Slashdot Mirror

With 2 beacons with angle (and depth) information it could determine its position without knowing the speed of sound in water (time * speed = distance), since the distance between the two beacons is known.

If additional beacons with known positions where placed then with 3 beacons the sub could also triangulate its position without angle information and without sending a ping.

Systems like this already exist:
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/184601.html

Using a GPS underwater exists too:
http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/6807127.html
http://www.longbeachdive.com/und-water-gps-product s.htm

Add a modem
Sonar communication (sonar modems):
http://www.benthos.com/acoustic-telesonar-modems-u ndersea-sub-sea.asp

And a directional receiver (antenna)... to determine angle...
(just needs two fast enough receivers + processing a known distance apart
(think ears). probably also not new technology .

Essentially its a slight variation on sonar triangulation
It goes back to basic trig...

This isn't that new and it sounds more like patent trolling to me...

But that's just based on a few minutes of googling and some back of the envelope trig,
not the opinion of a qualified expert... and I might be wrong...

Citeseer http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/ ;)

Notice of Full Disclosure:
I am vice president of the Palm Beach County Beekeepers.

Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) has caused a great deal of FUD amongst beekeepers, farmers, and the media. So speculation is running rampant. I am receiving 20 or more media stories a day on CCD. Most of them are copies of the same story. The media is asking us and other beekeepers lots of questions. The unfortunate fact is there are not a lot of answers. The studies are taking place but everything is so preliminary right now that they are still debating the possible causes. Symptons are still being discussed.

The American Beekeeping Federation through one of it's subsideraries held a discussion in Stuart area of Florida. This is mentioned in the NY Times article. The meeting wasn't held to discuss a cure it was held to discuss the progress of the research. Unfortunatly the meeting was invitation only.

The Mid Atlantic Apiculture is heading the reasearch into CCD. The most up to date information can be found on their site.

Some notes on the reasearch. Currently it is only involving commercial beekeepers with mulitple hives. Hobbiest are not included. And since this is preliminary research there are no control groups or investigation into feral bees as to weather or not they are having this issue. The study according to Troy with the ABF does not involve different breeds of bees. So there is no seperate breakdown on how it affects Italians, russians, hygenics, buckfast, or other breeds. Please understand that Italians are by far the most common type of bee used.

Commerical beekeepers are also the main focus since this affects their livelyhood. if you have 1000 hives and loose 400 of them to CCD that is a lot of money gone. If you are a hobbiest and you lose a hive life sucks but the impact isn't the same.

This was for a college extracurricular project I was working on, a rocket payload. We were flying a camera to take pictures during the flight, and the camera wouldn't run on anything but XP with their own software that required .Net.

It didn't work all that well, and it was a pain to get set up, and I definitely should have said "trying to do this with this equipment is stupid" but that was already the second camera I was given (the first didn't work at all) after being brought on with less than a year to launch, so... XP Embedded* it was.

* There should have been a cap E in my previous post

Oh, and for the magnetic field stability, there's lots of data about how it's changing, and even the original NASA link I had provided information about how magnetic north is constantly changing...

Face it, the planet is ALWAYS CHANGING, and that - by definition - includes the climate. How much is our impact? No one knows, but we do know it's been warmer AND colder in the past, and will continue to change. CO2 has been higher AND lower in the past. Just running around saying "it's MAN'S fault!" isn't honest or helpful...

After all, 20,000 years ago my home outside of Seattle was buried under 600 meters of ice! Without Global Warming I'd still be stuck in the frozen white stuff...

Compare the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern Torahs and you'll find it's letter-for-letter exact in the parts where they overlap.

Over the sample period we observe 1.75 million file downloads or roughly ten per minute.10 This is about 0.01% of all the downloads in the world. A significant majority of the downloads were music files. U.S. users accounted for about one third of the downloads (and the data contain about 0.01% of all music downloads by U.S. users).

The mean of sales for these albums during our observation period is 151,786 copies, ranging from 71 copies to 3.5 million copies.

We find that file sharing has no statistically significant effect on purchases of the average album in our sample.

If we are correct in arguing that downloading has little effect on the production of music, then file sharing probably increases aggregate welfare. Shifts from sales to downloads are simply transfers between firms and consumers. And while we have argued that file sharing imposes little dynamic cost in terms of future production, it has considerably increased the consumption of recorded music. File sharing lowers the price and allows an apparently large pool of individuals to enjoy music. The sheer magnitude of this activity, the billions of tracks which are downloaded each year, suggests the added social welfare from file sharing is likely to be quite high.

There is a presentation about it, but it doesn't go into any more detail about the detection occurs than the article.

I wish the article didn't pretty much suck...

This is the webpage for the Cyber Security Lab. I don't see anything about this on there, but a Google search for Proactive Worm Containment brings up this presentation.

I wish the article didn't pretty much suck...

This is the webpage for the Cyber Security Lab. I don't see anything about this on there, but a Google search for Proactive Worm Containment brings up this presentation.

Hello,

There's not really a lot of information about how Proactive Worm Containment (PWC) works in the article. A quick bit of searching found the Penn State University Cyber Security Lab's home page here and Professor Peng Liu's home page here along with the university's press release here, but I did not see any actual articles on PWC.

A more detailed description would be most welcome, since the press release makes it sound like this is an automated response to quarantining a host which is performing a DDoS, and it is not clear how PWC would differentiate between that and just a very busy server.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

Hello,

There's not really a lot of information about how Proactive Worm Containment (PWC) works in the article. A quick bit of searching found the Penn State University Cyber Security Lab's home page here and Professor Peng Liu's home page here along with the university's press release here, but I did not see any actual articles on PWC.

A more detailed description would be most welcome, since the press release makes it sound like this is an automated response to quarantining a host which is performing a DDoS, and it is not clear how PWC would differentiate between that and just a very busy server.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

Hello,

There's not really a lot of information about how Proactive Worm Containment (PWC) works in the article. A quick bit of searching found the Penn State University Cyber Security Lab's home page here and Professor Peng Liu's home page here along with the university's press release here, but I did not see any actual articles on PWC.

A more detailed description would be most welcome, since the press release makes it sound like this is an automated response to quarantining a host which is performing a DDoS, and it is not clear how PWC would differentiate between that and just a very busy server.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

Unless I'm misunderstanding the questions people are asking, the idea of Hydrogen comes from the fact that they've been developing ways to use it as a fuel source for quite some time now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_vehicle

Similar to how they have already (I think) developed an engine that runs on some kinda corn oil, that costs like 5 cents or something ridiculously cheap along those lines, per gallon.

http://www.engr.psu.edu/newsevents/EPS/v13n2_1997s pring/corn.htm

One of the measures by which a researcher's effectiveness is measured is by how often his or her papers are cited in other papers. And the more exposure their papers have, the more chances for citation.

I'm very glad to hear of this, actually. Right now I use CiteSeer for finding online papers. It's pretty good, but I would like to see it expanded and improved on.

That does sound like a pain.

In the case of oe (oe ligature), the US International keyboard just uses --, but, as you said, it looks like you have to do some weird keyboard voodoo , for other symbols, like æ (the ae ligature) - of course, you also have to do keyboard voodoo for those in OS X (in the case of æ, it's option + ' ).

How it works in a large company should be irrelevant, what matters is did they follow the law.

Either they invented this from scratch and it just happens to be exactly the same as something that already exists, in which case whomever didn't do the prior art search properly was incompetent. This seems unlikely given the previous public statements.

Or they implemented a design/overview/whatever given to them by someone else, in which case they didn't "invent" it and the person who gave it to them should be the listed inventor. But in that case that person must have known where the design was copied from. So that would be perjury no matter which of the two signed the form.

And this isn't hard to find prior art, this is a work of academia - there's publications galore going back a long way (such as http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/ing96objectoriented.ht ml and it's building on other things). This isn't a case of "Joe Smith did that in his ABC software (used by ten people) ages ago", this is published in academic journals. It seems a rather trivial prior art search, how does a patent lawyer manage to screw that up?

I tutored students using the object workbench in Blue a decade ago - well OK a in a couple of months it'll be a exactly a decade ago. Nice to see the "real world" catching up :)

The article you're pulling all of this from has no attribution whatsoever, it's just an editorial-style piece. Can you back any of this up with references?

Some information on the multiple imputation method they are using can be found through a FAQ at Penn State's statistics department. To summarize, it's a standard statistical method for dealing with missing information. If there are 20 drivers and 5 of them refuse BAC testing - you can either completely remove those people from the data set and skew the numbers, or you can calculate the numbers from what is known.

You can find some more info on what the numbers are and why things are calculated the way they are in the NIAAA/NIH document: Trends in Alcohol-Related Fatal Traffic Crashes, United States, 1982-2004. They began using the multiple imputation method in 2004, and recalculated the info from 1982 until then. Statistically speaking, I would think that this happens all the time - if you get a better method of dealing with data, then you recalculate your numbers.

By definition all the instances you list as being included in "alcohol-related" are, in fact, alcohol related. You don't have to "wonder what alcohol-related actually means," and saying that things that involve alcohol are "considered alcohol-related" is a bit silly. If it involves alcohol, then it is alcohol-related. I would agree with what seems to be your point that you can't say that the number of drunk drivers is equivalent to the number of alcohol-related incidents. The number of drunk drivers goes into the alcohol-related numbers, but it's only one part. For example, if a drunk person stumbles out into the street and is hit by a sober driver then while it isn't a "drunk driving" incident, you can't argue that the incident isn't alcohol-related.

The NIAAA's definition of alcohol-related as of 2004 is "...a crash is considered as alcohol-related if either a driver or a nonoccupant (pedestrian or pedalcyclist) had a BAC of 0.01 g/dl or greater." You can feel free to argue about whether this is reasonable, but again by definition - a measurable amount of alcohol is a level that is able to be measured, ie above .00.

If you really want to "fight MADD," then you should be able to back up your information with references, with facts, as opposed to just reprinting what comes down to propaganda - which is the same thing they're being accused of. Numbers are meaningless unless you know what they mean... so back them up.

This is not a specification; this is a DNA sequence.

It's appropriate to note that the 6000 pages will only fit the DNA of a few pathogens:

"Measured as Manhattan telephone books, each containing about 1,000 pages of 10-point type," said Simpson, "the genome of the bacterium E. coli is about a third of a book. Baker's yeast, which is my specialty, is a full book. The human genome will occupy two hundred books."

Other parts of the article about genetic disorders, witches and demonic possesion are also appropriate when talking about M$.

Java is several orders of magnitude more secure by default than any random C or C++ program.

Do you know what "several orders of magnitude" means? For variety, next time you should write "... exponentially more secure ..." or "... takes security to the next level!"

BTW, it's funny you should mention Java performance in this thread -- one of the DieHard authors published this fascinating paper on Java GC performance: http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/hertz05quantifying.htm l -- executive summary: GC can theoretically be as fast as explicit malloc/free, if you're willing to spend 5x memory size overhead (gulp).

When your list of published citations is as long as Peter's I'll be willing to examine your argument that he's making shit up or that he's an ideologue. Until then, I'll take Peter at his word. He's one of the smarter people I've met and seems to be a stand-up guy, but I don't know you from Adam.

There is a wide variety of documented evidence that fits in a larger web of evidence.

If you can't read the record and accept documented evidence then I couldn't prove the ocean was made of water by throwing you in it.

In the area of artwork:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_art
The oldest surviving art forms include small sculptures and paintings on rocks and in caves. There are very few known examples of art that date earlier than 40,000 years ago,

Weapons:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapon
Some of the earliest evidence for arrows are from ca. 20,000 BC in the Levant (the so-called 'Geometric Kebaran' period), made with several very small sharp pieces of stone embedded in an arrowshaft.

Buildings:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/662794.stm
"It does sound important," says Chris Stringer, head of the human origins group at London's Natural History Museum. "If this is correctly dated and correctly interpreted, it is the first good evidence from 500,000 years ago of a hut structure made by these people."

Before the discovery, the oldest remains of a structure were those at Terra Amata in France, from around 200,000 to 400,000 years ago.

http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/w/x/wxk116/habit at/

Genetics:
DNA analysis traced human ancestry back to an African "Eve," setting off debate about how modern humans evolved. While there was general agreement that Homo erectus dispersed from Africa across Asia between 1 and 2 million years ago, what happened next remained a question. The "out-of-Africa" hypothesis contended that modern humans developed in Africa and migrated from there recently, driving H. erectus into extinction. Proponents of a "multiregional" hypothesis held that H. erectus populations evolved into modern humans in many regions, and that these groups later bred with each other and with groups that emigrated from Africa. The Eve study examined mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which is passed only by mothers to their offspring. The researchers, Rebecca Cann, Mark Stoneking, and the late Allan Wilson, estimated that the ancestor of all surviving mt DNA types lived between 140,000 and 290,000 years ago. When did the migrations from Africa take place? They dated the oldest cluster of mtDNA types with no modern African representation to between 90,000 and 180,000 years ago. These populations might have left Africa at about that time, but the mtDNA data could not determine exactly when.

Tools:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/01/01 14_040114_siberianhumans.html
Russian researchers have found a wealth of hunting tools, which date back 31,000 years, along central Siberia's Yana River. The artifacts include hundreds of stone tools and flakes, as well as spear foreshafts made of rhinoceros horn and mammoth tusk.

Each of these pieces of evidence taken individually falsifies the assertion that it is true that man has only existed for 10,000 years.
There are hundreds, thousands, likely tens of thousands (more!) of pieces of evidence like this.

---

Either god is evil or twisted and wants us to ignore the actual evidence we see and believe some old books in preference over hard evidence or god is going to accept that we don't believe old books that are clearly wrong or there is no god anyway.

I have 5 very strong objections against Microsoft:

1. Unlawful monopolistic practices have led to a situation where it is hard to buy a laptop without Windows licence (for running other OSes)

2. Their technology is simply bad in all respects except C#.

The operating system has thousands of seemingly random places of configuration files, many of which are not understandable by text editor inspection.

The C programming API lacks definite power of UNIX filesystems/names (how many times have you seen a notice that says a file is reserved by some application?), that is, good separation of dentries and inodes.

The rest of the Win32 API is mostly random chunk that is hard or inconvenient to use. See

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/spinellis97critique.ht ml

Ironically a more advanced API (the NP API) was instroduced with the NT, but it was left undocumented by Microsoft and thus it is not used for applications.

Furthermore, their technology is FULL of hacks and workarounds, but the main reason for bugginess of their system is BAD design and implementation.

3. They hostile towards operating systems by obfuscating and hiding their file formats and protocols. Think of Windows file and print services, Windows Media, Microsoft Word, ... Interoperatibility is MOST important for successful use of technology because without that it becomes very hard to build more sophisticated systems that require components from various parties.

4. They are hostile towards technology improvement. Windows OS (but mostly applications) is practically useful with only x86 line processors, which slows down development of microprocessors. Windows is not even a good OS to take advantage of x86-64, let alone Itanium that they dumped. Fortunately, F/OSS operating systems made it possible to test and use those better processors with real applications from very early development to this day.

Also, the OS is a mess because they have REFUSED to fix it; the main drive has been money through gradual backwards compatible changes that has added to the mess.

5. The Windows culture is hostile towards maintainable systems. Where is the package management system that would be so desperately needed by ALL users of Windows? It would be simple to create a distributed package management system like apt in Debian, which would ease updates and installing software for all parties. Having a package management system would not even require Microsoft, but why hasn't Microsoft done it? Do they just hate convenience, or why is their update system such useless?

Summary: All in all, Microsoft has been harmful to all parties surrounding their operating system: the hardware and software people, consumers, users and administrators.

PS. sorry for "gain saying", it would take hours and hours to write comprehensive explanations of these points.

These things are getting harder to find as time goes on...

http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/j/r/jrk132/tech. swf

http://www.ucc.asn.au/~japester/humour/foamy/tech2 .swf

http://foamytoons.mirrors.corruptedtruth.com/tech3 .swf

That's an awful lot of cutting and pasting just to take a worthless jab at the Java language.

I went to Penn State. It is the best Meteorological school in the country and probably the world. A woman I dated in that curriculum was waist deep in fluid dynamics I seem to remember.

Climatologists ARE meteorologists jackass. Take a look at Penn State's curriculum and classes if you doubt me.

I went to Penn State. It is the best Meteorological school in the country and probably the world. A woman I dated in that curriculum was waist deep in fluid dynamics I seem to remember.

Climatologists ARE meteorologists jackass. Take a look at Penn State's curriculum and classes if you doubt me.

wtf? So maybe there wouldn't be an actual explosion unless the beam was somehow focused on a single point, but the fact remains the energy output of the beam is NOT trivial, it CAN cause damage to the accelerator wall because the total energy output is "333 MJ per ring" which is hella more than "only one ten-thousandth of a joule", and in order to avoid damage to the accelerator they have to dump that beam into a graphite block, which apparently must be carefully designed and magnetically shielded to ensure it doesn't get too hot. Maybe I was dramatizing it a bit, but the beam most certainly does have enough energy to cause damaging macroscopic effects.

Congradulations, you've managed to get my mostly-informative post modded down and your utter-bullshit post modded up. I don't need the karma; I just wanted people to know that they could help...

it's nothing in macroscopic terms

CVS developed from an earlier versioning system called Revision Control System (RCS), still in use, which manages individual files but not whole projects. Dick Grune has provided some brief historical notes about CVS on his site. To quote:

I created CVS to be able to cooperate with my students Erik Baalbergen and Maarten Waage on the ACK (Amsterdam Compiler Kit) C compiler. The three of us had vastly different schedules (one student was a steady 9-5 worker, the other was irregular, and I could work on the project only in the evenings). Their project ran from July 1984 to August 1985. CVS was initially called cmt, for the obvious reason that it allowed us to commit versions independently. --Dick Grune

The code was publicly released to mod.sources on June 23, 1986: the original usenet post is still visible via Google Groups.

The code that eventually evolved into the current version of CVS started with Brian Berliner in April 1989, with later input from Jeff Polk and many other contributors. Brian Berliner wrote a paper introducing his improvements to the CVS program which describes how the tool was extended and used internally by Prisma, a third party developer working on the SunOS kernel, and was released for the benefit of the community under the GPL.

I doubt that a computer can incorporate thigns like global news, company announcements, and other such real world variables into how it makes judgments.

Actually I was surprised how few references I could find to this sort of thing. Still I don't believe this is an indication that it's not happening; rather, I think market prediction is a black art because investors don't want anybody else to know what they're doing or how they're doing it.

Here's a picture of the process that Yuefeng Xie set up at PSU.

Note that on his homepage under news he has "A patent "Method of Using Waste Tires As A Filter Media" was issued to me on November 29, 2005. With 40% of royalties to the inventor (other 60% goes to Penn State), I am going to be a rich professor very soon."

Which reveals he applied for this patent on Aug. 26, 1999.

A lot of the material I can find online makes it look as though he's been working on this for six years, he was just waiting for the patent to to be granted. It seems now they just have to verify tha the water that is processed doesn't leach out any harmful toxins or heavy metals (as the article states). A side note is that he only has one other patent aside from this one.

Despite his plans to become rich over this, I hope he is very successful as a lot of countries (both 3rd and 1st world) could stand to benefit from this greatly.

Here's a picture of the process that Yuefeng Xie set up at PSU.

Note that on his homepage under news he has "A patent "Method of Using Waste Tires As A Filter Media" was issued to me on November 29, 2005. With 40% of royalties to the inventor (other 60% goes to Penn State), I am going to be a rich professor very soon."

Which reveals he applied for this patent on Aug. 26, 1999.

A lot of the material I can find online makes it look as though he's been working on this for six years, he was just waiting for the patent to to be granted. It seems now they just have to verify tha the water that is processed doesn't leach out any harmful toxins or heavy metals (as the article states). A side note is that he only has one other patent aside from this one.

Despite his plans to become rich over this, I hope he is very successful as a lot of countries (both 3rd and 1st world) could stand to benefit from this greatly.

You might want to check out Penn State's CS/IS program. They allow you to specialize.

For one example, as a CompSci/Information Sciences Major you can specialize in Security and Risk Analysis:
http://www.psu.edu/bulletins/bluebook/major/sra.ht m/

It includes the following focus option:

INFORMATION AND CYBER SECURITY OPTION. This option includes a set of courses that provides an understanding of the theories, skills, and technologies associated with network security, cyber threat defense, information warfare, and critical infrastructure protection across multiple venues.

Is this more what you were looking for than sitting there learning how to program a computer to say "Hello World"?

There are a lot of techniques available that can make software reuse possible. One of them is Test Driven Development. When every bit of your functionality is checked with automated tests you can easily put your sourcecode into another contexts, rerun all the tests, and if they are ok it is a good indicator that it will work.

We also need a paradigm shift to concurrent programming. This will IMHO inevitable happen, as the processors are becoming more and more multicore. The currently used threading model is totally infeasible, we need something like the Erlang model.

Erlang seems to be on the right track. The thesis Making Reliable Distributed Systems in the Presence of Software Errors should be a must read for everyone who cares about reliable software. We are going to have to live with the fact that software will never be error free.

Another concept for reliable software could be multi agent systems, that have similar ideas like in Erlang but go a far step forward.

All in all, reliable software and reliable software reuse definitely is possible. Just not with mainstream technology.

If anyone cares, Penn State has a strict policy with patents, detailed here among other places. It all comes from the fact that most of the University's reseach is paid for by grants and industry cooperation. I didn't RTFA yet, but I'd bet that this is going to be immediately licensed to either the federal government or other such body, whomever funded the research. Otherwise, it could very well become public domain.

Today Penn State is one of four 'state-related' universities (along with the University of Pittsburgh, Temple University, and Lincoln University), institutions that are not state-owned and -operated but that have the character of public universities and receive substantial state appropriations.

And you, Sir, perhaps first read some more basics before you try to educate me.

Quote, just one example of a broader definition: A second definition of intelligence comes from "Mainstream Science on Intelligence", which was signed by 52 intelligence researchers in 1994: a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience. It is not merely book learning, a narrow academic skill, or test-taking smarts. Rather, it reflects a broader and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings--"catching on", "making sense" of things, or "figuring out" what to do. (reprinted in Intelligence Gottfredson, 1997, p. 13)

And also, to let you attain some historical background, I would advise you to have a look at "Human Problem Solving" by Newell and Simon.

Finally, a real challenge would be the self-inventing compression method, not the self-extracting algorithm.

CC.

Bad Coriolis

What amazes me is how many tools are out and available online regarding this sort of pattern recognition development. Since a lot of people know Java, I'm would encourage you to use the Java Media Framework (free from Sun). Once you have those libraries installed, it's quite easy to start editing sound, images & video. You might need to grab and install codecs if you're doing video analysis but I think almost all image codecs are supported.

I'm not going to lie, the video computation can be quite heavily but thankfully that framework is implemented such that the entire video doesn't have to be loaded into memory, just a one frame buffer analysis can be used if you want.

The last thing you would need is simply the know-how on programming these analysis algorithms. There are sites out there with a large wealth of up-to-date algorithms. An example would be the text book style site of pattern recognition or image processing. While this doesn't teach you how to do things, it does contain the raw resources and algorithms. General resources like the computer vision homepage exist that serve as links to all kinds of resources. Unfortunately, I know of no real solid books that contain everything out there because this field is so rapidly developing. My professors taught me from hand printed slides in a large compendium they had accumulated over the last couple years.

The last piece missing is the data to analyze. While you might not have the ultra high resolution Van Gogh images to do this yourself, it may be possible to visit museums with 6 MP cameras to obtain your own data. Failing that, there are repositories online that sometimes contain image information you can start with. While this may not satisfy your specific needs, it sure is great for the lazy developer like myself.

Lastly, I will mention citeseer and Google Scholar for cutting edge papers that you might want to try implementing. Distributing these algorithms and building a good GUI can be tricky but really anyone can build the backend. I heavily recommend experimenting with this if it interests you.

"Forgive my seismology expertise but, if one is measured in Canada wouldn't the S waves be cancelled because they'd go through the core (the test was in Pakistan)? P waves propogate, S don't ... right?"

S waves _do_. They just don't make it through the outer core back to the mantle. Whether you see S-waves depends on where you're standing and where the quake is.

PSU link:

http://eqseis.geosc.psu.edu/~cammon/HTML/Classes/I ntroQuakes/Notes/waves_and_interior.html

--
BMO

There have been some problems (e.g. the weak pigeonhole principle) where it's been shown that any proof must be intractably large. There is some evidence http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/cache/papers/cs/27779/ http:zSzzSzwww.wisdom.weizmann.ac.ilzSz~ranrazzSzp ublicationszSzPchina.pdf/raz02np.pdfthat this is true of P!=NP.

If you think about this, there's a certain amount of poetic justice. NP-hard problems are solvable in principle, just not in practice. And the conjecture that P!=NP may be true in principle, but not provable in practice.

Apparently someone doesn't know how interesting this problem is.

Number one, would we know such an intelligence if we saw it? Furthermore, could we determine what such an intelligence was thinking if we could? I think we could deduce that something was behaving in an intelligent manner, if we applied the right tools to the purpose. The danger would be in not knowing if the object we are studying feels that such testing is against its interests and acts to stop the testing. For example, a theory of emergent behavior within large groups of people (think large bureaucracies or societal constructs) might indicate the possibility of a "group" or "hive" mind arising from interactions between the individuals involved, that is both of the individuals yet outside of it (same as Mind is to Neurons). The output of such a "mind" might seem to be intelligent, but is there any way to actually know what it is thinking, or how it is communicating? Can a neuron ever know of the human, or brain, or mind? What would we (as a human) do if a neuron suddenly could understand? Is it in any way possible such a group mind would act in the same manner? Would we understand it if it did? Can we assume that such a thing isn't happenning already in our increasingly connected and interacting world?

Secondly, I think the other problem with building such an artificial mind is that of design and construction. Interestingly, we likely have both at hand. For design, I subscribe to the view that the mind (or at the very least, the cerebrum) is nothing more than a pattern recording and playback machine, as detailed by Jeff Hawkins in his book On Intelligence. I am pretty certain that this idea is spot-on, and is something that should be investigated much further. As for construction, the design of Dr. Hugo de Garis's CAM-Brain Machine (CBM), as realized by Genobyte, seems to be the approach to use to build a system similar to what is described in On Intelligence. These machines were actually built, shipped, and used in a few research institutions around the world. Whether they still exist or not, or are buried in a back room, is anyone's guess. The fact is that they aren't a standard design for a computer, and furthermore they utilized Xilinx FPGAs that isn't manufactured anymore (whether a similar machine could be built using a different Xilinx FPGA is another matter), leads me to wonder what will happen to these machines as they end their useful lives and/or have hardware failures. Also, it doesn't appear that Genobyte is in business anymore, though their website still maintains "ghostship" status.

Maybe I am reading too much into either of these ideas? Maybe both are a bunch of hooey (indeed, the whole CAM-BRAIN machine thing is something that I am not sure whether to completely believe or not - I seem to remember a /. article a long time ago in which another company linked to this - STARLABS - was seen to be a hoax or something?). Even so, the ideas seem sound, even if the implementations don't exist in fact (although, all the research I have done seems to indicate that these systems do in fact exist).

There are many research languages and abstractions focusing specifically on this task.

If a problem can be broken down into a list-processing problem on lists with size powers of two, you can get parallelism essentially for free. (See this paper on powerlist.)

This may sound extremely specialized, but it's crucial to realize that several of the most fundamental functions in functional programming -- filter, map, sort, etc. -- can take advantage of this fact, immediately, for free in any case where the evaluation of the filter/map/sort/etc. expression has no side-effects. (Or in all cases, if the language is referentially transparent. Heard of Haskell?)

Further functions -- such as foldl, foldr, etc. -- can also take advantage of this construct if the function being applied is associative. So this is useful for addition, multiplication, gcd, matrix multiplication, ...

If someone were to frame boolean satisfiability in these terms, they might discover something interesting...

At any rate, remember that if a problem looks difficult from one angle, it often pays to look at it from another. That a problem seems hard to solve with imperative languages does not imply that a problem is hard to solve in general.

For more information, see the blog entry of Penn State astronomy professor Steinn Sigurðsson, one of the coauthors of this paper.

Penn State's new archive goes back to 1887. I read one of the issues and among other things there is an editorial on why Penn State needs a telegraph line and another decrying the current state of science education.

The more things change....

Not exactly (A plant-free greenhouse also warms up): http://www.ems.psu.edu/~fraser/Bad/BadGreenhouse.h tml

Does the atmosphere behave like a greenhouse?

The name, greenhouse effect is unfortunate, for a real greenhouse does not behave as the atmosphere does. The primary mechanism keeping the air warm in a real greenhouse is the suppression of convection (the exchange of air between the inside and outside). Thus, a real greenhouse does act like a blanket to prevent bubbles of warm air from being carried away from the surface. As we have seen, this is not how the atmosphere keeps the Earth's surface warm. Indeed, the atmosphere facilitates rather than suppresses convection. One sometimes hears the comparison between the greenhouse effect in the atmosphere (not in real greenhouses) and the interior of a parked car which has been left in the summer Sun with its windows rolled up. This comparison is as phony as is the comparison to real greenhouses. Again, keeping the windows closed merely suppresses convection. Whether the topic is a real greenhouse or a car, one still hears the old saw that each stays warm because visible radiation (light) can pass through the windows, and infrared radiation cannot. Actually, it has been known for the better part of a century that this has very little bearing on the issue.

No kidding... and here I thought a "get a mac" campaign would be in the spirit of the old Get a Macintosh commercial.

(And, no, my QuickTime plugin worked fine in Firefox 1.5.0.6.)