Slashdot Mirror

I recently noticed that google logged my searching habits, and while I thought it was kind of cool to see the stats, I was weary of the thought of my habits cataloged. They may have a desire to utilize searches to target ads they think consumers may like, but it still comes down to making money for them. It's notable that they are pushing for consent from users to use data that is collected, but that has always been abused even with telephone and credit card companies handing out your data. I'd prefer an opt-in rather than an opt-out version so I don't have to worry about who is tracking what, or I'll just stick to track-me-not.

• Lambda calculus-ish
  • Scheme
  • Haskell
• Combinator/Forth-ish
  • Joy
  • Interesting but not practical: unlamdba iota and jot
• Logic
  • Prolog
  • Mercury - compiled and pure
  • Lygon - prolog like linear logic programming.
• Pi calculus-ish
  • Join calculus
  • Nomadic Pict

I think I want to master logic programming next, though it may be better for me to do some haskell programming first so I have a better foundation. Monads/Arrows give me a headache, but with enough time, I'm sure I could get used to them. s-expressions a-la lisp/scheme are very similar to xml, except better, but logic programming seems more likely to make the hardest parts of internet programming easier.

Unfortuately, I have nowhere near enough time to get proficient in all these languages.

I would assume legal transcripts of trials would provide the best knowledge ie. evidence that was obtained and the defence against that evidence. Of course that would be a pretty geeky view point, whereas buying a couple of paperbacks sounds more like filling an idle interest in psychology and history.

The only interesting thing about the books is how they can so readily be used to create a false image. Books on terrorism does not equal terrorist, just like books on chemistry or biology does not mean your are creating weapons of mass destruction.

Just like web searches have been used for the same thing, will this addon http://mrl.nyu.edu/~dhowe/TrackMeNot/faq.html#options and it's random searches one day get me in trouble.

It seems nobody has yet mentioned the work of Paul Bourke (if that name seems familiar, he hosted the POV-Ray short code competition recently featured on Slashdot). I'm a fan of his work on fractals (scroll down, there's a *lot* of stuff on that page), especially slices of four-dimensional Julia sets. Definitely mathematical art of the highest order.

... well, that is, unless you're a fan of Ken Perlin instead ;)

Can't have a topic touch screens without mentioning Jeff Hans work on cheap multi touch tech.
http://cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/

Then there's the homebrew crew at nui group.
http://www.nuigroup.com/

I know someone who is building one of these and the overall cost to date is under £100.

There is a Firefox extension called TrackMeNot at http://mrl.nyu.edu/~dhowe/trackmenot that issues random requests to search engines generated from a wordlist. All that needs to be done to make it lookup poison is to modify the query strings with various WHOIS lookups and add .TLD or .ccTLD to the end of the generated search string and send it off. For more usability both the wordlists and WHOIS lookup site strings could be stored in user-editable text files and more words could be added from http://www.gattinger.org/wordlists. List updates could be distributed as extension updates. Later maybe something to randomly do command line lookups could be added too. Finally,a feature could be added to request Squatter URL's and load them in the background without caching to use up their bandwidth. If I knew extension code I would do it myself but as of yet all I can do is provide ideas. To get the source for the extension simply grab it from http://mrl.nyu.edu/~dhowe/trackmenot or https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3173 and rename it anything.zip then open it up. If anyone does anything with this please email me about it. Thanks. Note: I am not affiliated with TrackMeNot

There is a Firefox extension called TrackMeNot at http://mrl.nyu.edu/~dhowe/trackmenot that issues random requests to search engines generated from a wordlist. All that needs to be done to make it lookup poison is to modify the query strings with various WHOIS lookups and add .TLD or .ccTLD to the end of the generated search string and send it off. For more usability both the wordlists and WHOIS lookup site strings could be stored in user-editable text files and more words could be added from http://www.gattinger.org/wordlists. List updates could be distributed as extension updates. Later maybe something to randomly do command line lookups could be added too. Finally,a feature could be added to request Squatter URL's and load them in the background without caching to use up their bandwidth. If I knew extension code I would do it myself but as of yet all I can do is provide ideas. To get the source for the extension simply grab it from http://mrl.nyu.edu/~dhowe/trackmenot or https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3173 and rename it anything.zip then open it up. If anyone does anything with this please email me about it. Thanks. Note: I am not affiliated with TrackMeNot

As for obscuring your searches try this http://mrl.nyu.edu/~dhowe/TrackMeNot/ it doesn't use much overhead and well, by far the majority of searches originating from my IP address have nothing to do with me at all, sometimes I wonder who google is targeting those adds at.

As far as I know the "do no evil" has already been edited from google's corporate policy with the more marketdroid speak version "6. You can make money without doing evil." http://www.google.com/corporate/tenthings.html. Now WTF is that meant to mean anyhow, of course I simply read it as, but you can temporarily make more money with doing evil, well, at least until you get caught and you marketddoid trolls can't out shout or can't shut down the critics.

If you're sufficiently annoyed at Google that you actually want to punish them for their query retention policy, I recommend the TrackMeNot Firefox extension by Daniel C. Howe, Helen Nissenbaum. It automatically submits a false query to Google x times per minute, obscuring your real queries within a torrent of crap.

First, it's a mistake to mistake Branden's conception of self-esteem with the kind of crap that's foisted off as "self-esteem" now. Secondly, Ayn Rand did take psych courses, along with studying philosophy and history. Source.

A peer reviewed journal for geeks. What we need is to take the same approach to the peer reviewed scientific journals. Currently, they leech off the authors, and turn around and charge exorbitant fees to the readers to boot!

Example: Just today, I needed some information on a relatively esoteric mathematical topic: maximal count linear feedback shift registers. I'm interested in relatively fast ways of finding dense polynomials, without doing the brute force try and see approach. However, most of the articles returned by Google were either to simple - they just discussed the general theory - or they were pay to view. Not only is the abstract uninformative, I have to pay in advance to read, which means that even if I should fork over the exorbitant fee, I might still end up with an article which reveals little more than Wikipedia. To folks like me, who do need this knowledge for professional work, even the peer-reviewed articles are worthless to me if I have to pay for them in advance, without a preview. I can't help but wonder how someone supposedly well-versed in math can't figure out the economics of publishing: that if they pay to have their article published, and the publisher charges readers a fee, that their article isn't likely to be read by anyone of consequence. Because I do professional work in this field, such an article would be of great interest to me; however, those who go the pay-to-publish route literally work themselves into obscurity.

Honestly, I don't understand why the prestigious research institutions don't offer their grant-funded research for free. Rather than publish in a little-read, expensive, journal, they could publish on the net and let advertising pay their editorial costs. Instead of hiring experts, articles could be rated by experts across the world, using digital signatures to verify the authenticity of not just the author, but the moderator as well. Readers could choose articles for reading based on their endorsements by recognized authorities in the field, rather than the selections of a few ivory-tower types.

Some might say that top research journals must be pay-to-publish in order to retain editors who are experts in their field. However, this argument doesn't really hold that much weight in light of the Alan Sokal Affair in which a peer-reviewed journal published rubbish that was easily recognizable as rubbish to even the most casual reader.

Interestingly, names like Schneier, Daemen, etc... are well known because their work is widely available, without a fee. I can't help but wonder if paying to publish in one of these peer-reviewed journals actually does anyone any good - because they are generally ignored by both industry and the public at large.

Since you are posting from the heart of the Wolfram Hype Machine (TM), perhaps you could comment on why the prize was announced by Wolfram Himself as being successfully awarded, when Martin Davis on the FOM list states that the committee members were not polled.

This appears to be a flagrant violation of the rules for the prize, which state that "For the purposes of this prize, the treatment of universality in any particular submission must be considered acceptable by the Prize Committee."

To make my question crystal clear: how is it possible that the committee deemed the proof (or its treatment of universality) acceptable when at least some of them were not polled as to whether they thought the proof was acceptable?

p.s. Please don't appeal to a "New Kind of Logic" or a "New Kind of English" in your answer.

Actually, if the committee had reviewed it, I would consider that peer review (assuming they were not paid by Wolfram Media) -- insofar as a candidate journal article passing the review of anonymous referees is peer review -- since the committee contains heavyweights like Dana Scott, Martin Davis, Yuri Matiyasevich, etc.

Any work that was reviewed by and deemed correct by all the members of that committee would have passed a far more stringent peer review process than just about any Journal paper. Withstanding extended peer review after publication is another matter though.

Having said that, it looks like the committee did not actually review the paper in this case, but were merely "kept informed" (whatever that means), as Martin Davis states here.

Um, no, the problem is there were no proof reviewers. This was just Wolfram being overly eager for a chance to once again assert his superiority over the scientific community.

"We're excited to announce that the $25,000 Wolfram 2,3 Turing Machine Research Prize has been won." http://cs.nyu.edu/pipermail/fom/2007-October/012120.html

"As far as I know, no member of the committee has passed on the validity of this 40 page proof. The determination that Smith's proof is correct seems to have been made entirely by the Wolfram organization. My understanding is that the I/O involves complex encodings." http://cs.nyu.edu/pipermail/fom/2007-October/012132.html

Um, no, the problem is there were no proof reviewers. This was just Wolfram being overly eager for a chance to once again assert his superiority over the scientific community.

"We're excited to announce that the $25,000 Wolfram 2,3 Turing Machine Research Prize has been won." http://cs.nyu.edu/pipermail/fom/2007-October/012120.html

"As far as I know, no member of the committee has passed on the validity of this 40 page proof. The determination that Smith's proof is correct seems to have been made entirely by the Wolfram organization. My understanding is that the I/O involves complex encodings." http://cs.nyu.edu/pipermail/fom/2007-October/012132.html

Wolfram's lengthy response:

http://cs.nyu.edu/pipermail/fom/2007-October/012149.html

But it's worth noting that the Rule 110 proof, while not hogwash, was also not Wolfram's.

Delicate instruments can tell one cable from another pretty well, but the only way to prove that one sounds better is to do a listen. A blind listen, of course, to eliminate psychology.

The interesting part is that there is already a stab at the googlecleaner out there so some people think it is neccesery http://mrl.nyu.edu/~dhowe/trackmenot/

You can read the article at the author's website (sorry, Slashdot mangles the direct link. It is currently the first article in the list. Just click [pdf]). It is less than two printed pages. It makes no attempt to compensate for side effects such as age, gender, mood (conservatives are happier than liberals these days), etc. It doesn't come anywhere close to meeting APA guidelines, probably because it isn't published in an APA journal. On the plus side they do cite some good reasons to expect the result they found.

Germany has about 5 parties above the 2M voters watermark, many of which run local administrations. They can freely organize themselves into coalitions (that is, co-aligned parties can pool their votes together after an election) to achieve majorities when required. Voters have more choices, and there's not that many coalitions a party can enter unless it actually gets voted. Spain also has quite a few major parties. Don't want to vote for Socialist Party (social democrats in europe are like liberals in the US)? -- vote for the United Left party; they have similar goals and are likely to form a coalition if neither can rule by itself. Not that the system is perfect, but you do get slightly more "competition for ideas" and accountability than with a party system where minority parties don't get to play at all. There's lots of ways to organize a parliamentary democracy.

The actual study demonstrated that, for a given population (details on the selection of which were not provided), those that self-described themselves as liberals (whatever that label means) reacted differently to a situation (monitored by a certain measure of neural responses) than those that self-described themselves as conservatives. That part is "good science", though I may find it inconclusive. The bad part is where the study itself (from here) concludes that

This is only true within the experimental population, conservatism and liberalism where asked (instead of "measured"), and the neurocognitive sensitivity can depend on a host of other factors (mostly dependent on the selection of the experimental population), which may better explain the differences between subject's reactions. This part I find wrong.

When you read it, you find this:

"Awful science"? How so? Care to point out the flaws in the study?

Hmmmmmm?

The linked site is scarce on details - the paper itself is more interesting. First, David Amodio (lead researcher) is not obviously flaming. I'm no expert in neuroscience -- but the data looks good, and he has a track record on usage of scans for similar tasks (most of it race-bias related, but that's another subject).

Here's an interesting part of the experimental design:

To test the hypothesis that political liberalism (versus conservatism) would be associated with greater conict-related ACC activity, we recorded electroencephalographs from 43 right-handed subjects (63% female) as they performed the Go/No-Go task. Subjects reported their political attitudes condentially on a -5 (extremely liberal) to +5 (extremely conservative) scale. This single-item measure has been found to account for approximately 85% of the statistical variance in presidential voting intentions in American National Election studies between 1972 and 2004 (ref. 8). Among participants in the present study who reported voting in the 2004 presidential election, a more liberal (versus conservative) ideological orientation strongly predicted voting for John Kerry versus George Bush (r(21)= 0.79, P o 0.001).

I think that there are two ways in which the experiment may be flawed. One is that 43 persons are not enough to extrapolate to the whole US population; and more importantly, no details are given on how they were chosen. If they were chosen among colleagues in an academic setting, where most people (your mileage may vary) are left-wing, you may have problems finding people which self-describe as conservative. These few would be most resistant to changing their viewpoints, I would guess -- since otherwise they may have flipped from exposure to liberal arguments.

Another way in which I think the study may be flawed is by asking people to self-define their position in the political spectrum -- a one-dimensional political spectrum. What guarantees do you have that participants really are "conservative" or "liberal" (whatever that means to you), and have actually thought about the political issues involved in each "choice" (as if there weren't many, many greys)?. A 2-dimensional political positioning would provide more insight. A short questionnaire where participants actually had to think, instead of "choosing their favorite color" would have been even better.

This is assuming that the researcher knows what he's doing, and the

You can find the full article at the author's lab website.

Rather pointless when I don't have a fixed IP address, pretty much the same as the majority of users. Of course well done on the quality representation of M$ corporation arrogance, we don't care whether or not you want to retain your privacy we will be invading one or the other. I really think you missed the whole point, ie. the search failure engine, where a marketed major search player's search engines breaks down due to faulty code and trying to stretch a cookie to far. Jamming live in with the rest will similarly cause expected failures. As far as live search is concerned http://mrl.nyu.edu/~dhowe/TrackMeNot/ makes more searches than I do, good luck with anal-ising them.

This country has a lot of radical Christian roots (Puritans, anyone?) so it's not all that surprising that our views on intellectualism are shaped around that.

You give those people more credit than they deserve.

In light of what passes under the banner of "intellectual" nowadays, it's a miracle that anti-intellectualism is not far more prevalent than it is.

You are absolutely right. It's interesting to compare what the French and Americans spend on their healthcare systems. In the US we are spending 16% of our GNP and have 46 million people without any form of insurance (and of those who do have insurance, a lot of it is worthless when it really counts).

In France, however, they are spending 10% of GNP on a system which covers everyone and routinely outperforms what we have in the US.

More FUD to watch out for is the crap about lines and impossible waiting times. I've spent a total of two years in France, including two months in the hospital with a pretty nasty pneumonia. The staff was always courteous and competent. This is at the same time my compatriots were all bashing surrender monkeys and feeling clever.

From my collection:
* Nanotechnology information [archived] [2002]
* Bibliography of nanotechnology and nanoscience [pdf] [2004]
* Brad Hein's nanotechnology website
* Ned Seeman's DNA nanotech bibliography
* MEMS/nanotech reading list
* Even more publications in nanotechnology
* sci.nano archives
* The open micro/nano-manufacturing project
* Nanotech in scifi

And if anybody has links on nanomechanical synthesis, that'd be much appreciated. IIRC, nanolithography is one of the main areas of development, along with nonlinear optics to get the required precision manufacturing.

Tech forums are not getting eaten alive by blogs or forums, they are getting eaten alive by blogs and forums and media streams and by the shear volume of content now available across a whole range of web sites.

Another big development is computer tech is all becoming a bit much of a yawn, a decade or more ago the changes in computer tech were really dramatic with enormous improvements in performance and capability, nowadays it is all refinements with the only really interesting part being the OS wars and Linux development and you get most of that from slashdot, M$ and which ever distribution home site.

Plus there is enormous competition from each tech site and they are just spreading their reader base thin across a wide choice. All that you will see happen is the large portals that offer a wide range of content will start to dominate again and the old world media companies will start gaining market share as they improve and broaden their net offerings.

As for google, is just gets lot's of 10 to 15 second clicks, not to mention http://mrl.nyu.edu/~dhowe/TrackMeNot/ which further inflates meaningless clicks, search is neither hear nor there, it is really just cheap entry level marketing. Companies are still adjusting to a global market and a global audience and global choice.

Front and side, concept multitouch iMac mockup.

Perceptive Pixel demo by Jeff Han, TED talk, research homepage. Fingerworks, purchased by Apple, 2005.

Already done (see here)

Also see Bruce Schneier's opinion on the matter.

In short, it isn't a good idea.

Indeed:

If the United States had wanted to cripple, kill, annihilate Russia, they would have CERTAINLY made their move when they had them on the ropes!
In 1992 The Russians had to 'borrow'-that is, get food hand outs- from the US and Japan!
    All the civilized world had to do was not loan the Russians all that economic aid they requested-begged for- in the 1993 to 1997 time frame.
From 1996 to 1999 the US could have buried Russia in bad money and bought the whole nation with the good money!! The Russia that Dictator' Putin is trying to make today and going forward, WILL end up where the Soviet Union ended up,...EXTINCT!!! Doomed and kaput like the Dinosaurs running merrily, in my cars gas tank!!!
    People who hate Putin are coming down with radiation poisioning at a MacDonalds near you: Death is a state passion once again!
Oh, and tell Putin he has to PAY FOR THAT SUPERBOWL RING HE STOLE AND PAWNED!!! Yes, a state leader who is no better than a two-bit, low-brow, degenerate trailer-park boy!!!:
http://www.nyu.edu/classes/siva/archives/001558.ht ml

Mr. Putini-I am NOT impressed! Get thee to a nunnery, you COMMIE PIMP!

Jeff Han lead project at NYU to produce multi-touch display technology and some demo applications.

Take a look at the original work at NYU: http://cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/

And the spin-off company by the same guys to develop the technology: http://www.perspectivepixel.com/

Very cool stuff. If you look closely, you can tell that they're running it on GNU/Linux.

Hopefully, they'll chose to collaborate with the X and kernel guys to create proper generic interfaces for multi-touch pointing device input.

Check out Jeff Han's new company, the Perceptive Pixel at http://www.perceptivepixel.com/ The original NYU Quicktime demo reel is at http://cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/ Look familiar? I'm sure MS hooked up with these guys. This demo has been out there for a while.

I am a Linux zealot. I hate Microsoft. I push Open Source everywhere. I don't have any windows or macintosh computers. I have five linux servers in my house. I have two linux workstations on my desk. I just launched an initiative for Linux on the desktop at work. I have wanted multi-touch since I saw this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ftJhDBZqss, http://cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirsense/ and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcKqyn-gUbY

I'm afraid that is cool enough that I might switch back from Linux to Windows. Where do I get in line for one of these again?

Not a duplicate article - a duplicate technology that does the same thing as what a group at NYU are doing.

A description, and a nice Quicktime video.

I had a nice video of a demo at a tradeshow, too - but I can't find it right now.

This is actually quite interesting technology. It has been conceived before - but only that - conceived. This is one time Microsoft gets kudos.

Not quite. Even tho Microsoft was the first to market with something in the $10,000 range for places like Vegas. I wonder what the Blue Screens look like?

More info the MS product here, here and here.

I imagine that Jeff Han's own Fascinating multi-touch system just might not use Windows as a fundamental foundation. Don't forget about the 16 foot long interactive wall So I can imagine several patent fights coming out of this, even though the research lines are likely independent. Microsoft might even get accused of stealing somebody else's research, regardless of the facts.

Of course, this happens a little while after Apple revealed their own multitouch interface. Microsoft must hate that. After all, Microsoft can't get a patent on the use of fingers, even tho they can try.

This is actually quite interesting technology. It has been conceived before - but only that - conceived. This is one time Microsoft gets kudos.

Not quite. Even tho Microsoft was the first to market with something in the $10,000 range for places like Vegas. I wonder what the Blue Screens look like?

More info the MS product here, here and here.

I imagine that Jeff Han's own Fascinating multi-touch system just might not use Windows as a fundamental foundation. Don't forget about the 16 foot long interactive wall So I can imagine several patent fights coming out of this, even though the research lines are likely independent. Microsoft might even get accused of stealing somebody else's research, regardless of the facts.

Of course, this happens a little while after Apple revealed their own multitouch interface. Microsoft must hate that. After all, Microsoft can't get a patent on the use of fingers, even tho they can try.

http://cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/

YouTube Videos

Original Demo: http://youtube.com/watch?v=89sz8ExZndc
8 foot Wall: http://youtube.com/watch?v=ysEVYwa-vHM
TED2006 Talk: http://youtube.com/watch?v=5JcSu7h-I40

http://cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirsense/

There ya go.

And there was yet another that allowed you to mix music and create synthesized effects in real time by arranging various oddly-shaped prisms on the surface. I have two (large) videos of that but I don't know where they came from.

I think it's appropriate to link to Ken Perlin's site.

teh FAQ

"This is why you use Firefox" with the trackmenot extension:

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

You mean, for example, remapping the unlink calls to libc to actually move things to ~/Trash?

Surely you wouldn't want that on all accounts. Only for users. It'd be chaos if every single script on your computer that generated temp files had them moved rather than deleted.
How about putting it into the .bashrc (or .zshrc, or whatever) file to be loaded using the preload trick?

That way, all users that have that .bashrc file can have it on, and everything else won't.

There is a library for this.

something I've always been missing on Linux
It works like a charm. I've been using it for years. It's available as a package in most distros, and has been for quite a long time.

I should also note that it can be implemented systemwide - so that *everything* is used that way. But that's a good way to kill your system. Your computer sometimes needs to delete things.

I'm sorry, but mathematics is useless as a defense mechanism

Unless your name is Archimedes.

Why? Are you saying that we live in a 1984 world? Well that is our real problem not some Firefox extension. The government and big corps will eventually read our thoughts and either convict us or try to sell us services based on what we think. What we search is an extension of what we think. It is an even better reason to install and run TMN not just quietly block Doubleclick and cookies. You need to make their data 'bad' not just deny it to them.

Here is how TMN works from the website of the guy who created it:

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

Don't forget TrackMeNot. Thanks to ComputerWorld for telling me about it.

Who cares when you can get a decent business machine for 400 bucks?

I want a touch screen, with multi-point technology like on the iPhone or demonstrated here.

Obviously, whatever the fastest desktop hardware configuration is at the time would be a nice touch :)

I meant to say CustomizeGoogle Firefox plugin

That helps.

Of course, if you want to shorten log retention further than Google's "only 2 years!", you can go through a proxy like Anonymizer or Tor. If the fullbore proxies are too much of a hassle, there's always the search proxies like Scroogle Scraper (where the log retention is 48 hours).

Another approach is to poison the data mine with TrackMeNot by generating thousands of random searches in the background.