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My wife and I are looking into purchasing a game based learning console for our 4 year old boy this Christmas . . . We also have a 2 year old boy so something that lasts would be nice.

The HFS servers and tape library are situated in a climate-controlled, secure location. Three copies of your data are made, each to separate tapes; one copy is held in the automated tape library; the second, in a fire-proof safe located at OUCS and the third in a fire-proof safe at an offsite storage facility outside Oxford.

But I have a lab full of optics equipment that's taken several people years to assemble and align. Hell, even someone going in and knocking every single component in the lab out of alignment would probably take several months to rectify.

If a substantial amount of fire damage was caused to my equipment, I'd be extremely lucky to graduate anything remotely close to on time, if at all. If there were a fire threatening the lab, and I were around, I'd prbably take a greater amount of personal risk to fight it, than I would if my flat were on fire. My personal possessions can be replaced with a little money (some stuff is even insured) and a relatively small amount of work and time, but I have over two years of my life invested in my lab set up.

Several people have mentioned Moodle, a PHP-scripted system, but there is also Boddington, which is Java (no, I don't know whether it's J2EE). Oxford University has a Boddington instance that allows guest access. It's a totally different paradigm to the WebCT / Blackboard 'corse' one. Let's hope that both of these open source options grow and provide real competition for the single commercial product.

Because, unless I am very much mistaken, it would require that almost all of the project be re-written or thrown away and started on again. You can still have a radical change without having to throw away all of the code that's already been written. Also, they are porting the whole of the KDE project from the Qt3 toolkit to Qt4, since Qt4 is not backward-compatible with Qt3, so in a sense, they are changing the toolkit - but they are porting to one that is very, very similar to the one they use now. ;) What's wrong with Qt anyway that might make you want to port away from it? You might say that it's GPL and not LGPL, which might discourage proprietary developers who don't want to fork out for the alternative license, but that's about it, anything else is really just a matter of preference.

The write-up also seemed rather sparse in details, so while I am writing this post I may as well chuck in a few links:

Interesting interview with Aaron Seigo
Another good interview with Zack Rusin
Official site for KDE Plasma, the KDE4 desktop.

but here in Oxford I thought google was only scanning really old stuff that is too fragile to be read.

Its vapor is also very dangerous.

No it's not - I use 99.8% minimum purity Methanol all the time in the lab, and I can assure you it's pretty much harmless. No, you don't want to drink it and you don't want to shower in it. But that's about it ... Seriously, if you believed all that safety crap you wouldn't put salt on your food as it "may cause skin, eye or respiratory irritation."

I think it'd be great to get these fuel cell players - I'd have permanent access to all the fuel I need :))

i think you should read that interview of Zack who works full time on X and KDE.
it's here.
Basically it says that Qt4.1 will have full svg support and will be able to do its widget drawing in SVG. And once xorg 7.0 is out he's going to move xgl to xorg to bring it full 3d support.

At least if you are going to make smart comments, have half a mind about what you are talking about.
hehe

It's not like they had industrial strength santizing dish washers 5000 years ago - over ten years of use, one could imagine an accumulation of residue inside such a container

More than possible considering that a number of cultures use the same vessel for fermentation once it has "learned how to make beer". We know now about S. cerevisiae but in the past there have been all sorts of explanations of the brewing process.

The Hymn to Ninkasi http://www-etcsl.orient.ox.ac.uk/section4/tr4231.h tm
(probably the earliest recorded beer recipe) mentions the use of wine and honey in the recipe. So, I'm not sure what's new in TFA due to the lack of useful references. Anyone have more info on this story?

I few examples of this were discussed in The Selfish Gene. Its not the parasite that's self but its genes or so goes the thesis.

It is interesting to note that many legendary leaders in Ireland were women, and the most popular of modern politicians in Ireland was Mo Mowlam. (For that matter, England is no different - from the legend of Boudicca to the very real history of Margret Thatcher. Hey, I despised Thatcher's politics, but there's no questioning the fact that she was intelligent.)

One of the youngest students ever admitted to Oxford University for a degree program (mathematics) was Sufiah Yusof at the age of 13. Ruth Lawrence had actually achieved a starred First Class honors degree in maths by the time she reached age 13, had a degree in physics a year later and a PhD in mathematics by the time she was 16.

"These are the exceptions", you might say. That might well be the case, but exceptions are falsifications. If you have to add a whole bunch of exceptions to a theory, in order for it to work, then the theory is wrong.

But even the "exceptions" claim is suspicious. Girls generally out-perform boys in maths and science, up to the early teens. After that, western culture often requires them to be stupid. As such, any observations above that age need to be treated with caution. (You notice how the two prodigies I mentioned fit inside the age bracket I outlined.)

Actually, boys are often expected to be more interested in sports and social stuff (such as the Cub Scouts) than education, so it's actually very hard to know if earlier comparisons are any fairer - again because of cultural expectations. You'll notice how boys who are "geeky" are invariably described as "loners" and "anti-social".

My suspicion is that if we stop telling kids what they can't do, they'd start discovering what they CAN do. Actually, it's less of a suspicion and more of an observed fact (although the rock school mentioned in the article didn't seem to have many women). As such, I simply cannot see any merit to the study.

I'm the anonymous coward you are replying to.

No, it is not, what it is zero is its covariant derivative, don't be confused by the notation in GR: the nabla does not denote divergence but a covariant derivative. To prove the conservation of any quantity you have to show that the usual divergence of such quantity vanishes identically as stated by Noether's Theorem.

I will recomend you to look at Weimberg's book on cosmology or this online book for more information about these topics

Methane is an odorless gas. Need to go back and open your chemistry book...

Stephen Jay Gould is really not a good example of whom to learn about evolution from.

Most people think he is way off on the subject of evolution, yes he might be against ID, but not really an asset when you talk about evolution.

I for one think he is one of the reasons behind the notion that evolution still is disputed, cause his views are far from the views of most biologists outside of the US.

Instead, read some books by Richard Dawkins.

Here are some files about what people think of Stephen Jay Gould:
http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins -archive/Catalano/the_g_files.shtml

Especially read these:
http://www.nonzero.org/newyorker.htm
http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins -archive/Dawkins/Work/Reviews/1990-02-25wonderful. shtml

Stephen Jay Gould is really not a good example of whom to learn about evolution from.

Most people think he is way off on the subject of evolution, yes he might be against ID, but not really an asset when you talk about evolution.

I for one think he is one of the reasons behind the notion that evolution still is disputed, cause his views are far from the views of most biologists outside of the US.

Instead, read some books by Richard Dawkins.

Here are some files about what people think of Stephen Jay Gould:
http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins -archive/Catalano/the_g_files.shtml

Especially read these:
http://www.nonzero.org/newyorker.htm
http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins -archive/Dawkins/Work/Reviews/1990-02-25wonderful. shtml

The Church of Scientology buys the rights to Unix. Ok, Stop the ride, where do I get off.

Sorry, you don't get to get off until Microsoft has in turn bought the Church of Scientology. After all, in the end, Microsoft buys everything.

Of course there is the occasional times that a jury gets it wrong but usually that is because of missing evidence or evidence that wasn't allowed to be presented to them.

The truth is, the majority of jurors have little training in or facility with critical thinking, and have difficulty determining what constitutes reasonable doubt, or of taking into account the credibility of those involved in the case. I recall in particular an incident where a witness was shown to have lied under oath, and yet two jurors accepted all the witness's other statements without question.

A significant proportion of jurors are of below average intelligence. And many display prejudices about all sorts of quirks of the accused or accusers, which have nothing to do with determining their guilt or innocence.

Next time you get annoyed at some numbskull's idiocy, ask yourself, if you were falsely accused of a crime, would you want that person on the jury? Take a stroll around your neighbourhood, go to some stores, watch TV. Look at the people. Would you really trust them to reliably assess the evidence in a case and unerringly determine your innocence? Those people, or people much like them could very well be on the jury.

Richard Dawkins wrote a piece on the subject of trial by jury that is well worth reading.

Interestingly Karl Marx is nowadays subject of study of many great economists. If you study economics in Ivy League you might have to reed Marx. Reason why the father of communism is so hip is because Marx had very good understanding of capitalism.

Economists and political scientists note how the manifesto, written by Marx and Friedrich Engels, recognized the unstoppable wealth-creating power of capitalism, predicted it would conquer the world, and warned that this inevitable globalization of national economies and cultures would have divisive and painful consequences. "The manifesto speaks to our time," says Dani Rodrik, professor of international political economy at Harvard University. "Marx saw capitalism as the driving force of history. But he also warns of the divisions that capitalism's spread would bring, of the social orders destroyed."

Globalization has NOT been happening for hundreds of years.

Globalisation? Would you define that as the specialism of industries/expertise in certain countries resulting in necessary trade?
So what about industrial/textile production in the US 100 years ago?
What about the importing of labor from Asia in the US 200 years ago?
What about the European colonisation and use of Africa/India 400 years ago?
What about the concentration of plate/cup production in East Asia 1000 years+ ago?
What about the spice road 2000 years ago?

I recommend you read this about golbalisation since 3500BC.

a recent process of international capitalism whereby free trade agreements and development aid are used to make the transfer of resources and wealth from poor countries to rich one easier

Eh? I think you're mixing 2 important concepts here together:

1. Truely Free Trade Where a poor country can sell something to anyone in the world, thus generating income for themselves. They have a competitive advantage (for highly labor intensive products) as they can sell cheaper than western counterparts, generating income for their country. What would you rather they do? Live a subsistence lifestyle as a farmer and die at 35, or generate a better future through economic growth?

2. Non-free Trade As long as there is trade it will be free or non-free. Non free trade includes countries imposing tariffs, corruption of import/export laws. The European and US subsidies to farmers are the greatest example to this: where an income stream (and way to develop) could be given to a 3rd world farmer, Western governments subsidise their farms and tax imports. Lets be clear, this is denial of free trade, the opposite of free trade.

I'd be interested if you could explain you arguments on why free trade is detrimental, opposed to non-free trade which results in denial of wealth to pooper countries at richer countries expense (remember in rich countries its a redistribution of income that subsidises non-free trade, if wealth was not redistributed productivity would increase as cheaper produce benefitted the 3rd world AND 1st world consumers who would have more spare money to spend/invest in other areas).

> "A newly discovered fragment of the oldest surviving copy of the New Testament indicates that,
> as far as the Antichrist goes, theologians, scholars, heavy metal groups, and television
> evangelists have got the wrong number. Instead of 666, it's actually the far less ominous 616."

Why not take a look at the source itself?, which states:
One feature of particular interest is the number that this papyrus assigns to the Beast: 616, rather than the usual 666. (665 is also found.) We knew that this variant existed: Irenaeus cites (and refutes) it.

Irenaeus was born in AD 130 - 2 centuries before this papyrus. The 616 was dismissed as error even back then. Irenaeus writes:

1. Such, then, being the state of the case, and this number being found in all the most approved and ancient copies [of the Apocalypse], and those men who saw John face to face bearing their testimony [to it]; while reason also leads us to conclude that the number of the name of the beast, [if reckoned] according to the Greek mode of calculation by the [value of] the letters contained in it, will amount to six hundred and sixty and six; that is, the number of tens shall be equal to that of the hundreds, and the number of hundreds equal to that of the units (for that number which [expresses] the digit six being adhered to throughout, indicates the recapitulations of that apostasy, taken in its full extent, which occurred at the beginning, during the intermediate periods, and which shall take place at the end), I do not know how it is that some have erred following the ordinary mode of speech, and have vitiated the middle number in the name, deducting the amount of fifty from it, so that instead of six decads they will have it that there is but one.

The number is 666 as Irenaeus testimony (itself based on those that knew John - the author of the Book of Revelation personally) and the vast majority of manuscripts attest. Perhaps the fact that this papyrus was found in an "ancient rubbish heap" means something.

or even http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat1312/geek.html

I always thought http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat1312/geek.html/ sums it up rather well.

...it's not combined with C12H19Cl3O8 or C14H18N2O5, it would probably work.

If you've got any spare CPU cycles go here Spread Firefox

--Greg

--Greg

--Greg

So, I presume you still must attach leeches for most of your ailments?

And this isn't the first time he has come up with some interesting research that has been mentioned on Slashdot before. Sure, he seems to be a little arrogant, but with his record so far, I think he's earned the benefit of the doubt here...

And this isn't the first time he has come up with some interesting research that has been mentioned on Slashdot before. Sure, he seems to be a little arrogant, but with his record so far, I think he's earned the benefit of the doubt here...

A fireman that rescued me (barely sensible) after an electronic device exploded, said that BeO was probably the culprit. I had been in the room when the device(s) exploded and was the first one to ring for help.

About 15 minutes later (I hadn't been feeling too good), I collapsed and was taken to hospital.

BeO is highly toxic by ingestion and inhalation (Material Safety Data Sheet: http://physchem.ox.ac.uk/MSDS/BE/beryllium_oxide.h tml
).

Apparently it is one of the more common toxic substances emitted in smoke/fumes. Particularly in domestic / non-chemical-factory settings.

Have you ever looked at the MSDS for sodium chloride?
http://www.jtbaker.com/msds/englishhtml/S3338.htm

Or silicon dioxide?

http://physchem.ox.ac.uk/MSDS/SI/silicon_dioxide.h tml

You might never go to the beach again!

Mineral oil is ignitable, but you'll have trouble lighting it unless it's sprayed somehow or gets heated to well over boiling (its flash point is 135 C). By that point it's quite hazardous for being a lot of hot oil.

Mineral Oil==Gasoline?
Mineral Oil==Morphine?

Please. But even if Morphine and Mineral oil are equally toxic I would not worry about using it for a cooling fluid.

BTW Here is the MSDS for Ethyl alcohol.
http://ptcl.chem.ox.ac.uk/MSDS/ET/ethyl_alcohol.ht ml I suggest if mineral oil worries you you should flee to the hills at the sight of a beer.
Here is the one for Oxygen http://www.vngas.com/pdf/g1.pdf I suggest you start holding your breath.. That stuff can kill you.

Good grief people get a grip. Yea you should not put mineral oil in a paint sprayer and try and light it or breath it. I would also suggest that doing the same thing with vodka, beer, olive oil, or sunflower oil would also be a bad idea. Using it to cool your motherboard? While messy is not very dangerous.

My school offers ICT, not Computing. I do not want to take Computing at A Level.

I will be taking (for your interest) Chemistry, Physics, Mathematics, Further Mathematics, and Geography. This should set me off to a good start for Computer Science at a super-geeky university. [1] [2] Perhaps due to a low supply of Computing courses, neither of these pages mention A Level Computing.

Additionally, I read Wikipedia, I program basic Scheme and some C++ and I'm an expert in PHP (although I'm moving away as it isn't a computer-science-style-language). Worry not about my prospects. ;)

[1] http://www.cam.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/cour ses/compsci/factfile.html
[2] http://www.admissions.ox.ac.uk/courses/enreq.shtml #tab

There's a bunch of interesting papers out there on content-based image analysis and retrieval. Below is a sampling from my bibtex file. Does anyone else have others they'd like to share?

* Finding Naked People (Fleck et al, 1996)

* Video google: A text retrieval approach to object matching in videos (Sivic & Zisserman, 2003): web page demo here

* Names and Faces in the News (Berg et al, 2004)

* FACERET: An Interactive Face Retrieval System Based on Self-Organizing Maps (Ruiz-del-Solar et al, 2002)

* Costume: A New Feature for Automatic Video Content Indexing (Jaffre 2005)

most of our clients are now asking questions that require approximate or probabilistic answers

Bioinformatics databases are a good example of this. DNA and protein sequence databases are often searched by approximate string-matching algorithms based on "dynamic programming" to hidden Markov models and other stochastic grammars.

Historically, drug target-hunters in Big Pharma created a market for accelerated hardware to facilitate dynamic programming searches, some of which (e.g. Paracel's Fast Data Finder chip) was originally marketed to government agencies who, um, shared an interest in approximate string-matching ;)

When DNA died, Richard Dawkins wrote and delivered a funny/sad/bitter/grateful eulogy, included as one of the essays in his book A Devil's Chaplain, which is well worth reading in any event. http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins -archive/Dawkins/Biography/bio.shtml/

These images of an early Greek papyrus are clearly copyrighted by Oxford.

There is a technicality in U.S. copyright law (17 USC 303) that applies only to works fixed before 1978 but published between 1978 and 2002, that such works are copyrighted at least until December 31, 2047. Is this the case? I can't tell because the copyright notice at the Bodleian Library copyright page is incomplete, lacking a year of first publication.

If the manuscript was first published before 2003: It falls under this technicality and is copyrighted until December 31, 2047.

If the manuscript was published on or after 2003: Oxford claims a copyright, but is it enforceable in the United States?

ObTopic: The works that are the subject of this article are first published in 2004 or 2005, so the special dispensation for works first published in 1978 to 2002 inclusive does not apply.

Images of a public domain work are mere copies

It looks like indexing will initially be manual, but it'll be interesting to see what sorts of content-based searching and indexing methods Google will end up implementing. For those unfamiliar with it, content-based methods allow for information extraction based on the actual video data, rather than manually-added metadata. Searching google scholar and google web for "content-based video" methods comes up with some interesting results. The current state-of-the-art can do some impressive things, but there's clearly still lots of room for improvement.

Now that I think about it, having uploaders manually index the videos the submit is a fantastic way for Google to bootstrap an automated video indexing system.

One neat project is Sivic & Zisserman's Video Google (no relation to the Google company, I think). They have a demo available where you can search for automatically-extracted objects in a movie. They also show the results of doing things like detecting Bill Murray's tie throughout the movie Groundhog Day.

Just to correct myself, a calibration curve is actually created by looking at similiar patterns in the tree rings of a tree that recently died compared to an older tree. See this page for details.

And if you don't have DNA, you don't have imperfectly-replicating life forms, which means that you don't have evolution

This statement is baseless, unless you make certain implications about what a "life form" is. In any case, evolution isn't about life forms it's about replicators and DNA is but the mechanism used by one type of replicator here on earth.

Have a look at Dawkins' Selfish Gene or Blackmore's Meme Machine for some good explanations of replicators and their evolutionary powers.

This reminds me a little bit of a rather neat system I came across the other day, Video Google (despite the name, I don't think it has anything to do with the Google company). It doesn't use metadata or cheats like that, but rather uses image analysis to identify recurring objects and scenes.

They have a demo on their web site where you can select a portion of a video frame, and it'll show you all the places in the movie where the algorithm thinks that snippet shows up. Some other cool examples are displaying the appearances of a clock from 'Groundhog Day," and a recurring poster from 'Run Lola Run.' A research paper with more details is available here.

The abstract:

We describe an approach to object and scene retrieval which searches for and localizes all the occurrences of a user outlined object in a video. The object is represented by a set of viewpoint invariant region descriptors so that recognition can proceed successfully despite changes in view-point, illumination and partial occlusion. The temporal continuity of the video within a shot is used to track the regions in order to reject unstable regions and reduce the effects of noise in the descriptors.

The analogy with text retrieval is in the implementation where matches on descriptors are pre-computed (using vector quantization), and inverted file systems and document rankings are used. The result is that retrieval is immediate, returning a ranked list of key frames/shots in the manner of Google.

The method is illustrated for matching on two full length feature films.

This reminds me a little bit of a rather neat system I came across the other day, Video Google (despite the name, I don't think it has anything to do with the Google company). It doesn't use metadata or cheats like that, but rather uses image analysis to identify recurring objects and scenes.

They have a demo on their web site where you can select a portion of a video frame, and it'll show you all the places in the movie where the algorithm thinks that snippet shows up. Some other cool examples are displaying the appearances of a clock from 'Groundhog Day," and a recurring poster from 'Run Lola Run.' A research paper with more details is available here.

The abstract:

We describe an approach to object and scene retrieval which searches for and localizes all the occurrences of a user outlined object in a video. The object is represented by a set of viewpoint invariant region descriptors so that recognition can proceed successfully despite changes in view-point, illumination and partial occlusion. The temporal continuity of the video within a shot is used to track the regions in order to reject unstable regions and reduce the effects of noise in the descriptors.

The analogy with text retrieval is in the implementation where matches on descriptors are pre-computed (using vector quantization), and inverted file systems and document rankings are used. The result is that retrieval is immediate, returning a ranked list of key frames/shots in the manner of Google.

The method is illustrated for matching on two full length feature films.

This reminds me a little bit of a rather neat system I came across the other day, Video Google (despite the name, I don't think it has anything to do with the Google company). It doesn't use metadata or cheats like that, but rather uses image analysis to identify recurring objects and scenes.

They have a demo on their web site where you can select a portion of a video frame, and it'll show you all the places in the movie where the algorithm thinks that snippet shows up. Some other cool examples are displaying the appearances of a clock from 'Groundhog Day," and a recurring poster from 'Run Lola Run.' A research paper with more details is available here.

The abstract:

We describe an approach to object and scene retrieval which searches for and localizes all the occurrences of a user outlined object in a video. The object is represented by a set of viewpoint invariant region descriptors so that recognition can proceed successfully despite changes in view-point, illumination and partial occlusion. The temporal continuity of the video within a shot is used to track the regions in order to reject unstable regions and reduce the effects of noise in the descriptors.

The analogy with text retrieval is in the implementation where matches on descriptors are pre-computed (using vector quantization), and inverted file systems and document rankings are used. The result is that retrieval is immediate, returning a ranked list of key frames/shots in the manner of Google.

The method is illustrated for matching on two full length feature films.

*What* fundamental advances? Name them!

Firm semantical foundations, the Pi-Calculus, Game Semantics, Full Abstraction results for various languages, Zero Knowledge Proofs, Breakthroughs in Program Logics (Separation Logic, Honda-Logics), Proof-Carrying Code, Model-Checking.

See here for example. And there are a few good arguments against threads entirely (one of them being Linux's ultra-lite fork() implementation, which is of course not portable).

That said, AFAICT the only reason I can see that (AFAIK) no portable native-thread Ruby module has yet been standardised on is that Matz doesn't like the idea.

Everybody knows that dark is what happens when something fills up with light. (By the way, I googled the poor bastard I just linked to. Do your worst.)

For years, we all knew that lightbulbs emit light. Science has now proven this false. Lightbulbs, and other sources of light suck in darkness. In fact, when a lightbulb becomes full of dark, it stops working and has a dark spot on it. Candles are an even better example, since the wick clearly turns black as it is progressively exposed to dark.

Dark also has mass, which causes it to generate heat from friction as it is sucked in. Because lightbulbs are made of clear glass, the dark can go in easier than it can for a candle and there is less heat. For this reason, you don't want to touch a candle while it is sucking dark.

ICANN was also still in a confusing semi-democratic phase at the time (this seems to be steadily decreasing) and also weirdly self-imploding. Ester Dyson also gave the most contentless speech I think I have ever heard - no doubt to ensure minimum offense to anyone in the audience.

As with all these things wheels within wheels... but I do wish the call for some form of ICANN democracy would renew rather than lose it to a not very democratic body (i.e. the ITU) or to the corporations (kinda where it is now).

they instead called for European libraries to follow Google's lead.

No doubt he's delighted to note that one European library, at Oxford University, is way ahead of him on that.

Oh be quiet, nation of immigrants from elsewhere. Actually, sorry! I take it back, there are some really hot native american women aren't there?

stfu.