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High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Project
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This is a controversial project that might be of what you are talking about. There is a book out about it Angels Don't Play this HAARP by Dr. Nick Begich and Jeane Manning. Pretty good read. Basically states that depending on the frequency that they push up into the sky, they can do some really funky stuff. Good references to some work Tesla has worked on too...

As a snapshot of our times, we should include something that communicates our relationship with technology. I would suggest the text of the nuclear weapons FAQ, photographs of mushroom clouds, and the text of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (which the United States has yet to sign). Follow this with photographs of man walking on the moon, an exerpt of the human genome project, and perhaps one of those colorful maps of the World Wide Web.

We have lived for half a century with technology enabling us to wreak complete destruction on ourselves and our environment, yet we have demonstrated a similar capacity to work towards a common good. This has, to a large degree, defined us as a people and how we cope with these technologies will form an important part of our historical legasy. Which facet of the human animal will win out in the end is unclear, and how we will apply this technology to solving our current problems will be for historians of the future to determine.

Info on it can be found here.

I'm a grad student at Stanford and work in a different satellite lab. GPB is what is called a "drag-free" satellite. What this means is that it has a VERY good control system that monitors the position of the gyros with respect to the body of the satellite. The control system keeps the position of the satellite relative to the gyro constant, basically letting the gyro move in its own frame, with gravity being the only disturbance acting on it. This doesn't help with micrometeorite strikes, but that's a risk inherent to all satellites. The first us of drag-free control was the Navy's Triad transit navigation satellite, in 1972. The controller was was developed in Stanford's Aero/Astro Department as a spin-off of GPB. Drag-free control is now standard on all transit satellites. This is just one of many examples where a requirement for GPB drove development of a technology that is now widely used. For another good GPB site, check out the Navy's site http://www.onr.navy.mil/02/c0241e/GPB.htm .

When I invented the precursor to Postscript (an audacious claim that I can back up -- it started as a replacement for NAPLPS which I proposed while Manager of Interactive Architectures for Viewdata Corp of America back in November of 1981 -- the Xerox PARC guys found my approach of what they called a "tokenized Forth" communication protocol to be an intriguing way to encode text and graphics), I was interested in having a Forth virtual machine migrate into silicon (ala Novix) so it could evolve from mere graphics rendering into a distributed Smalltalk VM environment (ala Squeak) as videotex terminal/personal computer capacities increased. But I was _not_ interested in object-oriented programming as the long-term semantics of distributed programming environments. (I still have some of the hardcopy of the communiques with Xerox PARC and others from this period.)

Rather, relational semantics were what I saw as the ultimate direction for distributed programming. I had a bit of a go at Tony Hoare's "communicating sequential processes" paradigm and its Transputer realization because he was, at least, starting with the hard problem of parallelism rather than making like the drunk looking for his keys under the light post the way everyone else seemed to be doing (and still are, save for Mozart, since threads, etc. are always an afterthought). But, because there were other hard problems like abstraction, transactions and persistence that he ignored, I christened his approach "Occam's Chainsaw Massacre" in my communiques (in honor of his distributed programming language "Occam") and dropped it in favor of relational programming, which has inherent parallelism resulting from both dependency and indeterminacy. (BTW: Dr. Hoare seems to have finally come to his senses about this issue.)

Unfortunately, the only researcher doing hardcore work on relational programming (meaning, getting to the root of relational semantics in a way that Codd had failed to do) at the time was Bruce MacLennan, then, of The Naval Postgraduate School, and he just didn't have the glamour of Alan Kay at places like Xerox PARC to attract the attention of guys like Steve Jobs. Bruce had a bit of a blind-spot, too, when it came to transactions and persistence, which I attempted to remedy by bringing David P. Reed's work on distributed transactions for the ARPAnet to him, but although he wrote a white paper on a predicate calculus (close to a relational) implementation of Reed's thesis (MIT/LCS/TR-205), he didn't really "get it", IMHO. Reed and MacLennan abandoned their work for other pursuits (ironically, Reed was chief scientist at Lotus while Notes was being developed but did not contribute his ideas on distributed synchronization to that development despite the fact that we had a mutual acquaintance from my Plato days by the name of Ray Ozzie -- so, I share some of the blame for this failure) even as Steve Jobs botched the embryonic object oriented world by abandoning Smalltalk and giving us, instead, a lineage consisting of Object Pascal on the Lisa/Mac which begat Objective C on Jobs's NeXT which begat Java at Sun via Naughton and Gosling's experience with NeXT.

This brings us to the present -- a world in which Javascript-based technologies like Tibet promise to not only salvage the object oriented aspect of the Internet from the birth defects of Jobs's spawn, but actually provide an advance over Smalltalk in the same lineage as CLOS and Self. But it is also a world in which there is growing confusion over the proper role of "metadata" in the form of XML -- particularly when it comes to speech acts and distributed inference. I would call Tibet "the next major Internet advance" except for the fact that the basic idea for a Tibet-like system has been around and well understood since the early 1980's. When it is finally released, Tibet (or a system like it) will put the Internet back on track. I call that a "recovery", not an "advance".

We are now poised to move forward with type inference based on full blown inference engines, thereby dispensing with the nonterminating arguments over statically vs dynamically typed languages that allowed Steve Jobs's spawn to get its nose in the tent. If you want to declare a "type" in a declarative language, just make another declaration and let the inference engine figure out what it can do with that information prior to run time. See how easy that was? Well, there is more to it than that, but not that much: Assertions have implications and assertions made prior to run time have implications prior to run time. Live with it and don't repeat the mistakes of the past.

The confusion over semantic webs, and the reason Berners Lee et al will fail, is essentially the same as the confusion that has beleaguered all inferential systems such as logic programming and "artificial intelligence" over the years: logic is irrational and the real world demands rationality -- otherwise nothing makes sense. By "rationality" I mean that reasoning must literally incorporate "ratios" -- or, as John McCarthy would put it, doing arithmetic so things make sense. By making sense, I mean there is a sense in which one interprets the sea of assertions that clearly dominates for a particular purpose. With logic not only are you limited to 0 and 1 as effective quantities; you have no adequate theoretic basis from which to derive more accurate quantities with which to make sense by taking ratios and determining which inferences are dominant.

Fuzzy logic and expert systems incorporating probabilities have typically failed because they are not based in the first principles of probability and statistics. As Gauss, the premiere probability theorist put it, "Mathematics is the study of relations." He didn't say, "Mathematics is the study of multisets." There are good reasons that relational databases, and not set manipulation languages, have come to dominate business applications -- and Gauss was aware of these differences when he began to derive his laws of probability. Subsequent axiomatizations of mathematics based on set theory were similarly misguided and have led to the idea that "fuzzy sets" are the way to introduce rationality into programming. Rather than sets, relations are the foundation, not just of mathematics but of rationality in the same sense that Gauss realized when he derived his theory of probability from the study of relations.

Rationality allows for judgment which is recognized as inherently fallible -- but which allows one to procede without exponentiating all possible paths of inference. Judgment also allows various identities to limit sharing of information to that needed -- thereby creating speech acts and a basis for rational measures of credibility associated with those identities. Since credit-rating is a degeneration of credibility, it should come as no shock that the invention of negative numbers, originating as they did with the Arabic invention of double entry account keeping, has its analog in something that might be called "logical debt" with which negative probabilities are associated.

And now we have come to the "quantum" aspect of rational programming. It is precisely the "credibility debt" aspect of rational programming that corresponds, in mathematical detail, to the various equations of quantum mechanics and their negative probability amplitudes. (Von Neumann's quantum logic failed to properly incorporate logical debt which has led to much confusion.) Logical debt is important to distributed programming for the same reason debt is important to financial networks. Logical debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of information flow in the same way that financial debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of cash flow. As in any rational system, there are both limits to credit and limits to credibilty that influence one's judgments and actions, including speech acts.

The object oriented folks may, in a sense, have the last laugh here because when we divide up inference into identities that engage in speech acts, we are reintroducing the notion of objects that hide information via exchange of speech act messages that can be thought of as "setters" (assertions) and "getters" (queries). However, I believe it is only fair to recognize that the excellent intuitions of Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard did need the added insights and rigor of philosophers like J. L. Austin and T. Etter.

I know this is a subject of some debate ( and who doesn't like a spirited debate?), but the 20th century ( and subsequently, the 90s and the second millenium ) isn't over yet. What about anything cool that happens this year, eh? Some poor inventor's gonna feel cheated on this one.

Geosynchronous? Think again.

or... see for yourself:

http://sirius.chinalake.navy.mil/satpred/

In 3 lawsuits the existence of the Pohlig-Hellman algorithm was missed. To be sure, there is a good case against their patent. But the fact remains that the connection was not necessarily obvious.

In fact comments by the authors of the Pohlig-Hellman algorithm suggest that it was not. Go here and scroll down to "Martin Hellman". They were actively looking for a good public-key algorithm. They did not find it. They were experts who knew the field, clearly knew their own algorithm, were looking for something like RSA, but did not succeed in finding it. That alone qualifies as extremely good evidence that the idea was non-obvious at the time, no matter how obvious it appears in retrospect.

Simplicity of an idea has nothing to do with how patentable it is!

As for the fact that it is math, check the qualification I gave. If you consider anything in math or computers (by which I meant software) patentable, then RSA clearly should qualify. Whether or not an algorithm should be patentable is another - far more questionable - issue.

Cheers,
Ben

PS There was one thing that I was wrong on. The first public key algorithm predated RSA. However RSA is the first publically available public key algorithm that still stands. Here are some details. But the spooks apparently had it well before that.

You can get some more info on this issue in the Kerberos FAQ

USNO Clock

Wow, if all this happened just because of a leap day, imagine how the Japanese systems are going to react when the comes up to it's next leap second, and all systems synchronized with it, follow and the rest jump ahead. Tried to find the date for the next leap second, but couldn't...anybody have any luck?

As a matter of fact, we do have more spacecraft in place this solar maximum (SOHO, Yohkoh, ACE, and others) with which to monitor the inner heliosphere to help determine when coronal mass ejections are on their way. Unfortunately, the causes of coronal mass ejections are not well understood, and we have only a limited ability to predict when such storms will arise. Space Weather, including the prediction of geomagnetic storms [substorms] believed to result from the blob of plasma emitted in a CME striking the earth's magnetosphere with the right magnetic field alignment, has been an active area of interest in space science in the past decade.

Protecting spacecraft and terrestrial systems such as power grids requires first that we have a reliable predictive ability; the economic impact (and strategic impact, if you are in the military) of a "false positive" is high. Recent work in this field is encouraging, however, and I suggest the following site at the Naval Research Laboratory for more information: http://wwwppd.nrl.navy.mi l/whatsnew/prediction/index.html.

Here's The Honorable Jerry MacArthur Hultin's webpage. You can even snag a 1.5 megabyte picture of him! (Why anyone would do that is beyond me...)

this map shows the time zones, but i'm not sure where Michigan is on the map... I know, I should know my geography,

<sarcasm>

but... it's Michigan for god's sake.

</sarcasm>
___________________

Tons of info on upcoming lunar eclipses, other celestial events, and complete sunrise/sunset calendars (not to mention navigational ephemeris data) are available at the way, way cool page of the Astronomical Applications Dept. of the US Naval Observatory in Washington -- truly the home of the Time Lords.
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UT is short for Universal Time, natch: for practical purposes is == to GMT. "GMT" per se doesn't exist any more, the worldwide time standard is UTC, the Universal Time Coordinate. For a copious explanation of how time is kept today, you need to see the US Naval Observatory's web pages. Those guys truly are the Time Lords... it's way cool.
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Information Hiding Techniques for Steganography and Digital Watermarking by Katzenbeisser and Petitcolas is a book that has just been published last year and contains a lot more detailed technical information. However, Disappearing Cryptography is at least an amusing book to read.

There is also a bunch of software out there that can be used to embed hidden information into images and sound files. However, most of the programs can be detected. Read the paper by Westfeld and Pfitzmann, "Attacks on Steganographic Systems".

I myself have written a tool to hide data into JPEGs. It's called OutGuess.

You can find more software here.

The US Naval Observatory has some interesting stuff - including a decent discussion on the location of the "sunrise for the new millenium".

If the Vincennes tragedy wasn't their fault, you would think they would say something about it on the Official Vincennes Web Site. But not a single mention of the incident could be found. So as far as the Navy goes, the less we know about this the better...

the United States Naval Observatory

the Royal Greenwich Observatory

It matters because you cannot arbitrarily drop years from centuries or millennia and still have a functional calendar everyone can use. We have thousands of books of history based on each century encompassing years 1-100 inclusive. If you decide the 20th Century ends at the end of 1999, then which past century loses the year? (Only 1999 years have passed in the Gregorian calendar.)

If you change something like the method that time is measured or counted by, without unilaterally implementing it as a standard, you cause pervasive problems. As far as i am aware, there has been no world-wide agreement or even a Papal Bull from the Vatican (who created the Gregorian calendar) to short the 20th Century one year.

1998-12-31 23:59:59
1998-12-31 23:59:60
1999-01-01 00:00:00

Note that there can be 61 seconds in a minute when a leap second is inserted.

Some Unix systems pretend that leap seconds do not exist, others attept to take them into account, using tables of leap seconds. It might be better to run the system clock on TAI and convert to UTC or local time with a leap second table.

As for the BSD license, there is a fair amount of software out there under the BSD license, but there isn't really a whole lot to discuss, since there isn't really a whole lot to violate.

The artistic license isn't used much, so it isn't discussed much.

Why don't slashdotters like BSD? BSD licenses allow code that you write to come under the control of other people, and you can't stop them. You can't even stop them from putting out full page ads saying that their version of your code is better than theirs. Then there's the possibility that your code will become embrace and extendified by some greedy individual, as seems to be happening to kerberos.

As far as problems with the Artistic License, take a look at the OSD as commented by Bruce Perens for some gripes.

The Navajo code-talkers invented a code for words that aren't in the Navajo vocabulary. Here's a dictionary
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I think with a population of over 250,000 in the Navajo nation, more than 50 or 60 would still speak it. Could be wrong, tho'.

There's more info at the Navy's History site:

http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq61 -2.htm

They've even got the Navajo dictionary. Turns out that the system was more than just the Navajo language and a few code words, since even a captured Navajo couldn't decipher it.

The SCUD was not built during WWII. The SCUD is a Soviet weapon designed in the late 40's/early 50's that was based upon the design of the German A-4 ballistic rocket (the V-2).

I was mistaken, and conceded that I was initially incorrect on this fact--as I had written the original post well after my bedtime, and was a little tired. I had meant to say shortly after WWII, but thinking and typing it were two different things at that time of night.

I'd like to see the weapon system that does have an 80+% reliability!

In general, for the most part, the U.S. Navy's AEGIS type ships currently run at an 80+% performance rating with the system on "auto-pilot." It is also the only Naval vessel that has passed the Armeggedon test 100% of the time. So, if you have seen an AEGIS ship, then you have seen a weapon system that does have an 80+% reliability!

Granted that AEGIS combat system is not designed for anti-missile defense (however, it does have the Phalanx anti-missile system for self-preservation purposes). But as for its intended use as "ships [that] are multi-mission (AAW, ASW, ASUW) surface combatants capable of supporting carrier battle groups, amphibious forces, or of operating independently and as flagships of surface action groups." they have a battle proven record of excellence.

The US Navy Sea Systems Command has been hosting a research project called CIDER (Cooperative Intrusion Detection Evaluation and Response) for several years now. You can find more info about the CIDER Project -there.

They just change what their clocks say. They don't move the sun (though you gotta love the "Earth Orientation Department"), and AFAIK there's no law saying "Thou Shalt Own a Clock Accurately Set to Daylight Savings Time During the Summer."

If you're further inclined, you can even find out exactly how each box is supposed to be config'd.

You raise a great point however - where is the source code accountability? There have been unreported horror stories associated with the Navy's use of NT and other invalidated/unverified programs, but I'm not sure what it is going to take to get it fixed... maybe accidentally shooting down a passenger plane.

Oh wait, never mind.

Re metric time: there's always the swatch beat internet time. The day is divided into 1000 units (beats). No timezones, which is nice for networked and space applications.

A place to start, anyway. At least you can buy watches that display it.

The modified julian day is another standard in use, particularly in astronomy.

Hey Rob, can we get these added to the slashdot date formats, along with unix epoch?

As a scientist I've always leaned toward keeping the second as a fundamental unit, just to make converting easier. Makes things like 'standard business hours' hard to support, but that's an outdated concept anyway. :-)

Does anyone know if the latest version of internet time is mirrored anywhere?

The Department of the Navy serves as the country's official timekeeper, with the Master Clock facility at the Washington Naval Observatory. National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Years 1992 and 1993.

There's one called Snort that's pretty neat at http://www.clark.net/~roesch/security.ht ml

PortSentry is a port scan detector that can be found at http://www.psionic.com/abacus/portsentry

Northcutt's SHADOW project stuff is at http://www.nswc.navy.mil/ISSEC/CID/

Although the type of "oh, the millenium doesn't finish until 01/01/2001" pedantry generally irritates me intensely (look, we're all going to get very drunk whatever, OK, pedant? If you really want to you can stay at home and sulk, just don't expect everyone else to join in) in this case it could be quite interesting if the law became involved.

More information on this tricky topic can be found at the US Naval Observatory, or alternatively from Douglas Adams, who explains things much better than I could.

Although the type of "oh, the millenium doesn't finish until 01/01/2001" pedantry generally irritates me intensely (look, we're all going to get very drunk whatever, OK, pedant? If you really want to you can stay at home and sulk, just don't expect everyone else to join in) in this case it could be quite interesting if the law became involved.

More information on this tricky topic can be found at the US Naval Observatory, or alternatively from Douglas Adams, who explains things much better than I could.

One thing I find sorely lacking in many books on algorithms is any discussion of why you would select one over another

Do you mean GA versus say a Newton search method? GA is sometimes referred to as a method of last resort. This may be unfair, because many practical problems are not mathematically "nice". I am just getting into GA and I have very complicated simulations underlying my objective functions. We previously computed derivatives for these; it was a huge effort both computationally and for the programmer. One thing that I like about GA is that wrapping the optimizer around an arbitrarily complex objective function is really easy. Also, the parallelism is really good ("embarassing"), especially for distributed computing with message-passing (think beowulf).

For me, the bad thing is that convergence isn't nice and quadratic like some derivative based methods out there. On the other hand, quadratic convergence generally works only near the optimum and derivative based optimizers really only find local minimums (no guarantees about the optimum being globally optimal). Derivative based methods can blow up if you pick a bad guess objective too. Perhaps a good strategy is a combination -- use GA to get into the neighborhood of the global optimum and then use derivative based methods to find it.

I should stress that all this is for my particular application (groundwater). YMMV. Others with different objectives living in differently constrained control spaces will have different experiences. Also, to be fair I should point out that programs like ADIFOR make derivative computations easy to program.

Some helpful optimization links:

Decision Tree for Optimization Software

GA Archives

We all know that that Alaska is easternmost state in the union

By latitude, maybe; by the international dateline and Alaskan politics, no.

and I guess if there were any theaters out there they could have shown the movie almost a day earlier.

I was born and raised in Nome, Alaska and we would have gotten the movie last (if we had a movie theater, that is). When I was a kid, the state legislature voted to put Alaska all on one time zone (GMT -9); it's been this way for at least a decade.

This World Time Zone Map shows it. in case you don't take my word for it.

Actually, looking at the map, we would have beaten out Hawaii (which is GMT -10).

Jay (=

1. See SHADOW for network monitoring (non realtime) on the cheap.
2. Make sure you get permission to do this in writting from all of the
   right people. You may need permission from just the IT director or maybe the
   President of the university

His email address at the Naval Postgraduate School: tlewis@nps.navy.mil

Although please try to contain at least most of your rage... : )