'll admit that the traditional "Dartmouth BASIC" can result in some unnecessarily complex spaghetti code, but then again it also shows who the sloppy programmers are when they try to do tricks to save a couple bytes of code that ultimately makes code maintenance almost impossible. I've always hated "clever" programmers anyway, and this can be a pitfall in any language. Then again, this version of BASIC was designed to be used on a line printer terminal.

I don't want to admit to how many or how large of a program I've written using that software editing system, but it is more than a few and some fairly large programs.

BTW, I don't consider Python to be today's version of BASIC. Instead, I would consider Scratch to be the true philosophical descendant of BASIC. If you've never tried this programming language out, you are missing out on a very unique experience, and something that is certainly going to influence software design over the next century or more. For my own children, this is the software development environment I've been using to introduce basic software development concepts, and it teaches object-oriented design and event interrupts right from the beginning. Who knew that an introductory language could introduce multi-threaded design so easily? My only major complaint is that it encourages the use of infinite loops not as something to avoid but even implements a specific construct to push its use.

Yes, Python is pretty good, but it isn't an introductory environment.

Here is one reason the OP may want to do this: http://cua.mit.edu/ketterle_group/Projects_2007/Pubs_07/Boyd2007%20PRA.pdf (trapping ultracold atoms using the magnetic field from a hard disk platter).

Sociometric Badges - MIT Media Laboratory - .pdf files
A sociometric badge (commonly known as "sociometer") is a device whose main purpose is to automatically capture individual and collective patterns of behavior. We have built several hundred sociometric badges and used them in real organizations to automatically measure individual and collective patterns of behavior, predict human behavior from unconscious social signals, identify social affinity among individuals working in the same team, and enhance social interactions by providing feedback to the users of our system.
http://hd.media.mit.edu/badges/

Group Media @ MIT
http://groupmedia.media.mit.edu/

Reality Mining (@ MIT) defines the collection of machine-sensed environmental data pertaining to human social behavior. This new paradigm of data mining makes possible the modeling of conversation context, proximity sensing, and temporospatial location throughout large communities of individuals. Mobile phones (and similarly innocuous devices) are used for data collection, opening social network analysis to new methods of empirical stochastic modeling.
  The original Reality Mining experiment is one of the largest mobile phone projects attempted in academia. Our research agenda takes advantage of the increasingly widespread use of mobile phones to provide insight into the dynamics of both individual and group behavior. By leveraging recent advances in machine learning we are building generative models that can be used to predict what a single user will do next, as well as model behavior of large organizations.
  We have captured communication, proximity, location, and activity information from 100 subjects at MIT over the course of the 2004-2005 academic year. This data represents over 350,000 hours (~40 years) of continuous data on human behavior. Such rich data on complex social systems have implications for a variety of fields.
http://reality.media.mit.edu/

Sociometric Badges - MIT Media Laboratory - .pdf files
A sociometric badge (commonly known as "sociometer") is a device whose main purpose is to automatically capture individual and collective patterns of behavior. We have built several hundred sociometric badges and used them in real organizations to automatically measure individual and collective patterns of behavior, predict human behavior from unconscious social signals, identify social affinity among individuals working in the same team, and enhance social interactions by providing feedback to the users of our system.
http://hd.media.mit.edu/badges/

Group Media @ MIT
http://groupmedia.media.mit.edu/

Reality Mining (@ MIT) defines the collection of machine-sensed environmental data pertaining to human social behavior. This new paradigm of data mining makes possible the modeling of conversation context, proximity sensing, and temporospatial location throughout large communities of individuals. Mobile phones (and similarly innocuous devices) are used for data collection, opening social network analysis to new methods of empirical stochastic modeling.
  The original Reality Mining experiment is one of the largest mobile phone projects attempted in academia. Our research agenda takes advantage of the increasingly widespread use of mobile phones to provide insight into the dynamics of both individual and group behavior. By leveraging recent advances in machine learning we are building generative models that can be used to predict what a single user will do next, as well as model behavior of large organizations.
  We have captured communication, proximity, location, and activity information from 100 subjects at MIT over the course of the 2004-2005 academic year. This data represents over 350,000 hours (~40 years) of continuous data on human behavior. Such rich data on complex social systems have implications for a variety of fields.
http://reality.media.mit.edu/

Sociometric Badges - MIT Media Laboratory - .pdf files
A sociometric badge (commonly known as "sociometer") is a device whose main purpose is to automatically capture individual and collective patterns of behavior. We have built several hundred sociometric badges and used them in real organizations to automatically measure individual and collective patterns of behavior, predict human behavior from unconscious social signals, identify social affinity among individuals working in the same team, and enhance social interactions by providing feedback to the users of our system.
http://hd.media.mit.edu/badges/

Group Media @ MIT
http://groupmedia.media.mit.edu/

Reality Mining (@ MIT) defines the collection of machine-sensed environmental data pertaining to human social behavior. This new paradigm of data mining makes possible the modeling of conversation context, proximity sensing, and temporospatial location throughout large communities of individuals. Mobile phones (and similarly innocuous devices) are used for data collection, opening social network analysis to new methods of empirical stochastic modeling.
  The original Reality Mining experiment is one of the largest mobile phone projects attempted in academia. Our research agenda takes advantage of the increasingly widespread use of mobile phones to provide insight into the dynamics of both individual and group behavior. By leveraging recent advances in machine learning we are building generative models that can be used to predict what a single user will do next, as well as model behavior of large organizations.
  We have captured communication, proximity, location, and activity information from 100 subjects at MIT over the course of the 2004-2005 academic year. This data represents over 350,000 hours (~40 years) of continuous data on human behavior. Such rich data on complex social systems have implications for a variety of fields.
http://reality.media.mit.edu/

So this is the anatomical theatre of sorts:

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Computer-Science/6-661Spring2003/CourseHome/index.htm

Goo

Easy one. Just start wearing a tin foil hat. I'm sure some kind soul here would be more than willing to help you out!

Someone actually performed a study on this and discovered that a tin foil hat would only amplify electromagnetic waves! I kid you not.

Going out on a limb here, but is this the study you were talking about?