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Besides the Wiki page, this is a subjective but amusing review of the options.

You should give Citeseer a try for Comp Sci papers.

So here is where Bender's head is buried!!!

And this carving will probably be interpreted by our descendants as a pictogram with the meaning "Aim asteroid here".

How about the hexagram? _WTF_ is the deal with that??

Seriously, that freaks me the hell out. How can you explain that? Or many of those other weird patterns, for that matter. Humor? That'd be seriously f00ked, but funny.

But you only need to read Alien for this one: Oreo 51 writes "It was only a matter of time before someone did this. Barry Snyder used Google Maps to take shots of the infamous high-security Area 51 in the Nevada desert. I can't wait to see what /.ers think of all the craters and interesting sand geometry there."

I guess they read /. too:

http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/b/f/bfs124/area% 2051%20Pictures/

Either that, or my Firefox security clearance just isn't enough ;)

A lot of people are trying to come up with data mining tools for intrusion detection. Just check out all the forward links to this paper from citeseer. The problem is that they are currently reliable as bad motion detectors ... too many false positives. Which makes them useless.

> It is much much harder to write a compiler that generated good and fast code (now you need hundreds of experienced engineers working for years)

This assumption is wrong

see here and here

if it wasn't for licensing hiccups the plan9 c compiler would be OpenBSD's default by now :

"I am sorry for the strong minded way in which I am approaching this,
but I am very dissapointed [sic] that after years of requesting that the
plan9 c compiler become free so that we can start extending it and
working with it... that we could be rebuffed in such a way because the
lawyers have not been properly reined in." Theo de Raadt

Here's an explanation. Here's a manual. Here is a writeup.

I encourage you to look at any of those and then this C++ proposal (from the ISO people).

http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers /2004/n1736.pdf

Let me know what you think.

We're way off-topic here, but still...

First, thanks much for the cool book ref! It looks very nice.

That said, I think a little more of a depth discussion would make the conventional description of the current PL situation with dynamic checks more clear.

A traditional view of types, due to Strachey and Scott, is that a type is defined by the set of possible values that comprise it. As such, one might reasonably say that the operand type of the right hand operand of the C short int divide operator "/" is the set {-32768..32767}-{0} (given 16-bit shorts, but don't get me started).

In practice, however, and motivated by the above example, programming languages tend to restrict the set of types usable in programming. One usual consequence of this restriction is that static typechecking moves from being undecidable to being tractable. Another is that some valid programs are excluded by the type system.

The statement in the Java programming language reference manual that "the runtime type system cannot be subverted by code written in the language" is not limiting. Indeed, Chapter 4 of the spec makes it clear that it considers the base types of the language to be only those "standard" types that any first-year programming student would expect. Section 15.5 makes it clear that integer division by 0 is not regarded as a type error in Java. Instead, 0 is a legally-typed right operand for the Java integer divide operator---it merely causes a runtime exception to be raised when it is encountered. From the perspective of most normal folks, this is the same as saying "there's a runtime operand check for a right-hand side of 0, and an error is raised (but may be handled) when it occurs."

There are other views than the standard one of what a type is. A quite modern view is to regard "types" as a synonym for "properties" of a computation. This view leads to some interesting programming language ideas, but they're still pretty much in the research stage. Note also that the Strachey-Scott view is in some sense the one rejected by parent: that types are defined by the axioms and inference rules of a type system. It's just that Dana Scott's work on domain theory allows such a definition to be sound.

Hope this helps.

http://napster.psu.edu/ Should answer most of your questions. The catalog kinda sucks for me. I also want to mention that you need the newest windows media player to use napster, so us linux heads are screwed anyway.

Penn State is providing free music from Napster for around a year now. The music files are locally cached and the service is fast. I guess people tend to rely less on illigal downloading of music when they have ready access to seemingly free legal downloads with some restrictions.

As long as we're dreaming up OS wishlists, I'd like to be able to run the Hurd and an OS which incorporates ideas from the Synthesis project.

And when I mean "just work" I mean not having dependencies to track down, having software upgrades that are easy, easy integration between apps. None of those things exist in Linux.

I suspect that's why people have been saying "hey, that seems a lot like [insert drawing program here]" - this is a (somewhat) new twist on old techniques. (Which, of course, is why it's a one-page submission to the conference, rather than a 10-pager like the original "Computer-Generated Watercolor". Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

Yeah, I know that OSS is popular around here, and I'm not a stranger to it - my software engineering group from college released our project under the GPL. I like Free Software. I use it every day.

But, I don't think it's the only legitimate option, even for software development, and the OSS approach is fundamentally untenable for creating art, whether that be music, visual art, novels, games, or anything else.

Most Free software is developed by a bunch of hobbyists in their free time. All well and good; each person takes a small section and creates it, or perhaps adds a few bugfixes over the weekend; eventually, the tool becomes useful.

Try composing or arranging music that way. It really doesn't work. You can't really take a large number of people and have each one write a little music; the result won't be a cohesive whole in the least.

The fundamental difference, though, is this: badly written code is not a problem in a piece of software, so long as it performs the intended function reasonably well, or even at all, since a large proportion of the Free software users out there will use utter crap tools to avoid touching commercial software. Poorly written and/or performed music just sounds like crap.

To elaborate: it's possible to write code that performs a given function, but isn't documented, or perhaps runs a little slowly, or just accomplishes its task in a painfully ugly way. Once it compiles, if the user is happy, it doesn't matter to him.

With music, even if you have a solid grounding in theory, and write music according to that theoretical background (to analogize, write "music that compiles"), it's really easy to produce bad music. I know; I've heard a lot of it. Heck, I've produced more than I'd like to admit in my compositional career (but I try not to let that stuff into public ;).

For the record, I'm not at all opposed to giving away music; I just don't think people should expect artists to give away their work for free. Musicians, painters, writers; we like to do what we do. Sometimes that means we give free concerts, or crank out a sketch of a friend's D&D character, because it's fun to do. If someone told me, "Hey, I like what you do. I'll give you food, clothing, and a place to work, if in exchange you'll write and perform music," I wouldn't even think; I'd take it. No money needed, I'd be happy, just like the dudes who had patrons back during the Italian Renaissance. Eventually I might want to move on to something else, but certainly not for a few years...

Unfortunately, patrons don't really happen these days, so a musician's only real shot at playing/writing/recording full-time is to charge for it, in the hope that eventually he'll be able to make a living off of it.

For now, I program to live (fortunately, I really enjoy that too :-), and work on art, music, writing, etc. in my spare time.

And, on the off-chance you'd like to see some of that, you could check out the not-very-good samples I have on that hardly-ever-touched website... Boy, there's something else I need to work on...

Keep in mind that most of what's up there are musical sketches, rough ideas that I found interesting enough to put up. They'd all need lots of refinement before I'd call them good, or anything.

Nothing to see here folks, please move along.

Already done: http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/b/f/bfs124/area% 2051%20Pictures/

In fact, neutron stars are thought to have superconducting (and superfluid) cores. They also may be superconductors of the strong nuclear force ("color superconductors").

On a related note, "Exploring Superconductors and Neutron Stars on a Desktop using Ultracold Fermi Gases".

Off the floor simply describes how we work with our sand and molds. The "old" way is to have a pile of sand from which you shovel into your molding machines. The molds are laid out in rows on the floor and are then poured as the metal comes to temperature.

Most foundries in the US, and worldwide for that matter, use what is known as overhead sand. A system that is installed in a foundry that conditions and stores the sand. It uses conveyors to deliver the sand to the molding stations. These systems are now being used in conjunction with automatic molding machines from Disa, Sinto, or Hunter.

Here are some pics of my shop. The man molding is my dad and I am the one pouring. Those are tomahawks we make for reproduction.

http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/d/p/dpr156/pics/

Enjoy.

I think that citeseer and other online resources often provide bibliographic information in bibtex format.

I think there are also ways to export/import various bibliographic formats into bibtex as well, which makes it easy to use bibliographies that are already compiled.

... it shows me what a void there is still to fill!

ISI has had a fantastic run providing bibliometric research tools for nearly 30 years, but only to deep-pocket libraries. WebOfScience finally brought the ISI analysis of academic pubs into 21st century, and so it is no surprise that they quickly bumped into Google, who brought fundamentally the same insight (citation impact/in-degree is a great clue) to the Web. If GoogleScholar has simply nudged Thomson (who bought ISI in 1992) to broaden the market for this tool, that's already progress in my book.

For now, the interesting part to me is a compare/contrast of just what each brings to the party. While this review by Péter Jacsó' (his earlier review is also helpful) is part of Thomson/Gale's site, I think it's unfair to see it simply as a vendor whitepaper; he identifies serious flaws in GoogleScholar. But even with the price differential aside, it must be clear to all that WoS has some serious issues, too! (Some of you might be interested in an author-focused comparison I did recently between GS and WoS: Scientific impact quantity and quality: Analysis of two sources of bibliographic data , arXiv.org preprint arXiv:cs.IR/0504046, 11 Apr 05). Do they really want to hold up the interface to WoS as a virtue?! Checkout the touchgraph browser for CiteSeer as an example of what we can hope for. And while there isn't yet an API to GoogleScholar, screen-scraping at least lets us do some experiments over this corpus; WoS does not seem willing to provide similar access (I've tried:).

These aren't the only two vendors, of course: GoogleScholar was certainly inspired by the CiteSeer (originally at NEC, now at UPenn) project; it continues to be an innovative force. Our local, generally well-stocked library doesn't carry Scopus (too expensive?), but I hear good things about it. Entrez/PubMed has been mentioned and (while it is great in many other dimensions!) I don't see it is as especially relevant until the citation linkages it is beginning to build via PubMedCentral come online. And when the NIH's "Open Access" policy (cf. [Science 11 February 2005; 307: 825 DOI: 10.1126/science.307.5711.825], but not without a subscription:) starts to kick in, and as changing standards regarding exchange of ``open citation'' information (e.g, CrossRef) propagate, the pace of change is bound to accelerate.

Looking a bit farther afield for suggestions of what might be coming, some of you lawyer-types may appreciate what Shepards does for case law searching. They orignally started doing simply the manual "inversion" of citation links that ISI does, but grew into an entirely new source of independent analysis of the arguments connecting the two documents. Imagine how helpful it could be if scientific and web citations carried as much third-party (ie, from neither the cited or citing authors) metadata!

Slightly OT: It's my believe that you will get more citations if you publish in the more open journals, so I always prefer that.

It is not just your belief, it is well established:

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/online-nature01/

I think that as academia continues to pull its collective head out of its ass, and realizes that it does not need to pay for a multi-billion dollar publishing industry that gives nothing back (authors write for free, reviewers review for free, editors edit for free, yet my institution spends more than $200k per year on journal subscriptions), services like Google Scholar which revolve around open Internet publishing will become more and more important.

Is it a replacement for, e.g. Citeseer? No. But then it isn't intended to be.

What Google Scholar provides is a useful metasearch across existing archives (like Citeseer, the IEEE, the ACM, and so on). It can be handy for finding odd connections between topics covered in different archives. It can also be handy for trawling through those archives using a different search algorithm than the defaults provided by the archive itself. I can't see Google Scholar ever replacing Citeseer - I see it continuing to complement Citeseer.

So you went to Dr. Skillicorn's site and read the technical report? You will find your concerns and more addressed quite nicely. "Crap" is an opinion on research based solely on the interpretation of an article written by a reporter who is clearly not a subject matter expert.

Better yet, there's an interesting site called Citeseer. Intelligent types in computer science use it to look for papers and check out the credentials of the authors. Dr. Skillicorn is ranked 2999 of 767319 in the site's list of most cited authors. Do you really think he attained that (peer reviewed) stature by publishing tripe?

One hopes and prays that you are in no way involved in any kind of academic or technical pursuit. Your uninformed and flawed knee-jerk opinions will blind you to so much and keep you from producing anything of quality.

Insightful?! As if.

ftp://carroll.aset.psu.edu/pub/linux/distributions /fedora/4/

That's not how they work

That IS how they work. For god's sake, read before you post. The part of the shuttle that is an insulator is called the "thermal blanket"; it prevents the heat that isn't radiated away from getting to the frame, which being an aluminum alloy, is very temperature sensitive. The entire arrangement, of RCC panels, tiles, and thermal blankets is called the TPS (Thermal Protection System). Read about it some time, will you? I can get you as many references as you want, and can even direct you to an "Ask NASA" page if you still aren't convinced.

By the way, tiles are not nearly as brittle as you pretend. At the speeds that the shuttle flies on liftoff, rain would slice right through your hand as well. At high speeds, the water acts like a solid on impact. With a mass about a quarter of that of buckshot but a velocity about twice as high, it has the same total kinetic energy, focused on a smaller point.

Because they're salaried employees, not contract talent. Their salary is their royalty.

You could say the same about every industry. Why don't GM employees get a cut of the profits for every car sold? Why don't textile workers get a cut of every shirt sold? Why don't McDonalds employees get a penny for every burger they sell?

The fact is they do. It's called a weekly paycheck - where do you think payroll money comes from? Voice actors, like other project-based talent, are instead paid based on a work-for-hire contract - as it stands now, they're paid only once, regardless of whether a game sells a million copies or a thousand. (This in contrast to a salaried employee, who - theoretically - would see a raise or other increase in benefits if the company is doing well.)

Royalties are intended to fairly compensate non-salaried employees for work they have done, in proportion to the amount of sales their work is bringing in.

Let me counter your argument, by pointing out that royalties don't just compensate for an intermitent paycheck but actual provide profit sharing. Profit sharing already occurs with salaried employess in several industries. Most often profit sharing occurs via stock options or stock grants (especially with dividend producting stocks), but in some cases through direct profit sharing.

Profit sharing ensures employees benefit from a successful company. Under a profit sharing plan, the employees directly benefit (as opposed to the current situation where they benefit indirectly) from successful products. This inturn encourages employees to meet deadlines, lower costs, and increase the overall quality of product. Stock option plans attempt to do this, but under option regimes the responsibility (i.e. "ownership") of the product's success is diluted through executive decisions. The are some problems with the current stock option regimes. Perhaps direct revenue sharing could counter these problems, and result in happier, more dedicated, and more productive employees.

Compilers do manage to do decent jobs in some cases, especially with languages that are easier to do semantic analysis over than C/C++, but while it is interesting research it is not a practical way to go. The reality is that C/C++ is prevalent, and highly detuned code is abundant. This also fails to address the problem of migrating between versions of the processor, while recompiling everything every time is a way to go it is not terribly practical (and when every new processor will fail to measure up to the old in the users old apps the user will not be happy).

It is a bit odd that you bring up the Itanium since it is the best argument for this stance, there has not been any lack of effort in the compiler technology for the Itanium, the compilers are real marvels leveraging the very best the research has to offer. The silicon itself is very powerful, if you manage to actually fill all the instruction slots the thing will really fly. Unfortunately they never do, they get 50% fills and such, and the problem is that a modern sophisticated OoO processor will do an equally good job extracting parallelity on the fly while offering more flexibility.

A large part of the problem, and the reason why multithreaded models are becoming pervasive, is that OoO processors actually extract very close to the maximum in instruction level parallelism even with near-infinite window-sizes (I recommend the paper at http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/145067.html), so automatic vectorization of ILP is not a field to pin much hope on.

My final note is that; While having sophisticated issue logic is fairly complex, the chip real estate is not that large, and the gains to be made are huge. The Cell has a weak primary processor, mostly meant to be an organizing hub for the vector operations, if you don't write vectorized code you are screwed (unless compiler technology does something amazing soon).

For the last six years, I've been collecting data on all civil wars fought since 1816 as part of an update to the Correlates of War datasets, which have been instrumental in reshaping the scientific study of international politics. Right now, the biggest obstacle to further progress is that most of the abscure wars we're considering simply aren't described in English. The only materials on many Latin American wars (e.g. the dozen or so civil conflicts in Ecuador) are in Spanish, while information on many African revolts is only available in French. This project simply doesn't have the resources to hire full-time translators, so even basic MT would be great, for it would allow me to skim through reams of documents and online articles in order to identify the materials worth the costly time of a human translator. In addition, even a modest improvement in MT would allow me to extract data from foreign-language materials myself, since I'm generally seeking quantitative data on casualties and force levels, not a detailed description of events.

Pardon me for replying to my own post, but I found some references on what I'm talking about. One project is called visual IDs, where they generate random art for every icon in a filesystem, thereby making it easier to find files, based on their look rather than based on harder-to-remember filenames. Go here for more info.

Another one is a paper (reference 31 in TFA) that discusses hash visualization, i.e. generating random visual images based on unique strings/numbers/hashes.

I think there is alot of merit in these ideas. Humans are visual creatures, and can recognize images very quickly. I would like to see filesystems and authentication schemes that take advantage of this fact.

Damn you and your improper nomenclature! You don't enumerate singular atoms in inorganic molecules. The proper term is dihydrogen oxide.

Um, carbon monoxide?

http://www.geovista.psu.edu/grants/nci-esda/public ations.html

"The project will leverage GeoVISTA Studio as an environment for building and testing software applications focusing on exploratory spatial data analysis applied to cancer and related risk factor data."

http://www.geovista.psu.edu/research/healthvisuali zation/index.html

" Dynamic geovisualization methods extend traditional cartographic approaches for representing georeferenced health statistics and related information in at least two ways: by emphasizing the use of maps and other representation forms to construct knowledge (not just to present it) and by dynamically linking the visual map display with both the underlying geographic data structures and the system users (resulting in maps that change in response to changes in data and/or to actions on the part of users)."

http://www.geocomputation.org/2000/GC018/Gc018.htm

"One barrier to the uptake of Geocomputation is that, unlike GIS, it has no system or toolbox that provides easy access to useful functionality. This paper describes an experimental environment, GeoVISTA Studio, that attempts to address this shortcoming. Studio is a Java-based, visual programming environment that allows for the rapid, programming free development of complex data exploration and knowledge construction applications to support geographic analysis. It achieves this by leveraging advances in geocomputation, software engineering, visualisation and machine learning."

http://www.geovista.psu.edu/grants/nci-esda/public ations.html

"The project will leverage GeoVISTA Studio as an environment for building and testing software applications focusing on exploratory spatial data analysis applied to cancer and related risk factor data."

http://www.geovista.psu.edu/research/healthvisuali zation/index.html

" Dynamic geovisualization methods extend traditional cartographic approaches for representing georeferenced health statistics and related information in at least two ways: by emphasizing the use of maps and other representation forms to construct knowledge (not just to present it) and by dynamically linking the visual map display with both the underlying geographic data structures and the system users (resulting in maps that change in response to changes in data and/or to actions on the part of users)."

http://www.geocomputation.org/2000/GC018/Gc018.htm

"One barrier to the uptake of Geocomputation is that, unlike GIS, it has no system or toolbox that provides easy access to useful functionality. This paper describes an experimental environment, GeoVISTA Studio, that attempts to address this shortcoming. Studio is a Java-based, visual programming environment that allows for the rapid, programming free development of complex data exploration and knowledge construction applications to support geographic analysis. It achieves this by leveraging advances in geocomputation, software engineering, visualisation and machine learning."

One thing that would help a lot would be for more people to be aware of Jury Nullification. While the laws would still exist, unjust laws would be ignored.

There are some good links on this subject at:

• http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/z enger/nullification.html
• http://www.personal.psu.edu/faculty/j/p/jph13/Jury Nullification.html
• http://www.greenmac.com/eagle/ISSUES/ISSUE23-9/07J uryNullification.html
• http://www.friesian.com/nullif.htm
• http://www.november.org/razorwire/rzold/04/0412.ht ml

As the saying goes There are four boxes to be used in defending our freedom: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Use them in that order.

1. O(1) scheduler
2. Freenet, TOR, I2P
3. Bittorrent
4. Kademlia (as applied in Azureus)
5. Plugger
6. Autocorrelated music downloads (iRate radio)
7. TiVo (Code is GPLed)
8. "Mindstorms" (less earthshattering, but a good example)
9. The concept of the Wiki
10. The Scientific Method

Actually one of the reasons people often feel lumps from cancer is caused by osmotic pressure!. http://www.engr.psu.edu/NewsEvents/NewsDetail.asp? NewsYear=1994&NewsMonth=7

Hot babe theoretical physicists? Or were you thinking of these ones?

Refrences:

Should American Eat Less Meat

Humans Head Start [it's a PDF!] I'll even concede the meat might've more likely been fish met, but it was meat.

Did African Hominids Eat Meat We're not really natural herbivores at all...

I'm sure I can Google more out if necessary. We had a natural inclination towards meet as our food stuff became distributed over a wider area. We didn't have the ability to fight for the food stuff with larger animals, so we turned to meet.

I also realize that there is one piece of conflicting evidence to all this. Richard Wrangham and a few of his colleagues have argued that cooked tubers were really responsible for the massive growth of our ancestors' brains. The problem? This massive brain growth was roughly 1.8 million years ago (which Wrangham agrees), but at best we were able to control fire about 300,000 years ago. Quite a disparity. Not to mention that there's no archaelogical proof of such a diet.

I've tried two different images of airplanes; one of a bright red flying car on bright green grass and one of SpaceShip One against a deep blue sky. Both times, the results looked surprisingly like my query images in color composition only. Red planes on grass and white planes against a blue sky. Inauspicious start.

Next experiment: I took a picture of a highly distinctive plane, a harrier, climbing at a steep angle and viewed in profile. I got, in return, a list of passenger jets, and even a helicopter. Hardly surprisingly, all of the result pictures had the same bluish white sky as my original image. That was literally the only similarity.

According to the introduction on the search page the heuristics used compares colors, contrast and shapes in the images themselves. I saw no correlation whatsoever between shapes, and any correlation in contrast seems to be to be the result of the search engine simply looking for images that contain the same colors in a similar ratio to the original. In short, nothing to see here, move along.

On the other hand, one of the projects listed under the Penn State University link looks fairly fascinating. The Riemann a-LIP project (automatic linguistic indexing of pictures) doesn't allow user input of images, unfortunately, but it does show some fairly fascinating attempts at verbally qualifying image data. For example, it describes a blue and orange mandelbrot as pattern agate shimer abstract scene, and a sunset over a lake as Berlin Devon Namibia landscape lake scene. Okay, it may still need some work, but it sure beats the hell out of the "find the same color airplane engine".

Fortran...doesn't have pointers.

Originally, that was true, but now Fortran does have pointers.

One interesting thing about the Hitachi is that it has dynamic RPM (DRPM) scaling, so it will slow down to prevent overheating. This is useful because it prevents the drive from exceeding its thermal envelope. Other drives must stop processing when they reach their maximum rated temperature to prevent data corruption and mechanical failure. Granted, "stop processing" means several milliseconds of pause, but would you rather run really fast in bursts or just run continuously? Another neat feature is that DRPM will allow power management without completely shutting down the drive, providing good quality-of-service without wasting power. Considering that data centers spend a great deal of money on powering disk arrays and cooling them sufficiently, this could really take off in the server market. See Gurumurthi et al. for details.

here they are

Complain about Slashdot all you want, but the articles and the original press release are all missing the details you want. This is a case where the only details that have been reported have been gleaned from a press release, only published two days ago. It will take a while before a journalist asks the kind of questions you want asked.

Slashdot is not a news site. There aren't a group of reporters doing fact checking. It is new aggregation and community site.

However, it may well be possible for solids to exhibit superfluid flow. How? Imagine the flow of a liquid, except that all the atoms in the liquid have a crystal structure, and that entire structure is flowing in lockstep while maintaining a rigid crystalline structure. When Bose-Einstein condensation comes into play, you can have macroscopic coherence of atoms across the entire bulk of material.

Kim and Chan at Penn State claim to have created a supersolid state of matter in helium (and now, hydrogen). It's arguably the biggest experimental result in condensed matter physics right now; if confirmed, it will probably mean the Nobel Prize. However, theoretical studies have so far failed to unambiguously predict the existence of such as state of matter; there are arguments for and against, and the dust hasn't settled. If other experimental groups can replicate these results, we'll know for sure, regardless of whether theory has caught up with nature.

"You like your Macintosh better than me, ... don't you Dave?"

Awesome ad :-)

I love when my university gives away OS upgrades for Apple and Microsoft for free (at least they used to give Microsoft upgrades for free... at least Office Pro is still $24 for Mac & Windows).

OSU had developed light-tunable plastic magnets. Here the plastic material becomes 1.5 times more magnetic when blue light shines on it. Green light partially reverses that effect.

Another interesting work is from PSU on PLZT, this new material shows a large piezoelectric effect in response to near-ultraviolet light. Piezoelectric materials convert electricity into mechanical energy -- movement. When an electric current is run through piezoelectric ceramic, the ceramic changes size -- it shrinks or expands. Certain ferroelectric materials exhibit stronger photovoltaic (light into electricity) effects. Combining these ferroelectrics with piezoelectrics (electricity into motion), researchers created a single material that would convert light directly into motion.

http://www.geovistastudio.psu.edu/jsp/index.jsp

"GeoVISTA Studio is an open software development environment designed for geospatial data. Studio is a programming-free environment that allows users to quickly build applications for geocomputation and geographic visualization"

http://www.mancke-software.de/wmsClient/

"This is the Home of a Client vor viewing Maps from an WMS (Web Map Server). "

http://www.mindswap.org/2003/PhotoStuff/

"PhotoStuff - An Image Annotation Tool for the Semantic Web"

http://my.unidata.ucar.edu/content/software/idv/in dex.html

"The Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) from Unidata is a Java(TM)-based software framework for analyzing and visualizing geoscience data. The IDV brings together the ability to display and work with satellite imagery, gridded data, surface observations, balloon soundings, NWS WSR-88D Level II and Level III RADAR data, and NOAA National Profiler Network data, all within a unified interface."

http://opensourcegis.org/

"This effort represents an attempt to build a complete index of Open Source / Free GIS related software projects. The effort has some way to go, especially for projects in languages other than English. The definition of GIS has been kept loose to encompass a broad range of projects which deal with spatial data."

Ok, now besides "brand Recognition" why would I want to pay someone $1500 to upload my work to a web page in the Internet?, why not only upload it to my home in the Uni and then publish it in places like Citeseer or even something like ACM's DL.

I think (like some others in this thread) its only a matter of brand recognition and commerce, but if you have a good paper about any subject AND it is on the Internet, it will surely be published.

• Harvard doesn't list it in the admission requirements.
  
• But, U Penn does require a completed secondary education program in their requirements.
  
• Some like Penn State are a little fuzzy - they require four years of secondary education, but not necessarily a diploma (?).
  
• UCLA again doens't state a diploma specifically, but does require very specific secondary education credits.