Slashdot Mirror

• Scratch: http://scratch.mit.edu/
• Alice: http://alice.org/
• Storytelling Alice: http://alice.org/kelleher/storytelling/index.html

That's a *much* better way to start them off. It's equivalent to BASIC on an Apple II really, but even more fun.
Then you can start them off on something like a Facebook App, and then web pages with Perl/Javascript/HTML.

Try Scratch.

http://scratch.mit.edu/ is a good place to start, I would think. Let him do some of that and then when you start to hear, "I wish I could do X", point him toward something more complex. I've seen Python and Ruby both suggested as that next step, and I'd add Perl to the list.

MIT's Scratch http://scratch.mit.edu/ is a remarkable environment that will allow for young programmers (as young as 6 and 7 ) to become familliar with subroutines, variables, conditionals, message passing, etc. in an environment that makes it easy to express things visually. For a 12 year old, it might be worth a month of exploration in that environment, then on to a conventional language.

Hey! Thanks for that!!!!!

I'd heard variations on it several times but assumed it was just folklore or [un]conventional wisdom. Your post prompted me to search and find the article you mentioned: here's the abstract: Nobody Ever Gets Credit for Fixing Problems that Never Happened: Creating and Sustaining Process Improvement and here's a link to the full pdf document.

Hey! Thanks for that!!!!!

I'd heard variations on it several times but assumed it was just folklore or [un]conventional wisdom. Your post prompted me to search and find the article you mentioned: here's the abstract: Nobody Ever Gets Credit for Fixing Problems that Never Happened: Creating and Sustaining Process Improvement and here's a link to the full pdf document.

Definitely a move in the right direction to address the now prophetic "untold consequences" foreseen by Judge Archer and Judge Nies in their dissenting opinion in In Re Alappat, No. 92-1381 (Fed. Cir. July 29, 1994).

Unfortunately, as with the majority decision in the 1994 Tektronix appeals case, the tests provided to determine patent-ability of software algorithms continues to leave the door wide open to incessant lawyering not for the purpose of upholding the constitution and promoting "the Progress of Science and useful Arts".

No, instead we will continue to waste investment resources to stifle competition in the name of profit margins and monopolies.

Most people likely will not read the dissenting opinion so I'll quote the conclusion from the dissenting opinion here with emphasis added so others can see the prophecy for themselves:

The majority's holding is dangerous in the following way. First, it reasons that one can obtain a patent for a discovery in mathematics as long as some structure is formally recited on the face of the claim. Under this aspect of the holding, many of the requirements for patentability other than "newness," such as nonobviousness, make no sense and cannot be meaningfully applied. Thus, mathematical patents will be easier to obtain than other patents. Moreover, the patent law will now engage in the charade wherein claims directed to a particular method of calculating numbers (for use in a computer) are unpatentable, but claims directed to a computer (performing a particular method of calculating numbers) are patentable. (Mercifully, the majority leaves open the possibility that a claim reciting structure on its face can still be rejected under 101. The majority says that this will happen where the claim reciting structure on its face is merely a "guise" for a claim to a mathematical process. Although the majority finds that Alappat's claim to a rasterizer is clearly not a "guise" for a discovery of a mathematical process, the majority does not describe in detail how one distinguishes in general a "true" apparatus claim from an apparatus claim in "guise." Presumably, the way this is done is to determine what is the invention or discovery for which the patent applicant seeks an award of patent, and then to determine whether that discovery is the kind the statute was enacted to protect, as this dissenting opinion does.)

Second, the majority accepts the argument that all digital electronic circuitry is statutory subject matter when it performs a mathematical operation, and it is all equivalent when the particular mathematical operation is the same. Under this aspect, the mathematical patents will create an enormous scope of technological exclusivity. The lack of meaningful examination and the breadth of exclusive rights conferred by patents for discoveries of bare mathematical operations are repugnant to Congress's careful statutory scheme for the promotion of the useful arts.

As the player piano playing new music is not the stuff of patent law, neither is the mathematics that is Alappat's "rasterizer." And the Supreme Court has in its decisions required it so. Alappat's claimed discovery is outside 35 U.S.C. 101, and for this reason I would affirm the board's rejection. I dissent from the majority's decision on the merits to the contrary.

Not according to the FDA or the ACSH or MIT, among others. On the other hand, überquack Mercola and the holistic nutters agree. Basically, the aspartame thing is just like the vaccine thing: scientists with evidence versus quacks who try to dress their bias up as information. Sure, aspartame tastes like dog shit, but (unless you have a certain rare genetic disorder), it isn't dangerous.

Here is a better review.

I recall a study done several years ago by MIT students regarding tin foil hats. Apparently certain folds will actually amplify certain frequencies!
http://people.csail.mit.edu/rahimi/helmet/

A copy of the 2006 Lancet study of excess deaths in Iraq during the war. http://web.mit.edu/CIS/pdf/Human_Cost_of_War.pdf

No, it's even worse. Tinfoil hats block most radio signals, but they amplify signals on certain bands reserved for government use.

http://balloon.media.mit.edu/timothylord/

timothy

I wonder if it will spread through /.... ;) http://balloon.media.mit.edu/tkhamilton

I really like this triangular based scheme they've got going there. Everyone knows triangles are the sturdiest shape, so this is a good basis for the transfer of money. These techies should let some investment types in on their cool ideas.

Also, let's say I sign up directly from MIT and find one balloon, I get $2,000. Awesome, go me. MIT is out $2,000 for that balloon. If my friend Fred had referred me, I get my $2,000 and Fred gets $1,000. Now MIT is out $3,000 for that same balloon. One can see from this geometric progression that no matter how many referrals a balloon goes through MIT maxes out their payout at no more than $4,000 per balloon or $40,000 total. As long as they only pay out money if they get all 10, they can't lose money on this. But what's to stop me as an individual from noticing that I could just refer myself 10 times or so in series and then get a payout close to $4,000 instead of the $2,000..

http://balloon.media.mit.edu/evilwombat/ ;-)

Went and looked up what you're talking about, and found this: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/fuel-supply.html It seems that it isn't that there's not enough Uranium (easily mined or otherwise), but that we haven't been mining it, nor have we been effective in enriching what we have. Effectively, this is a supply/demand issue. We haven't built up our supply, so now that demand is increasing, we're setting ourselves up for trouble. But I don't think we're going to run out.

Seriously? I wasn't around in the 1940-50's, but this always seems like historical revisionism to me. How has the standard of living dropped in relative terms if "In 1950 some 35 percent of dwellings lacked full indoor plumbing"? Not to mention all the junk I can purchase for Black Friday coming up.

Or what about McCarthyism in Washington? I'll agree we seem to lack an Edward R. Murrow reporter, but I think current politics are still better than the panic & blacklists that existed then.

But, like I said, I wasn't around & IANAH, so I'd be interested to hear how I'm wrong.

Your analysis makes a number of faulty assumptions:

You assume that money spent on mitigation will be lost. However, if that money is invested in renewable energy technologies, it will pay dividends in the form of energy sources that are not affected by scarcity of fossil fuels -- this gives countries that pursue the R response a huge advantage during peak oil.

You assume that money not spent on mitigation will be well-invested and pay dividends via compound interest. Recent economic events call this assumption into question, to put it mildly.

You assume that the dividends obtained by investing the saved money will be sufficient to pay the cost of adaptation. However, most credible economic estimates put the cost of adapatation so far above the cost of mitigation that it would take unrealistically good investment to return enough to cover the cost. An ounce of prevention...

You assume that the H response by AGW will be relatively mild in any case. There are growing indications that there is significant risk that this response will be severe -- that is, beyond the reasonable possibility of adaptation. See for example the latest modeling from MIT.

Generally speaking, you are failing to account for interaction with other factors, such as resource scarcity, political instability, economic instability, slow physical feedbacks, population pressure, and many other factors that influence the outcome significantly. Nothing happens in a vacuum.

Greg Craven has a detailed analysis of global warming from a risk management perspective, I think you would find it interesting.

McIntyre's paper (23 pages)

It comes down to that the thought that Mann in 1998 got his math wrong when performing principle component analysis over the data, particularly while using Bristlecone Pine cores. (Which I have to say is an amazing organism. They live at least 5,000 years. Wow. Just wow.) The 2008 Mann paper does two different analyses, one with tree cores, and without. The hockey stick remains in both.

Mann should have given McIntyre the data, which he started to do, but then stopped for some reason. Why, I don't know. I suspect there was some personality clash, but that's just speculation on my part. Just release the data. Who cares? If someone wants to examine the samples directly, then let them if they real credentials (i.e. a PhD in climatetology or some other related field). It's just impractical to give access to every Joe down at the bar, samples can be damaged. It's a scientific resource worth millions, not an exhibit at a hands-on museum.

The conclusions of all the investigations was that Mann didn't do PCA right, like how McIntyre said, but McIntyre didn't do it right either.

Perhaps the most interesting for you would be this link than contains links to the Mann's data, and statistics source code to analyze the data correctly. You just have to download R.

The legal basis for the right to privacy was first/best explained in a Harvard Law Review paper by a pair of gentlemen who both later became US Supreme Court justices http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/privacy/Privacy_brand_warr2.html

I think they know a bit more about the law and what rights it protects than this "McNealy" guy.

It's good to see a poster who worked on the Therac-25 - we don't get many of those here anymore.

This is a great idea. The only thing I would add to it would be to open up the creation / modification of these plans a bit more. Like putting these lesson plans on some sort of wiki or something. Available lesson plans with optional elements for differing abilities (e.g. remedial history versus normal history versus AP history) would be a great compliment to something like OpenCourseWare. (Granted OCW is college material, but basic idea remains the same.)

Of the above-mentioned forms, the perversions are as follows: of royalty, tyranny; of aristocracy, oligarchy; of constitutional government, democracy. For tyranny is a kind of monarchy which has in view the interest of the monarch only; oligarchy has in view the interest of the wealthy; democracy, of the needy: none of them the common good of all.

There's definitely something to be said for his insight, though, as we see the "needy" today vote in those politicians who will promise them the most free stuff.

Yeah but with this website: http://people.csail.mit.edu/jrb/goo/

Do they deserve to even keep the name? :)

Greed isn't deviant. In fact, it's rather common, and to some degree, universal. What we call "greed" is just the manifestation of game theory. Every organism acts in its own interest, or more precisely, in the interest of its genes. ...

Then, by your definition, murder isn't deviant behavior. Civilization works because people recognize there are other people than themselves, and wish to assist society as a whole. While they recognize they have self interest, they avoid putting a burden on others or society as a whole. In extreme circumstances, one has to make difficult choices, but sometimes choosing yourself over society (when reasonable) is okay. However, always choosing yourself even when you will gain just a little benefit and many people will be screwed is not okay.

You are describing honorless psychopaths who are parasites which drag down society and are not civilized. The methods you describe exist to control psychopaths. Since in my country (USA) there are so many people who think selfishly as you, my country is going down the toilet.

People buying mansions they can't afford, banks lending knowing they can't afford it and giving them adjustable rates, so they can jack up the interest. Endless bailouts, Patent and copyright fraud, all sorts of crap which is resulting in the bailout baby boomer generation's children and grandchildren to live in conditions worse than their parent's. Anyone wonder why the disability rate is rising in the US? Boomers will say the reason is the later generations are lazy and faking it. The real reason is their selfish behavior has put dangerous substances into the food supply, they are working us to death (look at productivity--note much of the money non-baby boomers have earned has "mysteriously" disappeared during the bailout fiasco), and they essentially took away our medical care, so even minor medical problems grow into big ones.

Thanks for making a great country into a shitty one.

Considering most of the major telecos went along with wholesale spying on the American public

Only the calls with one of the ends outside America were ever "spied" on. Whether that's legal or not, it is hardly a "wholesale" spying on a public, the majority of whom have never been abroad nor personally know a foreigner. For domestic calls, the only things captured were the fact of the calls — not the conversation itself.

This, I believe, was always legal — the government never needed a warrant to look at your envelops at the Post Office, for example — as long as they weren't opening them. On the other hand, foreign mail was always subject to check by the government, and expanding that power of the Executive to phone calls is not entirely illogical...

Keep your exaggerations in line, in other words... Even if it were illegal, calling it "wholesale" is a flamebait...

If I understand your post correctly, I think that what you suggest is actually what economics already does. Most of our models don't give a sharp prediction of what will happen and when it will happen. Rather, for a given point in time, they give a probability distribution over outcomes. Or instead of fixing a point in time, you could fix an outcome and get a probability distribution over when that event will occur.

As for your observation that the mere act of looking at a market changes behavior -- you might like this book: An Engine, Not a Camera by Donald MacKenzie.

"require"?

Medical - http://www.sri.com/esd/med_devel/robotic-systems.html. Since 2000 the FDA has cleared a system for telepresence surgery "for thoracoscopic (chest) surgery, for cardiac procedures performed with adjunctive incisions, and urologic and gynecologic procedures."

Education - this being slashdot, let's skip over U.C. and the many, similar others who offer long-distance learning options at the undergraduate level and go hard-core. http://sdm.mit.edu/distance.html. The SDM distance-learning option is a 24-month program—MIT’s first graduate-degree program offered primarily at a distance.

...ever since I played SimCity 2000... But I don't want the beam pointing toward my head when I am not wearing my tinfoil hat!

Physics FAIL (unless your goal is to make your brains extra-crispy)

Compressed air storage is only about 50% efficient. It's very hard to find a good use for the heat generated when you compress a gas. Even worse, natural gas is used to offset the cooling that occurs as the air expands when the power is drawn out, so there is still some reliance on fossil fuels. Nonetheless, it's still one of the best options where pumped storage is not practical.

There is good hope that better storage methods will be found. The US government just announced funding for liquid metal batteries, where a major potential application is grid storage

It might help to read the actual paper instead of some hand-waving article.

You haven't been in his class, so you don't know.

I've also found that if students are given a copy of the slides beforehand they don't listen as well, skip ahead, etc. Whereas if things are written on the board, people are forced to concentrate and write, draw, think, ask questions, engage and have a better chance of understanding in fine. Also the material can be presented in multiple ways, whereas a single figure on a slide can be confusing.

Go have a look at the MIT Gilbert Strang applied math lectures on the web. This guy is well over 65, he should be a relic, but he teaches enthusiastically on the blackboard like a young man and it works. It even works on video !

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_center
Sort of like NSA meets army meets FBI meets NYPD meets you and your lawyer.
Under section 802 its "any action that endangers human life that is a violation of any Federal or State law" and the full force of the the US gov starts to warm up around you and your lawyer ;)

Whoosh. Fusion Center:
http://www.psfc.mit.edu/research/alcator/intro/info.html

Still wondering why ? A 6th grader with a good pair of eyes can understand and control a paper vote. The more people you gather to keep watch, the better, no training necessary. It would take you, with all your intelligence and experience, weeks of efforts to verify an e-system implementation, and you'd be one of a handful able to do so. And all it would take to rig the system would be to outsmart your small lot of scientists. Just *imagine* for a second the source code is mathematically correct and you verified it. How about the compiler ? Do you know if the system really runs on the bare metal or is it trapped in a VM ? Are you per chance a computer scientist as well as a cryptologist ? How many scientists would it take to screw that light bulb in the end ? How long would it take ?

Thanks, but I am neither a computer scientist, nor am I still wondering why. I figured out what you said a long time ago. Some computer scientists have also figured it out. That's why a lot of voting research these days is in the area of non-cryptographic voting schemes that still provide secret ballot end-to-end security. No such scheme is known today, but significant progress has been made, for example ThreeBallot by Ron Rivest.

I, and many researchers, are well aware that no solution to the voting problem can ever involve a system, or a compiler, or source code, or any sort of bare metal hardware. The solution has to be non-cryptographic. Unfortunately, the politicians and legislators have not realized this yet (or they have, and are committing intentional sabotage), and most importantly, the general public has not realized this yet. The general public still thinks that voting machines are the way to go.

I think you might enjoy reading about Ron Rivest's three ballot voting system (pdf).

I also discussed this idea in the context of novel models of computation in my MIT Ph.D. thesis, Games, Puzzles, and Computation (section 8.2; also published as a book by A.K. Peters).

OK, ok, you win. Blah blah MIT PhD thesis. Smart arse.

by John Gribbin, (Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, 105(2):120?125, Feb 1985). In that story a powerful particle accelerator seemingly fails to operate, for no good reason. Then a physicist realizes that if it were to work, it would effectively destroy the entire universe, by initiating a transition from a cosmological false vacuum state to a lower-energy vacuum state. In this story, the explanation of the failures assumes a many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. So instead of explicit backward causality, there is effective backward causality: only the branches of reality with equipment failures contain observers; therefore, observers can only experience histories with equipment failures. The effect is the same.

I also discussed this idea in the context of novel models of computation in my MIT Ph.D. thesis, Games, Puzzles, and Computation (section 8.2; also published as a book by A.K. Peters). The idea was a bit similar to Nielsen and Ninomiya's proposed experiment. It turns out that by connecting an accelerator capable of destroying the universe to a computation depending on random numbers, one could in principle solve problems that are otherwise intractable. I termed this "doomsday computation", as a variation on the similar concept of "anthropic computation" proposed earlier by Scott Aaronson.

Furthermore you need plenty of training data partitioned into training and test sets so you can evaluate the generalisation error. If you don't do that you can have absolutely no confidence about the performance of your system.

Maybe you will find this interesting: http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/papers/volume9/shafer08a/shafer08a.pdf

In other words, your computer and thousands of others would devote some bandwidth and storage to backing up chunks of each other's data, sharing where appropriate, making available to the wolrd+dog where appropriate. Files that you want backed up would be broken up into redundant little pieces, and distributed among your peers, and in return, you'd do the same for others.

Sounds a bit like DIBS, the Distributed Internet Backup System. Or at least like my wishful-thinking fantasies about DIBS, since I haven't gotten around to actually trying it yet.

Truth? Wikipedia might actually have a good idea. Truth is whatever the majority believes at the moment, and the majority can always edit the story to make it fit the latest fad.

Thrasymachus, is that you?

That's an awfully short summary of a pretty big field of philosophy, right there. Sure, there's a spin on it and we will always see what we want to see, but 100 years later, when people have had time to dissect leaked documents with the benefit of hindsight, things will surface. The majority may believe something at the moment, but it's not the truth.

"Honestly. She's not that good."

I know, I just found her photo:
http://clarebayley.com/?page_id=15
http://graphics.fansonly.com/photos/schools/mit/sports/w-crewop/auto_headshot/683289.jpeg
http://www.eecs.mit.edu/spotlights/images/google-android-enlarged_Coveney.jpg (not the little Asian girl unfortunately)

I can see why she sticks to pen and paper instead of video blogs. Even for /. or MIT that has to be bad.

This article cannot be left to stand with out a link to one of the most entertaining essays I've ever read. Now, unfortunately, it's not an MIT essay (instead, it's for NYU), but it's at least hosted at MIT, and therefore I feel that it is contextually meaningful.

If the scores are all the same, then it really doesn't matter who gets in. An essay is a shitty way to select engineering students and doesn't gauge anything other than their ability to make up 500 words of bullshit.

If there's any reason why these kinds of things tend to be bullshit, it has nothing to do with the fact that these are engineering students, or that engineers can't or shouldn't learn to use language as a tool (or, for that matter, that they shouldn't learn to bullshit).

The problem comes in the intersection of the purpose of the essay and the formation of the questions. It's an admissions essay, which means that whatever you're asked to say or whatever you're ostensibly saying, the purpose is to say whatever impresses admissions officers and get admitted to the college. Everybody knows this, and it reduces the ability of most people to speak authentically (and increases their tendency to bullshit). Particularly with essays that ask people to talk about themselves, because no matter how many distinct things there are about individual people, even smart people, there's an awful lot of sameness running through the human condition. Meanwhile, admissions officers are looking for distinction. Talk about cross-purposes.

Clare Bayley's suggestion "change the prompts, not the length" is some clear thinking. Prompt the applicant away from a self-focus and you untangle the better part of the tension I describe above, while still allowing applicants to reveal expressiveness and distinctive thinking.

http://elbitz.net/home.php is good, but they only open up registering every now and then (I remember I waited like 2 months to get my user). In general, though I just use the same popular torrent sites for everything else I get for books, too and I've gotten 6.28GB that way. Also, appear to have just found a .pdf with a huge list of ebook sites (and one for how to swear in all languages!). Haven't tried any of them, but go for it:
O'Reilly online http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/ | http://sysadmin.oreilly.com/ Computer books and manuals http://www.hoganbooks.com/freebook/webbooks.html | http://www.informit.com/itlibrary/ | http://www.fore.com/support/manuals/home/home.htm | http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/webbuy/freebooks.html The Network Book http://www.cs.columbia.edu/netbook/ Some #bookwarez.efnet.irc links http://www.extrema.net/books/links.shtml Some #bookwarez.efnet.irc fiction http://194.58.154.90:4431/enscifi/ Pimpas online books (Indonesia) http://202.159.16.55/~pimpa2000 | http://202.159.15.46/~om-pimpa/buku Security, privacy and cryptography http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~rivest/crypto-security.html | http://www.oberlin.edu/~brchkind/cyphernomicon/ My own misc online reading material http://www.eastcoastfx.com/docs/admin-guides/ | http://www.eastcoastfx.com/~jorn/reading/ Computer books http://solaris.inorg.chem.msu.ru/cs-books/ | http://sweetrude.net/~cab/books/ | http://alaska.mine.nu/books/ | http://poprocks.dyn.ns.ca/dave/books/ | http://58-160.skarland.uaf.edu/books/ | http://202.186.247.194/~ebook/ | http://hooligans.org/reference/ Linux documentation http://www.linuxdoc.org/docs.html FreeBSD documentation http://www.freebsd.org/tutorials/ Sun documentation http://osiris.imw.tu-clausthal.de:8888/ | http://uran.vvsu.ru:8888/ SGI documentation http://newton.unicc.chalmers.se/ebt-bin/nph-dweb/dynaweb;td=2 | http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi-bin/init.cgi IBM Online Redbooks http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/ Digital Unix documentation http://www.unix.digital.com/faqs/publications/base_doc/DOCUMENTATION/V40D_HTML/V40D_HTML/LIBRARY.HTM Filesystem Hierarchy Standard http://www.pathname.com/fhs/2.0/fhs-toc.html | http://www.linuxbase.com/ UNIX stuff http://ww

Well, MIT's got a 3-year head start.

Rensselaer has been making them as light as paper for a couple years now.

Or even just use other existing technology to boost efficiency in their LiON battery idea.

But who knows, maybe they're content with reinventing the wheel without building on existing tech.

You might want to read this article on the effectiveness of foil helmets. ;)

MIT is working on a Mechanical Counterpressure Spacesuit, its called the Biosuit. The materials its made out of are not as advanced as they need to be, but some of the mechanical structures, and the concepts used to design the suits are ready.

http://mvl.mit.edu/EVA/biosuit/index.html

Basically by being a skin tight suit the wearer is better equipped to handle long hours in a space suit, right now something like 80% of an astronaut's exertions are fighting the suit, with 20% left for actually working on the Space Station or Hubble or something.

In 'the future' we're going to spend a lot more time outside doing things, on orbit, on the moon, on mars and it'd be a lot better off if we didn't have to fight the suit to do the work.

Those already exist:

http://ocw.mit.edu/
http://www.youtube.com/ucberkeley
http://www.google.com/search?q=tensor+calculus (or any other subject)

They could be organized a bit better though. Personally I wonder whether it would help if researchers were to edit wikipedia in their areas of expertise (citing their own published research). It could act as a hypertext, open access journal. It's ridiculous that at the moment, government funded research is locked away by journal publishes and can only be accessed by those who are either affiliated with universities, or willing to pay exorbitant fees.

...they can write them, why not grade them?