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My physics teacher in high school referred to sound waves propagating. Here is an example. There are 5 million google hits for "propagate sound waves" so maybe it isn't as incorrect as you think. According to Princeton, propagate (travel through the air) "sound and light propagate in this medium" is the 2nd definition.

The (Mis)Behavior of Markets, by Benoit Mandelbrot and Richard L. Hudson.

Fooled by Randomness, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

A Random Walk Down Wall Street, by Burton G. Malkiel.

All of these are fascinating reading, and highly recommended. Certainly anyone who pays attention to CNNfn and the rest should read Taleb; anyone who's trading options (and relying on an option pricing model) should read Taleb and Mandelbrot; and anyone who still thinks that investing in mutual funds is a good idea should read all three. The parent's remark about survivorship bias is right on target, and that's by no means the only pitfall out there.

Seeing that plastic is going to get incredibly expensive once the petroleum is all gone (2025 by the most realiable non-industry estimates) I don't think we want to be using plastic. Personally I think the future lies in ceramics. Of course that doesn't help the bridge builders out since it's heavy and probably not stable enough for bridges.

Their research seems to deal mostly with the third problem, which is one of the biggest barriers to use in real life. Many of the algorithms used on these types of problems are NP, or require ridiculous amounts of (expensive) labeled data to train from. Also there are problems with generalization and overfitting.

There is no freeware software that can compete with this type of algorithm under these conditions - over 300,000 articles in just a few hours.

All that being said, I'm waiting for the paper, along with more technical specifics, to be released so I can really see what this is about

The evaluated http://gate.ac.uk/ which is GPL software but ended up using http://search.cpan.org/~acoburn/Lingua-EN-Tagger/. There are several other tools in this space that can be glued together to create this type of software:

http://www-nlp.stanford.edu/
http://tcc.itc.it/research/textec/tools-resources/ jinfil.html
http://wordnet.princeton.edu/
http://www.alias-i.com/lingpipe/web/faq.html
http://www.isi.edu/licensed-sw/halogen/index.html

Not trivial, but if you wanted to DIY, you don't need to start from scratch. Though, having a bunch of hardware to chug through 1000s of documents would still be needed :).

Here's the source code Latent Dirichlet Allocation

And my favourite visualisation of this can be found in the http://www.astro.princeton.edu/~mjuric/universe/ Logarithmic Maps of the Universe page. I get a kick out of it every time I look at this map - it still blows my mind! It is amazing how insignificant our planet is, when you consider the number of galaxys (let alone stars) there are in the universe...

(adv) literally ((intensifier before a figurative expression) without exaggeration)
(v) explode, irrupt (increase rapidly and in an uncontrolled manner) "The population of India is exploding"

(adv) literally ((intensifier before a figurative expression) without exaggeration)
(v) explode, irrupt (increase rapidly and in an uncontrolled manner) "The population of India is exploding"

(adv) literally ((intensifier before a figurative expression) without exaggeration)
(v) explode, irrupt (increase rapidly and in an uncontrolled manner) "The population of India is exploding"

It isn't my definition. It is what you find on WordNet and similar internet sources.

http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn2.1

Defining patriotism as pride in country is not at all consistent with the historical meaning of the word.

defining subjective: taking place within the mind and modified by individual bias

You can't bias physics. Obviously the experiment is not completely understood or there wouldn't be such trouble with repeatability. They are producing a reaction. It's hard, not fake.

according to Princeton, at least, anyone who keeps a journal is a journalist. Just like anyone who keeps a diary is a diarist.

See for yourself.

• anguish: extreme mental distress
  
• unbearable physical pain
  
• agony: intense feelings of suffering; acute mental or physical pain; "an agony of doubt"; "the torments of the damned"
  
• torment: torment emotionally or mentally
  
• the deliberate, systematic, or wanton infliction of physical or mental suffering by one or more persons in an attempt to force another person to yield information or to make a confession or for any other reason; "it required unnatural torturing to extract a confession"

IMHO this unlikely juxtaposition is a PR move by Randi himself to disguise and/or market his agenda. You can safely ignore it.

Randi has been called a "professional debunker," though I think that term is a bit generous, but even as such he would have a specific agenda. This is not the same kind of healthy agnosticism we would expect from a true skeptic. James Randi has gone so far as to offer the Smithsonian $20,000 to NOT screen a movie that he didn't happen to like, and directly or indirectly has on occasion even compared a faith healer to Al Capone.

How can I say this? Earth to Randi: faith healers don't use machine guns!

But that's nothing. Randi has even stooped so low as to similarly compare Uri Geller (an Israeli) to Adolf Hitler. Since Randi earned his fame substantially through imitating by illusion some of what Geller claims to do without illusion, you'd think he'd show a little more courtesy.

In my opinion if "The Amazing Randi" were the slightest bit objective, humanly decent OR eager to pay out on that million dollar challenge, he'd browse to the website of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory (PEAR Lab) promptly sign his mythical cheque for seven figures and go away.

More info on Wiki

This lab at Princeton has been producing loads of concrete proof of what could only be called psychic phenomena for something like 20+ years, and they have never EVER been successfully debunked. PEAR Lab represents a serious black eye to ALL debunkers or professional skeptics, so as you may have noticed, debunkers tend not to talk about this lab!

There's an interesting quote out there, from the television program PM Magazine on 1 July 1982: "I'm a charlatan, a liar, a thief and a fake altogether. There's no question of it." -James Randi

What, then, does a booby trap do?

• Theory says hardware is faster than software; in this case, theory is wrong. Workstation 5.5 has a full, optimized VT implementation. It's no faster than the normal binary translation approach, and in significant cases does worse. (Full details are at an academic conference in October; the paper itself is hard to get, sorry.). The short version is, switching in and out of VT mode is so expensive that it wipes out the few performance gains VT gets. Which means my expectation is that Xen/VT/Windows will be significantly slower - there is no theoretical difference between Xen/VT and VMware ESX/VT, since they do about the same thing. I have seen no Xen/VT/Windows benchmarks at all, and I am eagerly awaiting them. I expect Xen/VT/Windows to be, at best, equal to ESX, depending on how good the Xen/Windows paravirtualized drivers are.
• VMware EULAs now allow benchmarking (as of a month or so ago), especially of ESX 3.0. I realize there hasn't been time for anyone to put together good benchmarks - and if I could take the time away from my job, I'd do benchmarks myself, because I believe in being honest about this stuff! But personally, I'm really sick of seeing the study that compares Xen's work against a 5-year-old version of VMware's lowest-end product. And I'm hoping we finally get some interesting benchmarks soon! (Yes, I expect Xen to be faster than ESX, because paravirtualization is theoretically faster - by just a few percent.)
• Paravirtualization ... I'll just point to an event at the Ottawa Linux Symposium this week; Zach is a VMware employee and this paper discusses performance of paravirtualization on ESX.

Water is not a beverage.

• Human minds can affect random physical processes, to a minor but statistically detectable degree.
• The effect seems to disappear when deterministic (pseudo-random) sources are substituted.
• The effect is idiosyncratic (different individuals produce different results).
• The effect is erratic, showing long-term fluctuations which can be partly (but only partly) explained by changes in the operator pool.
• The scaling in response to simple physical variables is not obvious: for example, speeding up sampling by a factor of 10 produced no detectable difference in the effect size per bit, but speeding up sampling by a factor of 10,000 inverted the sign of the effect and reduced the per-bit effect size by a factor of 30.

I think you mean sentient

Research into this stuff isn't just for cooks and crazies -- even Princeton has a small lab the goal of which is to experimentally gather a "better understanding of the role of consciousness in the establishment of physical reality". It's called the "Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research" (PEAR) lab, and its web page can be found at http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/ -- Martin

"Disinterested" means "unbiased," and connects up with phrases like "conflict of interest" or "vested interest," in which we are talking about some sort priorities, maybe economic or family. Whereas "uninterested" is about apathy, lack of attentiveness or low curiosity -- it's a feeling. Ideally, a good judge is disinterested in the cases he hears, but not uninterested.

"Disinterested" means "unbiased," and connects up with phrases like "conflict of interest" or "vested interest," in which we are talking about some sort priorities, maybe economic or family. Whereas "uninterested" is about apathy, lack of attentiveness or low curiosity -- it's a feeling. Ideally, a good judge is disinterested in the cases he hears, but not uninterested.

>people are too lazy to create a second, non-admin account.

Lazy? Doing that presents so many issues that documenting and fixing them occupies an entire blog about non-admin logins in Windows. Then once you create the second, non-admin account, you're still vulnerable if an attacker includes in their payload a privilege escalation attack.

>developers are too careless and still write software that doesn't work unless you run it as admin.

Amen. For example, the person or persons who wrote a *typing tutor* program that requires admin access.

eventually the human would be reduced to the title "passenger".

And you'd have to be discreet about it, because forming porn into discrete patterns for your kids is something that you generally don't want people to know about.

So, is discreet a common synonym for discrete worldwide? They're two separate things here in .au

And you'd have to be discreet about it, because forming porn into discrete patterns for your kids is something that you generally don't want people to know about.

So, is discreet a common synonym for discrete worldwide? They're two separate things here in .au

Are you SURE about that? Even after a few decades of SETI, *we've* already found better ways of doing it. We can't even imagine what forms of communication that a radically different lifeform that is even slightly more advanced than us may be using.

-Eric

Radio SETI is really a waste of time. Optical SETI is the logical choice because;

1) Visible light-emitting devices are smaller and lighter than microwave or radio-emitting devices.
2) Visible light-emitting devices produce higher bandwidths and can consequently send information much faster.
3) Interference from natural sources of microwaves is more common than from visible sources.
4) Naturally occurring nanosecond pulses of light are mostly likely nonexistent, although there are all kinds of radio signals that could be similar to intentional SETI transmissions. Thus Optical SETI does not require grid computing to find signals.
5) Exact frequencies of light are not required, as nanosecond unfiltered light pulses would still outshine the planet's star by over 30 times.

Optical SETI detection out to 100 light-years is doable today, with a bit more work optical SETI out to 1,000 light-years is possible.

Optical SETI paper

advertising

Either spelling is acceptable.

As for Singer, I didn't misrepresent him at all. Check the FAQ on his own website [princeton.edu]. Here is a select quote for you: "So killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living. That doesn't mean that it is not almost always a terrible thing to do. It is, but that is because most infants are loved and cherished by their parents, and to kill an infant is usually to do a great wrong to its parents. Sometimes, perhaps because the baby has a serious disability, parents think it better that their newborn infant should die. Many doctors will accept their wishes, to the extent of not giving the baby life-supporting medical treatment. That will often ensure that the baby dies. My view is different from this, only to the extent that if a decision is taken, by the parents and doctors, that it is better that a baby should die, I believe it should be possible to carry out that decision, not only by withholding or withdrawing life-support - which can lead to the baby dying slowly from dehydration or from an infection - but also by taking active steps to end the baby's life swiftly and humanely."
So, killing a baby after it is born is fine if it's disabled and the parents want to, according to Peter Singer. I'm interested to have you explain how I've misrepresented him.

The fascination with speed for me is how much "work" can be produced in a collaborative real-time environment. In particular for computer performance with languages such as SuperCollider or Chuck. Also, it is fun to watch programmers battle with logic under pressure. :) Cheers, Rob.

I meant this reply .

I am suggesting that since i can't determine the principle of when a creature deserves what rights, to instead set the principle at the point where we meet the actual creature.

Also, humans who "don't have capacity for intelligence" may have much more intelligence then you think.

First you say that I am arguing against a straw man, and then you basically repeat what I said you were saying. Classic!

It basically boils down to lying about his arguments, or pulling musing points made in a long philosophical digression with quite different conclusions out of context.

Applied to politics, fundamentalism means [...]

Changing the definitions of the terms to suit your views is unacceptable in a debate.

Islamic fundamentalism could include a reduced set of civil liberties for women, corporal penalties, sex regulation and jihad.

The argument for it is, usually: "because Koran says so," — thus perfectly within the WordNet's definition of fundamentalism as "the interpretation of every word in the sacred texts as literal truth". See, no need to invent your own...

Looking at all those new bills introduced in the last years, I can't but conclude that fundamentalism is at raise in the US.

At the very beginning of this thread I asked for an example or two. Why can't you offer any, I wonder? Again: what do Bush and/or other high-ranking US officials advocate by appealing to some scripture's words? Awaiting...

Merci bcp.

How is this special? Princeton's entire CS curriculum has been there for all to see for the last 9 years, and I haven't seen any /. articles about it in that time.

Hi. Sorry to help him burst your fantasy bubble there pal, but you are so ignorant and you picked such bad examples that, well, I couldn't resist:

Tell me, is there a serious cultural movement to ban birth control in Japan? (I'm going to laugh at you if you say there is.)

If by "birth control" you mean "the pill" (and not, say, abortion) then you might be surprised to learn that it was not available in Japan until 1999.

Any gay people crucified on fences over there? No?

Homosexuals in Japan may not adopt or marry. While a fantastically unrealistic concept of homosexuality is tolerated in Japan, sometimes even esteemed, real homosexuality is almost always kept very discreet and is considered shameful by most. The disparity in "acceptance" of homosexuality between the rural and urban areas is even more stark than your colorfolly-worded description of the same issue in the US.

Any other ignorant fantasies about Japan you'd like shattered?

(I enjoyed that more than I should have, sure, but slapping morons is so fun.)

Look Mr. Four-digit-UID, I made a decent point originally, stop breaking my balls :P.

We are governed by a Democratic Republic. Democracy is, most simply, defined as "rule by the people" and Reupblic is defined, again simply, as "rule by officials in lue of the people", or something like that.

A republic is simply "a form of government whose head of state is not a monarch", say, a president.

So it can be democratic, oligarchic, a dictatorship or whatever else, as long as the big cheese isn't a king.

Forget about public service, there's still a lot to investigate and play with...

TOP SECRET FACT:Most modern cars have tracking transponders! While you drive on highways. Wires in the road and 14 feet above, work fine and log your car movement.

Spy transmission chips embedded in tires that can be read REMOTELY while driving.

A secret initiative exists to track all funnel-points on interstates and US borders for car tire ID transponders (RFID chips embedded in the tire).

Yup. My brother works on them (since 2001).

The us gov T.R.E.A.D. act (which passed) made it illegal to sell new passenger cars lacking untamperable RFID in the tires allowing efficient scanning of moving cars.

Your tires have a passive coil with 64 to 128 bit serial number emitter in them! (AIAG B-11 ADC v3.0) . A particular frequency energizes it enough so that a receiver can read its little ROM. A ROM which in essence is your GUID for your TIRE. Multiple tires do not confuse the readers. Its almost identical to all "FastPass" "SpeedPass" technologies you see on gasoline keychain dongles and commuter windshield sticker-chips. The US gov has secretly started using these chips to track people.

Its kind of like FBI "Taggants" in fertilizer and "Taggants" in Gasoline and Bullets, and Blackpowder. But these car tire transponder Ids are meant to actively track and trace movement of your car.

Taggant chemical research papers :
http://www.wws.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/byteserv.prl/ ~ota/disk3/1980/8017/801705.PDF
(remove spaces in url from slashcode if needed)

I am not making this up. Melt down a high end Firestone, or Bridgestone tire and go through the bits near the rim (sometimes at base of tread) and you will locate the transmitter (similar to 'grain of rice' pet ids and Mobile SpeedPass, but not as high tech as the tollbooth based units). Sokymat LOGI 160, and Sokymat LOGI 120 transponder buttons are just SOME of the transponders found in modern high end car tires. The AIAG B-11 Tire tracking standard is now implemented for all 3rd party transponder manufactures [covered below].

It is for QA and to prevent fraud and "car theft", but the US Customs service uses it in Canada to detect people who swap license plates on cars when doing a transport of contraband on a mule vehicle that normally has not logged enough hours across the border. The customs service and FBI do not yet talk about this, and are starting using it soon.

Photos of tracking chips before molded deep into tires! :
http://www.sokymat.com/index.php?id=94

PLEASE LOOK AT THAT LINK : Its the same shocking tire material I have been trying to tell people about since the spring of 2001 on slashdot.

a controversial dead older link was at http://www.sokymat.com/sp/applications/tireid.html

(slashdot ruins links, so you will have to remove the ASCII space it inserts usually into any of my urls to get to the shocking info and photos on the embedded LOGI 160 chips that the us Gov scans when you cross Mexican and Canadian borders.)

You never heard of it either because nobody moderates on slashdot anymore and this is probably +0 still. It has also never appeared in print before and is (or was) very secret.

Californias Fastpass is being upgraded to scan ALL responding car tires in future years upcoming. I-75 may get them next in rural funnel points in Ohio.

The photo of the secret high speed overpass prototype WAS at :
http://www.tadiran-telematics.com/products6.html ...but the shocking link finally died in July 2004 and the new location 2005 does not have a photo of a RFID bridge underpass RFID database collector. But this 20005 link below does discuss their toll booth RFID tracking uses...

There's VerbNet, FrameNet, Arabic WordNet, and probably others I don't know about.

WordNet has become a standard for working with semantic relations computationally these days. It works by storing all known senses of every dictionary word, and each sense has links to other words based on how it's semantically related(synonym, antonym, hyper/hyponym, meronym, troponym, cause, is_a, morphological derivative, etc...)

There's not any model that can compete with it currently, and it's widely accessible and very easy to use. As this tool improves, so will the semantic web.

I think a taxonomy could be culled from Wordnet, or some other similar smantic project.

http://wordnet.princeton.edu/

Glencoe Textbook Software, especially the Test Generator ©2004, insist on copying a DLL file from its own directory on the Root of C: (This location is hard coded into the software) into the \%system%\ directory everytime it runs. With-out Admin rights, it is unsuccesful ergo it will not run. (It doesn't matter that the DLL is already there.)

MediaMax DRM generates an error if you do not have Admin Rights. You'll get this error even if you run once as Admin then try to run again as a Power User. Since you can't install/update/run the DRM, the CD will not play. There is a work-around, but to me it is not worth it. This is just another reason to not buy BMG products.

Memo

I attribute much of this sloppy work to a growing dependency on the IDE and a fear of writing anything by hand. With advent of the modern IDE, with its fancy properties tabs and auto-magical code inserts, the "Drag-n-Drop generation" is becoming disconnected from their code. I'm constantly hearing "I'm afraid I might break the page," when asking for a minor change to layout or functionality. This tells me that the coder has no idea what makes the page look the way it does and that there is probably some scary stuff going on under the hood. (Unfortunately, company policy prevents me from calling the guy a wuss.)

To me, good code means that the programmer understands why it works and has the confidence to turn it upside down and shake it without fear of breaking it. I'm not against VI or syntax highlighting -- not even autocomplete or code snippets -- but I think 99% of the work should be taking place on the "Source" tab and that the "Design" tab is only there for the "Computers 101" class.

http://www.enterprisemission.com/
http://www.xenotechresearch.com/
http://www.coasttocoastam.com/
http://www.divinecosmos.com/
http://www.haarp.alaska.edu/
http://einstein.stanford.edu/
http://www.biocybernaut.com/
http://www.lod.org/
http://noosphere.princeton.edu/
http://www.sitchin.com/
http://www.lenr-canr.org/
http://www.zptech.net/
http://www.un.org/depts/dhl/dag/meditationroom.htm
http://www.starchildproject.com/

That should keep everybody busy ..

It's worse than that. "Indifferent" means "unconcerned," but "disinterested" means something else. In fact the word is a complement. It's the opposite of Halliburton-style conflicts of interest.

Definitions of joke on the web:

• a humorous anecdote or remark intended to provoke laughter; "he told a very funny joke"; "he knows a million gags"; "thanks for the laugh"; "he laughed unpleasantly at his own jest"; "even a schoolboy's jape is supposed to have some ascertainable point"

• jest: activity characterized by good humor

• antic: a ludicrous or grotesque act done for fun and amusement

• tell a joke; speak humorously; "He often jokes even when he appears serious"

• a triviality not to be taken seriously; "I regarded his campaign for mayor as a joke"

• act in a funny or teasing way
  wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

• A joke is a short story or short series of words spoken or communicated with the intent of being laughed at or found humorous by the listener or reader. This sort of "joke" is not the same as a practical joke.
  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joke

• Humorous tales that can be very short or very long. The older, longer humorous narratives, called Schwänke by folklorists, present stereotyped characters who act out common conflicts of neighborhood life. One type is the Numskull joke which concern the stupid person.
  www.lpb.org/programs/swappingstories/glossary.html

• Humor in a dream is a good indication of lightheartedness and release from the tension that may have surrounded some issue. There is, however, also a negative side of humor, such as when someone or something is derided or made fun of.
  www.dream-dictionary.org/interpretation/dream_dict ionary_j.html

Before you start laughing and saying "well of course," take a gander at this map. You'll notice that Alabama votes to the left of a significant percent of the country. If you consider the Washington Post a bastion of neoconservative thought, you haven't encountered the really rabid Bush authoritarians.

I'm not sure where you live but, ahem... would you mind sending me the real estate section? :-)

"I've not heard comments like that with regard to microeconomics before."

How I work (Krugman)
What seems terribly hard for many economists to accept is that all our models involve silly assumptions. Given what we know about cognitive psychology, utility maximization is a ludicrous concept; equilibrium pretty foolish outside of financial markets; perfect competition a howler for most industries. The reason for making these assumptions is not that they are reasonable but that they seem to help us produce models that are helpful metaphors for things that we think happen in the real world.