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You are missing something. The Antarctic treaty encourages scientific research activities in Antarctica. There is not a single word in that treaty that even momentarily suggests that it would be an awful thing if the research was not expressly about Antarctica itself.

The later Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty, established in 1991, goes into more detail about Antarctica's status as a nature preserve, "dedicated to peace and science." It specifically bans mining and similar activities, and makes clear that all activities in Antarctica must be compatible with scientific research and environmental research in particular.

But it definitely does not ban non-scientific activities, like tourism, as long as their environmental impact is addresses correctly. And it certainly doesn't ban astronomy (an awful, polluting activity, astronomy! Shudder!).

There used to be a machine at McMurdo Station called mcmvax.mcmurdo.gov. I remember back in, oh, 1994 or so, sending finger requests to their machine and using the VMS equivalent of talk(1) (can't remember what it was called...) to send text messages to the folks logged on. I don't remember ever getting a response, though. It was also kind of fun to do traceroutes and pings to the machine. The network path was insane...apparently it went over satellite and the latency was usually at least 800ms+. Ah, memories...I miss the days when almost everyone ran open finger and talk/ntalk daemons.

People act as if author charges are a big issue. They're not. Take a real example: the grant I'm currently working on: NSF Award 0228651. We'll probably get two, three papers out if it tops. What's $4500 compared to $2,480,000? Nothing at all.

Many of those problems nearly weren't solvable without having a person there, and most of them could have been solved much more quickly if a person had simply been able to flip the pod over or replace the problematic hardware.

More quickly, yes. But it's cheaper - by orders of magnitude - to build and send another robot. Yeah, we'd like to get the answer now, but the rocks aren't going anywhere.

Anyone who says that people are an unnecessary part of space flight has an agenda.

Of course they do. So do the people in favor of manned space flight. In the case of most of the "people in space are unnecessary", the agenda is simple economics; the costs aren't worth it.

I used to be an unabashed proponent of manned space exploration. But the more I think about it, the more it makes sense to stick to sending robots out, until such time as we have a need and a good plan to send humans. Not just sending a couple guys out to plant a flag and take some photos, but making a real commitment. Say something like McMurdo station on the moon.

It may be decades, or centuries, before manned space flight makes sense. Not for technical reasons (though better launch technology would help bring the cost down), but for social and economic reasons; we're not ready to make the investment to do anything worthy with manned spaceflight.

How is this informative? first he's wrong on a shitty movie, which i guess is ok, but the numbers are way off, which is not ok. He's just pulling numbers out of his ass. and its moded informative?

check this for the actual statistics, which, oddly enough, came from the link that he posted.

Well, according to NSF statistics, US science and engineering is pretty clearly heading for an extinction-level event!

Here are total doctoral degrees by US citizens (or permanent residents) for the years 1995 and 2002.

1. US PhD Electrical Engineers: 971 in 1995, 506 in 2002 (-> extinction in 2010).
2. US PhD Mechanical Engineers: 563 in 1995, 343 in 2002 (-> extinction in 2013).
3. US PhD Physicists: 1059 in 1995, 586 in 2002 (-> extinction in 2011).
4. US PhD Mathematicians: 771 in 1995, 442 in 2002 (-> extinction in 2011).

The physics and math communities, in particular, need to recognize that companies hiring few American engineers will be hiring no physicists or mathematicians. Conversely, the engineering communities need to recognize that in the long run, US companies need several PhD-level engineers to justify employing even one physicist or mathematician.

The present system is like an ecosystem with plenty of sea otters (the physicists and mathematicians), but far too few abalone (the engineers). All very beautiful, no doubt, except the young sea otters starve to death. Meanwhile, the senior sea otters -- who are in secure possession of resources protected by tenure -- are slow to recognize that an extinction-level event is underway.

Thus, unless dramatic breakthroughs occur, the numbers seem to indicate that a US techno-Ellie is irreversible and inevitable.

Here's the original post from robots.net...

A recent National Science Foundation press release includes photos and video clips of the latest Scout emergency response robots. Scout is a small (100mm x 35mm) two wheeled, tube-shaped robot containing a video camera, IR range sensors, light sensors, pyroelectric sensors, and two-way radio links that support frequency hopping and encryption. MegaScout is a larger version that will eventually carry manipulator arms, grappling hooks, and may act as a mothership for the smaller scouts. The robots are designed to survive a six story fall or being thrown up to 100 feet into a disaster area. The Scouts are built entirely from off-the-shelf parts. The robots are being deveoped by Nikos Papanikolopoulos
and other researchers from the University of Minnesota Distributed Robotics Lab, the University of Pennsylvania GRASP Lab, and the Caltech Robotics Group. More video of the robots performing amazing feats is available on the UMN website.

As of 2001/2002, it seems you're wrong. People really do believe in this crap.

http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/srs/seind02/toc.htm

13% of Americans believe that both evolution and creationism should be taught as scientific theories in science class.
16% percent want no mention of evolution at all.

More than 25% of the public believes in astrology, that is, that the position of the stars and planets can affect people's lives.

60% of respondents agreed that "some people possess psychic powers or ESP" in a 2001 NSF study.

In 2001, 30% of NSF survey respondents agreed that "some of the unidentified flying objects that have been reported are really space vehicles from other civilizations"

Between 25% and 50% of people believe in haunted houses, ghosts or communication with the dead.

Only about half of the respondents knew that the earliest humans did not live at the same time as dinosaurs.

And many other interesting tidbits.

It's amazing that we still have creationism vs. evolution debates in the 21st century or that a functionally illiterate president (MBA=pointy haired boss) prays to decide the merits of stem cell research. But while Bush's public anti-intellectualism may just be a public pose he strikes to appeal to Joe Sixpack, the fact that this has such wide appeal is worrisome.

I'm almost done with a joint MD/PhD program and I'm seriously considering not hanging around the US. I'm not saying I'm the future of the country or that my leaving will make even the slightest change in anything, but a lot of people in the sciences are starting to get very disillusioned by the direction of our country. If enough of them leave or decide to go back to their home countries, we're in trouble.

Luckily, the US, despite our recent woes, still spends more on R&D than any other country. People like me can bitch and moan all we want about the rubes in government or our immoral foreign policy, but at the end of the day, if you want to practice science, the US is still where it's at. Anyway, maybe the reason we have all this money to throw around (some of which dribbles onto the sciences) is because our military is so good at killing people all over world to protect our economic dominance.

The NSF grant search website is far more primitive than Fastlane, but if you haven't used it to see who has NSF grants at your institution, it can be revealing. A good way to search is to look for "investigator contains ucla.edu" and "start date after 1-1-2002" to find people at UCLA who have recent grants, though only the PI's email addresses are listed under investigator, so that won't find grants where the UCLA person is a "co-principal investigator." But it's a good start.

The problem with physics as they're portrayed in films has absolutely nothing to do with the correctness of it. It has to do with the spreading of misconceptions. If you look through studies by the NSF, you see startling facts about the [American] public.
Personally, I don't think the UCF physics department is trying to "shut down those evil filmmakers for making an asteroid impact unrealistic" or what-have-you. I think the idea is to:

1) Educate the general public, which include senators and other politicians, businessmen, et al., about science (physics in particular).

while

2) Attempt to dispel common non-scientific beliefs.

Whether you like it or not you don't own your DNA.

>For instance, if my genetic makeup was found to have some desirable trait, there's no reason why millions of clones of me could not be made without my consent.

Thank God you can't do anything about that, or else identical twins would be suing each other all over America. Or, worse yet, you would have the right to selfishly deny others the right to the cure for AIDS, for example, just because of some twisted hatred (not that I accuse you of that, but you can see, it's best you *don't* have the right to own your DNA).

We might even get into situations where parents lease their DNA to their kids. Nasty, scary stuff.

(1) Is it really a completely separate ecosystem?
(2) Does that really have anything to do with the possibility of life originating on other planets?

Politics plays a big role with NSF grant proposals. This is the "who on the panel is a `friend' of mine" type of politics. Smaller universities are also hurt by "politics"; the quality of many funded projects is lower than that of many declined projects. The former NSF director Rita Colwell supported larger grants: "Among the highlights of her tenure, Colwell championed increases in grant size, which rose from an annual average of $90,000 in 1998 to $142,000 at present" (NSF press statement).
Larger grants in a time of limited NSF budget increases means fewer grants are funded and most of those go to the "rich" universities. However, nothing says that the best ideas always come from MIT, Stanford, Texas, Minnesota, etc. Faculty from less well known universities (and unpopular faculty from the top universities) are at an extreme disadvantage in obtaining grants.

You asked a very good question, and it is one that every astronomer gets confronted with at one time or another. I'll give you a quote I borrowed first, and then my opinion second. From a report by the National Science Foundation, here is a good summary of why astronomy is important in general:

The essential purpose of fundamental scientific cutting-edge research is to advance knowledge. Regardless of whether information of potential relevance to particular applications is sought at the time the research is initiated, the insights produced by the research enlarge the knowledge base on which future scientific and technological advances can draw. For example, studies of quantum mechanics in the 1920s were considered to be "pure esoterica" by many at the time--few people understood the theory. However, in the succeeding fifty years, results of this work in combination with findings and applications from other fields produced transistors, lasers, and electronic devices used today in a wide array of activities, including information processing, communications, and video imagery.

Here is my opinion, second: Astronomy research does not produce tangible results that improve your day to day life. I can point to technology spinoffs (X-ray machines at airports, CCD imaging - i.e., digital cameras) that you can attribute to astronomy, or you can argue came more directly from somewhere else (military). I could point to the fact that astronomy as an "industry" drives IT development (our storage needs are growing exponentially - check out the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and look up their daily data flow). However, what I would say is that what drives almost everyone in astronomy to do what we do is our strong desire to understand the universe AND communicate that to Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie. The fact is that astronomy consistently rates as the #1 or #2 science most interesting to the public (the other is paleontology). We all have a desire to understand the universe, and I have personally been thanked many times by people for explaining how our Solar System works, where we are in the Milky Way Galaxy, and how we know the Universe is expanding. It is up to the tax paying public to decide if that is worth funding (BTW, our funding is a tiny fraction of the national budget compared to cancer research, and rightfully so!).

I really don't have an axe to grind about this. If Hubble is cancelled, my job won't be affected. However, my motivation for posting on this topic frequently is to try and combat a few misconceptions, and the previous poster struck a nerve. The fact is that the tax paying public has invested billions of dollars in Hubble, and it has paid the public back by being one of the most (if not the most) productive telescopes ever built. Please check out HubbleSite and page through the immense archive of fabulous imagery (I recommend looking for the V838 Mon light echo image, the Antennae Galaxies, Stephan's Quintet and/or Seyfert's Sextet, and any of the Solar System images). I do not dispute that we should have a dialogue about the future of Hubble. We should weigh the risks of servicing it to keep it in service for another decade. My position is that if the Shuttle (or a replacement) flies, servicing Hubble is a worthwhile mission because it simply can't be replaced by ground-based telescopes, and there is no space-based telescope that will have the capability of Hubble that will fly within the next 10 years.

Sure. Lake Vostok. You can get most of the information about it from these sources, including the National Science Foundation fact sheet here.

I'm glad I'm not the only one At the Mountains of Madness.

I don't remember hearing about one of these since I was younger - I suppose my focus has shifted since then :) It still excites me nonetheless.

Anyway, the original National Science Foundation article can be found here and contains a little more info and some better pictures.

Perhaps they should get together with those University of Wisconsin researchers who developed a tin/nickel catalyst for breaking off hydrogen atoms at a much lower temperature.

See this article.

> "When its controlled by the government, it will be lobbied into a capitalist tool of consumer exploitation. Profit at its best"

Wake up, it's already happened. At the end of one meeting 4 years ago the head trademark lawyer for IBM bragged they'd spend 2 years of their $30M a year Washington lobbying budget to make sure no new top level domains had been created to protect their intellectual property interests. Dave Farber was at that meeting (as was Vint "Darth" Cerf).

Roger Cochetti, then a VP of IBM, helped Ira Magazier pick the "interim" ICANN board in secret - when that was supposed to have been done by the internet community. Cochetti is now an NSI VP and figures prominently behind the scenes of ICANN.

The IFWP effort, started in Becky Burr's (US Department of Commerce who have oversight over ICANN) office at the suggestion of Kathy Kleinman and Mikki Barry and had 3 meetings worldwide - Reston Va, Geneva, Singapore to determins consensus points to use as guidelines to create bylaws and elect a board for the organization that would replace IANA. While this was going on Cochetti and Magaziner were running around in secret getting the likes of Ether Dysan and Mike Roberts on board. Mike Single handedly tanked the IFWP effort (notice he has Farbers ear) and became the first president of ICANN and his organization was the recipeint of the "intellectual infrastructure fund" - the domain tax fund that we all paid into back then, and and .edu. Nice little payoff. Esther was by her own admission clueless about the whole thing and did nothing. It's probably just a concidence she was in IBM commercials at the time.

(" Esther Dyson says that she was approached by Roger Cochetti of IBM and Ira Magaziner in Aspen, Colorado and asked if she would be interested in joining the ICANN Board. The IFWP wrap up was finally completely derailed by ICANN's refusal to participate in the meeting."

ICANN was created to do one thing: make new tlds at a time when it seemed (at least to the US government) the US government had to step in to solve the war between the IAHC camp (who had just been shut down) and the alt root camp (who seemed to be making progress). Magaziner met with us all and created the "white paper" that was going to create 7 new tlds immediatly. Trademark lawyers and the EU freaked and when it was revised as the "green paper" it had punted to "ICANN will create a method to elect a board and a process to create new tlds". Instead they spent 3 years futzing around with the UDRP and other things trademaek laywrs wanted and didn't get round to new tlds till the fall of 2000 and it must have had all of ten minutes thought put into it and was intentinally lame as hell. To this day the new tlds that were picked are still viewed by ICANN as a "feasability study" to deteremine the effect of net stability when adding new tlds. Never mind in that period 100 new cctlds were added almost all of which were commmercial in nature.

Then you have the "Government Advisory Committe" the well named GAC of ICANN. Governments of the world get to meet in secret and "advise" ICANN.

Govrernments and the Tradmark Lobby have already coopted ICANN. It's foolish to worry that the ITU/UN will let this happen if they're in control, it's already happened.

So, don't move control of the internet to ineffective treaty organizations, move it to you

Umm.... I don't recall signing that treaty.

Indeed - only 8 countries were signatories of the Moon Treaty(1979), which didn't include the United States. However, the Outer Space Treaty (1967) was signed by 91 countries and has similar principles to the Antarctic Treaty (1959).

The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 explicitly forbids any government from claiming a celestial resource such as the Moon or a planet. The Moon Treaty forbids the exploitation of Space, the Moon and other celestial bodies for profit motives. According to the Moon Treaty, individuals may not claim the Moon and other celestial bodies.

However, there's just one small, minor problem: The Treaty was never ratified. Of all the approximately 185 member states of the UN only six states supported it. All others, including all space faring nations (USA, Russia, China etc) refused to sign it and did not sign it. That is something that does not seem to be well known. The USA explicitly refused to sign it as it would inhibit the exploitation of Lunar and other celestial resources for profit by corporations and individuals.

Everybody knows that the environmental folks would pitch a fit if we tried to launch a fission-based spacecraft. But they already hate President Bush as it is, so he could include a proposal for a new fission-based shuttle replacement tomorrow and it won't get them any more angry at him than they are now (I mean, is it possible?).

And President Bush could even help handle crowd control at the launch site as well! Let's say we're launching from Cape Canaveral. During that week, Bush flies off to... say... Amundsen-Scott, muttering phrases like "oil exploration," "WTO" and "nukuler." Maybe suggest he's going to do something that will kill off the ultra-rare Antarctic Dodo. Those myopic protesters that don't die of an instant embolism upon hearing of it will then take off after him, leaving the Cape nearly deserted for lift-off.

His lab team is all female except for him. It's pretty weird, but a couple of them are fairly attractive.

Girls!

Anyways, I have supported myself for the past 2 years through research jobs at school . I like what I do (currently I am working a nasa's version of maglev train) and I get paid well along with tuition. I just graduated (3.5 years, no summer school) and might have a job offer soon from a Fortune 500 co. through my advisor's network. I also got to publish a paper at a prestigeous conference which will help when I go to grad school.

See if you can find something similar in your school. Keep an eye out for who's getting funding, stay around them (take classes, volunteer, etc.) and eventually he will ask you to work for him.

Good luck.

Namecalling is the technique of the intellectually bankrupt.

It seems to me that Western governments are trying their best to improve the technical education of their people. Do you have evidence otherwise?

What I would suggest you want to look at here:

Enrollment in Science programs prior to H-1b/L-1 expansion and after. I think what you'll see is that the effect of offering large numbers of visas to those in Scientific and technical fields has been to drive US citizens from those fields. When I look at what the promoters of the H-1b/L-1 expansion were promising a few years ago, the effect was the opposite(Phil Gramm was saying stuff like "every one of these guys is going to create 20 jobs").

I'm not commenting on the moment about trade deals-but specifically about the wisdom of creating visa categories for specific jobs in a situation where the US economy isn't creating jobs at the same pace as immigration.

Back in my day we didn't have this abstract stuff [introduction to a book]. No sir. No turing machines and no compilers. We had to hard code our algorithms. We didn't have punch cards either. I had to manipulate the very laws of physics. My computers were huge, took large grants from the government to build. Heck, one of my employees (a woman) had to pretend to be a man just to find work.

--Charles Babbage

1. Nothing contained in the present Treaty shall be interpreted as:

(a) a renunciation by any Contracting Party of previously asserted rights of or claims to territorial sovereignty in Antarctica;

According to http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/news/press/00/pr0025.htm , the BOOMERANG data shows the universe's geometry is likely to be flat.

Have a look at the original release from the US National Science Foundation. With some nice pictures. :-)

Have a look at the original release from the US National Science Foundation. With some nice pictures. :-)

The TeraGrid is the NSF flagship for grid computing - be it good or bad.

The Grid.org people are some of the former SETI@home people gone more general purpose.

And of course, there is The Global Grid Forum which is meeting in Chicago in a week or so. GGF is the standards behind the Globus enabled grid.

We could ask why CERN/etal couldn't have come up with a slightly more imaginary name?

We can also ask why NSF are such suckers for the last 20 years of hype from the people who have run the national supercomputer centers in the USA? Ditto congress. But that is a (sad) story for a different day.

And finally we can ask what Top500.org is going to do when people begin reporting HPL benchmarks using these things? That HPL became the standard that people are designing supercomputers around argues just how totally screwed up high performance computing really is at the moment.

-- Multics

"Photographs, pictorial and diagrammatic illustrations, computer graphics, and animations are now an essential aspect of communicating research findings. These new avenues prompt discussion of different techniques, and encourage innovative approaches to visual communication. This competition was created to reward these new techniques and ways of communicating."

"In the ancient Greek arts of rhetoric, memory was a science. The science has an origin in what is surely myth. The poet Simonides of Ceos was hired by the noble Scopas to attend a formal banquet as a paid performer, singing a poem of praise of his host. As was the custom, Simonides began by first praising a pair of gods. After the performance, Scopas informed the poet that he would only get half of the agreed-upon fee, the other half he should get from the gods who had stolen the limelight.

"At that point, a messenger came in and told Simonides that a couple of athletic men on horseback were outside waiting for him. Simonides went outside, but nobody was there. But, while he was outside, the gods destroyed the banquet hall to teach Scopas a few lessons about respect. (The lessons being pay the poet; don't mess with the gods; and, memory palaces are a gift from above.)

"The banquet hall was so badly destroyed that none of the diners could be recognized. Simonides was able to remember the exact location of every guest at the banquet, using the principles of the Method of Loci, the science of memory. Later, Cicero (106-43 B.C.) wrote a few pages on the science in his classic work, De Oratore. [See De Oratore, II. lxxxvi. 350- 353]. The definitive treatment in Greek literature, however, is the work of an unknown author previously attributed to Cicero in the classic work Ad Herennium.

"The principles of the science are fairly simple, at least using our modern hindsight. A person who wished to memorize a large work, say an address after dinner or the closing argument of a legal proceeding, would begin by constructing a memory palace. While novices constructed a palace by going to a real one and memorizing the rooms, the memory palace could just as easily be any structure that can be imagined."

Source: Mappa Mundi

One problem with this type of arrangement is that it requires thoughtful meta-description of all content (which scientists do but PHBs don't). What you have an interesting way of representing "degrees of separation", not a "triumph of Linux on the Desktop." The challenge ( http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/events/sevc/overview.htm ) was:

"This new international contest is designed to recognize outstanding achievements by scientists and engineers in the use of visual media to promote understanding of research results."

So for the visual representation of linked data structure, sure this looks great. As a GUI, heck no. "File Manager" seems like a misnomer here.

Open Mash was funded for a while by the NSF, a common source of academic funding. I'm not sure if you and your colleagues are in an academic setting, but the Open Mash web site does have the proposals and reviews of those proposals available on the site. Check out the Papers and Publications area.

I'm not exactly sure what you're asking when you talk about measuring the results of an open source project for publication. But any proposal would have to talk about why the project you are proposing has value in-line with the goals of the committee or group you are submitting the proposal to. Knowing exactly what those goals are can be difficult. This is one of those situations where you really have to tailor your writing to the specific reader(s).

According to Lovley, Strain 121--it will be given a species name after his lab finalizes the microbe's description--uses iron the way aerobic animals use oxygen.

"It's a novel form of respiration," Lovley says, explaining how Strain 121 uses iron to accept electrons. (Many archaea also use sulfur.) As oxygen does in humans, the iron allows the microbe to burn its food for energy. Chemically, the respiration process reduces ferric iron to ferrous iron and forms the mineral magnetite.

OK, it reduces iron and produces magnetite.

Try this...

Life on other Planets
Thomas Gold
May 1997
Where iron oxides served as the oxygen donors, the end product will be iron in a less oxidized state in which it is magnetic. Magnetite is the most common form.
...
Microbial life on Mars could be dependent on the same processes as we have discussed for sub-surface life here. Highly oxidized iron is abundant on Mars, and very small-grained magnetite can then be expected to be one of the accumulated residues of microbial processes; so can iron sulfide and methane-derived carbonates.

The original news release, with mpeg videos, is available from the National Science Foundation website. Enjoy.

From the article: The original work along these lines dates back to the late 1980s and early 1990s and was done by Peter F. Brown and his colleagues at IBM's Watson Research Center.

IBM's pioneering work was written up in a student-friendly workbook available online. Feel free to try coding it and see how well you do. Do remember though, the state of the art has progressed a lot since IBM's work. This workbook only covers the basics.

You will find that debugging statistical translation system is really hard. You can write test cases, but they take one hour to run each time. You can look at the result of your test cases, but since you cannot work the answer out by hand, you can never by sure if the numbers you are computing are correct. As an example of how tricky it can get, in Brown university's cs241 last fall, amongts the four teams, only two teams managed to correctly implement Model-3, and the workbook goes up to Model-5.

There are two reason why a three way translation is a bad idea. First, it is already difficult to find large amounts of text translated two-way and available in digital format. Restricting your approach to three-way translated text would reduce the amount of text you could train on so much, it would offset the advantage you would get from the three-way text.

Second, training for statistical translation is really expensive. If running one single test case can take an hour, running a full training can take a whole week. Under these conditions, you are always very careful how you spend your cpu cycles. Until better cpus come along, training three-way and cross referencing each language with the other could well take a month of processing (or two).

IMO, smart bacteria through genetic manipulation may be the quickest path toward all the goals that nantoech is attempting to achieve. After all, the cell is just such a 'nanomachine' with several billion years of refinement behind it.

So I wonder how much longer we'll have to wait until we have bacteria growing huge quantities of CNT's, or other small scale nanostructures.

And as far as commercial entities go, don't forget IBM's find back in September of 2002, which was making nanotubes with carbon instead of metal.

This year's one day seminar on Integrating Speech Technology in Language Learning has been cancelled. The InSTIL seminar was all that had been left of what was once a funded U.S. research program to use speech recognition to help people learn to read. However, over the past few years the budget of the Interagency Educational Research Initiative has been slashed and the Learning Anytime Anywhere Partnership program has been ZEROED. The IERI and LAAP programs were created to deal with DARPA funding deficencies, but DARPA has not taken up the slack for speech recognition in language instruction. Fewer U.S. polyglots will have a far greater impact on intelligence-gathering efforts than bandaids like Project Babylon or any of the DARPA advanced speech recognition programs can possibly provide. Please join me in asking John Poindexter and his advisory board and NIST to help get this vital funding back in the budget.

Also, the Linguistic Data Consortium sent their catalog update out yesterday. As usual, there are no new corpi of people attempting to read a language as they are acquiring it, at any age.

This year's one day seminar on Integrating Speech Technology in Language Learning has been cancelled. The InSTIL seminar was all that had been left of what was once a funded U.S. research program to use speech recognition to help people learn to read. However, over the past few years the budget of the Interagency Educational Research Initiative has been slashed and the Learning Anytime Anywhere Partnership program has been ZEROED. The IERI and LAAP programs were created to deal with DARPA funding deficencies, but DARPA has not taken up the slack for speech recognition in language instruction. Fewer U.S. polyglots will have a far greater impact on intelligence-gathering efforts than bandaids like Project Babylon or any of the DARPA advanced speech recognition programs can possibly provide. Please join me in asking John Poindexter and his advisory board and NIST to help get this vital funding back in the budget.

Also, the Linguistic Data Consortium sent their catalog update out yesterday. As usual, there are no new corpi of people attempting to read a language as they are acquiring it, at any age.

Judging from the abstract it looks like they plan to take advantage of the PS2's ability to handle graphics. I doubt if you could get a PC that could handle graphics as well as a PS2 for under $400.

Most people seem to be focusing on the "paper" or energy use aspect (often in conjunction with paper/recycling), but are ignoring the chemical factor of computers. Every computer takes hundreds of different types of deadly chemicals and chemical products to produce, most of which goes strait into the environment. Those who don't, go inot the computer components that are quickly finding their way back into landfills, causeing just as much polution. Also, unlike naturally produced things like paper, computer components cannot be easily or cost effectivly recycled (some components, often the most dangerous ones cannot be recycled at all). This is causing very serious environmental damage. for more info, Google, or:
Cleaning Up Computer Trash - TechTV
Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition Web site
Virtual Ecology: A Brief Environmental History of Silicon Valley
Computers in a Sustainable Society
The next revolution in computers: Think Green

This year's one day seminar on Integrating Speech Technology in Language Learning has been cancelled. The InSTIL seminar was all that had been left of what was once a funded U.S. research program to use speech recognition to help people learn to read. However, over the past few years the budget of the Interagency Educational Research Initiative has been slashed and the Learning Anytime Anywhere Partnership program has been ZEROED. The IERI and LAAP programs were created to deal with DARPA funding deficencies, but DARPA has not taken up the slack for speech recognition in language instruction. Fewer U.S. polyglots will have a far greater impact on intelligence-gathering efforts than bandaids like Project Babylon or any of the DARPA advanced speech recognition programs can possibly provide. Please join me in asking John Poindexter and his advisory board and NIST to help get this vital funding back in the budget.

This year's one day seminar on Integrating Speech Technology in Language Learning has been cancelled. The InSTIL seminar was all that had been left of what was once a funded U.S. research program to use speech recognition to help people learn to read. However, over the past few years the budget of the Interagency Educational Research Initiative has been slashed and the Learning Anytime Anywhere Partnership program has been ZEROED. The IERI and LAAP programs were created to deal with DARPA funding deficencies, but DARPA has not taken up the slack for speech recognition in language instruction. Fewer U.S. polyglots will have a far greater impact on intelligence-gathering efforts than bandaids like Project Babylon or any of the DARPA advanced speech recognition programs can possibly provide. Please join me in asking John Poindexter and his advisory board and NIST to help get this vital funding back in the budget.

Yeah, I saw that woman with the rare-earth doped flouride glass at SIGGRAPH '97 or so. Just looked her up on google and found a name and familiar picture: Dr. Elizabeth Downing. Further googling turned a website for her company, 3DTL.

There was a flurry of info about it in 1997 and not nearly as much since then. Did it go private or did it fold? Further googling describes 3DTL getting a $1.9 million NIST grant in late 1998, and a $340k grant in 1999. Not much visible info since then; I supose you could call the phone number on their website to find out more. I recall one key problem being the small size of the laser-addressable cube. There are probably problems aligning lasers as you scale up in size, but this is speculating based on 5-year old memories.

I ran across a nice survey paper motivated by the problems with rotating displays that discusses a lot of the static volumetric displays including Dr. Downing's.

--LP

Ah, very good. I did actually realize that there are scientists who think there is more to evolution than the modern synthesis includes. There are plenty. There are few if any who believe in a young earth.

James Valentine is apparently one of the discoverers of HOX genes. He seems to have an idea called the "Cell-Type Hypothesis" which I can't find any information about. Not a creationist.

Google could find nothing about Stanley Awamril. But Stanley Awamrik is a researcher on the early history of life on earth. Not a creationist.

Philip Signor I found less about, but judging by this book he's not a creationist.

Peter Sadler published a paper with this incomprehensible abstract. References here and here (PDF) indicate that he is (drum roll) not a creationist.

I didn't research further. Really, is this the best you can come up with?

The USA has the National Science Foundation, which funds quite a bit of research at the university and otherwise.

Barring that, many universities hire summer interns to do research with professors. Get to know some people in the CS department and see if there are any such opportunities.

Interesting, my company is involved in a grant with the National Science Foundation to produce a multimedia database primarily for medical information which is all professionally cataloged so as to accept/reject submitted multimedia based on the quality and accuracy of the information the contributor provides. Anyway the goal is to give educators and students a place to share and find information with 100% signal, and no noise. It uses an established, focused, and standard vocabulary (Medical Subject Headings) as well as the usual keyword-based searching.

Reinventing the wheel, it seems (sigh).

-Sou|cuttr

You may be interested in checking out Carnegie Mellon's The IrYdium Project, which has been developing a Virtual Laboratory, as a free (with a lowercase "f") simulation of acid base chemistry, including thermodynamics, strong/weak acids, redox, indicator chemistry, solubility, etc. It's currently being used by a number of universities and high schools, and is funded by the NSF.

(Of course, in the interest of full disclosure, I should also mention that I'm the author of said software -- having worked on it for the last six years -- so I may be a little biased. :)