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Here's a much more detailed article:

http://news.nus.edu.sg/press-r...

"This paper has virtually zero substance."

0.04 g/cm^3, to be precise.

Earth/Luna is a binary planet by the criteria.

It's not. The center of gravity is under Earth's surface.

Most significantly, Luna's orbit is never convex with respect to the Sun.

The Moon's orbit is convex.

No - you're confusing radio bands with the actual EM radiation spectrum. That's low frequency for EMR - in the 10^4 um range on this chart: http://www.crisp.nus.edu.sg/~r... which is pretty far in the low end. Considering these are medical studies, they would look at the bands of EMR across the whole spectrum. Consider that calling these "Ultra High" seems a misnomer given that medical radiation often concerns x ray wavelengths.

And, yes, they're low power too.

Singaporeans liked the concept of Daylight Saving so much that in 1982 they moved to it permanently.

Not so. See the article Why is Singapore in the 'Wrong' Time Zone? for a better explanation.

like the one i work at: http://www.mixedreality.nus.edu.sg/ there are many more like this all over acedemia, which employ practitioners from a wide range of fields to collaborate.

Experimental evidence of transmutation of Hg into Au under laser exposure of Hg nanodrops in D2O

http://www.springerlink.com/content/711615204x0740m7/

Single Bubble Sonoluminescence

http://sps.nus.edu.sg/~pokailin/acad/72.pdf

Yea that's the first thing I thought as well; the principle is similar to video interlacing from back in the day, except that this is more sophisticated, and could conceivably be used to capture extremely high definition, extremely high framerate footage.

I could only read the abstract, but this just seems to be the reverse of Frameless Rendering: Double Buffering Considered Harmful which relates to rendering 3D graphics in scattered sets of pixels.

Much as I like to be other wise genie is out of the bottle here , only thing we can do is to keep design of your app as platform neutral as possible. than attack the implementation part with tools for cross platform development , Java , J2ME is one way , there are other tools like Mobile Distelry ,Phonegap and Mitr trying to solve this problem only . but we have a long way to go on this . for more detail i suggest you read this excellent paper from a NUS professor named RAJAPAKSE . it will give you a lot of insight about the same .
Disclaimer : I work for SpiceLabs the company behind Mitr

For iPhone, please try this: http://tiger.dbs.nus.edu.sg/~xiechao/i/slashdot.pl read only though

The Moon, in it's orbit, never engages in spirals. In fact, its orbit (as seen from the Sun, or any outside point of reference) is always convex.

Actually, that's nowhere near true. Don't let anyone or anything pigeon whole you, and especially not some semi scientific study done for entertainment purposes claiming that your mental abilities are declining in the 20s.

How about some data that shows at what age those of us that use our brains on a daily basis achieve our best work:

http://sps.nus.edu.sg/~limchuwe/articles/youth.html

Considering that at 22 most people are fresh out of college and their brain still well exercised.

After that they join the corporate slavery, where 5 years in cubes destroys their mind and numbs them down to the obedience level demanded by their PHBs, and corporate masters.

A few more decades of that and they will be completely senile.

Those who stay in academia on the other hand make their biggest achievements in late thirties (most at about 38).

http://sps.nus.edu.sg/~limchuwe/articles/youth.html

Amazon et al should use a trust metric, preferably one that deals gracefully with attempts to manipulate it. Perhaps something like Advogato's metric could be used, or the manipulation-resistant versions of EigenTrust. What metric one may use, it would help decreasing spammers' powers, since they would presumably not be able to integrate themselves as thoroughly into the system, and definitely not do so in the kind of en masse, flooding, way that traditional spammers make use of.

1. Good CS programs: Two great universities with well-regarded CS programs - NTU and NUS
2. Language: All classes are in English; most people speak English (it's quirky Singlish, but you'll get by)
3. Infrastructure: The country and both schools have excellent infrastructure and your basic living comforts would be similar to or better than in the US
4. Travel and exposure: It's cheap and easy to explore neighboring countries (Malysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Australia, China, India, Korea, etc). You can experience a rich diversity of cultures solely through weekend getaways
5. Diversity: Singapore itself is pretty diverse - you can experience elements of Chinese, Indian and other cultures within the city-state.
6. It's not "the West": Chances are, you have visited or will visit Europe anyway. Singapore will expose you to an entirely different worldview. Yet, you will not sacrifice basic comforts that you take for granted in the US

Full disclosure - I am an NTU alumnus.

Maybe they've been worried about something like this happening, except with lava.

It joins these wonderful architectural accomplishments:

http://swedish.wunderground.com/data/wximagenew/p/pjgeraci/188.jpg
http://www.usp.nus.edu.sg/writing/folio/vol2/duck_side.jpg
http://i-eclectica.org/wordpress/wp-content/my images/architecture/architecture2/piano house 1.jpg
http://dvice.com/pics/shoe_building.jpg
http://dvice.com/pics/japan_upsidedown_house.jpg

I'd love working in the building, myself. I can imagine each time I cross over the big gap between the most offset buildings. Each time I did this, I'd need to go up a level to the walkway and cross over a bunch of unused space which will provide more external surface area, thus making cooling more expensive. I'd just love it. People wasting my time on something inefficient is what I live for.

But why a bar code? Why not a bug? Or a CD ROM? Or a finger pressing an ANY key?

The 1st that come to my mind when i read that was the evolution of a programmer, when a "program" evolving started to get back thin in lines didnt meant that were a step backwards.

UCT = universal civilian time, which is UTC with epsilon to UT1 increased to a large enough value that it becomes possible to publish the leap second table 20 years in advance. Because this only needs to accommodate future *uncertainty* of the earth's rotational period (taking into account the known decay term), I imagine epsilon wouldn't be much greater than 5s in practice, but it would require some fancy math and quasi-speculative models to determine probable bounds.

There is plenty of reason to keep civilian time on solar terms. I've been reading a lot of research lately on the importance of circadian phase to human health. We need a civilian standard consistent with civilian health.

If this does not work for the mil/aerospace industries, they can decide their own standard in relation, just as long as they don't redefine a known standard under an existing name.

As far as continental drift is concerned, that's a matter of establishing civilian leapzones with respect to the astronomical divisions. Ordinarily, the analemma that determines whether midnight is mid night doesn't take into account tectonic drift.

A while back I had the notice of also establishing season's saving time. Right after Halloween, we roll the calander back to the beginning of October, then after Halloween II, we fast forward to December 1st, leaving only three weeks for xmas shopping.

If any true geeks remain here, rather than geek-wannabees (how pathetic is that?) or apron-string apers, this is actually a good read:
http://www.math.nus.edu.sg/aslaksen/projects/tsy.pdf

Here's a link with a bit more practical info, and a video of a working model. As conjectured elsewhere this machine has a tail rotor with a vertical shaft (like a helicopter main rotor) to compensate for the cyclo-rotors.

http://serve.me.nus.edu.sg/cyclocopter/

I think the point he was trying to make was not that they were invented because of space programs but that they were popularized by them. As qouted by one NASA Astronaut "Without velcro, we can never go to space.". As for Tang. It was initially intended as a breakfast drink, but sales were poor until NASA began using it on Gemini flights in 1965, and that use was heavily advertised. Since that time, it has been associated with the U.S. manned spaceflight program.

The disaster occurred as the company, Lapindo Brantas, drilled thousands of feet to tap natural gas and used practices that geologists, mining engineers and Indonesian officials described as faulty.

Eight villages are completely or partly submerged, with homes and more than 20 factories buried to the rooftops. Some 13,000 people have been evacuated. The four-lane highway west of here has been cut in two, as has the rail line, dealing a serious blow to the economy of this region in East Java, an area vital to the country's economy. The muck has already inundated an area covering one and a half square miles.

But as the liabilities have escalated, Lapindo was sold - for $2 - last month to an offshore company, owned by the Bakrie Group, and many fear it will declare bankruptcy, allowing its owners to walk away.

So now Ghandi and all his fellow protesters have to be non-violent AND immune to searing pain.

They were repeatedly beaten and at times massacred by hundreds. I'd say they were already immune to all the things any protester in a modern democratic country is subjected to.

The Amritsar Massacre.

The vast majority of Indians are not native speakers of english
http://www.thecore.nus.edu.sg/post/india/hohenthal /5.2.html

The total number of native speakers of english in Britain and all countries formerly under British colonial rule is less than the number of native speakers of english in the U.S.A.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language#Geog raphic_distribution

Total number of native speakers of english: 320-340 million
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_ total_speakers
http://sirio.deusto.es/abaitua/konzeptu/nlp/top100 .htm

Total number of native speakers of english in the USA: approximately 200 million
http://www.ethnicharvest.org/regions/50languages.h tml

When my school started to offer friendly email address (as opposed to unfriendly uXXXXXXX@nus.edu.sg) you could only sign up for addresses using a combination of your initials and your name. Smartass that I am, I signed up for a@nus.edu.sg.

It's a college, and long story short seems like every few months somebody testing out the new shopping cart or mail server they made, sends me test emails. I've had credit card information more than once. I reply and tell whoever it is that I'm getting the emails, and it stops.

It's a good way to liven up an inbox that usually only gets circulars and spam.

$ enlightenment_remote -module-unload ibar (not essential, but having both is rather redundant)
$ enlightenment_remote -module-load engage
$ enlightenment_remote -module-enable engage

For anyone interested in testing out Enlightenment 17 in Fedora, you can find a repository here: http://sps.nus.edu.sg/~didierbe/news_e17.html I've used it with FC2 & 3, haven't tried FC4 yet, but so far it's been fairly stable. I do still prefer E16, but it's worth a shot.

Didier's Fedora repository has up-to-date FC3 packages that work just fine in FC4 (using them atm, in fact), however the site seems to be down at the moment...

Development has actually been moving very rapidly in the last few months as E17 reaches maturity. Get-E is a good place to watch for user-related updates. Or, if you're more interested in the developer work, there's Edevelop.

What's missing is the genetic algorithms built neural network deciding which action to take.

It looks more like
MonsterAction action = myNeuralNet->pickAction(inputs);
doAction(action) ; ...
myNeuralNet->feedBack(feedBackInputs);

where the first set of inputs is a bunch of parameters picked from the environment (direction and distance to each player, health % each player, class of each player, etc), and the second set of inputs is some information about the success of the doAction (number of players hurt, how much, how much I got hurt etc).

The second set of inputs retrains the neural network a little bit, and theoretically the doAction gets a little smarter over time.

The problem of course, is that it takes a pretty big neural net to play any game very smartly, and a lot of training time. That's why most games only bother with pre trained neural nets (at least among people I've talked to) and in my case I have dynamic training, but its mostly a toy as there isn't enough time to learn anything meaningful, and the neural net can't be big enough for performance reasons anyway. To really play a game like D2 effectively (at a guess) the AI would need probably a few hundred inputs, many thousands of nodes, and in the tens of thousands of connections. I could happily use up several gigabytes of memory and roughly 100 p4s worth of cpu just to do a competent learning AI.

For more information, have a look at this:
http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~cs6211/papers/TNNKChel lapillaAndDBFogelText.pdf

It'll give you an idea of the computing resources necessary just to play something like checkers effectively.

My original point in posting on this topic was just to note that game devs aren't ignorant of the computer science behind AI, and that in fact we've been developing and using 'real' AI techniques for a long time. It's really just that they don't work very well in the context of such complex game environments that you don't really see more talk about the subject.

If you want us to accommodate your inability to improve single threaded performance and rearchitect 20 years of software for parallel computing, then how about this:

DON'T CALL US WEENIES! Ya bunch of Verilog writin', pocket protector wearing misfits, who take six months to implement what we can do in five lines of code, and cannot maintain app. integrity even in a single core non-hyperthreaded CPU! (See here: http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~abhik/pdf/pact04.pdf).

Yours Sincerely,
A Software Engineer.

"Adrian David Cheok".

Reporter Lakshmi should really appreciate the additional 'touch' capability!

The OSNews story has a link to a FC2 yum repo in one of the coments, but I haven't found a source repo for those packages (I'm on PPC, so I need to rebuild the packages :().

Are we talking about the country that ran over student protestors with tanks, or not?

How about opening fire on 10,000 men, women and children, peacefully gathered to celebrate a religious festival?

Oh wait, that wasn't China! That was Britain!

I guess the British ought to be described, to this day, as a nation ruled by a gestapo-like military, eh?

Oh but wait you say, that tragedy happened a long time ago.

So, believe it or not, did Tiananmen. Politically, 1989 was an eternity ago. But it's difficult to make this clear to someone who hasn't bothered to go to China and witness how much the nation has changed, politically and socially, since those years.

Which is not to say that it's perfect, but the days of the lone student standing in front of a tank are well behind us.

The Japanese architect Shigeru Ban has some interesting designs using waterproofed paper tubes - they are really beautiful. See Paper Architecture, A Case Study: Cardboard Shelters, Kobe Earthquake January 1995, Time's Innovators article on him, and a Google Images search of his work

IMO, the best direction for natural programming is embedded domain-specific languages. The best direction for natural debugging is a harder problem. It's well known that many expert programmers still find "printf" debugging the best option, which suggests to me that tracing systems are promising. Of course, powerful type systems eliminate many possible run-time bugs, but then you need a type debugger....

I'm from the National Univesity of Singapore, and we have a system called IVLE. Click on "IVLE Web tutorials" to have a look around. They've made this into a commercial product, and are now selling it to other colleges and Unis.

I'm from the National Univesity of Singapore, and we have a system called IVLE. Click on "IVLE Web tutorials" to have a look around. They've made this into a commercial product, and are now selling it to other colleges and Unis.

Although gravity doesn't disapear after 20 miles, you can acheive geostationary orbit at 22 miles - so they weren't too far off.

No, wait - I think I'm missing the obvious ... they were 22 miles off

Anyway, from the link:

Computing the shadow of the Moon aided the calculation of time and planetary positions. Many works were composed on this topic, the major ones being: Candracchyaganita I by Paramesvara, followed by Candracchayaganita II by Nilakantha, and Candracchayaganita III and IV that remain anonymous. Other works include Chayaslaka by Acyuta Pisarati, and three anonymous texts Candracchayanayanopavah, Chayaganita (four different volumes), and Suryacchayadiganita (two different works).

Which was my main itch in the first place, really; of the few Sanskrit texts I've read, there have been none where the author seemed to have willingly chosen to remain anonymous; the concept of a 'Sutradhar' (literally 'director', but more accurate to translate here it as 'narrator') was pretty strong back then (even in mathematical texts, incidentally; Leelavati in Bhaskaracharya's works as an example), and most authors used to offer themselves as willing narrators. And indeed, they often used to present themselves as characters of their works, much like Night-saab, Hitchcock and Subhash Ghai these days; both Valmiki and Maharishi Veda Vyas were actual characters in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata respectively.

This, of course, is not to say that the authors of the CCG III and IV weren't willingly anonymous; just that, it's impossible to tell from this text. It is also not to say that you're wrong in your assertion; quite possibly, it is I who needs to read even more and even further. :-)

Nevertheless, shameless self-plug time: Many moons ago, I was a student of Indian astronomy. :-)

In a NYTimes opinion piece in March, David Brooks made an astute comment about what success in life is all about:

"Once you reach adulthood, the key to success will not be demonstrating teacher-pleasing competence across fields; it will be finding a few things you love, and then committing yourself passionately to them."

It really is true. No matter what you decide to do, do them with aplomb, whether it's music, cooking, computers, whatever. But most of all, don't force yourself to fit into the boxes the world makes for you. There's money in every field; follow your passions first, stick with them, and be open to opportunities, and you'll find the money.

You may enjoy the article as well while you're en route to college. I found a copy here (old Times content is only available for $)

http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~rtan/articles/success. html

Actually the Earth orbits the Sun. The Moon orbits the Earth which orbits the Sun. mmkay.

Jack the sound barrier. Bring the noise.

I'm not anywhere even close to a biology major, but curiosity killed . . . err, maybe I shouldn't use that one. Anyway:

Some Googling on the subject says that light from Proxima Centauri reaches the human eye at about 100 photons per second. Proxima is about 4.2 ly ~= 4e16 m away from us, so we're on a sphere of surface area 2e34 m^2. I don't have a mirror handy, but let's say the human eye (pupil) has a surface area of 20 mm^2 = 2e-5 m^2. So Proxima is putting out 1e2 * (2e34/2e-5) = 1e41 photons per second.

Proxima is a red dwarf, so let's say for the sake of argument that it's spitting out 700nm photons, with E = hc/l = 6.6e-34*3e8/7e-7 = 2.8e-19 J; that gives is 2.8e22 J/s of output. Einstein says E=mc^2, so m = E/c^2 = 2.8e22/9e16 = 3e5 kg/s.

If you actually use these numbers for anything, you're insane, and I refuse to furnish you with two million hamburgers a second.

I'm a physicist, but IIRC a rod (monochrome sensor) absorbs a photon 50% of the time, and from that absorbed photon outputs a signal about 50% of the time. Hence, about 4 photons to have a high probability of detection.

The colour sensors (cones) are less sensitive. Whilst googling for the sensitivity of these I found a page detailing the sensitivity of the eye It needs about 500 to 900 photons/sec to actually register. However, I've already written about rods so I'm not going to delete that!

Please check out the link that I provided.
The Moon's primary orbit is no more around the Earth than the Sun's is, although it may look like it from here.
(For example, we also say that the Sun "sets", even though it really doesn't.)
The Earth and Moon do orbit each other, but the primary orbit of each is around the Sun.

It is a terminology issue in the same way that defining what a planet is is a terminology issue.

You could change the definition to say that the largest (or heaviest?) body in a group of star-orbiting objects is the planet, and that the others are moons.
This would make the Earth a planet and the Moon a moon.

If a uniformly round object's primary orbit is an orbit of our sun and meets X size requirement, it is a planet. This excludes moons that way since its primary orbit is not around the sun.

Here are pictures and discussion of the moon's orbit about the sun.

If you don't mind studying abroad, you can try Universities in Singapore and Germany.

Singapore has this option of you earning your degree and working there. If I'm right, both Nanyang Technological University and National University of Singapore support this. The last time I checked, there was also something called Singapore MIT Alliance, which is again a fully funded programme.

The next option is Germany - education in Germany is absolutely free - you just have to pay for the living. And I'm guessing that getting scholarship to this effect should not be that hard. And besides, Germany has some real top notch research institutes and tech schools.

Human Pacman