Slashdot Mirror

Here's the Coral P2P Webcache of the Main page and a example recipe

Note: Cache includes images (vs google link posted above).

PS: somebody wrote a javascript bookmarklet that'll take you to the coral cache of the page you are on. There's also a offical Coralize plugin for Mozilla

perhaps this might help him
courtesy of the Coral Distribution Network

http://www.cookingforengineers.com.nyud.net:8090/

save his bandwidth and use that

Perhaps /. scripts should be modified to automatically prepend a Coral link to user provided links.

This way, assuming someone posts a story with:

at link X you will find freebeer!

It would come up as:

at link X (non-Coral link) you will find freebeer!

Well, nice "painting style" effect, but i can't really see the gain here.

Take the carpet example: from the original image i can tell how many white dots are within the green spots.
From the 'enahced' one it is impossible to tell.

So this actualy *looses* information ... :(

It's superresolution!

There's actually a whole host of algorithms that go well beyond the junk they throw at us for "digital zoom". The two most applicable algorithms for this particular problem -- increasing the resolution of video above and beyond the source data available in a particular frame -- are temporal integration (collecting data across multiple frames) and superresolution by example (automatically associating and recalling high resolution imagery when a low resolution equivalent is shown). Some example code:

Temporal Integration: ALE
Superresolution by Example: Image Analogies -- not automated, but remains one of the cooler pieces of code ever shown at SIGGRAPH.

From the article, I'm guessing it's another ALE style stacker. They probably needed to write one for their cameras anyway.

--Dan

why didn't the author think to utilize NYU's Coral content distribution network (covered here on /. just a couple weeks ago) to keep the bandwidth off diveintopython.org? Now it's too late, since Coral can't access the site to get it in the cache.

"The success of negative campaigning isn't just the public's fault, either; it's partly because both candidates this time really do suck."

The success of negative campaigning is due in large part to the press being pathetically unwilling to do their job. Instead of determining and reporting the truth, they take the easier route of "he said/she said" reporting where they accurately repeat whatever people say, no matter how absurd. This rewards people who are willing to lie with great authority, because the general public never hears an informed, objective perspective, only two opposing partisans presented as equals.

For example:

"You remember when [Secretary of State] Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons....They're illegal. They're against the United Nations resolutions, and we've so far discovered two.* And we'll find more weapons as time goes on, But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong. We found them." -- George Bush, quoted in the Washingon Post, May 31, 2003

What the US press did not do is investigate the claims, and provide some context. Specifically, they accurately reported what Bush said, but they didn't bother to do the research to determine that, in fact, Bush's statement was not at all representative of what the intelligence community thought of the trailers.

In the UK, where there's some competition in the press (so they have to actually do real work), they did the (trivial) research of actually asking intelligence people whether the claim was true, and determined that:

*At the time of this statement, the U.S. position was that some analysts thought that the trailers could possibly have been used for menufacturing weapons. --Politex, 06.09.03

Note that in the UK, the press researched the issue and reported their results, while in the US the press only reported what Bush said.

So, because the US press is lazy (and/or fearful of being accused of being "unpatriotic" for pointing out when government representatives lie) the result was that the people in the US believed that biological weapons labs had been found in Iraq, when in fact all that was found were helium production trucks used to fill balloons.

Personally, I really like the idea of he said/she said/we said. That is, after reporting accurately what everyone says, they should do their jobs and tell us what's really going on.

Shows what you know! I just saw the parent sitting there and thought I'd jump on, crack a couple doodie jokes. It is funny, though, how scientists spend so much time working on a new technology such as Coral, and it's immediately put to use as a redirector.

Actually, Duke is also popular because in 1996 they were a hotbed for the deconstructionist/post-modernist cultural movement with their journal Social Text, until Alan Sokal, a physicist at New York University, submitted a deliberately pseudoscientific paper and they published it.

On the same day the volume of Social Text with his article came out, Sokal announced in another journal, Lingua Franca, that the article had, in fact, been a hoax, making Duke look like a bunch of idiots.

Actually, Duke is also popular because in 1996 they were a hotbed for the deconstructionist/post-modernist cultural movement with their journal Social Text, until Alan Sokal, a physicist at New York University, submitted a deliberately pseudoscientific paper and they published it.

On the same day the volume of Social Text with his article came out, Sokal announced in another journal, Lingua Franca, that the article had, in fact, been a hoax, making Duke look like a bunch of idiots.

Don't forget Coral! Just add .nyud.net:8090 onto any domain name, and use the cached web-page, just like this:

http://www.projectcensored.org.nyud.net:8090/publi cations/2005/index.html

javascript:location.href=location.href.replace( /http\:\/\/([a-zA-Z\.]+)\/(.*)/, "http://$1.nyud.net:8090/$2");void(0)

That barfs on any hostname with numbers or dashes, as well as any URL with a port number.

If you're running Mozilla or Firefox, try the Coralize extension, which lets you right-click any link or page to load it in Coral.

As an annoyed Wikipedian, I'd try to slashdot slashdot, but someone would just edit the page with the link and coralize it. :-(

Well, if you are able to load the page in the first place, do you really need the Coralized version of the page?

You could check out their (Mozilla) plugins instead, which include a right-click option "Coralize this link".

Yeah, I think more people should use the free caching from the NY University, Coral

Why not link to it using the Coral caching system?

Use this link instead: Mozilla.org.nyud.net:8090

Well...let's try out Corel http://bikesagainstbush.com.nyud.net:8090/

This suggests that
* a browser could add the nyud.net to the cookies it receives from pages sent by nyud.net
* the page author could specify nyud.net as the domain for cookies

This won't work because Coral's FAQ says they don't forward cookies (see the last point on the linked page).

Check out their logs...

Coral Statistics

...note the recent blip?

Here it is as a link.

Here.

A sequel to this book, The Man Who Mistook His Neighbour for a Hat? (And how does a hat step up? :)

You can check the page of David Grier at New York University on this topic.

First off, let me say that there is really no ambiguity about the structure of DNA anymore. Structures of DNA have been determined by x-ray crystallography, NMR, and to lower resolution, electron microscopic methods. The kinetics of the binding of DNA strands to one another has been studied in detail (and naturally the kinetics would be very sensitive to differences in the number of strands found in the structure).

Most of the x-ray structures which have been solved have used multiple heavy atom derivatives, which relieves the ambiguity of the Bessel function solutions that you referred to IIRC. Also, many of the structures which have been solved show DNA bound to the proteins which bind it in vivo. Since the structure is antiparallel double helical when bound to these proteins (and in general, the structures are consistent with large numbers of biochemical and genetic experiments on the proteins and DNA sequences in question), one has to assume that the Watson-Crick structure is generally correct.

I don't follow your thread-tying experiment, despite a degree in biochemistry. Eukaryotic DNA (which includes the DNA that Franklin, Wilkins, Watson & Crick worked on, I believe) is linear. Thus, you shouldn't be tying *any* of the threads together.

Bacterial DNA and some viral DNAs are circular, but the correct way to model them is to twist a black and white thread together, then tie them, black to black and white to white.

Anyway, you are raising the issue of topological transitions in DNA. This is a well understood and extensively studied issue. In fact, there is even a good mathematical formalism for it. For the math, see (sorry, no full text for these):

FB Fuller, The Writhing Number of a Space Curve, PNAS 68(4) 815-819, 1971
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/68/4/815

FHC Crick, Linking Numbers and Nucleosomes, PNAS 73(8) 2639-2643, 1976
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/73/8/2639

FB Fuller, Decomposition of the Linking Number of a Closed Ribbon: A Problem from Molecular Biology, PNAS 75(8) 3557-3561, 1978
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/75/8/3557

So, the need for de-linking enzymes has been appreciated for some time, and enzymes that catalyze that reaction have been identified and characterized. In fact, inhibitors of these enzymes (called topoisomerases) are used in treating cancer and bacterial infections. For more recent references and explanations, see:

http://www.maich.gr/natural/staff/sotirios/topo.ht ml
http://cmgm.stanford.edu/biochem201/Handouts/DNAto po.html
http://crab.nyu.edu/~alex/mypapers/MolBiolRev.pdf

I may be incorrect about this, but I seem to recall that the mathematician Paul Garabedian independently developed the mathematical theory for shockless supersonic flight at the same time that people in AE developed a theory. The Popular Science article does not mention Garabedian.

I never suggested any crime. Lots of authors release free ebooks these days. I don't think that's an unreasonable request to make of someone who seems to support the freedom of informationas much as this guy. Mr. Vaidhyanathan submitted a great friend-of-the-court brief in support of Emmanuel Goldstien and 2600back in 2000, so I figured the guy'd be nice enough to put his book out for open electro distro, perhaps like Bean does.

"Belleview" sounds very nice, like (from the French) a "beautiful" view, but in NYC it's famous as a psychiatric hospital/jail.

A learning AI would presumedly store the results of its decisions in its experience database. If its experience database grew far too conflicted and far too confused, the AI could conceivably be unable to do anything - stuck in a decision deadlock.

"Obviously"? Why is that? We, ourselves, are N[atural] Intelligences, each made up of several thousand interlocking neural networks. Granted, some people act like they are "ranking a decision tree" or "get stuck in decision deadlocks", but we don't all do that -- in fact, most of us don't. (Those would be the Asperger's Syndrome types and the catatonics respectively.)

In fact, procedural code makes the worst kind of AI: the overly rigid, easily broken type. See http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859 -1&q=%22expert+systems%22&btnG=Search 'expert systems': good only in a well-defined environment (which IMHO the world is not). Everything is very carefully hand-coded for optimality, but if the system gets an input which doesn't match its parameters, it degrades *not* gracefully.

We don't know how to make an AI.

You don't know how to make an AI. Read Doug Lenat's work on AM, Eurisko and http://www.cyc.com/ CYC: *he* knows. Also read http://i5.nyu.edu/~mm64/x52.9265/january1966.html Joseph Weizenbaum: *he* found out that you get out of AI what you put into it. 8^D

...we don't have those three laws.

Sure we do.

Robot version:
First Law: A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

Second Law: A robot must obey orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Human version:
1) Be nice to each other. Take care of each other.
2) Obey, except if the order is 'unlawful', in that it would involve hurting others.
3) Take care of yourself.

(However, the human version is not really a good 'translation' of the robotic version, because it is lacking the implicit 'master/slave' subtext: the concept that these are imperatives, rather than just guidelines (because humans have, relative to robots, "free will".)

If these were, in fact, imperatives, what you would then have is a religion (non-monotheistic category): something somewhat like, say, Confucianism.

Have you seen teenages with their cell phones, some of these kids can enter text like mad people. Entering text by moving a joypad or something simple in simple patterns is an idea that works really well. Ken Perlin (of Perlin noise) had a great idea based on this a few years back, it deserves to be brought back to life.

A good product based on this could work really well. Indeed, you could set up an N-Gage to do this and you might wind up with something that you can enter text into FASTER than with a normal PDA.

How To Pitch Projects

Thinking Creatively

Pre-Production And Production

Teambuilding Skills

Video Role-Play Sessions

Understanding Rigging And Animation Controls

Many state AG offices will deal with MS this way.

New Mexico's AG settled their part of the anti-trust trial for US$100K plus legal expenses; somewhat less than what MS makes in the way of profits in the state. Maybe they were giving Bill a pass because he spent some time in NM before moving back to Washington.

As far as most people are concerned, MS owns an essential facility for computers and the product vouchers are practically as good as cash.

It shows that most of the public, including those in state law enforcement offices, remain unaware of alternatives that are much better than they suspect (open source, MacOS...) .

I'm not sure what overpowered means in this context.

The corners are easier to defend and create a base for expansion along the sides, true. But they lack influence in the center. You can do just as well pinning your opponent's stones in the corner and grabbing a chunk of the center.

Now, as a double-digit kyu, I like to try for corners. But that's because I still can't estimate influence from other stones worth diddly so I have difficulty building towards the center. Having a corner

When someone from MIT says peer-to-peer is a good thing, he's talking about peer-to-peer as an architecture. He does not mean "KaZaA 0wnz!! fr33 pr0n = 1337!!!!111oneoneone." People are interested in peer-to-peer for reasons other than file-sharing because they're scalable architectures that can handle load balancing very well, and have no central point of failure.

Most peer-to-peer research in universities regards creating better, faster Distributed Hash Tables, or DHTs for short. Typically, for N nodes on an overlay network connected by a DHT, insertion and queries come at log(N) cost. MIT has one of the best, called Chord. Some DHTs are very fragile and their routing topology can "break" when under extreme churn (when a flash of nodes suddenly join or leave the network), or malicious nodes attempt to manipulate other nodes' routing tables by creating fake identities (see the Sybil attack) -- Chord has been shown to be very resistant to both. Other notables are Kademlia from NYU (which is under the hood of eMule), and Pastry from Rice (Microsoft collaborated).

MIT has done some pioneering research in DHTs, and they have a lot of great minds on it. I'm making my own peer-to-peer program (hopefully it will be ready in a few months) and it will incorporate quite a few of the ideas they've developed. One of their ideas that I find particularly interesting (and I think should be incorporated into BitTorrent, because it seems like the perfect application) is called Vivaldi. You can read for yourself on how it works, but when applying it to BitTorrent, basicially the tracker would give you peers it thinks you have a low ping time to, as opposed to a random list which may be sub-optimal.

They're also involved in Project IRIS, which aims to develop a decentralized Internet infrastructure using all the latest DHT technology. It's funded indirectly through -- gasp -- the government via the NSF.

So yeah, don't just think that MIT is jumping on the bandwagon. They've been on the bleeding edge for some time.

- shadowmatter

Sorry, but a secure runtime can never trust that the intermediate bytecode is correct. Any language whose "complier" produces an intermediate step that is then interpreted into native machine code can be hijacked by a sufficiently clever and/or persistant developer. Please refer to Jasmin (a "Java assembler") for my proof-by-example. If a Java VM implementation ignores the security rules (sandboxing and bytecode validataion), a malicious developer could use Jasmin to write an exploit.

Never forget: security is a process, not a simple goal. Production systems which face a network must have professional paranoids designing, reviewing, and maintaining their security infrastructure.

They teach assembler in my school's CS program second year. The whole class is basically 8086 assembler and then the end of the class gets into more advanced assembler coding (like AT&T style and NASM). The class ended with an overview of Jasmin, which is basically a Java assembler... the purpose being to understand how the JVM works and to code directly for it. At the time I thought this was strange, but considering the only "Programming Language" courses my CS program has are in Java, this actually made sense. (Note: other classes expect a lot of programming, but expect that you already know C/C++/Java/whatever.) This teaches the graduates here who aren't thinking about it already to be wary of what kind of code is being executed by the JVM.

I do think this is important, and am spending a lot of time on my own to learn as much as I can assembler/C-wise, since I know jobs I get here and there (like my summer job) will require high-level languages (Java, C#) and I don't want to lose that low-level knowledge.

It's actually harder for us (the younger generation), because there have been so many abstractions that you really have to be on top of things to understand what's going on at the machine level. At this point, programs tend to go from source to bytecode to being executed on the physical machine, and in order to optimize programs you have to know what's going on at every step. That and you have to have a lot of discipline to learn the low level stuff, since the high level stuff can make you so productive without even thinking about it or putting in any effort. But this discipline ultimately makes you a better high-level programmer too, so it's worth it regardless...

Yeah, add that to Ibsen's suggestion that the majority is always wrong, and things start looking pretty gloomy.

-Ted

I thought of that too--then I checked to see if anyone else had mentioned it. Rather waste a search, here's another good link.

From the projects actual site:

"Using Global Positioning, WIFI internet connections, cell phones and custom software designed by the Pac-Manhattan team, Pac-man and the ghosts will be tracked from a central location"

mov

The project website is here where it mentions the top score is 20,000 so far . . . that's a lot of city blocks to have run - even if you assume they maximized each power pellet (4*(200+400+800+1600)), that leaves 8000 points, and at 30 points per block, that's 266 blocks . . . I guess they beat the board a couple times?

and a movie to go along with it too!

At least they look good in those costumes. Oh, wait...

Funniest thing I've seen in a long time!

http://www.cs.nyu.edu/cs/faculty/davism/

What NYU is really like

Fuck CS. No one goes to NYU for academics.

• joking
• nuts
• Alan Sokal repeating the "Social Text" spoof for /.

Your affirmation is false, for Ken Perlin is the one who designed Google's festive period Java applets -- applets I am too lazy to search for in Google's festive period logos archive, so here are the links found on Ken Perlin's official site: Valentine's day applet and Easter Bunny applet.

Um, I'm hoping you're not suggesting procedural textures originated in the demo scene.

Ever heard of Ken Perlin?

Programmer who actually won an Academy Award for basically inventing this?

Anyone?

This thread is already full of very knowledgable people expoudning at great length as to why Java is not slower (and infact, is often faster than "native code"). Therefore, I will not waste my time writing an indepth response to those who would argue that 1 + 1 in Java is somehow slower than 1 + 1 in C/C++. This post does that quite well. What that comment does not do, however, is explain why some Java programs do, in fact, feel slower than native programs.

I'll simplify this as much as I can without diverging from the technical truth too much. Most complaints that Java is slow come from two sources. First, you must wait for the virtual machine to load, and depending on the libraries used by the program, that can be costly in terms of IO, which is always very slow. Second, Java's GUI toolkits are fairly heavy weight--they do a lot and many programs take advantage of much of the functionality they provide. I won't embark into the details, but to those inclined to find out why should read more about Swing and what Java2D libraries offer. Because of all they do, many Java programs with GUIs feel a little sluggish. Of course, keep in mind that most software sits idle 99% of the time while the user decides what to do. So otherwise, Java code that is not bound by user response time is very fast.

One quick post script: because the Java language is object oriented, complex software will do a great deal of memory allocation and garbage collection as objects come in and out of use. That too, is very expensive. However, there is no reason that you have to use the Java programming language to code for the virtual machine. Case in point: Jasmin. In theory, you could write compilers that generate JVM bytecode from any language (and a former professor of mine is currently in the proceess of writing a book that explains precisely how to do that).

Actually I would say that it's a good example of media presenting it as something science can't explain.

It's a news story, not refereed article. (You can tell because no subscription was required to read it.) What do you expect, a "fair and balanced" reporter's statement that no scientists have presented replicatable explanations -- but they could if they really wanted to?

If you read the article you may note that they have no citations from any of the billion of scientist who are apparently there.

"Citations"? When was the last time you read a scientific article by reputable scientists saying, effectively, "Here's something a lot of people have witnessed and it beats the shit out of us what's happening"?

Certainly, the news that 1/6 of the world's population have become scientists and are visiting this tiny village should be covered in something like Demographics Journal. But even if that article were accepted for publication, the delays mean we won't be able to read about it for another year or two. Thank Sagan we can read authoritative, unrefereed Web sites to get the real story that the news media are afraid to print!

What these people do is a good way to sell more papers.

What more scientific way of refuting data than by impuning the methods of the reporters? I mean, aside from the Sokal and Lomborg affairs, we all know that scientists publish for the purist of motives, right?

Demon-haunted science bigots is more like it. Feh!

Tyler

IMHO, the discovery of a real-world application of the idempotent law that was Boole's greatest accomplishment. One could argue that Lebnitz and Boole had independently discovered this. This is not unlike Hamilton's discovery of an application for non-commutative algebra.

Boole's contribution to logic was profound. First, a real world model for any mathematical property ensures the consistency of that model. Boole's work provided an abstraction for elementary set theory. The key to this abstraction is idempotency. The aggregate of set A and itself is the set A (i.e. A+A=A). Thus, Boolean algebra formalizes the basic set theoretic operations of union and intersection, which in turn is almost trivially isomorphic to a Boolean ring. I could create all kinds of stupid rules [insert your favorite slam on mathematics here] that have no meaning in the real world. Most importantly, Boole seemed to be the first to attempt to bridge the gap between abstract thought and mathematics. Admittedly there was some previous work in attempting to formalize|classify all syllogistic reasoning. It was the first step towards a unified theory of logic and ultimately what is hope to be a universal theory of symbolism (see Chomsky's mathematical linguistics).

The irony about mathematics is that often the best ideas are childishly simple. It's not the proof of deep theorems (although that has it's place) that often has the greatest impact. It's the fresh applications of mathematical rigour to some real world scenario. Thus, mathematics is often at it's weakest when done in isolation. Incidentally, Knuth's work in algorithm analysis was revolutionary. In a world described by (K-Complexity (AIT)|cellular automata|simple computer programs) algorithm analysis and ultimately a proof of P not= NP may be to hold the key to the fundamental laws of nature (i.e. physics, biology, and chemistry).

Incidentally, the Martin Davis' The Universal Computer is a great popular science book on this topic. A free copy of the introduction is here. This book manages to introduce the ideas of Turing (Turing-Post?) Machines and the Diagonal Method to the lay reader. The author is a respected logician and computer scientist who studied under Church and Post.