Slashdot Mirror

Eigenbehaviors allow us to identify the structure inherent in daily human behavior with models that can accurately cluster, analyze and predict multimodal data from individuals and groups. We show that it is possible to accurately model many people's lives with just a few parameters - thus allowing accurate prediction of their future behavior from limited observations of their current behavior - as well as to create a similarity metric between individuals and groups that allows accurate identification of group affiliation and behavioral 'style'.

Distributed Internet Backup System (DIBS) is a free, cross-platform python-based solution.

http://web.mit.edu/~emin/www/source_code/dibs/index.html

This computer game (gPlanarity) is a good for training oneself to speedcabling.

Better yet...(lecture notes, previous exams, labs, etc., etc.! :-))
All publicly available, free, online, around the world...

http://ocw.mit.edu/

Harvard is soooooooooo far behind the times...

Someone at MIT got bored and supposedly proved that tinfoil hats actually
amplify the effectiveness of radio waves in the UHF range, those frequencies most often used by government agencies in the US.

A must read in the domain is the pioneering work of J. Weizenbaum:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Weizenbaum

See also:
http://www-tech.mit.edu/V105/N16/weisen.16n.html

Excerpt:

Why is there so much poverty in our world, in the United States, especially in the large cities?
Why is it that classes are so large? Why is it that fully half the science and math teachers in the United States are underqualified and are operating on emergency certificates?
[...]
It is much nicer, it is much more comfortable, to have some device, say the computer, with which to flood the schools, and then to sit back and say, "You see, we are doing something about it, we are helping," than to confront ugly social realities.
[...]
It is also safe to say, it is simply a matter of fact, that to date weapons which threaten to wipe out the human species altogether could not be made and could certainly not be delivered with any sort of precision were it not for the computers which guide these weapons.
[...]
Instead of saying the computer is involved with the military, say the computer is involved with killing people. It is only when you come to that vocabulary, I think, that the euphemism begins to disappear


And especially:

People have a series of rationalizations.
People say for example that science and technology have their own logic, that they are in fact autonomous.

This particular rationalization is profoundly false. It is not true that science marches on in defiance of human will, independent of human will, that just is not the case.

But it is comfortable, as I said: it leads to the position that "if I don't do it, someone else will."

Of course if one takes that as an ethical principle then obviously it can serve as a license to do anything at all. "People will be murdered; if I don't do it, someone else will." "Women will be raped; if I don't do it, someone else will." That is just a license for violence.

For those with gateways that see this as proxy avoidance... here's a direct link instead:

http://csg.csail.mit.edu/oshd/index.html

I nanotube batteries ever take off, there probably won't be
a need for recycling or fancy recharging stations.

That's some kind of contradiction along the lines of "military intelligence." I kid.

Slightly off topic:
Vista desktop + openldap win32 binaries + apache and bind = GNU Windows Server?

openldap on win32: http://www.openldap.org/lists/openldap-software/200705/msg00152.html
apache2: http://httpd.apache.org/download.cgi
kerberos5: http://web.mit.edu/Kerberos/kfw-3.2/kfw-3.2.2.html

Granted, the average win32 admin will hit a wall because Microsoft does not design their product, documents and services for an admin smart enough to DIY.

Openldap/kerberos5/apache2 opens many, many more security/identity/authentication possibilities than Microsoft's active directory.

Be wary of those tinfoil hats...... http://people.csail.mit.edu/rahimi/helmet/

Layne

No, it doesn't. I looked it up once before in an argument with an electric universe guy and I'm too lazy to do it again, but you can find the velocity of the solar wind as measured by SOHO and also by Voyager with a quick Google. I found an average value for Earth's neighborhood as well. Guess what? Fastest at SOHO, slower at Earth, slowest as measured by the Voyagers. That is, the solar wind slows down as it "passes the planets." The solar wind DOES accelerate within a few radii of the sun's surface but it certainly does not accelerate farther out.

You're comparing apples with oranges. Measurements in the immediate neiborhood of any planet will show a very different behavior than at the same distance from the Sun with no planet in the way. Admittedly, the statement you have responded to should have been phrased less ambiguously, in terms of orbital distance.

While it is true that the solar wind does not accelerate, it doesn't slow down either, until very very far out, probably due to the proximity of the heliopause. That slowdown is qualitatively consistent both with the hypothesis of a slowdown due to ionization of interstellar neutrals with the subsequent ion pickup, and with the Plasma Universe hypothesis of the heliopause having the structure of an electrostatic double layer. Note that neither camp has been ready to give a quantitative prediction--we don't even know where the heliopause begins.

The relative constancy of the solar wind in between is consistent with the Plasma Universe hypothesis of the area between the solar corona and the heliopause representing a positive column of a plasma discharge. Since most of the voltage differential occurs inside the double layers--one at the solar photosphere and another at the heliopause--the electric field inside the positive column is very weak. It likely keeps the solar wind from decelerating (the poster you have responded to has been rash to claim absolute acceleration).

For more rigorous comparative data on the solar wind velocity, see:

H.R. Collard, et. al. Radial variation of the solar wind speed between 1 and 15 AU. J. Geophys. Res. 87:A4 (1982)

J. D. Richardson. Solar wind processes. Physics of Space Plasma (1995)

Notably, there is a 1.3 year periodicity to the solar wind averages. The velocity distribution at 1 AU is still very volatile, with the standard deviation of approximately 100 km/s, whereas the standard deviation decreases to 25 km/s at 15 AU. This means that the solar wind becomes closer to constant further on. At 40 AU, decrease of merely 30 km/s has been observed.

Leo

This is old.... OLD news. It is a simple mob effect. See Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams

The nature behind it is rather simple. Imagine you have a mob of angry rioters walking down the street. No one really has a plan, but the mob moves together. More or less, no one individually generally wants to break off by themselves and smash in a window and take a TV from the appliance store. It is perceived as a risk of sorts. Eventually though, someone will want to do something enough that their want levels start matching or exceeding their perceived risk of breaking off of the mob. The person who begins to break off will be at an equilibrium of sorts... if the mob keeps going and are going to leave this person behind, either their want levels have to have a bit of increase, or they join back into the mob, because they don't want to be singled out. The other scenario is parts of the mob will notice said person breaking off and their perception of risk goes down, where more of the mob will follow... then the more that follow, the more that end up following.

Maybe, but his economic success in business certainly didn't translate to success in running Massachusetts - his tenure here consisted of making Massachusetts the butt of his jokes, and doing everything he could to break unions in preparing for his presidential run. The Boston area is doing okay, because, well it's the Boston area, but the rest of the state is trying to dig ourselves out of the hole he dug for us.

Yes I do, because the other purposed use, is empirically inutil.
go to : http://people.csail.mit.edu/rahimi/helmet

For anyone who wonders why a lot of military software projects (but not all) turn to crap, as the parent posters allude to, read War Upon The Map.

IMHO, This is the most insightful paper into the deep interworkings of DoD politics and how it influences software design. I've experienced this myself and what the parent posters say does not surprise me in the least.

He could probably sue them for making false statements about the law.

In an Oct. 4 statement, Dean for Student Life Larry G. Benedict and Jerrold M. Grochow '68, vice president for Information Services & Technology, said, "Unauthorized downloading and sharing of copyrighted files is illegal

Downloading is not illegal. Sharing (or publishing) a copyrighted work without authorisation is illegal.

MIT repeats this falsehood on their copyright website: http://web.mit.edu/ist/topics/security/copyright/

The website they link to (presumably a **AA front) also tries to muddy the waters. But in the legal details it mentions nothing about downloading being illegal: http://www.campusdownloading.com/download.htm So: using a protocol that downloads and uploads at the same time (eg. BitTorrent) to obtain copyrighted works would be illegal. Receiving an email containing such works would not.

http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/3f716ffebe

For other people who can't wait out the writers strike, Go through these. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/view/
Interspersed with heavy doses of these
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm

The point though is that programming as a concept is completely alien to somebody who hasn't done it before, so the fact that some bits about a very simple Java program can't be explained without knowledge that students don't yet have is not something peculiar to Java, but is inherent in the nature of programming itself.

Then they should, because the first thing any student needs to learn is what a program is, i.e. something that processes input, and outputs the result.

While one does not have to be a "hardcore math geek" to do programming, one should have a solid grasp of formal logic. A programmer who does not understand logic is worse than no programmer at all, because they will waste the time of whomever ends up cleaning up their buggy mess - it would have taken less effort to do it right in the first place.
However, logic is the bare minimum. For example, getting the most out of relational databases will require an understanding of set theory and relational algebra.

Second, the reason we start at the beginning (or maybe somewhere in the middle and eventually visit the beginning) is to know what has been done before and *why* is was done so and why it is or isn't a good idea in the current environment. This is why a decent CS curriculum will have a course or two on the basics of hardware - everyone except maybe some of the algorithm people will at least occasionally be working within the constraints of real hardware.

P.S. While C++ might not be particularly usefull to you, an assembly language would certainly provide insight into how those languages you do use ultimately work. The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs might also be a worthwhile read.

OpenAFS for Windows 1.5.30 (1.5.3001.0) using MIT Kerberos for Windows 3.2.2 for authentication.

Apparently you haven't read the study on tinfoil hats.....

http://people.csail.mit.edu/rahimi/helmet/

Tinfoil hats actually amplify frequencies controlled by the government (very likely the ones the government would choose to use for mind control). The tinfoil hat is a lie.

Unless, of course, this study was produced with government funding and is an attempt to dissuade people from wearing their hats........the conspiracy lives on.

Layne

Don't forget to teach them Logo.

I remember hearing about this information many many years ago, when they had managed to get the monkey to control a robot arm. It seems they are moving up in the world, or, as the poster above states, they are merely programming a robot to walk and a monkey to think "walk." Regardless, the six-year-old article, http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2000/monkeys-1206.html/ gives some context to what they have been doing.

http://www.mit.edu/~jtidwell/language/sovereign_posture.html from a collection of HCI design patterns at http://www.mit.edu/~jtidwell/interaction_patterns.html; I think J. Tidwell has since moved on to http://designinginterfaces.com/Introduction however, and in restructuring her thinking items like 'Sovereign Posture' seemed to lose their place. The new site seems to be more about layout than 'modes' or 'purposes' of use.

'Sovereign Posture' refers to the situation where an interface may be complex, and is designed for the 'expert user', but that's okay -- anyone using it already intends to become an expert and is willing to take the time needed to do so, so long as they know the reward will be a faster/more-expressive work environment. The idea is that sometimes it's not worth it to create a 'dummy' version of your software. It makes some sense for 'winzip', but not for 'word'.

http://www.mit.edu/~jtidwell/language/sovereign_posture.html from a collection of HCI design patterns at http://www.mit.edu/~jtidwell/interaction_patterns.html; I think J. Tidwell has since moved on to http://designinginterfaces.com/Introduction however, and in restructuring her thinking items like 'Sovereign Posture' seemed to lose their place. The new site seems to be more about layout than 'modes' or 'purposes' of use.

'Sovereign Posture' refers to the situation where an interface may be complex, and is designed for the 'expert user', but that's okay -- anyone using it already intends to become an expert and is willing to take the time needed to do so, so long as they know the reward will be a faster/more-expressive work environment. The idea is that sometimes it's not worth it to create a 'dummy' version of your software. It makes some sense for 'winzip', but not for 'word'.

I have it on suspicious authority that the mechanism may be inherited from a Multics mechanism with a different epoch date, but I cannot find proof.

You can look at the documentation for the Multics equivalent of ctime, date_time_ () at http://web.mit.edu/multics-history/source/Multics/doc/info_segments/date_time_.info. You get the basic timestamp with block_ () http://web.mit.edu/multics-history/source/Multics/doc/info_segments/clock_.info. I have a feeling that times were stored in the filesystem as 54 bit quantities (a word and a half), giving the same range but only quarter-second resolution, to save space, but I can't quickly find the documentation for that and I can't put my hand to any source code that would show it in use.

I have it on suspicious authority that the mechanism may be inherited from a Multics mechanism with a different epoch date, but I cannot find proof.

You can look at the documentation for the Multics equivalent of ctime, date_time_ () at http://web.mit.edu/multics-history/source/Multics/doc/info_segments/date_time_.info. You get the basic timestamp with block_ () http://web.mit.edu/multics-history/source/Multics/doc/info_segments/clock_.info. I have a feeling that times were stored in the filesystem as 54 bit quantities (a word and a half), giving the same range but only quarter-second resolution, to save space, but I can't quickly find the documentation for that and I can't put my hand to any source code that would show it in use.

And here's just the tool for the job. :)

Someone should modify SCIgen to generate random legalese :)

Was that website's content randomly generated? It makes about as much sense as something generated by MIT's random paper generator.

Too true. The guy responsible had nothing on the stuff college folks do.

Just a short time ago, Slashdot ran an article that talked about Gary Taubes latest book Good Calories Bad Calories: Challenging the Convention Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease. How many Slashdot'ers actually examined what this article was all about? It appears that many posters have not given this topic the consideration it needs.

In short, Taubes argues very thoroughly and persuasively that there is much known about the cause of fat accumulation, and it goes very much against what the medical establishment claims. Anyone who has not closely looked at this matter is very likely in the dark about what is going on in our bodies, regardless of what they've heard or believe. Carbohydrates, specifically refined carbohydrates like white flour and sugar are the main culprits. Obesity is a disease that occurs because of poor nutrition, not because of poor willpower, gluttony, and sloth.

Here are the relevant links:

New York Times Magazine article from 2002: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F04E2D61F3EF934A35754C0A9649C8B63
MIT interview about the above article: http://web.mit.edu/knight-science/fellows/interviews/taubes.html
Taubes' recent article about the role of exercise: http://nymag.com/news/sports/38001/


Happy reading! And good luck staying healthy!

This paper from MIT describes how to create 3D trees from a series of photographs mostly automatically. It builds what it can from the photographs, and interpolates the rest using L systems.

The last slashdot article on the subject of 3D objects from video sequences does not seem to have a workable approach to creating trees due to their none planar nature.

Is it me or does parent post look randomly generated?

Remembering back to physics, induction is different from resonance energy transfer, right?

So are these technologies distinct from the magnetic resonance transfer used by the MIT lab last year? Resonance transfer seems like the safest and highest efficiency method for wireless transfer over short distances, to me. (In that it doesn't lose much energy to those bothersome things between source and destination...such as human beings)

I'm relatively pessimistic about both of the technologies mentioned due to the inherent limitations that they pose (large leakage of radiated power or short range). I'm looking forward to seeing products based on the wireless power idea that came out of the Joannopoulos group at MIT in 2006.
The idea was that you can setup an RF wireless power transmitter in such a way that it does not actually transmit any power unless it resonantly couples to a precisely shaped receiver. This way there is little to no leakage and they claimed that the power transfer was quite efficient. I'm sure this was posted to slashdot, but I can't seem to find it. Here's a link to the paper if you are somewhere with access to Science: Science 6 July 2007: Vol. 317. no. 5834, pp. 83 - 86 and here's a link to the press release by the MIT news office (no subscriptions required).

My education has not been particularly difficult or time consuming to get good grades,

• Practice saying "would you like fries with that" OR
• Get all the maths you can
• Learn Lisp
• Read Knuth
• Play with other "interesting" languages - particularly things like closures and regexs in Perl
• Learn systems engineering. (See NASA SP-610S http://ocw.mit.edu/NR/rdonlyres/Aeronautics-and-Astronautics/16-892JFall-2004/9722DD5E-CDBB-4B0F-8F5E-791CFF5FD359/0/nasasysenghbook.pdf) Or CMMi

Read the classical SICP http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/

It looks like to me that the basic premise for most things in the USA is to do something or grant something and then let the courts work it out after the fact. This has the benefit of getting things done cheaply along with that only the people who are grievously upset will bother to fight things in the courts (which is really those who have money to do so)

To me this is a direct result of a purely capitalistic approach - the worship of the Dollar.

It looks like to me that the basic premise for most things in the USA is to do something or grant something and then let the courts work it out after the fact. This has the benefit of getting things done cheaply along with that only the people who are grievously upset will bother to fight things in the courts (which is really those who have money to do so)

To me this is a direct result of a purely capitalistic approach - the worship of the Dollar.

The full research article (PDF) is only 3 pages long. The experimental description and discussion of results are so terse that they are barely informative. There are not enough details to know whether they handled the experiment properly or not.

In addition to the problems you mentioned, I'm worried by the fact that they don't describe in detail what they mean by "placebo." For instance, they mention "two separate rooms" in their experimental section, but don't explain why they have two rooms; if one was "real" and the other "placebo" then the variability could easily be ascribed to minor variations in the rooms (lighting, ambient sound, odor, etc.). The RF transmitter is placed immediately beside the person's head (there is a photo in the article), which worries me because they never mention measuring or accounting for audio effects: a high-pitched whine from a running device could easily explain the differences (it wouldn't even have to be consciously audible to influence the subjects).

Combined with the very large standard-deviations on their results, I'm hesitant to ascribe any significance to this finding just yet. More details, and corroborating independent verification, are definitely necessary before raising any public alarms.

Anyway - the era of Netscape is over.

Conveniently killed by Microsoft and reborn into Mozilla/Firefox.

Today the alternatives to IE; Firefox, Opera and Safari are the most well-known and supported by web developers. Yet another alternative is the Lynx browser for those with pure text terminals. (you may think it's masochistic trying to use a text-only browser in today's web but sometimes it's helpful or the only resort left.)

Safari for Windows is still beta (and has had some bugs, I haven't checked the latest yet but 3.0.3 did crash on me). However it is still useful to verify your web page with and compared to the crashes we had with older browsers it's actually OK.

And still - there have been an era where Mosaic was a revolutionary new interface, but even that wasn't the first as you can see at Web Browser History.

A relatively up to date graph can be seen at Wikipedia, but your browser should support SVG to make the most of the graph. Unfortunately it only shows the most common browsers and oddballs like tkWWW are left out.

Google was started by a 50% European team.

At an American company, and the ideas spawned from an American University.

Nokia is European. ...but nearly everything they design is engineered from American-designed specs and algorithms.

Television was invented here.

Electronic reproduction of sound, moving pictures, and color photography all came from the US.
The European invention was just making an electronic version. I'd say that's a rather obvious step by comparison.

The Compact disc was invented here.
Digital recording was invented in Japan. Then a Dutch physicist had the idea to put it on optical media instead of a tape. Much earlier, (and without consultation of the other two), an American also developed compact discs, but he didn't sell the idea. I'd say the lion's share of that invention belongs to Japan.

The automobile, albeit slightly longer than your arbitrary 100 years.
You got one! Germany certainly deserves the credit for this idea.

Digital computing.

This is definitely not clear cut. What's first? Newton's algebra? Zuse's Z2? Babbage's calculator? ENIAC? And that's just talking about the first computing - not even mentioning the huge amount of work that came after it that one might consider essential. There's too much credit to go around to attribute it to one place. Europe or the US, probably, but it's hard to be sure which.

This game isn't worth playing. There's very little that one region can really take full credit for. Besides, what good is it saying that a countryman made something? It's not like you did. The Wright brothers may have been American, but so what? It's not like that means I have anything to do with planes. Besides, we very seldom get a guy who comes up with something out of the blue that's not a very small increment of something that already exists. Almost always, if it hadn't been one smart guy from one country, it wouldn't have been someone from another, so what does it matter who did it?

it's actually not too far from the truth. it's common for these systems to share information with each other. for example, for surveillance...

Funny thing is, the sentence is about a person whose job (hobby?) is to look for errors in grammar.

Look at his correction of this textbook:
http://www-math.mit.edu/~sipser/itoc-errs2.1.html

http://people.csail.mit.edu/rahimi/helmet/

Research indicates that the tin foil hat is actualy a conspiracy itself.

A video assistant for the New England Patriots was video taping the hand signals that the NY Jets were using, essentially spying. Though it doesn't relate specifically to blogging, I can see why having bloggers hang around would make coaches, staff and players nervous.
http://www-tech.mit.edu/V127/N42/patriots.html/

I don't know what the deal is with this story linking to 'Eurekalerts', but here's the link to the press release on MIT's news office's site:

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/vascular-1217.html

Greg

1. You don't actually speak in terminology so I have no idea if you know what you are talking about or are just ranting.
2. Analogy is not a helpful means of argument.
3. There are people making biological machines right now. There's a competition which they enter every year to showcase their progress. (see http://parts.mit.edu/igem07/index.php/Main_Page)
4. The creation of completely new proteins and back-transcribing of the protein sequence to a suitable DNA sequence has been demonstrated. Parts will probably start showing up in the BioBricks databases in a few years as desktop computing power gets cheaper and cheaper.

This stuff really is happening.

I did most interesting things with voice mail (including "visual voice mail") and telephones in my Master's thesis in 1984. this predates by a good margin most voice mail systems. for the best quick overview see the video at http://xenia.media.mit.edu/~barons/phone-slave-video.html for full references, including my thesis, see the "Phone Slave" section near the bottom of http://xenia.media.mit.edu/~barons/AronsAnnotatedBibliography.html