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Hippies vs Top Graduates?

Easy. Top Graduates learn by rote. Hippies are immersed. Hippies will win every time there is a conflict between corporate goals and human goals.

Have you forgotten the 1984 Apple commercial where the girl throws the hammer at Big Brother and frees all the zombie clones? Those zombie clones were MicroClones from Redmond. When they get the message, the world will be saved.
http://pulsar.esm.psu.edu/Faculty/Gray/graphics/movies/1984.mov

Ha! Found it!

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/393340.html

There is a paper I can go to bed with ;).

"We categorically reject the idea that, in a society committed to the rule of law, jury nullification is desirable or that courts may permit it to occur when it is within their authority to prevent. Accordingly, we conclude that a juror who intends to nullify the applicable law is no less subject to dismissal than is a juror who disregards the court's instructions due to an event or relationship that renders him biased or otherwise unable to render a fair and impartial verdict." U.S. v. Thomas.

That's a crock.

"The jury has the right to judge both the law as well as the fact in controversy." - Chief Justice John Jay

"It's not only ....(the juror's) right, but his duty, in that case, to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgement, and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court." - John Adams

"The judge cannot direct a verdict it is true, and the jury has the power to bring in a verdict in the teeth of both law and facts." - Oliver Wendell Holmes

"In the trial of all criminal cases, the Jury shall be the Judges of Law, as well as of fact, except that the Court may pass upon the sufficiency of the evidence to sustain a conviction." -- Constitution of the State of Maryland

At the time of the framing of the Constitution, it was well understood that a jury meant a panel of persons empowered to render judgment on both the facts and the law. The ignorance - or straight-out power grabbing - of later judges cannot remove this right.

(I also note that despite the erroneous statement you quote, the court did find the dismissing the juror was an error and remanded the case for new trial.)

but they can certainly (and should) prevent you from sitting on the jury if they feel your impartiality will be threatened by your personal issues.

There is a large difference between "having personal issues" that make one partial to a person involved in the case, and judging the law and finding it wanting.

I'm not sure if you remember this -
http://www.collegian.psu.edu/archive/2000/03/03-17-00tdc/03-17-00dops-letter-3.asp

"The committee, consisting entirely of Democrats and Republicans, has decided that in order to participate in a presidential debate, a third-party candidate must have 15 percent voter approval.

Had this rule been passed in 1992, Ross Perot, only having 7 percent of the vote, wouldn't have been able to raise key issues during the debates. Because Perot greatly pushed balancing the budget and brought this issue to the forefront, he forced President Bill Clinton to turn his energies toward balancing the budget while in office.

Had this rule been passed in 1998, reform party candidate Jesse Ventura, with only 10 percent voter turnout before the debates, would have never won (the governorship of Minnesota). This rule single-handedly allows for the continuance of the Democratic/ Republican monopoly."

The debates are the single most important place a serious party can vent their views and make themselves known to the public.
If the system itself inherently keeps people from knowing of a parties existence, let alone it's viewpoints, the system is a total farce.

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/342276.html

There seems to me some (a lot?) of FUD mixed up in this article. (surprise surprise...)

It starts out with the fact that public key encryption relies on the existence of one trapdoor one-way functions. Now in practice we mainly instantiate these functions with the RSA function (f_e(x):=x^e mod n with trapdoor p,q such that pq=n). But there is no reason to believe this is the only possible example of trapdoor OWF! Admitedly in the 80s when this concept was first being explored there were quite a few failures when trying to base implementations on NP-Complete and/or NP-Hard problems (think knapsack for example). But since we already had RSA with all it's nice properties (efficiency, elegance and simplicity) the research community was not overly motivated to find others.

There have been and to this day still are other lines of research. Take Ajtai and Dwork's work in the direction of basing PKE on worst-case hardness of the shortest vector problem (SVP) or Micciancio's work on generalizing the knapsack problem such that average-case hardness of approximating the answer can be reduced to worst-case hardness of certain lattice based problems.

Another general direction has been to come up with groups and fields over which solving the DLP is difficult. (For example torus-based crypto and generalized Jacobian groups). AFAIK for most of these candidates there are no (known efficient) reductions from the DLP problem over Z_p or elliptic curves to the DLP in these new groups. Thus it is not immediately clear how or if Schorr's algorithm would break such systems.

In any case there is reason to believe that there can not be (or that we can't find) good candidates for trapdoor OWFs in the quantum computational model. After all there is such a thing as Quantum P and Quantum NP. Though the inequality of these set's of problems doesn't directly imply the existence of quantum trapdoor OWFs it is a good indication there of.

So basically the message is : Relax! The PKE world is by no means on the brink of an apocalypse. At most (and best in my opinion) we're in for a bout of some serious foundations research. to me that just sounds like more funding for applied mathematicians and complexity theorists from various corners and a WHOLE bunch of new candidates and interesting results. :-) i'm down with that.

> truly random, depending upon quantum interactions

Misguided quantum mechanics who persist in thinking that their theory is in any way logical, are invited to read this paper, which clearly describes the error of their ways.

You can do some stats on the output, for example: http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/maurer92universal.html

Where are you?

In North America, I'd recommend ftp://carroll.cac.psu.edu/pub/linux/distributions/ mandrivalinux/devel/iso/2008.0/ . In South America, ftp://ftp.c3sl.ufpr.br/MandrivaLinux/devel/iso/200 8.0/ . In Europe, ftp://distrib-coffee.ipsl.jussieu.fr/pub/linux/Man drivaLinux/devel/iso/2008.0/ , or ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/os/Linux/distr/Mandrakelinu x/devel/iso/2008.0/ if that one's slow.

We don't do torrents for beta releases as the demand is not usually high enough to warrant it - the FTP mirrors usually cope with the demand easily.

Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen, the discoverer of X-rays, died of carcinoma of the colon in 1923.

He was 78 years old and his cancer was not radiation induced. Those kinds of cancers were more common before refrigeration reduced the need for cured meats.

There's been no established connection between GM crops and bee populations.

Oh, it's hard so say but there is evidence that's more convincing than cell phone towers.

bees eat pollen [which lack GM proteins]

Don't forget nectar, fruit juice and other stuff. They pollen for proteins, especially while "milking" to feed the queen, so any modified proteins will get into the population and effect the colony.

You don't need GM to kill bees anyway. Pesticides do the job too.

Indeed. Bandwidth may be a commodity, for instance, but in no way can it be a 'currency'.

I don't see your point. Basically, everyone wants to download data. How do you keep track of who's contributing to the P2P community and who's mooching? Face it, raw bytes are a de facto currency for a primitive marketv like P2P.

My point was merely that "currency" is the wrong word.

See pretty much any mainstream source that discusses the evolution of money from ancient barter systems up to today's rather abstract practices. The GGP post that I was replying to suggested http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money#Economic_charac teristics , and indeed it looks like a reasonable (although very terse) overview of the subject.

My point was not to argue against the technology under discussion. I've long taken for granted that eventually things like p2p will become pervasively integrated with all internet services (as will a variety of increasingly sophisticated free, for-pay, micro-payment, barter, commodity, futures, derivatives, etc. market practices).

Indeed, I didn't notice anything notably new (i.e. never-before suggested) in the proposal at all, although certainly I may have overlooked some nuance, somewhere. Except, of course, for the misuse of the word "currency", which I think gave the story more zing and captured more attention. Does grabbing more attention justify mislabelling? Definitely not (digg and reddit overzealous poster's frequent practice notwithstanding).

As to your question about tracking contributors versus moochers, a large amount of work has been done on related topics. Here's one (semi-randomly selected) paper regarding related technology: "A Trusted Execution Platform for Multiparty Computation (2000)" http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/ajmani00trusted.html .

It may or may not be obvious how it's related, for those who haven't been following the evolution of the application of cryptographic systems to increasingly disparate real world problems beyond mere secret-message passing for its own sake -- which has become a pretty large research area. Cryptography turns out to be the basis for building complex systems similarly to the way that steel girders are the basis for building skyscrapers.

There's a solid collection of Mac+LaTeX info (including software, getting started, etc.) at:

http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/

I've not used OS X in years, really, but when I did I used TeXShop as my LaTeX front end and i-installer (which seems to be no more) for installing LaTeX itself. The i-installer page is still there, and there's some TeX info there:

http://ii2.sourceforge.net/tex-index.html

I can't emphasize enough how much better it is to use a system like (La)Tex or troff or docbook for writing papers than it is to use a word processor. (Though I've only really used the first two.) Separation of content and formatting (however imperfect the implementation is in LaTeX or troff) in a plain text file really is the way to go.

Like Cows (or, I think, hooved animals in general). See either this week's episode of Mythbusters, or this paper, Principles of Cow Comfort, Animal Handling, and Movement:

Cows can see color; however they have dichromatic vision which means they see only a limited spectrum of colors. This makes a cow more sensitive to seeing sudden movement, but means they do not like situations with a high contrast of light and dark.

J. Carlberger published a paper titled Design and Implementation of a Probabilistic Word Prediciton Program in 1997. That should pretty much take care of the prior art argument.

Ok, but CAN you bring the sugar bags onto the flight? It can be used as a rocket fuel and here; and as an explosive Sugar has a LOT of energy!

I'm aware there are video game ratings. Maybe you missed the part I wrote where I said, "holding vendors accountable for sales according to those ratings."

Actually, no. Your knowledge of such issues seem to be about as dated as your lack of knowledge of the fact that the ESRB has been around since 1994.

Really? Here are the first handful of hits in Google when you search for "are video games harmful?":

http://www.apa.org/releases/videogames.html

http://culturalpolicy.uchicago.edu/conf2001/papers /freedman.html

http://www.psychologymatters.org/videogames.html

http://www.psychologymatters.org/mediaviolence.htm l

http://mentalhealth.about.com/cs/familyresources/a /vidgameviolence.htm

http://www.psu.edu/dept/medialab/research/vgviolen ce.html

You'd better get back to class there, professor.

I've struggled with gender politics in geek circles for years and it's one of the reasons why I am no longer involved in my local geek groups such as lug, or hold an IT job.

I think one perspective that is always overlooked is that sexism is not an isolated problem in IT culture. Other issues such as classism and racism are just as rampant. These problems, sexism, racism, and classism need to exist in order for IT to exist. The oppression is very much locked to the technology itself.

The book "Feminism Confronts Technology" put a lot of things in perspective for me. It has very strong analysis stemming from the historic development of technology leading up to present day IT culture.

The IT culture has been shaped by very obvious military, political, economic, and corporate pressures. Like other power professions, it has necessitated that it's people come from privileged backgrounds so that they can afford to be ignorant of diversity and arrogant towards other people. They need to have a certain level of insensitivity to avoid the harm of their own profession against others.

Equally important is the author's warning against progress. She cites many examples where apparent progress has been made to include women, people of color, economically under-privileged populations, etc. into technology professions. However, the progress made is motivated by power struggles in and surrounding the technology sector, which simply leads to new hierarchies being formed and the same old oppression reappearing under the guise of progress.

Through her criticism, the author suggests various ways of tackling change, and to work towards radically redesigning and shifting technology to benefit, rather than harm people.

Feminism Confronts Technology
by Judy Wajcman
http://www.psupress.psu.edu/books/titles/0-271-008 02-4.html

Write once thermal magnetic paper tape or digital optical tape

See:

D. Boggs, J. Mogul, and C. Kent, "Measured Capacity of an Ethernet: Myths and Reality," WRL Research Report 88/4, Western Research Laboratory, September 1988. http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/boggs88measured.html

Nope, it's possible. Penn State already did it, and I'm sure other schools have as well. Students are only allowed 2GB of upload and 2GB of download per week.

Students often need to download copyrighted material to support their work. I wonder if Kansas U has considered the implications of their policy: if the RIAA can get you disconnected instantly for downloading an MP3, surely other publishers can do the same.

In my own work, I often have to fetch journal and conference papers from digital libraries, e.g. a good one. Often I will find a paper is not available to me because it isn't covered by my University's subscription, like many of the papers here or here. That situation is supposed to force a trip to the brick-and-mortar library (if it has the document), but sometimes you can find the paper online anyway, using a search engine. It might be on the author's website or Citeseer. Sometimes people seem to "accidentally" leave copies of papers where a search engine can find them. This is extremely helpful for a researcher, saving much time, and it is known that online articles are more likely to be cited.

However, except in special cases (e.g. the author has retained the copyright and distributed it for free), this is technically copyright infringement. The publishers want you to get everything through their paywall. That would be fine if everything was accessible, but the exhorbitant fees charged for full access by some organisations prevent that. Therefore, copyright infringement actually helps scientific research by allowing information to flow. At my University, nobody seems to notice (or care about) students digging up papers from elsewhere. But if the Kansas U management style spread here, a publisher could presumably get students instantly disconnected for "bypassing the paywall". You might lose your Internet connection -- for studying.

Is this close to a situation where research is actively inhibited by greed?

"The content you requested is not part of your subscription, please pay $30 to download this 10 page article".

Students often need to download copyrighted material to support their work. I wonder if Kansas U has considered the implications of their policy: if the RIAA can get you disconnected instantly for downloading an MP3, surely other publishers can do the same.

In my own work, I often have to fetch journal and conference papers from digital libraries, e.g. a good one. Often I will find a paper is not available to me because it isn't covered by my University's subscription, like many of the papers here or here. That situation is supposed to force a trip to the brick-and-mortar library (if it has the document), but sometimes you can find the paper online anyway, using a search engine. It might be on the author's website or Citeseer. Sometimes people seem to "accidentally" leave copies of papers where a search engine can find them. This is extremely helpful for a researcher, saving much time, and it is known that online articles are more likely to be cited.

However, except in special cases (e.g. the author has retained the copyright and distributed it for free), this is technically copyright infringement. The publishers want you to get everything through their paywall. That would be fine if everything was accessible, but the exhorbitant fees charged for full access by some organisations prevent that. Therefore, copyright infringement actually helps scientific research by allowing information to flow. At my University, nobody seems to notice (or care about) students digging up papers from elsewhere. But if the Kansas U management style spread here, a publisher could presumably get students instantly disconnected for "bypassing the paywall". You might lose your Internet connection -- for studying.

Is this close to a situation where research is actively inhibited by greed?

"The content you requested is not part of your subscription, please pay $30 to download this 10 page article".

US continues to lead Networking and Networked Systems research by a large margin.

Take SIGCOMM for example. It is arguably the top conference in networking. It is the most reputable
among computer networks researchers and it happens to be among the top 4 most cited conferences
in computer science in general ( http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/impact.html
http://libra.msra.cn/conf_category_24.htm).

Out of the 33 papers in SIGCOMM 2007, there are 29 papers from American research centers
(MIT, UCB, UCSD, Cornell, CMU, SDSC etc ). There are only 4 from Europe (Polytechnico di Torino, TUD, Delft, INRIA).

The truth is that the number of European and Chinese Publications in top Networking and Systems Conferences
has increased substantially (there used to be a time that a top conference would have at most one non-US publication).

This however, by no means can be interpreted as the quality of US research in communication networks degrading.
It simply means that the rest of the world is beginning to realize the benefits of fundamental communication
networks research. Still, Europe and Asia have long way to go.

Actually, here's a paper on just that.

Text Compression as a Test for Artificial Intelligence
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/171781.html

Here's a link to the original article at the author's site that unlike the ACM digital library version is not locked up behind a subscription requirement: The Effect of Brand Awareness on the Evaluation of Search Engine Results [PDF]

Here's a more understandable summary that in TFA: They got Google search results on four e-commerce topics, stripped identifying HTML, and created 16 fake results pages with branded header and footers for four search engines The query results for a topic had identical content and presentation. They presented each of 32 test subjects four results pages, one for each topic. Which of the four brands each was shown and in what order the topics were presented were randomized. Subjects looked at each result one at a time. They were asked to evaluate the results, following links as they chose to and commenting out loud. Note that all results sections were identical is both content and format, with only the branded page header and footers being different.

The authors claim that Yahoo got the highest ratings (averaged over all four topic queries), 15.3% more than the overall average, compared to Google's 0.7% over average. But their table and graphs show results all over the map. Google scored 52.2% over average on the home improvement query. MSN had the highest score on the camping mexico query, Yahoo was highest on techno music, and the made up unknown search engine got the highest score on the laser removal query. That says to me that when you have four search engines and four queries to mix together in random order you need a lot more than 32 subjects to get statistically meaningful results. The paper contains no analysis of statistical significance of the results.

Five minutes of thoughtful searching brought up useful, important information for anybody willing to take these sciences and technologies seriously. The National Institute of Health (NIH) stem cell page has some paper abstracts as well as listed universities with programs in these United States (and some online resources). Useful sources of information at this bibliography re: human reproductive cloning, at Boston University and this one. CiteSeer popped up the paper on nuclear transfer / human cloning. Apparently there's at least one dedicated research foundation out there.

Granted, most of these links are preliminary- check those deep databases, like over at PubMed Central, for those detailed reviews of the state of the art. And just for kicks, one last link which (still) impresses me.

For a sci-fi writer, he sure missed the obvious answer.

What if humans lived longer?

We're making some astonishing medical progress and unlocking many secrets of how biology actually works. While physics says that we can't travel faster than the speed of light, as far as I know, there's no inherent law of physics that says man cannot live for 1000 years. If you could live that long, then, taking 100 years to travel to another star at .1c suddenly seems a lot more tenable, and furthermore, if you have scientists that can accumulate that much knowledge, then, surely, they would contribute an incredible amount more.

I'm not convinced, either, that .1c is an upper limit. If we hit higher fractions of the speed of light, then time dilation does become a factor, and the crew could get there with a ship time of a few months or years, rather than decades.

It's a bit premature to say that advances in technology are impossible. Even now, more than a few researchers are going straight for the best known holy grail of advanced propulsion and are studying anti-matter drives. These drives could produce a specific impulse of 50,000 or more, as oppossed to just shy of 400 for chemical rockets. 100 grams of anti-matter equals the propulsive power of the space shuttle, which, you might have noticed, weighs considerably more.

http://www.engr.psu.edu/antimatter/introduction.ht ml

There yet remain some holes in known physics. There could be any number of breakthroughs that allow us to produce exotic kinds of matter that might prove useful for advanced propulsive systems.

The bottom line is, that, while Gene Roddenberry might have gotten a lot of the science wrong, he got the most important thing right : I wouldn't bet against humanity.

The only point to ask the author is this: what technology is really magical? Computers changed our lives completely, and I'm old enough to have seen how we lived before PCs. Things have changed, dramatically, but are they magic? Don't think so.

And BTW, Trees aren't the subject of of active research into non-human intelligence.

It comes from New Zealand. Specifically, from Peter Gutmann. It's briefly covered in section 7 ("Methods of Recovery for Data stored in Random-Access Memory") of this paper, and elaborated on in a paper called Data Remanence in Semiconductor Devices.

Seriously, you don't know everything there is to know about physics.

Apparently pretty pictures of electromigration constitute "making up bullshit"...

Well, from 5 minutes in google, here's a paper that touches on several similar topics, published in 1996. Here's another one by Larson, published in 1995 (look up the title: "Geographic Information Retrieval and Spatial Browsing" and you'll find citations to it that indicate a publication date of 1995). The relevant process even has a term: Geographical Information Retrieval (GIR). Larson's paper also makes mention of a system called "Virtual Tourist" for finding and browsing web sites by their geographic location.

About the only aspect of the claims that is superficially novel is putting together a geographic location from IP address algorithm with a search engine, but that falls into the "Duh, obvious!" category.

Something tells me that searching for more than 5 minutes might yield *alot* more.

All they would need is a more robust run-time type information system.

No, not at all. The current C/C++ specifications permit compilers to transform code in ways that can interfere with a garbage collector. Fortunately compilers do not do that as often as they could, but it seems like something important that should be addressed.

See Hans' paper Simple Garbage-Collector Safety for details.

Hello - have you used Office 2007?

Well, it's only been out 4 months. I based everything I said off of previous incarnations of Office, from 2003 (the second latest-n-greatest) to 95 (when WordPerfect started sucking). Given I don't want to replace my shiny & new copy of Office 2003 so soon after I got it, I won't be purchasing 2007 for some time. And nor will I be using to submit to Nature or Science, apparently, even if it were free.

1. PDF publishing is supported (free)

That's good to hear, and long long missing. Questions: is the output of "Print to PDF, then print the PDF" the same as just printing? I've had issues with such software producing different output that way (even sometimes products made by Adobe!). Also, how "good" is the PDF output. That is, are the files sizes quite small, is it embedding proper scaleable fonts, and does it print fast? A big problem with the old "print to .PRN, change extension to .PS, then ps2pdf" way of going from Word to PDF was getting bloated, poor quality, and complex PDF files; even Acrobat sometimes will non-sensibly make a crappy PDF.

2. Citations and Bibliographies are both supported under Word

Having used BibTeX, I will never go back. There are huge databases of freely available BibTeX format citations. The second runner up, EndNote, hasn't nearly the amount of citations available (although importing BibTeX into EndNote isn't hard). I have used EndNote, and it is not nearly as good as BibTeX. Other people (read the comments) seem to feel that EndNote works better than Word 2007's support; I simply don't believe that a mouse-driven interface for adding citations can ever beat a text-based one.

Office 2007 documents can be saved to document managment servers for sharing

I think you're missing the point. LaTeX easily allows you (and encourages you) to split your documents up into multiple files. So, regardless of what collaboration service you use, anything from emailing files back and forth to something overly complicated like SourceVault, you can have multiple people editing the same document simultaneously. They just work on different sub-files. I've done it with email, but usually do use RCS to automate the locking support. Unless Office 2007 vastly changes things, Word documents are still monolithic files. That makes it quite difficult to support simultaneous editing; you *need* a concurrent versioning system. And, forgoing large changes in Office 2007, .doc files are still stored as BLOBS, which makes automated commit/merging difficult to impossible.

4. LaTeX has style files; Word has templates. What's the difference?

As best I can tell (I've never found it, and I've tried...) you can't apply a template to a document after the fact (and get the expected results). If my paper is rejected from one place, I can reformat the entire document by changing which style file I include. Style files pretty much guarantee that all of the final product will have a consistent look, and that said look is easy to change across the board. Journals that are either done all in LaTeX or those that hire separate typesetters (for mucho $$$) have the most consistent appearance. Others look a bit like just a bunch of papers glued together.

I can't claim Office 2007 is better than LaTeX, since I've not used the latter extensively,

Except for those on the Office 2007 team, *nobody* has used Office 2007 extensively :)

From talking with people who have used 2007, there is quite a learning jump to go from 2003 to 2007. Especially since 2007 breaks math support for journals, it makes sense to consider moving to LaTeX just a

Go is not yet as well-automated as chess, but it appears that go-playing software is rapidly advancing:

"Two Hungarian scientists have now come up with an algorithm that helps computers pick the right move in Go, played by millions around the world, in which players must capture spaces by placing black and white marbles on a board in turn.

"On a nine by nine board we are not far from reaching the level of a professional Go player," said Levente Kocsis at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences' computing lab SZTAKI.

The 19 by 19 board which top players use is still hard for a machine, but the new method is promising because it makes better use of the growing power of computers than earlier Go software."

Link

See also:

http://zaphod.aml.sztaki.hu/papers/ecml06.pdf

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/vanderwerf03solving.ht ml

http://www.primidi.com/2007/02/26.html

-kgj

There are many researchers who are approaching this problem and aiming to put trust measures PDF file

While it may not be the holy grail in the format that is described in the article it is always possible to add additional social measures to the framework (similar to what has done to filter out trolls and and off topics here in /.)
That is why research is important and although you only read about how it is formated there are definately more research addressing the credibility problem. It is just that you need to have a common basis of understanding (i.e. data format) clarified first before you can extend it to the next problem. Of course the problem with the Semantic Web is deciding on exactly how and what needs to be represented.

Of course. But figuring out what branches to insert in the example above is static and *easy*, there's no excuse for a language not to do it for you.

> you don't have too many languages to choose from.

Yes, it's a pity. There is so much embedded code it's surprising things haven't moved much past how they were in the 60s. But the ideas are out there. There are papers on technqiues like region analysis for figuring out in advance what memory needs allocating, and there are interesting tools like Lava which can serve just as well as programming languages for embedded systems as well as HDLs. There are lots of smart people thinking hard about targeting small devices with functional languages and at some point I'll test this out.

" Satellites == poor TCP performance (doesn't mean you could not use another format of course:http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/470799.html " http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/470799.html, File not Found Did you mean to cite "Congestion Control for High Bandwidth-Delay Product Networks" XCP : http://www.sigcomm.org/sigcomm2002/papers/xcp.pdf ?

OK as an apiculturist MOD THIS GUY UP!!!

Not only is this well known it has already been dealt with.
There are sprays and smokes to take care of the issue.
There are also two breeds of bee now that are naturally resistant to the fungus.
This whole The bees are dieing thing reminds me of the whole Y2K thing.
However on the other had I am getting top dollar for putting my bees into other peoples fields this year. :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diseases_of_the_honey _bee#American_foulbrood_.28AFB.29

or
http://maarec.cas.psu.edu/bkCD/Bee_Diseases/AFB.ht ml

At Penn State, we've basically got a blight-resistant line of trees ready, but production in quantity is limited.

TACF orchards in the Arboretum at Penn State

They basically cross American chestnut with Chinese repeatedly, then backcross these with wild trees... then the seedlings are innoculated with the fungus and the 2 or 3 out of hundreds that survive are homozygous for the resistant genes.

The 1 of 64 innoculations were successful, and a few blight resistant trees went out. Cool stuff.

Sam

Actually, the first couple sentences of the abstract of the PSU paper I linked previously say, "Old-growth forests are often assumed to exhibit no net carbon assimilation over time periods of several years. This generalization has not been typically supported by the few whole-ecosystem, stand-scale eddy-covariance measurements of carbon dioxide exchange in old-growth forests."

Again, I don't know where that carbon goes, but research seems to indicate that the carbon-absorption of old-growth forests may never really drop to totally insignificant levels. However, I'll grant that at some point, it would be more efficient to cut the trees down and and plant new ones, taking the short-term hit to CO2 absorption. However, the ideal time to chop down the trees (in terms of ecosystem carbon absorption) is much later than what intuition would suggest based on the growing cycle of the trees -- I would assume "mature" trees are past peak growth (or else we wouldn't use that term to describe them), and yet that is when the ecosystem is doing the most carbon storing. Based on the numbers given earlier, I would estimate those trees should be cut down no earlier than 150 years after planting, maybe closer to 200. I don't have enough data to calculate the actual optimal age, but I don't expect to be too far off.

I more-or-less agree with you in principal, but there must be better ways to store carbon than growing trees and throwing them in the ocean (where they'll still rot and release carbon unless we do something to seal them up). If tree stands did most of their carbon storing in the first 20-50 years of their life, then it would be a much better idea. But the reality is that it takes a long time (50-100 years, according to one of the linked papers) just to break even from planting new trees, much less to have a significant net carbon store. Maybe there are better trees for doing this, but I still bet we can come up with something (in terms of carbon capture technology) that would be better than those trees.

• "initiation" stands (9-23 years old): -124 g C m^(-2) yr^(-1) (note that this value is negative -- that's not a typo)
• "young" stands (56-89 years old): 118 g C m^(-2) yr^(-1)
• "mature" stands (95-106 years old): 170 g C m^(-2) yr^(-1)
• "old" stands (190-316 years old): 35 g C m^(-2) yr^(-1)

The problem isn't acceleration G forces. It's energy density. Even a "beamed core" antimatter annihilation system, to go 0.4 c with 100 mT of payload, would require about a thousand mT of antimatter. 10:1 antimatter/payload ratio. That's not even slightly realistic, even in the long term, and we're talking about only 0.4c.

About the most we could realistically hope for is somewhere between 0.01c to 0.1c. Antimatter-induced microfusion, dusty fission fragment rockets, thermal rockets, nuclear saltwater rockets, various kinds of sails, etc, seem to be the most realistic options. But probably not during our lifetimes.

Thanks bongk. You are quoting http://www.ento.psu.edu/MAAREC/FAQ/FAQCCD.pdf (insightful deserves a source link!) -- so far, has anyone managed to actually produce MAPS with REAL DOTS on them, aside from those silly "affected states" maps? The http://beealert.blackfoot.net/~beealert/index.php people are taking surveys -- not even asking people to volunteer zip codes by incident (I've emailed them about that) so what kind of GIS treatment is there, could there be?

The other notable aspect is the 'sudden' onset of this problem. And unlike the genetics of monoculture bees, dissemination of crops, introduction (and use!) of pesticides... if the cell network had changes to its signalling patterns, there is the possibility to fit the suddenness aspect.

My offering in the bees/cellphone intersection set,
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=230891 &threshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=1874544 5

is a theory where phones themselves -- through routine queries to go to high power and ID their location, could have been asked to step up their activity in 2006. Or some 3G rollout. Still hoping for some cell aware slashdotter to weigh in on this. And no, for the record I'm not the guy claiming there's some cell-tower based shadow mind control network out there. With all due respect -- I'm starting to lose mine. ;-)

From The Colony Collapse Disorder Working Group:

Clearly, this shows that it was the devious Austrians, led by Wilhelm Roentgen, who (as a preliminary attack to weaken their honey-loving victims during the Great War) unleashed the Roentgen or "X" ray upon the world's bees. We must not tolerate these unnatural attacks on the purity of our bees' essence. Let us rise up and destroy all "X" ray machines!

For some or another reason the lameness filter won't post a list of companies/products I had listed.

WebPhone, CUSeeMe, Net2Phone, ... all around 1995

Much dotcom boomers which I even remember using. CUSeeMe for example has been around forever, NeVoT is an example of something that ran on older stuff. I used to do it while messing around with modems. ICQ had it (I don't know when exactly).

NEVOT (NetworkVoice Terminal) is a media agent that provides packet-voice communicationsacross internetworks. It operates in either unicast, simulated multicast or IP multicast environments, using the vat or RTP protocols. NEVOT is part of the SPOKES conferencing systems that allows to create flexible multimedia applications from independent components. This document describes installation, operation and implementation of NEVOT. Copyright 1991-1995 by AT&T Bell Laboratories and GMD Fokus;

Start here: http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/384701.html

Also, the H.324 protocol describes a way to get video & audio conferencing over POTS. The Datapoint MINX system was one of the early steps ('80s) and had all the fun-stuff we find in calling systems today. http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/D atapoint-Corporation-Company-History.html

There you go, have fun in court.

No joke -- all of the clean-air legislation has started to clear out decades worth of accumulated crud (aerosols) in the atmosphere. That results in more sunlight hitting the surface and intensifies the greenhouse effect. In fact, air pollution caused by the industrial processes that release greenhouse gases may have been limiting the warming impact of those greenhouse gases for a long time. Now that the air is getting clearer, the impact of those greenhouse gases may be exacerbated. This effect is also regional since different parts of the world have differing clean air standards.

Here's the original article on this subject, from June 2006:

http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/shared/articles/Man nEmanuelEos06.pdf

It's really worth reading the whole report, but here are a couple of tidbits:

"Evidence shows that usage increases when access is more convenient [2], and maximizing the usage of the scientific record benefits all of society."

"We analyzed 119,924 conference articles in computer science and related disciplines"

"Figure 1 shows the probability that an article is freely available online as a function of the number of citations to the article, and the year of publication of the article. The results are dramatic. There is a clear correlation between the number of times an article is cited, and the probability that the article is online. More highly cited articles, and more recent articles, are significantly more likely to be online."

"On a point of pedantry, also you cannot have a meteoric rise. Meteors fall!"

I believe that's a reference to a 'rising star', not a real meteor. It's supposed to be clever. I always liked these from school:

http://www.personal.psu.edu/wxk116/vocab.html