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And whence do you do derive the HTT vis a vis MIT?

http://www-tech.mit.edu/V125/N11/11_sloan.11n.html

Again, back to my point. Some people will just dismiss things out of hand without actually taking the time to carefully examine it simply because it is familiar. Thanks for proving my point. Your simple meter explanation will be inadequate in explaining the example.

To save you the effort: http://web.mit.edu/persci/people/adelson/checkersh adow_illusion.html And let me quote him: "The visual system is not very good at being a physical light meter, but that is not its purpose. The important task is to break the image information down into meaningful components, and thereby perceive the nature of the objects in view."

Once again, thank you for being a perfect example to my original post.

Well, not all research is truly useful, but the problem here is that the author of the article provides no context. He does not even discuss what the studies were investigating. Surely, it could have been something random and pointless, but I'm rather betting that it was taken out of context (exactly how valuable the research is, is another matter entirely, and depends on whose perspective you answer that question from).

The "conclusion" seems to be a paraphrased one-liner which was likely taken out of context, and the quotation, "when employees get chilly, they are not working at their full potential," is most likely there for continuity in the paper (i.e. a stylistic element).

So, I won't defend that particular study done, as I have no grounds to, but I will give it the benefit of a doubt, because you certainly cannot conclude much from what the article's author wrote. Had he provided a full research paper, and then attacked that, he would have had some substance to go on. As he does it, he has nothing.

On another note, it isn't unheard of for gibberish research papers to get published: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/paper.html

When I posted check this out, I meant to link: http://web.mit.edu/persci/people/adelson/checkersh adow_illusion.html

I haven't RTFA yet, but I wanted to link to Piggy Bank, which is a Firefox plugin by the Simile MIT group, which seems to be making a large step forward in bringing the usefulness of the sematic web to the users.

It contains a RDF engine, and allows you to install "screen scrapers" for different sites, plus it knows automatically how to read FOAF and some other ontologies that have spread on the net a little bit. When you see the "Semantic web coin" icon in your status bar, you can click on it and it will extract what semantic information it can about the given page. Using javascript or XSL based screen scrapers makes this a bit like developing for Greasemonkey.

As examples, they have screen scrapers for Craig's List Jobs, and they can merge the location (lat/long) information pulled from that along with other info pulled from other sites and display it all on a Googlemap.

It's just getting started, but it seems very cool.

Piggy Bank is an eleet RDF creating, greasemonkey web scraping, meta plugin.

http://simile.mit.edu/piggy-bank/

props to waxy 4 the link

http://waxy.org/links

check out Sir Tim Berners Lee the Knight that goes nee rap on the semantic future of the web at the Royal Society London - total futurosity.

http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/page.asp?id=3110

Do you think theres a porn site somewhere using sign ups to process secretly referred slashdot catchems?

I think the thing more than anything else that would help ease getting Windows to work with laptops is simply publishing a good hardware spec sheet.

In installing gentoo on my IBM T22 I relied on the spec sheet more than anything else. If vendors could just get into the habit of releasing information like the the ethernet chip, audio chip, etc., then we wouldn't have to resort to guesstimating from lspci.

As far as I know, there is no non-free networked object-oriented database. Relational databases are nice, flat files have their place, but OO databases are quite useful too; I've built a few webapps using this. Thanks, Pavel Curtis!

Several programming languages exist only in a free version, or the non-free versions are derivatives. Scheme, Squeak (Smalltalk based), Python, and Perl are just a few that come to mind. Perhaps this clown would say that these are all derivative works from Fortran, or somesuch, but it's a stretch.

This move is a direct response to the SCO challenge to IBM's Linux (and therefore the subsequent Linux codebase as a whole). SCO has failed in its specific legal claims (so far, and perhaps inevitably). But it has succeeded in introducing uncertainty (akin to the GIF patent uncertainty, inaccurately called submarine patents) to the Linux FUDsphere. Nokia has, with this action, made a legal committment to letting Linux "off the hook" for any possible infringement to date. And with current kernel development so much more auditable than the original, with individual code heritage clearly delineated in open records, Linux itself is largely protected from such claims.

I don't know if there have ever been nastier ones

Depends on what you mean by "nastier".

* In terms of total damages, Blaster and Sobig are the record holders.

* Compared to the number of machines on the internet at the time, the Robert Morris Internet Worm would take the record - it took out about 1 in 10 machines on the internet (ironic for a worm that was intended to spread slow enough that it wouldn't be noticed - whoops!).

Personally, I was really annoyed by Code Red's spamming of my apache logs ;)

One of MIT's Inventor of the Week pages last November mentioned this technology... along with the comment "In recent years Iomega has reduced investment into new optical data storage technologies, thus, according to Thomas, AO-DVD is still in want of corporate support to bring it to market. It is an idea that is a bit ahead of its time."

Moore breaks a taboo that pervades much of fiction, not just the comics: the suggestion that those in power might not have thought through what they are doing, that they may not even care enough or be smart enough to think things through.

Yeah, some taboo... Try Dr. Strangelove, Catch-22... heck, try Oedipus Rex.

This kind of criticism of people-in-charge is one of the major themes in Western literature and drama.

Maybe a bit OT, but MIT has basically open sourced alot of thier stuff (pretty cool). MIT's OpenCourseWare

Hi,

Interesting conjecture, and I frankly don't know whether you'd be right about that or not. The reason why I mentioned "putting FP back into the curriculum" was, however, that it is my understanding that, if you're right, there's a good chance that programmers would prefer multithreading in imperative languages precisely because it'd be closer to what they'd be used to. So, by getting them used to FP, we'd see a "more fair" evaluation of the practicality of this approach.

Alternatively, we might ultimately wind up with some "middle ground", as proposed in
imperative functional programming
on the functional end and
type system improvements for imperative languages of one kind or
another on the imperative/imperative OO language end.

-- Christoph

If this had come out earlier, a lot of nerds wouldn't have wasted a perfectly good Saturday evening. http://web.mit.edu/adorai/timetraveler/

http://ocw.mit.edu/ would it restrict the classes they can put online?

with the Time Traveler Convention. I refuse to use the word "meme," but its Slashdotting triggered an avalanche of mainstream publicity, culminating in a front-page New York Times article; Slashdot is more relevant than I once thought. Total hits exceeded 1 million before the Times article came out.

with the Time Traveler Convention. I refuse to use the word "meme," but its Slashdotting triggered an avalanche of mainstream publicity, culminating in a front-page New York Times article; Slashdot is more relevant than I once thought. Total hits exceeded 1 million before the Times article came out.

The MIT team is gonna own this competition. It's not even a question. http://grandchallenge.mit.edu/

How about this?

Hehe funny... ...but seriously...
software patents have been a a reality in the not too distant past.. see here:

http://www.softwarepatents.co.uk/past/how_the_us_g ot_there.html

hey lookie here what Donald Knuth had to say on the matter.

http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Patents/knuth-to-pto.txt

This is how Kademlia works:

Nodes randomly generate either 128 or 160 bit node identifiers. An identifier uniquely identifies a node on the network. Traditionally, they are computed as just the MD5 or SHA-1 hash of your IP address (this is to make it harder for clients to select exactly what identifier they want, which could help them target certain files for takedown... more on that later).

In Kademlia, the idea is that messages routed through the network are identified by a message key. This is, as well, either a 128 or 160 bit value. The goal of Kademlia, and every other DHT (Google for Chord, CAN, Pastry, etc.) is to route a message to the node whose identifier is "closest" to the message key. In Kademlia, the distance between a node identifier and another node identifier, or a node identifier and a message key, is computed by simply XORing the two and treating the result as an unsigned integer.

Each node maintains (roughly) a routing table containing nodes that match successively-longer high order bits with itself. For example, node 0100... maintains an entry to a node starting with 1..., a node starting with 00..., a node starting with 011..., and a node starting with 0101... Note that in terms of distance by XOR, the first node has a distance of 1..., the second with a distance of 01..., and so forth. Thus, nodes matching more high order bits are closer to you in the identifier space.

So if you are node 1010... and you receive a message starting with 0111... You should have some node in your routing table that differs in the highest-order bit, that is, it starts with 0... Say its node identifier starts with 0000. You route the message to that node. If you compute the XOR between your node identifier and the key, and this node's identifier and the key, you will see that this node is approximately twice as close to the key as you are.

Now this node differs in the second bit: 0000 vs 0111. In its routing table, it must have some node that matches in the first bit, and differs in the second: that is, starting with 01... If the message is routed to that node, we again cut our distance to the key by approximately 1/2. This process repeats until we find the node "closest" to the message key.

Routing in this manner takes log(N) time, and each node on the network maintains log(N) connectivity. Note that there are well-established algorithms for nodes joining and leaving the network, of which the former takes log(N) time as well.

So how does BitTorrent fit in? Here's what I'm assuming: Each .torrent file has a 160-bit info hash embedded in it, derived from SHA-1. Now substitute the message above for the .torrent file, and the message key for this info hash -- you are now routing .torrent files to their closest nodes. These nodes, in turn, can be the tracker. If a node knows the 160-bit info hash of a .torrent, it can find a tracker by placing this hash as the message key in a lookup message and finding the closest node, which must necessarily be the tracker.

You can do other neat tricks, too, like keyword searching, load balancing, and whatnot (see eMule -- it uses the Kademlia DHT for its serverless system). Other DHTs work in a similar manner. I'm a little confused as to why everyone uses Kademlia, when there are better ones out there. (Accordian, for example, is truly state-of-the-art.)

Plenty of resources on DHTs can be found at Project Iris.

- shadowmatter

The lecture you went to see will be posted online to the MIT World website in the near future. Everyone will be able to enjoy the content for free, though late.

Where are these kittens [mit.edu] from?

That is a great link. This one has got to be Bill the Cat^H^H^HKitten.

Hmm... Maybe this letter to Bill is a reality

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.02/microsoft .html

Just a thought.

Hey - Maybe it was brought back at the time traveler convention.

http://web.mit.edu/adorai/timetraveler/

I know the dates don't match up, but if you can travel in time...

Mono vs Macro... what about Exo

As I understand it, just rotated. Here's a paper on the subject: http://web.mit.edu/8.20/iap05/weisskopf.pdf

they could just be making it up :-)

Where are these kittens from?

How cute...

Maybe you already noticed, but here is a source.txt file in that directory which says that the collection was copied from http://kittens.sytes.org/. It also says that (parts of) it can be found all over the web, so maybe this is not the final answer.

(And not just for the 14-17 year old British girls).

http://nms.csail.mit.edu/projects/infranet/

Technical paper (pdf)

An increasing number of countries and companies routinely block or monitor access to parts of the Internet. To counteract these measures, we propose Infranet, a system that enables clients to surreptitiously retrieve sensitive content via cooperating Web servers distributed across the global Internet. These Infranet servers provide clients access to censored sites while continuing to host normal uncensored content. Infranet uses a tunnel protocol that provides a covert communication channel between its clients and servers, modulated over standard HTTP transactions that resemble innocuous Web browsing. In the upstream direction, Infranet clients send covert messages to Infranet servers by associating meaning to the sequence of HTTP requests being made. In the downstream direction, Infranet servers return content by hiding censored data in uncensored images using steganographic techniques. We describe the design, a prototype implementation, security properties, and performance of Infranet. Our security analysis shows that Infranet can successfully circumvent several sophisticated censoring techniques.

http://nms.csail.mit.edu/projects/infranet/

Technical paper (pdf)

An increasing number of countries and companies routinely block or monitor access to parts of the Internet. To counteract these measures, we propose Infranet, a system that enables clients to surreptitiously retrieve sensitive content via cooperating Web servers distributed across the global Internet. These Infranet servers provide clients access to censored sites while continuing to host normal uncensored content. Infranet uses a tunnel protocol that provides a covert communication channel between its clients and servers, modulated over standard HTTP transactions that resemble innocuous Web browsing. In the upstream direction, Infranet clients send covert messages to Infranet servers by associating meaning to the sequence of HTTP requests being made. In the downstream direction, Infranet servers return content by hiding censored data in uncensored images using steganographic techniques. We describe the design, a prototype implementation, security properties, and performance of Infranet. Our security analysis shows that Infranet can successfully circumvent several sophisticated censoring techniques.

Okay, I do not get this at all...

From the post:

Farley wrote to point out that his[sic] neither a Harvard post-doctoral fellow nor a professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, writing "I am not and never have been either. (I am a tenured professor elsewhere and have been for several years.)

FTA:

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Harvard professor Jonathan Farley is an award-winning scholar, but he wouldn't mind being known as a Hollywood mathematician.

So I thought to myself, couldn't he just come out & say he's a Harvard prof., not a grad student? But then, I googled, & lo & behold:

http://math.mit.edu/people/faculty/farley.html

Is he the male equivalent to prime-time Alias? A doppelganger? An elaborate hoax?

Haven't read the book, but am now thinking about it. One thing in your post caught my attention and raises a question: where does he get the idea that the human mind can be either both or correct, not to mention both? Seems a strange notion.

Btw, if you are interested in a truly wonderful book about the interdependencies of mind and matter in the human brain, read Zen and the Brain by James H. Austin

Actually publishers are quite useful, although there might be a need for them to change some of their working style.

Currently there are two ways to get one's work published: through conferences and through journals. All fields other than computer science value journals quite highly, whereas computer science puts a quite a bit stronger emphasis on conferences.

The main reason for the latter is that the journal reviewing system is too slow for the pace at which CS research progresses.

The fact that reputable journals take so long to publish an article is caused by two reasons:
most research publishes is crap and whatever is worthwhile needs some understanding and verification.

About the amount of crap being published: the mentality in US is to "publish or perish". It doesn't matter whether what is written in one's article isn't worth the paper it's printed on. It doesn't matter that all it shows are some tables with numbers, which nobody even bothered to check. Forget about understanding or interpreting them. Basic verification is rarely done. Just stick in there some tables with numbers.

Conversely, articles containing only ideas, but not numbers are rejected by default, regardless of the quality of the content. The times when the Ph in PhD stood for "philosophiae" are long gone. Nowadays nobody is allowed to throw an idea on the table, to talk of one's dream, if you will. Results must be quantifiable, immediate and should come fast. Running like a chicken with its head cut off between experiments and editing, one doesn't have much time left for taking a step back to think a little about one's work.

What's the point of all this ? At least the good journals provide the means for filtering through all the crap out there, by employing a slow and tedious process that involves going through a lot of hoops. This makes sure that what is published meets certain criteria. Perhaps not everything published in a good journal is the topmost quality, but, most frequently, it is much better than what is published in conferences.

Personally I see the future of journals as organisations who publish lists of interesting readings. Some sort of highly educated "Readers' digest"... This won't be affected a bit by the free availability of publications. There is so much information out there, that most researchers would be happy to have at least a source to point them to interesting research.

For those who like to think that publications will flourish in an open environment, analogously to the F/OSS projects, there will be an opportunity to address this matter. Perhaps someone will come up with a good idea about ranking scientific articles by quality.

Citeseer citeseer.ist.psu.edu/ attempted to provide some metrics. They can be useful, but frequently enough they are too limited.

The Journal of Machine Learning Research http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/ is an example of a free online journal. Personally I admire the dedication of its editors and the quality of the articles published in it. I consider it an astounding achievement, and even more so when I think that it was launched in 1999, with its first edition published in 2000.

Particularly when considering these two examples, I find that both have their merits, but for most practical purposes CiteSeer is an indexing and search engine, while JMLR is the source to ask for quality. This is why I said that publishers do have a place in scientific publishing, although perhaps they might have to alter some of their current ways.

MIT is offering all of its courses for free online (has been doing so for a yr. or more) - evenutally all 10,000 courses will be online. Included are notes, videos, assignments, projects, projects results, software, books etc. - all free! Most universities guard their stuff - even more so that some corporations - what do those universities have to hide? http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html

By now, OCW has over 900 MIT classes available, and is an amazing success. I hope that the Dutch will succeed in a similar fashion.

In my experience a high degree of saftey and type checking in a language is overrated. While it is useful it can also lead to inflexibility.

You appear to think that this is an argument about static vs. dynamic type checking, but I have no problem with dynamic type checking. The problem with Objective-C isn't that its object system is dynamically typed, the problem with Objective-C is the unsafe, inflexible, static type system it inherited from C.

Again showing you can only think in the standard mode of programming and are not really getting your head into the message-passing realm. What you just laid out is so clumbsy really compared to message passing as a first class citizen...

I got my head around that 25 years ago. I just think a programming language should get typing and memory management right before it attempts to support message passing OOP. Java is not the world's best OOL, but at least its type system and runtime are sound.

Holes as you see them may be vanishingly small in real-world use, especially if you have expeirenced developers...

Experienced programmers clearly are incapable of avoiding these holes, otherwise programs on Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and UNIX wouldn't be full of buffer overflow problems and pointer errors.

I'm really looking forward to submitting my paper this year...I think it will be well accepted.

Interested parties can view my submission here .

Please let me know what you think...any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

As others have pointed out, lack of evidence is not evidence of a lack. Maybe we're digging in the wrong places, why just the other day we discovered Hobbits (well, not really "Hobbits" but thats the name the news outlets gave to the skeletons). Maybe in 10, 20, 300 years we'll discover a skeleton with physiology somewhere between an ape and the earliest skeletons of Homo erectus.

But lets leave that aside: the theory of evolution cannot explain alone why we are here, today. It can, however, explain why salamanders become distinct new species as they spread out across a region (see Ring Species). It explains the various famous observations like the "pepper moth" observation. Using mutation to survive even explains sudden explosions of wildly variating plants and animals (the "Punctuated Equlibrium" theory, which even explains why we don't see reptiles' eggs hatching chicks these days). It even touches on genetic transfer as observed in modern times in polyploid plants (roughly half the modern flowering plants).

People attempting to use the "Theory of Evolution" as it currently stands in order to explain the source of life itself are using it incorrectly (much like a kid playing with a loaded gun), as most of the models posited (random molecules forming amino acids then proteins then replicating enzymes (which don't reproduce of themselves, but more accurately build models of themselves from components they find laying around)) are more of a chemistry problem than an evolutionary problem. Evolution doesn't really appear in the equation until there were a handful of things that converted energy from one form to another, and some thing appeared that found it easier to convert those things into energy. At that instant in time, those things would have been better off being something else, and evolution begins. But how to form amino acids in <insert nasty chemical soup here>? That's strictly chemistry.

I'm curious to ask the guest of honor at the tonight's convention says about how successful this will be :)

We seem to have different views of FSFS vs BDB. On a 2GB project with a lot of branching I've measured a penalty of around 15-20% extra overhead for FSFS vs BDB. One of the svn authors has this to say: How FSFS is Worse [than BDB]

Each application has issues with high heat flux densities and high power dissipation, but each also has their own unique issues that need to be addressed.

This is one of those generated articles, right?

If not, /. should be ashamed of itself.

Here is PDP-1 Spacewar running on an emulator written in Java.

You can read the permanent version of this response here.

I know only a little about this field, but I do know that current available computing power can only scratch the surface of what is possible with Virtual Reality. I took a class on the subject a couple years ago, in which we were introduced to some currently available technologies. Most of these I found fairly impressive, though not the fully submersive environment that I had envisioned as a child.

As is most technology innovation these days, the impetus behind many of these devices was largely for military purposes. One such device that sticks out in my mind was a set of goggles that performed a matching algorithm on a subjects face to determine if they were anyone that the soldier should remember. The example the guest speaker used was to suppose a soldier got a glimpse of Saddam Hussein. The goggles projected a small screen in the top corner of the lense that could be used for a variety of things including a conformation of a suspect and another example they gave of an MPEG video display. The screen was pretty tiny, but near the eye it had a pretty neat effect.

Another device introduced was the Phantom from MIT's touch lab. This haptic feedback device provides touch feedback to simulate real world situations. The example in the article I linked to cites the feel of Tiger Woods' grip as and example.

There was some talk of submersive three dimensional environments ala star trek, but we didn't go into much depth. There are all sorts of complications regarding various projection systems and with the helmets there are still serious simulator sickness problems in many subjects.

These aren't the only limits however. Others include a lack of computing power to create a realistic 3D environment that can really fool the brain and problems creating haptic and other sensory feedback. After all of this, perhaps a bigger problem is an overall lack of interest. Outside special circumstances such as military training (flight simulators etc), there is no great need. There is also no great want. The public is largely satisfied (read saturated) with smaller, "low" cost devices such as iPods, PDAs, cameras, cellphones, gaming systems camera phones and laptops. All of these barriers will have to be overcome before we see Virtual Reality anywhere near the forefront of technology.

Due to the incredible density of the, still unknown alloys, the Area 51 team had to leave the wreckage in place. It was spray painted black and the cover story of it being campus outdoor art concocted.

Other attempts to move or otherwise camouflage the wreckage over the years have been attempted.

The hope is that the temporal verion of AAA will show up at the convention and finally remove the eyesore.

Due to the incredible density of the, still unknown alloys, the Area 51 team had to leave the wreckage in place. It was spray painted black and the cover story of it being campus outdoor art concocted.

Other attempts to move or otherwise camouflage the wreckage over the years have been attempted.

The hope is that the temporal verion of AAA will show up at the convention and finally remove the eyesore.

"We were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp."

- Guy Steele, Java spec co-author (source)

Actually, the page an non-equatorial elevators you are looking at is a bit out of date. There is much more recent material in the paper I presented at the 3rd annual space elevator conference. The slides are also available here. The paper should give you a quantitative idea of what the situation is.

To put into perspective what the previous post says. Moving a bit off the equator is possible and costs nearly nothing. On the other hand, if you want to place the Space Elevator in the continental USA, you are going to have to significantly increase the tension at the base of the space elevator, for a given payload.

The reason for this increase in tension is that as you move further away from the equatorial plane, the elevator ribbon starts being inclined at the anchor. The vertical component of the tension needs to be able to lift the desired payload, so the total tension in the ribbon is greater. This gets really bad as the inclination of the ribbon nears 90 degrees (at a latitude of about 48 degrees for the standard Edwards ribbon parameters).