Slashdot Mirror

Yes it's just you since everyone else is well aware of this usage of the word war.

http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=war%20room

The best-reviewed and studied "action at a distance" phenomenon I've found is http://noosphere.princeton.edu/. It is a study being run out of Princeton University that has several hundred quantum random event generators located around the world. They've found statistically interesting variance in their outputs during massive human events, including Katrina and the Indian Ocean Tsunami.

The best-reviewed and studied "action at a distance" phenomenon I've found is http://noosphere.princeton.edu/. It is a study being run out of Princeton University that has several hundred quantum random event generators located around the world. They've found statistically interesting variance in their outputs during massive human events, including Katrina and the Indian Ocean Tsunami.

The books in the Princeton Library are free, thanks to the generousity of far-seeing individuals who realised that their money was better spent on a library than a new yacht.

One other thing: The libraries at Princeton are most decidedly NOT free:

http://library.princeton.edu/about/access-firestone.php
http://library.princeton.edu/about/access-branch.php

To gain admittance, you need to pony up $33,000 in tuition and $11,000 in room and board.

Each year.

The books in the Princeton Library are free, thanks to the generousity of far-seeing individuals who realised that their money was better spent on a library than a new yacht.

One other thing: The libraries at Princeton are most decidedly NOT free:

http://library.princeton.edu/about/access-firestone.php
http://library.princeton.edu/about/access-branch.php

To gain admittance, you need to pony up $33,000 in tuition and $11,000 in room and board.

Each year.

Some other folks at 4 or 5 already have commented on the fact that this is not a C# bug or a .NET bug, but a programmer mistakes, so I will not elaborate.

But the article linked to was authored by "RedGate Software" for the Code Project, so it is basically an advertisement for their product. Their product did help the team fix their bug, so maybe that is good.

But the bug was discovered and fixed in 2005:

http://pave.princeton.edu/main/archives/114

So what happened is that probably Red Gate wanted to score some PR points over at the Code Project and they digged up a story from their existing customers, decided to sponsor the guys in exchange for a few quotes that they could put on the article to promote their product.

It would probably not gone too far, except the guy that submitted the story thought he had found the smoking gun against C#.

Miguel.

Then there are things like, we'd like to make robot swarms and we want them to act like birds except do X instead of Y. Even if the natural behaviors are modeled it is very difficult to figure out what rules to add/change/delete to get the desired change. Or, we want the robots to do natural thing X, but we need some guarantee that they will do it with some level of accuracy and we need a kill switch in case they become self-aware. This field is wide open and is extremely interesting, because even if we're not explicitly mimicking natural phenomenon we are anyway when we have groups of things (computerized or otherwise) that have many individual components with complex and somewhat autonomous interactions.

the other interesting result is, that the next state of the swarm can depend on states in the past, this leads to spatial memory effect.

My favorite thing about Dr. Couzin is his willingness to work with people in other disciplines - particularly the "harder" sciences. It's mentioned towards the end of the article. My advisor, Naomi Leonard, and her students have published several papers with Iain as a co-author - see http://www.princeton.edu/~naomi/ and search for "Couzin" and "Levin" on the page for a few references. Dr. Grunbaum, who is also mentioned in the article, is great with this as well (also on the page). They are both fantastic guys to work with.

And a shameless plug for my tiny contribution - http://www.princeton.edu/~dswain/publications/2007/DSCDC07.pdf

My favorite thing about Dr. Couzin is his willingness to work with people in other disciplines - particularly the "harder" sciences. It's mentioned towards the end of the article. My advisor, Naomi Leonard, and her students have published several papers with Iain as a co-author - see http://www.princeton.edu/~naomi/ and search for "Couzin" and "Levin" on the page for a few references. Dr. Grunbaum, who is also mentioned in the article, is great with this as well (also on the page). They are both fantastic guys to work with.

And a shameless plug for my tiny contribution - http://www.princeton.edu/~dswain/publications/2007/DSCDC07.pdf

I would like to welcome Slashdot to 1986.

I would like to welcome Slashdot to 1986.

I would like to welcome Slashdot to 1986.

I would like to welcome Slashdot to 1986.

I would like to welcome Slashdot to 1986.

The article is a popular science article, but addresses this, more interesting, question much more than the summary. They discuss some of the rules involved in specific situations (ants), and even look at "human swarms" (although that bit is a little cheesy). There is no general theory posited about how to make these rule sets though, apart from trial and error (in simulation if you can). They say that the researchers are starting to see patterns, but don't talk about what those patterns are - pity really, as that would have been very interesting.

He was correct about the tidal forces being caused by the moon. The rotation of the earth has more to do with weather than the tides. http://www.princeton.edu/~pccm/outreach/scsp/water_on_earth/tides/science/causes.htm

"standard deviation .. is exceeded"

sorry for the inaccurrancy. Look at technical details if you want.

"standard deviation .. is exceeded"

sorry for the inaccurrancy. Look at technical details if you want.

That reminds me about an interesting project "global consciousness project", which based on years of randomly generated numbers says, that basically - when a lot of people think about the same thing - the standard deviation of randomly generated numbers is exceeded.

The random numbres are generated using eg. quantum-indeterminate electronic noise, and when there is a tsunami, or the pope died - the random numbers are suddenly not as random as expected.

Interesting stuff.

That reminds me about an interesting project "global consciousness project", which based on years of randomly generated numbers says, that basically - when a lot of people think about the same thing - the standard deviation of randomly generated numbers is exceeded.

The random numbres are generated using eg. quantum-indeterminate electronic noise, and when there is a tsunami, or the pope died - the random numbers are suddenly not as random as expected.

Interesting stuff.

From http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/press_release_closing.html:

"The enormous databases produced by PEAR provide clear evidence that human thought and emotion can produce measureable influences on physical reality."

I smell somehting fishy...

Actually, see http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/press_release_closing.html. The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory has closed. At any rate, how does the existence of these laboratories say anything? There are places you can go to study Christianity, and Islam and Judiasm, does that mean that obviously there must be something to them?

As a physics graduate student I had to teach loads and loads of students and their math/physics/analytical skills were a depressing sight to see.

more accommodating to the hard struggling american students (struggling to catch up).

In fact, the few countries that place higher than the U.S. are generally small nations, and few of these rank consistently high across all grades, subjects, and years tested.

Jet turbine power plants have have 2 SIGNIFICANT advantages:
(1)They can operate with just about any type of chemically and thermally stable combustible fluid with a sufficient energy density having consistent and reliable combustion properties.
and
(2) They are not hampered by the well-known significant inefficiencies introduced by exhaust emissions systems such as mufflers, catalytic converters, EGR systems, etc..

NOTE: Modern Jet fuels are hydrocarbon BLENDS. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_fuel
These blends are created as cheaply as possible to meet specific fuel properties and standards, including their energy content, and intended use: http://www.csgnetwork.com/jetfuel.html
There have been many well-intentioned pushes for "replacement" Jet fuels, including a "safer" version which was intended to reduce fire balls when Jets crashed, but it was a flop as it introduced safety concerns as the 'safety' additive increased the possibility of a flame-out (it basically made the flash point of the fuel higher and reduced the flammability of jet fuel mist) and it cost way too much for little if any margin of safety it would have introduced. (Most people in jet crashes do not die from a fireball of jet fuel, but from actually hitting the mountain, crashing into the ground/ocean, or basically some form of 'Aortic Dissection' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aortic_dissection )

I say that this is really a SPIN and a PR campaign.

Everyone looks good waving the environmental flag, but when compared to boats, trains, and trucking, jets are NEVER environmentally friendly. (Jets have to fight gravity continuously when moving goods and people = INEFFICIENT)
TFA ( http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S18/96/92S56/index.xml ) is a Press Release about research into processing "Biomass" into Jet fuel And, oh ya BYW, COAL!! THAT'S RIGHT, COAL!
We are talking about fuel from "other than" OIL Sources = SYNTHETIC FUEL (AKA SynFuel), specifically SYNTHETIC "JET" FUEL. http://www.syntroleum.com/pr_individualpressrelease.aspx?NewsID=907157

This really has EVERYTHING to do with the price of oil being SKY HIGH (pun intended): http://www.peak-oil-news.info/new-synthetic-jet-fuel/
Everyone knows that Aviation drinks fuel of any kind faster than other transportation types (when you realize the efficiency ratio of Distance traveled with quantity of cargo compared to actual fuel used per unit cargo (person, metric ton, etc..) for that given distance)
We are talking about stirring up money to get more research into the conversion of Coal into Synthetic Jet fuel (and other fuels) and we'll get to work with biomass too.
Oil is so expensive these days it is becoming just as cheap to chemically engineer/create (from scratch!) synthetic Jet Fuels from Coal. (which the US still has hundreds of years worth)
Why expensively pump it out of the deep ocean, or the middle east, and then transport around the planet (BYW, they use ships for this because of their efficiency, not jet aircraft) when you can just dig up some local Coal or Bitumen Tar Sand deposit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar_sands and make your own synthetic fuel.
(Now observe the pollutants released and the energy required during the "upgrading" of Coal/Bitumen into the new Synthetic Jet Fuel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upgrader )
FYI: The Germans made Synthetic Jet Fuel during WWII because they had Coal but not so much oil...

ample evidence that Bush administration is using the threat of violence against U.S. civilians to instill fear in the public, as a means to accomplish political goals that go back LONG before 9-11 ... By your own definition that would make them terrorists, no?

Uhm, no, the violence (or threat thereof) in the definition has to be applied (or threatened) by the same people, who try to achieve their goals.

For example, a stock-trader profiting from a price-hike (or drop) of something due to somebody else's act of terror, is not a terrorist.

So, unless you are stating, that Bush administration has performed (or threatened to perfrom) such acts against U.S. civilians, the definition would not apply.

It is not "my own definition" either, BTW. It comes from the WordNet program... A great tool.

The first tenant of the free market is that all players have equal information and access....

Wrong. The first tenants of the free market are the poor.

Or did you mean tenet? 8^)

According to Wikipedia, a modified version of lcc was used for compiling Quake III. It seems to me, this compiler would be far more maintainable, but for some reason, the world doesn't seem ready for literate programming.

One of the seminal analytic papers in this area is

Tamás Vicsek, András Czirók, Eshel Ben-Jacob, and Inon Cohen ``Novel type of phase transition in a system of self-driven particles'' Phys. Rev. Lett. 75 1226 (1995)

Another great paper:

Couzin, I.D., Krause, J., James, R., Ruxton, G.D. & Franks, N.R. (2002) Collective memory and spatial sorting in animal groups Journal of Theoretical Biology 218, 1-11.

In the above, a phenomenon called "collective memory" was exhibited in a model similar to Reynolds'. Individual members of the group have no explicit memory, but the group as a whole exhibits behavior that differs depending on the previous state of the group - in effect a "group memory".

Also, a shameless plug for my own software/API designed for similar simulations: glSwarm. Admittedly in a very early state of development, but functional enough to play with.

Wake me up when you're able to use PCC instead of GCC to do a 'make world'

I'm surprised nobody's mentioned tcc on this thread - it's lighter, faster, and close to a drop-in replacement for x86. The original poster doesn't seem aware of the wider context or they might have mentioned icc too. Even lcc is almost a drop-in, if far less optimising than gcc, and it supports more than just x86 targets.

ASAP program, where a group of coordinated robots was used to perform oceanographic measurements.

I never saw any real applications.

One of my favorite papers is a neat one about analog computer by Vergis, Steiglitz and Dickerson:

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~ken/MCS86.pdf

It shows how to bolt together car differentials to solve all NP complete problems. They only need a linear number of differntials (2x the variables in 3SAT). Sounds awesome, right? The problem is that the differntials need to be machined with a level of precision that increases expoentially. And precision costs cash.

Is it possible that the quantum computers require the same steeply increasing level of precision? Enquiring minds want to know?

You might know Sedgewick's books about 'Algorithms in [language]', where the language is any of C, C++, Java. Well, I still have a (digital) copy of it's very first issue around where all those algorithms were written in Pascal - the book was called 'Algorithms'.

I did some Pascal coding back in the nineties (I was a thirteen yo Pascal newbie - when I take a look at the programs today I feel tempted to puke all over my keyboard) and re-learned part of it for the algorithms in this book - it's an elegant language, sad thing it's dying - the verbose syntax isn't all that bad; I think the most important thing about easy understanding of a program's logic is consistent indentation.

And google will give you some help with getting started with Pascal. I think there should be a lot around...

"Dual licensing works because people that want to make commercial software and don't want to follow the GPL."

I know what people do, but what definition of commercial are you using?

http://www.innovativefinance.org/home_tools/glossary/C.htm
http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=commercial

Much GPL software is commercial software. You seem to be using the term in such a way that makes it impossible for GPL software to be commercial software. I am just trying to get it cleared up.

all the best,

drew

http://pc.celtx.com/search/zotz
http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=zotzbro

If some "facts" are not to be trusted or not true, they're just that: "facts", not facts.
Granted, Wikipedia (Oxford English Dictionary) tells that the meanings allegation or stipulation have a long history in English. It does not mean that it's really the case in contemporary every-day language.

And actually the Wikipedia (OED) example quote is: "the author's facts are not trustworthy". It would sound silly to say "author's facts are not facts" because it does not emphasize the point which is that the "facts" are not trustworthy. They might not be true.

And all this is even without taking the context into account. Here we are talking about scientific (or technical) facts, and in that context you can not talk about "true facts" or "non-true facts" because there is no such thing as a non-true fact. Fact is a fact is a fact. Fact is something that exists, has existed or something that has "the quality of being actual" (i.e. it is true). Even your own sources tell that this is the case in our context.

http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3A%20fact
http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=fact
http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/fact

I think the signatures are based on different ratios of chemical isotopes produced by different reactors.

From Princeton wordnet

Isotropic,
http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=isotropi c
"invariant with respect to direction"

From Wikipedia

Isotopic Signature,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopic_signature
"a ratio of stable or unstable isotopes of particular elements found in an investigated material."

It looks like Isotopic is correct.

If you are trying to carry out some sort of electrically large scattering problem through inhomogeneous anisotropic materials - you are in for a tough ride. Unless you can approximate things away furiously you will soon find the problem computationally intractable.

It sounds to me as though you really need to get a feel for the basics before embarking on anything too heavy. Time spent in reconnaissance is rarely wasted. Once you have an intuitive idea of how things work you will probably better understand the problem - hence be able to pick an appropriate solver.

A good general starting point in my opinion (particularly in the scalar case) is the use of pseudospectral methods. These will allow you to describe the field propagating through materials in a reasonably tractable manner - they are not too much effort to understand, reasonably quick thanks to the magic of FFTW and surprisingly robust.

I suspect your problem breaks down into three distinct domains:

1. Getting the excitation field to the interaction region
2. Modelling the (potentially complicated) interaction of the field with the surface
3. Getting the field back from the interaction region to the detector.

Since the excitation is presumably beam-like, a pseudospectral technique (particularly one with coordinate scaling) will probably help with 1) and 3). With finite difference techniques you must model the field step-by-step through space. With FFT methods you can jump from one plane to the other - this can be orders of magnitude faster than finite difference.

How you manage 2 is the tricky part! The detail of this will depend strongly on what the material interaction is (e.g. will a scalar approximation suffice). I highly recommend you read Weng Cho Chew, Waves and Fields in Inhomogeneous Media for some pointers. Other things to look into:

1. Green's function techniques (see, e.g. Martin et. al. for an accessible start point).
2. Transfer matrix methods (see, e.g. Barns and Pendry)
3. Discrete dipole scattering (see, e.g. Bruce Draine's DDSCAT)
4. Multiple multipole methods (see, e.g. C. Hafner
5. Finite Difference Time Domain (e.g. see the excellent MEEP from MIT) (see my warning below)
6. Basis expansions and stratified media (similar to transfer matrix) see. Chew for details)

A

Hi. The rise in income is "economic". That is, it is the arithmetic difference in expected shareholder value (a) without and (b) without the investment in security. Cash income is not the only way to make or lose money: one can lose money by having additional future costs (payments), as well as by having a lower expected future income. Conversely, an investment can pay off by resulting in larger future income than would be the case without the investment. In either situation, the difference is the return on the investment. Even if we consider an organization that does not retain assets (and hence its shareholder value is based purely on its expected future income streams and debt payments), then future losses represent future payments, or they represent reduced future income. Thus, investment in security does indeed have an ROI. For more information, I refer you to the seminal book on risk-based investment, "Investment Under Uncertainty", by Avinash Dixit & Robert Pindyck (1994): http://press.princeton.edu/titles/5474.html - Cliff

I am just sitting here shaking my head in disbelief at the shear stupidity of their business model.

Sheer

(adj) absolute, downright, out-and-out, rank, right-down, sheer (complete and without restriction or qualification; sometimes used informally as intensifiers) "absolute freedom"; "an absolute dimwit"; "a downright lie"; "out-and-out mayhem"; "an out-and-out lie"; "a rank outsider"; "many right-down vices"; "got the job through sheer persistence"; "sheer stupidity"

Shear

(n) shear ((physics) a deformation of an object in which parallel planes remain parallel but are shifted in a direction parallel to themselves) "the shear changed the quadrilateral into a parallelogram" (there isn't an adjective form)

I believe you're looking for the first one. Now you've learned something today.

</grammar nazi>

I am just sitting here shaking my head in disbelief at the shear stupidity of their business model.

Sheer

(adj) absolute, downright, out-and-out, rank, right-down, sheer (complete and without restriction or qualification; sometimes used informally as intensifiers) "absolute freedom"; "an absolute dimwit"; "a downright lie"; "out-and-out mayhem"; "an out-and-out lie"; "a rank outsider"; "many right-down vices"; "got the job through sheer persistence"; "sheer stupidity"

Shear

(n) shear ((physics) a deformation of an object in which parallel planes remain parallel but are shifted in a direction parallel to themselves) "the shear changed the quadrilateral into a parallelogram" (there isn't an adjective form)

I believe you're looking for the first one. Now you've learned something today.

</grammar nazi>

Oh wait, you must be one of those crackpots who somehow thinks science is a field for people with CLOSED minds that already believe they know the answers to the big questions.

One of the big problems I see with these studies is they don't consider legitimate on-line sales in their argument. They focus on "CD sales", and "Album sales".

They argue:
CD sales are down,
Cassette sales are down,
Album sales are down,
Record stores are hurting
...therefore revenue is down

However:
iTunes just sold their 3 billionth track.
wallmart and other stores now sell online
LEGITIMATE online sales are increasing.

I've found graphs online that show the increase then decline of vinyl sales as Cassettes became popular, then the increase of and decrease of Cassettes, then the increase and now decrease of CD sales... each hump bigger than the last... What these graphs nearly always fail to show is legitimate downloaded music sales.

This paper touches on the total sales but i don't think adequately addresses online sales. Interestingly it points out that there is a direct correlation between New Music Releases and sales.... and shows that there was a downward turn in new music that directly affected said sales. Just because the music world chose to heavily promote a handful of crap artists (i.e KFed - and who the fuck recorded that Paris Hilton album? - no not the pr0n, the album) and promote the hell of these half baked untalented hacks, they shouldn't blame US for their lack of sales (if indeed sales have gone down.)

Personally, I need to see an independent study of what the ACTUAL sales are that INCLUDES legitimate online sales INCLUDING singles, before I believe any more of the drivel coming from the RIAA et al.

• advanced: ahead of the times; "the advanced teaching methods"; "had advanced views on the subject"; "a forward-looking corporation"; "is British industry innovative enough?"
• being or producing something like nothing done or experienced or created before; "stylistically innovative works"; "innovative members of the artistic community"; "a mind so innovational, so original"