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In no event shall Licensee use the Beta Software for Licensee's product development or any other commercial purpose.

Actually, bad article, too. Wonders never cease.

The satellites the "article" talks about are the result of MIT and DARPA's Synchronized Position Hold Engage and Reorient Experimental Satellites (SPHERES...sounds like they were stretching a little bit to get decent sounding acronym). The immediate focus of research is to develop control systems for automated docking, with later potential applications of station-keeping and maybe even satellite repair. For example, you may recall a DoD satellite repair mission that failed last year when the robot failed to latch on to the target satellite and accidentally bumped into it before running out of fuel.

The SPHERES are tested inside the ISS and manuever using cold gas thrusters (standard CO2 bottles, I think). The goal is for them to maintain alignment with a hand held beacon that the astronauts move about inside the station. For this generation, I believe the beacon is auditory based. Obviously that won't work outdoors, but this is a pretty low-cost, basic level development effort.

There is a bit more information here and here about SPHERES including images and video at MIT.

These puppies are not quite "bowling ball" shaped.

SPHERES (Synchronized Position Hold Engage and Reorient Experimental Satellites) is a very interesting project that has a lot of potential. There are some videos here: http://ssl.mit.edu/spheres/videos.html One of the biggest obstacles for these satellites is that most use thrusters, which aren't very attractive for long missions as they're non-replenishable. But MIT and DARPA are working on that as well: http://ssl.mit.edu/emff/index.html.

SPHERES (Synchronized Position Hold Engage and Reorient Experimental Satellites) is a very interesting project that has a lot of potential. There are some videos here: http://ssl.mit.edu/spheres/videos.html One of the biggest obstacles for these satellites is that most use thrusters, which aren't very attractive for long missions as they're non-replenishable. But MIT and DARPA are working on that as well: http://ssl.mit.edu/emff/index.html.

Since when does the SEC launch "informal" investigations, and more importantly, since when does the SEC acknowledge that they're investigating any company? The SEC is a bit like the Spanish Inquisition (NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition!), in that you don't know they're investigating you until they come knocking on your door with subpoenas and start carting aways boxes full of corporate financial documents.

http://acg.media.mit.edu/people/fry/valence/valenc e-id40-512x384.mov

it was generated by http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/.

Except in fake papers and speeches by our college president have I heard something simple ( and trivial ) said in so many words.

• People who are decedents of all people that lives today.
• People who are decedents of some people that lives today.
• People who are decedents of no one who lives today.

• Times where all people are ancestor of either some or none : today ~ 1500 BC
• Times where all people are ancestor of any of the three categories : 1500BC ~ 5500BC
• Times where all people are ancestor of either all or none : before 5500BC

But if you still insist, it is obvious that the soul, if present to begin with, can be only in the head, and only in the brain then. We do not have prosthetic brains yet, so there is nothing to discuss yet.

It is my opinion that your statement that the "soul" can only be in the head/brain is unjustified. It is, to me, like claiming that the essence of a computer lies in a single central processor, ignoring chips on the periphery.

That said, I would also like to point out that current neural interface research does not focus exclusively on limb prostheses. For a number of years, brain prostheses have been studied. While these are not entirely artificial brains, they certainly may be considered replacement parts for the brain. Perhaps there is something to discuss after all.

http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedo.html - The text online for anyone too bum lazy to type "Phaedo" into google and click on the first link.

Especially the ISN video.

Haha. My bad. Spent way to much time reading CLRS. Don't post before the morning coffee.

>It's easy to write but no one has done it.

It's actually, both mathematically and computationally, a very difficult problem.
Image Segmentation
I'm sure if you know how to do it, and write a nice paper, those folks will be very interested though..

A tip: most things that are obvious problems that 'no one has done' are actually quite difficult if you think about them for more then 10 seconds.

Nope, it was a conspiracy

Especially if we are able to figure out an alternative I/O to the standard mouse/keyboard/screen model that would take up much smaller real estate than a laptop... basically access to the internet's information wherever you go.

You just described Wearable Computing. If you're interested in it, you should subscribe to the Wear-Hard mailing list and become familiar with some of the research groups working on such things.

You can have a wearable computer right now -- the technology exists, and some people use it daily. In fact, a "wearable computer" can include anything from a cellphone or Nintendo DS all the way up to a $5000 OQO + head-mounted display + chorded keyboard. The area that really still needs development is applications, though -- Thad Starner, one of few full-time "cyborgs" (he's been wearaing a computer daily for years) basically uses EMACS for everything [warning: PDF], for example. In addition, a lot of what wearables are used for now is traditional and obvious stuff like taking notes and looking stuff up. There are many more possibilities for context-aware applications that don't exist yet.

Try here: http://pgp.mit.edu/

Or try sing tfw.

Best thing I've seen in awhile concerning god:
http://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/t ext/godTaoist.html

Despite the generated jokes about dogs and the French, and the "oohing and aahing of the crowd at the AIBO robotics soccer games broadcast on U.S. national television, this is not merely "cute". This may be the most important research that you have ever read about.

Researchers Luc Steels and colleagues at Sony's Paris Computer Science Laboratory in France have performed a series of remarkable experiments demonstrating the development, from naught, of spoken language among robots. Words, grammar and semantics evolve spontaneously among cooperating robotic agents initially programmed with a small base set of ground perceptions and behaviors. And from the development of language arises cooperative group (intelligent) behavior.

Enhanced AIBOs are initially programmed to recognise simple stimuli from their surprisingly limited hardware sensors. Over the course of several hours or days, the AIBOs learn to distinguish objects and how to interact with them. A built-in curiosity system ('metabrain') continually directs the AIBOs to look for new and more challenging tasks and to cease activities that are not fruitful. In time they develop more complex tasks, just as do human children.

Like children, the enhanced Sony AIBOs initially babble ("argue?") until two or more settle on a sound to describe an object or aspect of their environment. Over time the group gradually builds a lexicon and grammatical rules through which to communicate. Agreement on word usage spreads through the population as terms for similar meanings compete for acceptance. For example, the robots develop the language structures to express that a red ball is rolling to the left. Just as human twins sometimes develop a unique language in which only they can communicate, the enhanced AIBOs (which are clone-like and similar to twins) develop their own language.

Language analysis and generation are part of Good Old Fashioned AI (GOFAI) and have been studied extensively for decades by AI researchers. In the past several decades GOFAI was challenged by Nouvelle AI (Situated AI) championed by Hans Moravec and Rodney Brooks. This alternative approach holds that true AI will not arise from formal mathematical systems but instead from robotic behaviors which have a subsumption architecture as an overall organising principle for the individual robot. This architecture consists of layers of behavioural modules, each capable of carrying out a complete but simple task. Steels' enhanced AIBOs are embodiments of just such a subsumption architecture and provide strong support for Moravec's and Brooks' hypotheses

Prior to Luc Steels' experiments, no one had experimentally demonstrated how language develops among intelligent agents. Steels' experiments are no less than stunning: in a controlled environment AIBO robots develop their own words and grammars for objects in their environment. All aspects of human language development are mirrored in these experiments: words compete for acceptance in the population, new words are created, and grammatical structures arise spontaneously. Steels' work also addresses the idea of a "robot culture", since it is in the context of a population of cooperating agents that language becomes most useful.

Contrast this with the W3C's Semantic Web effort, which has received much more interest and money in recent years due to the growth of the Internet yet has proven far less fertile. In the Semantic Web there are multiple competing "ontologies" (roughly, data dictionaries wherein all terms are strictly defined by specialists from their

Actually, not really. Researcher's at MIT's CSAIL and Media Lab have determined that a regular tinfoil hat improves reception of government-allocated frequencies.

Yes, we want people to stay less knowledgable, because we know society is better off having more dumb people.

• People are dumb ... and giving everyone a piece of paper doesn't change that
• People have all the resources of the library, the 'net, etc and still don't bother to educate themselves. A formal education is merely proof that you've paid for and passed some standard-level examinations. MIT has their courses on-line for free, and plenty (all?) others will tell you what books you will read in getting your degree. It's plenty easy to educate yourself if you've a mind to
• Someone still has to dig ditches, and for this very little (no?!) education is necessary, why waste resources giving an education to someone who won't ever use it?
• Fabricating more people educated in a specific discipline than can be employed doesn't increase the demand for that skillset: it does however diminish the return that any member of the group can expect. So resources are spent and there is no return

The early 90s saw a number of big changes at the paper that I was lucky to be involved in. We replaced the Atex editorial system and Compugraphic type setters with Macintoshes running Quark XPress and the Quark Publishing System. Josh Hartmann, Reuven Lerner, and I set up The Tech's first Web server using a 20-line Perl-based HTTP server written by Mitchell Charity. We published the first issue online in May 1993.

Same here, I had a MegaHAL bot running on a pretty active IRC channel for a few years. The reason the overtraining makes it act strangely is because the algorithm picks a sentence out of several generated with the most information value; that is, the least probable one. MegaHAL also generates as many candidate replies as it can within a preset time frame, so with a faster computer you have a higher probability of getting some of the weird special cases that have accumulated in the model over its lifetime. Changing the function for picking the reply to some sort of gaussian distribution would probably improve it, but I haven't tried.

I did have some fun experimenting with a Python implementation I made, coupled with MontyLingua for adding word classification into the training process. Even then it eventually runs into the obstacle that the Markov model really only puts words into a short context within a sentence; it doesn't "think", nor can it hold topics beyond what the user carries on in his sentences.

You want to know the latest trends for Java-based web development? Fewer and fewer people are going to be doing Java-based web development in the future.

Fuck trends. They're wrong. Every day the industry continues to stay with its current ridiculous technologies when vastly superior ones were invented decades ago infuriates me further. If it doesn't infuriate you, you're not paying close enough attention.

My advice: read Lambda the Ultimate and Steve Yegge's blog. Endeavor to learn what the lambda calculus and referential transparency are. If you are sincerely interested in bettering yourself as a programmer and don't go find out who Alonzo Church was then so help me God I will kick you in the balls. Learn about SML and type inference. Learn about Haskell and monads. Learn about process calculi and Erlang. Learn about Lisp and code generation and domain-specific languages. Learn about Scheme and lexical closures and continuations. Learn about Smalltalk and what OO was really supposed to be. Learn about type theory and formalism and the Curry-Howard correspondence. Learn about Forth and Joy and how you can have a powerful, expressive language without even so much as a grammar. Learn about Intercal and Befunge and just how badly your choice of programming language can torture you. Learn about UML and Ruby on Rails and Seaside and agile programming and Java generics and Python generators. Learn about aspect-oriented programming, context-oriented programming and concept programming. Learn about multi-paradigm languages like OCaml or Oz. Learn about weird Lisp dialects with syntax like Rebol or Dylan.

Realize that library design is language design. Realize that asynchronous programming with callbacks and explicit state in a world where lightweight coroutines were around in the days of fucking Simula in the 60s for Christ's sake is cruel and unusual torture. (Sorry, pet programming construct.) Realize that the programming language research community, while considering systems programming a solved problem and generally not interested in talking about human factors, is doing some genuinely promising work. Did you know that there are conc

It's not *that* much more complicated; high-quality scalers just use filters with multiple horizontal and vertical tap coefficients.

Think of it as rotating through sets of filters (which map a single destination pixel to a number of 'weighed' source pixels) as the image progresses vertically, as opposed to using an identical filter to get every destination scanline.

This is done so that you don't get stuff like ugly line-aliasing artifacts, where the exact same source line created multiple exact-same destination lines beside one another.. this looks terrible. By changing filters on every line, we can make sure that even if the same source line is chosen for two destination lines, they won't look exactly the same. It gives kind of an "illusion" that you're creating detail.. really, you're just extracting detail from the original image in multiple ways and presenting it all together.

High-quality deinterlacers though (such as those required to go from 1080i to 1080p), are a whole different beast.. they do really look across time, figure out what's moving, and attempt to fill in missing details. More info here..

I am a proud citizen of South Africa.

South Africa is the only country to voluntarily give up its nuclear weapons.

Many other states, such as South Korea, Taiwan, Argentina, and Brazil, ABANDONED their nuclear programs before they developed a weapon capability. However, South Africa's abandonment of its twenty- to thirty-year-old nuclear weapons program remains unique.

South Africa's first device was completed in 1979. A decade of weapons development followed, leading to plans to mate nuclear warheads with ballistic missiles. In 1990, President F. W. de Klerk terminated the program and in 1991 South Africa signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The IAEA then conducted an unprecedented verification of nuclear rollback. Although the IAEA was traditionally concerned only with the accuracy of a nation's declaration, after the agency's failure to detect Iraq's nuclear program the IAEA shifted its focus also to verifying the completeness of a nation's declaration of nuclear activities and facilities.

Source : http://web.mit.edu/ssp/seminars/wed_archives_01spr ing/albright.htm

And we're still considered a third world country.

Whenever this topic comes up, I always refer people to this classic Dilbert strip:
  http://pag.csail.mit.edu/~adonovan/dilbert/show.ph p?day=10&month=09&year=2005/

-Sarkoon

You wonder why, here's an explanation : RMS is a genius, but our "beloved" prime minister clearly is not.

Maybe he didn't want to look stupid when asked some questions about DRM...

One of the more hardcore puzzling events each year is held at MIT. I competed in it this year and had a blast. For more info, go here http://web.mit.edu/puzzle/www/

Umm, yeah, they do.

I have 200 hundred custom-designed yo-yo's to show for it.

The guy has a poster discussing uses such as electric car batteries, so I would say no. One part that bugged me in the "poster" is the energy density. A value of 60Wh/kg (is this gravimetric charge density?) is less than lead-acid. The power density is a whole lot higher at 100kW/kg, would someone care to explain the difference between the two?

The real information can be found in http://lees.mit.edu/lees/posters/RU13_signorelli.p df It lists project goals as 300,000 cycles and 60 Wh/kg (Which if I used the units program correctly is 0.216 MJ ar almost as much as a NiMH battery.)

Nice slides :)

Someone should tell him that the Hindenburg skin being made of rocket fuel is not such a solid theory.

Also, I found the slides describing metals vs nonmetals to be oversimplified and misleading. Not an unusual thing to miss in a chemestry course though.

You see, one can consider crystal as one giant molecule. The ability to conduct relates to how much electrons are tied to the atoms - does the electric field to move the electrons can be weak, or does it have to be strong enough to tear atoms out ?

Now analogously to what we see in the first slides (with comments on Hydrogen and Bohr's atom) the classical E-M model of the crystal is unstable, electrons would fall down on nuclei. So we have quantum mechanics (and more precisely Hizenberg principle) forcing them to mill about the nuclei.

Just like in the atom, inside the crystal there are possible "orbitals" electrons can fill - though they occupy whole intervals of energy spectrum.

To move an electron within an atom one needs to tear it from existing place and put it in a new one - this requires much energy, except when levels are close by (such as changing between different p orbitals).

In crystal, as long as we move within one energy band very little energy is required and so we have conductance.

This might seem to imply that most materials are metals, but there is one important exception - if the band is completely filled with electrons the exclusion principle does not let them move. This is just like a Noble atom - the crystal does not want to exchange electrons with anything and to force it to do this you need to overcome the gap to the next band (just like using halogen gas to oxidize Argon).

Now in some substances this gap is pretty small - these are called semiconductors.

Looks like Sadoway may just be on his way to that Nobel prize he's been obsessed with. :P

For those that aren't familiar with MIT's most pimp chem prof you can enjoy a full semester of his lectures right here: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Materials-Science-and-En gineering/3-091Fall-2004/LectureNotes/index.htm

I took Sadoway's class last year. Awesome guy -- this is right up his alley (making things more environmentally friendly).

Here's a PDF presentation on the process:
http://web.mit.edu/dsadoway/www/MOE_Ti.pdf

I'm a little curious where you're getting these sales figures?

From this TIME article:

and this NARIP document. (Sorry, direct link to a PDF.)

If you insist on making spurious claims about Apple, or any other company for that matter, don't try to disguise them as facts please, that's all we ask. They're certainly not the kings of interoperability, but I can't think of any OS/company that is. no, not even *nix.

One of my current projects at the Broad institute is working on a similar problem.

Our goal is to link and work with many kinds of biological data:
Association studies
Linkage data
Expression data
Small molecule interactions
Model organism data
etc

I've created a way to 'navigate' between various types of data (ie: a SNP in an association study links to a set of genes that link to model organism homologs which link to their expression probe tests.) After that, users store REAL experimental data, and the system unifies data sets (This worm gene is the same as this human expression data). The goal is to find supporting evidence for any particular starting point you are at (I have a fat worm because of this gene, what data in humans supports this hypothesis), or hypothesis generation (I have 5 interesting experiments, what do they tell me about fat regulation.)

What this project does *not* do is work with the actual experimental data, just the stated hypothesis and conclusion. So, if that paper was in error (and ~50% of papers are, according to a recent study that we'll pretend is not in error), the hypothesis is unreliable. But, if you have the data to work with, then you can perform your own analysis and meta-analysis of the work.

I suppose there's a trade off between the two technologies, but then I don't expect to draw a lot of conclusions about genetics from high energy physics.

As an aside, a co-worker on the project is also attempting to model the data in OWL, and using MIT's Haystack project @ http://simile.mit.edu/hayloft/ as a first round GUI.

This works with the roomba:

http://people.csail.mit.edu/bpadams/roomba/

Probably the scooba as well. Looks very, very interesting...

That's cool, but my carrier grade linux is running a counter measures kernel

Whoops! Then I guess I shouldn't post this link...

But yes, Walter Lewin's lectures were fantastic. It's a shame that he doesn't do freshman physics anymore, with the advent of the s/learning/technology/g program (a.k.a. TEAL). I think the move to make his old 8.01 lectures available was in part to provide a good resource to those students who don't like TEAL and who don't learn well in that environment.

Whoops! Then I guess I shouldn't post this link...

But yes, Walter Lewin's lectures were fantastic. It's a shame that he doesn't do freshman physics anymore, with the advent of the s/learning/technology/g program (a.k.a. TEAL). I think the move to make his old 8.01 lectures available was in part to provide a good resource to those students who don't like TEAL and who don't learn well in that environment.

MIT has the full text of the book Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs online. They also have the videos of all the lectures. I've been going through them slowly; they really make you think.

MIT has the full text of the book Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs online. They also have the videos of all the lectures. I've been going through them slowly; they really make you think.

The MIT OpenCourseWare site has a sizeable amount of free learning materials. I had it bookmarked a while back when they weren't offering that much but they've since put a lot online.

The problem with the data brokerage industry isn't that they collect data about me (and sometimes get it wrong).

No, I'd argue this is part of the problem. You can't control the misuse of data if you can't control the circumstances surrounding both its collection and use. HIPPA is one obvious example of how this works in the context of legislation.

You just can't stop data collection. It's going to happen, it's already happening, it's been happening.

If you can create laws to control misuse, surely you could create laws to prevent collection in the first place. In fact, it is necessary to define proper use before you can even talk of misuse.

Organizations and people need to collect and exchange information in order for the economy and society to function efficiently and smoothly. Law enforcement needs information to investigate and prosecute wrongdoers. These kinds of informational needs aren't going to magically disappear.

Organizations have gotten along without this information before now. The economy and law enforcement have demonstratedly operated without it. In terms of law enforcement, there are also very clear sociological implications for this kind of soft surveillance.

I agree with Gary T. Marx when he says:

The first task of a society that would have liberty and privacy is to guard against the misuse of physical coercion by the state and private parties. The second task is to guard against the softer forms of secret and manipulative control. Because these are often subtle, indirect, invisible, diffuse, deceptive, and shrouded in benign justifications, this is clearly the more difficult task.

Data collection of this kind, despite your benign justifications, is primarily a form of manipulative control by the state and private parties. While there are good arguments based on utility that can be employed on behalf of these kinds of measures, most of these arguments fail to account for all the negative repercussions (indeed, this assumes we even understand them all) of the data collection and use, and they do not provide for built in safeguards to address them (which I believe is your point).

However, I think, from a policy point of view, it is best to make laws that criminalize the collection of this information by default. Then, we could have discussion about legalizing specific applications and specify the controls that must be in place that minimize the level of manipulation and protect the rights of individuals. However, if you don't control data collection, you don't control how it will be used. So, it goes back to my original comment that data collection is, in fact, part of the problem.

If I'm wrong, and it turns out that video games do damage children, then I'd be first in line to regulate their sale.

The problem is you won't turn out to be right or wrong. You'll be both alleged right and alleged wrong because each side will pay for biased studies. It's not that good science is not done, it's that bad science is done, too.

See Ron Rivest's very interesting paper on chaffing and compare his theory of security through what amounts to a formalized and theoretically sound notion of smokescreen with the way the market is going.

I think in the end it will be something where people make up their minds and we just have to vote and hope. But I would hope we vote for freedom if we're unsure because freedoms lost are hard to get back. There probably is some occasional effect of violence in movies against weak minds, but the effect of lost freedom is not without tangible cost and I weigh the latter more heavily in my own book of public accounting. No scientific survey will ever sort that out.

For most of us, though, video games still come down to choice. Does letting someone pull a trigger not also let them not pull it? Rather than removing violence, maybe we should focus more on seeing the consequence of violence. In the studies I've chosen to believe (heh), the idea of consequence-free violence is closer to the root of problems than the mere choice of violence.

The Sims, for example, is full of ways to torture people to death with no consequence to the player. I might argue that practice, bloodless as it is, was worse than a game with guns that lets you rescue a princess or save a hostage or a nation, which some might argue instills basic values.

And what about movies, which offer no choice but force you to just ride the course. How is this better than sitting in a movie where you want the violence to stop but can't make it stop without leaving the people you came with. At least a video game gives you a choice at each moment.

It might be kinda cool, actually, if some movies were more videogame-like and you could press a button saying "no more of this kind of scene please" and it would dynamically tone things down for either just you or for the whole of an audience if everyone voted likewise... Then seeing the movie multiple times would give you a different experience every time, too, which would be great for the movie houses...

Rise up, Third World. Beat your plowshares into swords! Turn your laptops into bricks!!

I bet I could use ask.com if it could really answer questions and they concentrated on that, instead of being a generic search engine.

Sometimes I use START http://start.csail.mit.edu/ when I have a question like "what's the biggest country in Europe" or "What's the distance between Buenos Aires and Rosario"

It's as much a human-factors disaster story as a strict "engineering" disaster story, but the story of the Therac-25 incidents (warning: radioactive .PDF) should be part of every CS curriculum on the planet.

It seems to me that the thing we call "The Internet" today ain't really the Internet - it's just a hollow, stuffed-shirt MBA reflection of what the actual Internet used to be before it became a gold rush. To revive the real Internet (the Internet up to about 1995), we'd have to take the ISP's out of the picture entirely. I wish somebody less lazy than me would create a Roofnet that I could hook into - then let the now obsolete ISP's charge whatever the hell they want to charge.