Slashdot Mirror

You would have a valid point IF Apple had in fact been the first to do pinch on multi touch. They were not. There has been experimental systems since the 90s, and MS came out with the Surface the same year Apple came out with the iphone.

Here, look at this from 2006 : http://cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/

The reason there was no multitouch devices before the iphone was the enormous cost of making them. Remember that the iphone initially cost nearly $600 with contract. After Apple showed there was a market for this type of tech, others followed suit. But to say that Apple invented multi-touch, or pinch to zoom, is a complete fallacy.

I'm pretty sure you don't need, for example, the 15 megapixels that a modern SLR gives you; the reason you need so many in an image or a monitor is because you can look anywhere in it, so it has to match your maximum resolution everywhere, even though you can only see a tiny bit of it at once. (This is massively wasteful, so you can achieve great compression if you know where people are looking.)

It seems that the only solution is to add so much noise that data miners will have a really hard time filtering out the real data.

Here is a start.

Here you go:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3173
http://mrl.nyu.edu/~dhowe/TrackMeNot/

I don't actually use it, I just googled it.. oh the irony.

I hope you realize this will be a very long, slow and painful execution...

Dr Nadrian Seeman has been working with DNA as a nanomechanical framework for decades now. Using the well-known mechanical and electrostatic properties of DNA as a sort of erector set. I'm not too surprised he's furthered this work.

TrackMeNot for Firefox is useful for masking your real search engine queries with randomised search terms. That's a start. Not sure if there's a Chrome equivalent. Is Chrome that much of a necessity? Firefox does the job (though it freezes far too often for me). Otherwise, why not exercise some self-constraint and try products from Yahoo, or even host your own? (First post? :P)

I'd wonder how it'll affect users of this nice Firefox extension...

PS Are there any such applications in existence today?

TrackMeNot

Yep. TrackMeNot's been available for a little while.

And here's Bruce Schneier's reason not to use it.

You could also try CustomizeGoogle or the Scroogle scraper...

trackmenot

If Google or others sites are recording & selling our search keys, here's a solution:

- develop an application that - while our browser is idle -

      selects BOGUS search keys AT RANDOM and sends

      them to Google as if we'd entered them in real searches

Ie, feed Google a "noisy" stream of search keys, at about
the same speed as we'd be sending them, if they were
real searches.

I have no doubt that such an application would become
very popular, very soon...

Any takers?

PS Are there any such applications in existence today?

Track Me Not

http://mrl.nyu.edu/~dhowe/trackmenot/index.html

Indeed: http://www.nyu.edu/classes/keefer/ww1/byrne.html

Maybe he knew that an LED is essentially the same as a photodiode. Of course a one-pixel camera isn't going to do anyone any good...and it'd be one hell of a hacking job to take over a DVD player and rewire the connections.

I've used TrackmeNot for a long time, and today I can see why that's been a great idea!

http://mrl.nyu.edu/~dhowe/trackmenot/
'TrackMeNot runs in Firefox as a low-priority background process that periodically issues randomized search-queries to popular search engines"
Now load that up with your 600 congresscritters and Senators and do your part to help warm up the NSA.

Mac OS X's operating system is XNU. The XNU is the operating system (so called "hybrid kernel"). The XNU operating system kernel is a Mach 3.0. Mach 3.0 is just a microkernel and all other OS parts (servers) are from the (Free)BSD (networking, filesystems etc) and Driver I/O Kit.

The Darwin is then a XNU operating system + development tools. You need to darwin to get the XNU operating system compiled so it will work with the Mac OS X API's.

If you want, you can just compile the Mach 3.0 microkernel, while leaving all other OS parts (XNU) in touch.

http://cs.nyu.edu/~pcg234/xeniac/compile_darwin_x86.html

http://dinomite.net/2006/darwin-kernel-compile/

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f2/Diagram_of_Mac_OS_X_architecture.svg/556px-Diagram_of_Mac_OS_X_architecture.svg.png (even that it has GNU-like propaganda in it)

Even GNU's own operating system Hurd, use derivated Mach 3.0 microkernel what is called "GNU Mach". GNU Mach is the kernel of the Hurd operating system what is part of GNU/Hurd development environment. All other Hurd OS parts are written by GNU people but the microkernel is copied from Mach 3.0.

If someone utilizes Excel to its full "potential," they're probably producing absolute garbage:
http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~jsimonof/classes/1305/pdf/excelreg.pdf
http://www.daheiser.info/excel/frontpage.html

I have a question about the feasibility of the design. As I understand the video a user rests their hands on the 10gui input device and the capacitive sensor detects the positions of those ten fingers. Pretty normal multitouch so far. Where the 10gui design is innovative is the combination of the resistive layer to detect 'clicks'. If you watch the video at 5 minutes you'll see what I'm talking about and where I'd like to understand how this is being done. The problem is, you cannot detect multiple presses with a resistive layer - that's a basic limitation of that tech and no way around it afaik. My initial reaction to this was to think 'hey, this is just a concept for now, lets look in to the boring details later' so I went back and did some research on the other multiple touch sensor technologies and found a very interesting problem. A very fundamental problem too! Take a look at this video http://cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirsense/ So, all the other multitouch sensors are optical - That I've found, and I would dearly love to be corrected! - are optical. So the fundamental problem is how do you 'see' the difference between a user resting their fingers on a surface and the user pressing down on the surface. You need to use two very different technologies - as 10gui proposes. But, all the other technologies are single touch only. I use a multitouch sensor for my desktop (wacom bamboo 8x5) and it is tiring as hell to hover your hands above the input device. The only way these device will work is as demoed in the video. However, I dont think its technically possible.

Btw, what is C programming language? Is it an obsolete computer language like Visual Basic 6 or machine code?

It's actually a tool created by communist conspirators to enable the creation of the infamous Lunix operating system intended to subvert our free society. That is why you're well advised to stay away from it if you ever see it, stick to God-blessed, corporate-backed tools such as Java and .NET, and report any sightings of C programmers in the wild (generally identified by the beard) to BSA and NSA.

'Any human can tell that it lacks any meaning at all.'

Hopefully:

http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

Instead and looking at your preferences it analysis social interactions and establishes a method by which they can mimic those social interactions in order to what, manipulate your choices and future social interactions.

What is interesting is specially they are seeking to monitor non-customers ie. using customers as judas goats to analyse the behaviour of the people they contact. Reminds me of the whole g-mail thing, whose email is it, the person who sends it (a gmail customer), the person who receives it (a non-gmail customer who now has no choice as to whether some of their email is analysed) or the corporations that temporarily handles it.

It's like more and more companies are looking at the privacy invasiveness of facebook, google, M$ and seeking to spread it into every facet of human life, to what convert humanity into droid buy bots, the 21st century equivalent of consumers. Looks like we are going to need tools like this http://mrl.nyu.edu/~dhowe/TrackMeNot/faq.html#options not only to obscure searches but also to obscure email and even voip phone calls. So in the future 80% of your communications will not be genuine but random obscuring coms designed to regain your privacy by burying under a ton of obscuring, pointless and wasteful coms. It seems much simpler, simpler and more energy efficient to legislate back in privacy and respect for the individual, let's get some 'mind your own fucking business' back into the market.

Since this thread might have some people still using PowerMac 8500 and related machines, I've recently hacked the 7300/7500/7600/8500/8600 Graphics Driver to support resolutions in the 1600x1200 range on a stock PowerMac 8500 (probably works on the other models as well). I now have a 20" 1680x1050 LCD connected and working perfectly, locking on to the analog signal with perfect pixels. I figured out where the timing parameters are stored in the driver, allowing other new resolutions as well (like 1440x900), and fine-tuning of the pixel rate. Even with a CRT, this allows higher resolutions. Contact me if you'd like try the driver or have a different resolution.

SQL is great for financial data.

Actually, this isn't true either. See this article for pointers to some of the failings of SQL in dealing with financial data, particularly time series (e.g. sales figures, share prices, etc.). Here's another take on the problem, which essentially is that SQL doesn't recognise that there can be relationships between the rows of a table (e.g., "this happened after this").

But it's apparently also not like the old days when the university provided the resources.

No, universities still provide labs and other resources but many expect students to have their own computers if not a laptop. Here's NYU Stern's requirements. Not only do they require a laptop but Office 2007 Pro Student for a Windows PC or Office 2008 for Mac Student. Now the licenses for them are only $70 or $65 for the Mac version. For Macs they also recommend VMWare Fusion at $40 and MS Windows Vista Business Full at $300. Here's Emory Goizueta Business School's requirement.

Not too long ago we had a discussion on slashdot about how a philanthropy was donating cheap laptops to schools and children in either North or South Carolina.

Falcon

Possibly the Trackmenot plug-in for Firefox?

You may be interested in a paper that discusses the results of TIMSS, which is an organization that compares the quality of K-12 education in the US to that of other countries.

You can find the original paper here.

Despite the wealth of information provided by the TIMSS publications, it is fair to say that two specific TIMSS findings have captured the majority of the headlines, and have had the greatest influence on classroom practice and education policy. The most eye-opening results come from the achievement scores of students around theworld. For example, in the little multicultural, multilingual, top-performing country of Singapore, some 46% of the eighth graders scored in the top 10% of the world. And 75% of their students placed among the top 25% of all eighth graders worldwide. Just 1% of their students placed among the bottom 25% of all eighth graders around the world. This is a stunning achievement. Singapore has indeed shown what it really means to have an education system where no child is left behind. Moreover, these performance results have held up with remarkable consistency in each of the TIMSS testing rounds. Just a notch down from Singapore, the next group of top performers have been Korea, Hong Kong, Chinese Taipei (formerly known as Taiwan) and Japan (mostly in this order) with Flemish Belgium trailing somewhat behind, but consistently next in line.

The U.S. scores are also worth mentioning. Roughly put, American fourth graders and eighth graders scored somewhat above the international average. But at the twelfth grade, the U.S. scored at the bottom of the industrialized world, and only significantly out-performed two countries: South Africa and Cyprus. No other country fell so far so fast. There was also a more sophisticated twelfth grade test that was reserved for twelfth graders in advanced math programs in the participating countries. On that test, the U.S. was next-to-last; even Cyprus performed significantly better. For completeness, it should be noted that the twelfth grade testing has not been repeated since 1995 and the U.S. plummet just described. This is unfortunate because the lack of follow-up testing forces us to infer whether the American mathematics programs have recovered from the results documented in 1995. Moreover, the real purpose of a K-8 program is to prepare students for subsequent study as opposed to an eighth grade TIMSS test. So our understanding of mathematics education around the world would be greatly enhanced by a schedule of testing that includes grade twelve as well as grades four and eight.4

In view of the absence of follow-up twelfth grade testing, one could speculate that the American TIMSS scores might show that the newest programs are beginning to make a difference. After all, the latest math reforms are often introduced at the earlier grades first, and then extended by one grade level per year. Could it be that U.S. high school students are performing better now because more of them are participating in reform math programs? The answer seems to be a clear no. A variety of studies have documented very little progress in high school math achievement over the last decade. To date, the NAEP scores, for example, have been most notable for their lack of improvement.

I think you're ignoring the fact that during the period to which you refer, most people were getting their news from propaganda outlets, not from free outlets. E.g., Fox News, etc. I mention Fox because they're the most blatant, but pretty much all of the news networks can be accused of being propagandists, even if they're not doing it deliberately.

If you read the article I just linked to, from the NYU School of Journalism, you'll see that they have a pretty good working theory for why this is so. What I like about the article is what it says about the future, though - it's quite hopeful. Whether or not they are right, only time will tell, but I've seen a lot of evidence to that effect.

So despite what you say here, I think it's very important to try to preserve the freedom of the Internet, and that it is in fact a real force for genuine democracy.

It looks like this article is implementing the system that Jeff Han made about a few years ago and famously presented at TED. I'm glad to see this DIY article out there since it is getting lots of people interested in physical hacking, but I wish it would have referenced what came before. Here's the UIST paper:

Han, J. Y. 2005. Low-cost multi-touch sensing through frustrated total internal reflection. In Proceedings of the 18th Annual ACM Symposium on User interface Software and Technology (Seattle, WA, USA, October 23 - 26, 2005). UIST '05. ACM, New York, NY, 115-118. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1095034.1095054

We need a Firefox addon that randomly visits sites in the background.

It's called Trackmenot.

There's a PDF link buried in the interview which had me giggling with geekish delight. The phrase

"hash codes" for locations on the sky

makes me happy.

Also, I'll give credit to waxy.org which is where I read this first.

when left to their own devices

http://itp.nyu.edu/dano/blog/wp-content/uploads/gPhoneHat.jpg

The folks I know who use Excel for analysis use it because it's the package that everyone gets in their organization

That's a shame, because Excel has some serious deficiencies when it comes to statistics and analysis. You simply can't trust any of the numbers it gives you. It's just flat out wrong a lot of the time.

http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jcryer/JSMTalk2001.pdf
http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~jsimonof/classes/1305/pdf/excelreg.pdf

Also, searching the interwebs will dig up all kinds of articles about problems with Excel doing odd things. Excel is the wrong tool for the job.

why are diamonds still considered precious?

I'll answer that one - it's because the Cartel that sells them decides on the price. That way it is maintained artificially high. If diamonds were sold for their rarity value they'd be much, much cheaper.

Here's more on the subject (pdf link)

On Neural Nets at least.. The only text book that I can think of offhand which is decent is Duda, Hart and Stork

Hawkins, like many others, has ripped off many of his ideas from Steve Grossberg (in this case, the ART model). Although he's not very easy to read, especially if you start much earlier than say, Ellias and Grossberg, 1975. You should also check out the work of people like Jack Cowan, Rajesh Rao, Christof Koch , Tom Poggio, David McLaughlin, Bard Ermentrout, among many, many others. I think the above names are sufficient to start a survey.

"Excellent Hardness is Easy" sounds like an ideal title for a TCC submission if I've ever seen one. They're at home with stuff like:
"Semi-honest to Malicious Oblivious Transfer - The Black-Box Way"
"On the Complexity of Parallel Hardness Amplification for One-Way Functions"
"The Ultimate Male Package", well that one's actually from my spam folder.
http://www.cs.nyu.edu/~tcc08/

http://mrl.nyu.edu/~dhowe/TrackMeNot/

Agreed. Search engines were horrible back then, and google was no exception (for me, anyway). It was about a year and a half after they debuted that I started using them, and I haven't looked back.

As for the 'do no evil' part, I find it funny that the people who hate google so badly still use it. They're so much better than the competition that the people who hate it come up with convulted methods to try to use it without their information getting tracked.

• Ricardo Ruiz, Huiman Kang, François A. Detcheverry, Elizabeth Dobisz, Dan S. Kercher, Thomas R. Albrecht, Juan J. de Pablo, and Paul F. Nealey "Density Multiplication and Improved Lithography by Directed Block Copolymer Assembly", Science 15 August 2008: 936-939, DOI: 10.1126/science.1157626
• Ion Bita, Joel K. W. Yang, Yeon Sik Jung, Caroline A. Ross, Edwin L. Thomas, and Karl K. Berggren "Graphoepitaxy of Self-Assembled Block Copolymers on Two-Dimensional Periodic Patterned Templates" Science 15 August 2008: 939-943. DOI: 10.1126/science.1159352

Block copolymers are polymers (long-chain molecules that make up, for example, plastics) that are designed in such a way that they spontaneously form well-defined nano-patterns when allowed to equilibrate. So for instance a block-copolymer cast as a coating might spontaneously form nano-sized cylinders inside it (where the 'cylinder' and 'matrix' are formed of two different components... the two 'blocks'). Depending on what kind of copolymer you synthesize, you can form nano-cylinders, nano-sheets, nano-spheres, and other shapes (check out this, and this for some examples of the morphologies one can obtain).

One of the problems with block-copolymers, however, is that although they form very well-defined shapes (of exceedingly small and regular size), that's useless if you can't put those nano-objects where you need them. That's where this new work in "Templated Self-Assembly" comes into play. Basically you create a conventional, big pattern using the tried-and-tested techniques used to make microchips (optical lithography, e-beam lithography, etc.). Then you use that as a template for the block-copolymer. It fills in the gaps in the big pattern with its much smaller-scale nano-objects... which are now placed at well-defined positions because of the larger-scale template. So basically you get "density multiplication" of whatever pattern you're able to make.

So if you can use normal lithography to make a pattern of 100 nm, the block-copolymer can fill in the gaps and give you a pattern with sizes of 20 nm. Also, this "self-assembly" process has a way of "healing" over defects, basically giving you a very well-defined pattern even if your original template wasn't perfect.

The patterns in question can be "chemical templates" (basically stripes of different chemicals on a surface), or "topographical templates" (physical channels), which is what the two above-mentioned papers deal with, respectively. (Other kinds of directed-assembly, like surface treatments, electric fields, or thermal fields, are also possible.)

The research is coming along very nicely, and Hitachi seems pretty serious about it. There's no guarantee that this will end up in real technology someday, but I'd say this is looking more and more viable as the research pours in.

(Disclosure: My research covers similar topics, and I've worked with some of the above-mentioned people on occasion.)

From all the documentation I have read on smart cards, 3V (and 1.8V) cards are an extension of the 5V SIM spec. That is, they work at 5V as well (but with higher power usage, of course). If you have specific documentation otherwise, please post it. Secondly, I assure you the quality of my soldering is excellent (ie http://farm1.static.flickr.com/149/332269259_21900c5a01_b.jpg), but the lighting and video makes perfboard-soldering (ie http://itp.nyu.edu/physcomp/images/tutorials/perfboard/solderaperf26.jpg) look bad

> because every reputable scientist in the field agrees with you: > Now, I don't really see any immediately obvious applications for this new molecule Such a "scientist" would be very dumb. But feel free to give names. BTW, it was published in JACS, this should give you a hint about the importance. > This article did nothing to expand our knowledge. It created knowledge new nucleotides. As far as I know similiar stuff already exists. > It didn't prove anything. Big surprise. While we have heard about prove in mathematics, it is new in science to me. Concerning the applications, start browsing here: http://seemanlab4.chem.nyu.edu/

This was done long before, by Tangler and
Dagster.

Most of the distro's packages don't compile screen with the ultra productive nethack option, so you have to compile it yourself.

http://www.mrl.nyu.edu/~dhowe/trackmenot/

This is an area with lots of crackpots, but also lots of really interesting stuff.

How do you tell the good stuff from the crackpot?

The good ones are published in top machine learning, computer vision, robotics, and AI conferences and journal. The crackpot stuff doesn't survive peer review.

Here are a few good examples:
- Geff Hinton (U. Toronto): http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/
- Yoshua Bengio (U. Montreal: http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~bengioy/
- Yann LeCun (NYU): http://www.cs.nyu.edu/~yann/index.html
- Andrew Ng (Stanford): http://ai.stanford.edu/~ang/
- Sebastian Seung (MIT): http://hebb.mit.edu/people/seung/
- David Lowe (U British Columbia): http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~lowe/

If you disagree, please provide at least two examples.

Two examples:

http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/lingua_franca_v4/lingua_franca_v4.html

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/11/01/physics_hoaxers_discover_quantum_bogosity/

Have a look at Track Me Not. It is a Firefox plugin which acts as a spider crawling through the web in the background. In this way, it scrambles any profile that spyware vendors like Phorm try to build up.

Are you looking to dive in with practical information or learn pure theory first? I personally like to learn by building first, and then start learning theory after I fried a couple of components. I just spent the last three years at an art school in an Interactive Media program. (Art school and electronics? Yes - there's a growing amount of interactive works - not to mention the increasing demand for User Interface Design) We learned some very practical information in Physical Computing: interacting between the real world and computers. We began by building our own temperature sensors, pressure sensors, and then learning how to connect them with computers, without any formal programming experience, using a combination of serial communication, arduino and basic stamps, python, MaxMSP, Processing and Flash.

You may want to check out the art world for some really creative uses of technology:

I had an opportunity to speak with Norm White, an artist who has been building with electronics since the 60's , he made some amazing artwork, such as the "The Helpless Robot" - which runs off an old 386 and Delphi. Details here. (He's looking for someone to translate it to a modern language)

Alan Rath is another artist who builds interactive robots.

Conflux is a street art festival in Brooklyn that often attracts artists who mix technology with art. There have been some really cool interactive games that use modified cellphones

Aram Bartholl does some cool work, mixing virtual world concepts such as IM'ing with very low tech. See Chat

Some other practical suggestions:
For a great hands on approach, check out Tom Igoe and Dan O'Sullivan's Pysical Computing Tom Igoe is the head of Physical Computing at New York University.

Amphibionics by Karl Williams was my first attempt at building my own circuit board and robot.

I usually buy my components online at DigiKey. Navigating their site and trying to choose between the 100s of varieties of 1uF capacitors was a learning experience in itself.

I realise that rule-based systems (at least the monotonic ones http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-monotonic_logic) are static and not of a great deal of use in anything more complex than Eliza (http://i5.nyu.edu/~mm64/x52.9265/january1966.html) games, but CBR is a powerful tool if you incorporate some amount of Bayesian algebra into it.

That's to say: pick some criteria (say, A and B) which most closely define the essence of the object being looked at, and if the current case has 50% of the required A and 50% of the required B then if BOTH of the attributes are required you AND them and multiply the attribute values (therefore getting 50% * 50% = object is 25% like target). If EITHER of the attributes are required, you OR them and add the values (50% + 50% = object is 100% like target), then apply your result to other attributes, forming a chain of probabilities.

It's possible to achieve some good results with quite complex problems this way, though of course the real intelligence comes in deciding what the crucial attributes are in the first place!

I wonder when Google will decide to archive the world's opinions into some kind of a "this thing is like this other thing and unlike this third thing [etc]" database. that would be CBR on the grand scale (and very useful to the marketing profession too, I shouldn't wonder).

Tor just sends your traffic through other servers. I don't think that that is the statistical noise that the parent poster meant. I think he meant something like track-me-not http://mrl.nyu.edu/~dhowe/trackmenot/ which runs random searches to screw up data mining.

I like google but disabled the search tracking since I found it a little creepy. For extra protection I use track me not.