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Technological Singularity has really got to mean artificial intelligence.

Vernor Vinge has brought you the Meme of the Singularity.

Mentifex (Latin for Mindmaker) has brought you the Mind of the Singularity.

The Mind of the Singularity is here but in a very primitive state.

When will the Singularity happen? This is a much discussed topic.

The A.I. Zone is where you may discuss and witness the Singularity in situ.

(ignoring facts like a single volcanic eruption spews out 500 times as much as greenhouse gases as man has every produced).

Except that's not a fact. A mere minute with google would have avoided your embarrassment.

Volcanic eruptions can enhance global warming by adding CO2 to the atmosphere. However, a far greater amount of CO2 is contributed to the atmosphere by human activities each year than by volcanic eruptions. Volcanoes contribute about 110 million tons/year, whereas other sources contribute about 10 billion tons/year. -- http://www.geology.sdsu.edu/how_volcanoes_work/cli mate_effects.html

Definitions of reporter on the Web:

• a person who investigates and reports or edits news stories
  wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
• A reporter is a type of journalist who researches and presents information in certain types of mass media.
  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reporter

Definitions of journalist on the Web:

• a writer for newspapers and magazines
• diarist: someone who keeps a diary or journal
  wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
• A journalist is a person who practices journalism.
  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalist
• Someone who works in the news gathering business, such as a photographer, editor or reporter.
  edweb.sdsu.edu/courses/edtec670/Cardboard/board/p/ pulitzer/pulitzer5.html

* Milton Friedman, PhD Nobel Laureate economist: http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/dunnweb/rprnts.f riedman.html

* Gary Becker, PhD Nobel laureate U. of Chicago economist (still teaching!): http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2005/07 /do_corporations.html

* Judge Richard Posner, economist and U.S. Federal judge: http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2005/07 /the_social_resp.html

* The Economist magazine: http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id =3555212

This array would likely be able to do it's share in submarine tracking, but only as piece of a larger system.

Part of the adventure of sonar detection is that low frequencies, especially the 30-100Hz range, travel thousands of miles with very little loss. This trick to long range submarine detection is listening for sounds from pumps, fans, etc, in those low ranges. Next, you need a wide baseline to triangulate a position. The SOSUS arrays covering the Greenland-Iceland-Britan gap covered hundreds of miles.

Now comes the problem of sound ducting. The temperature and salinity gradients of seawater can steer sound in much the same way as a mirage is from bent light due to temperature gradients in the air.

The Fata Morgana mirage, also called Looming, is a prime example of a sonar problem. By eye, you see a mirror image of a distant, even over-the-horizon object reflected as if by a mirror -- the temperature inversion layer. By ear, you care only for the direction of the sound, but now the problem is "which mirror?" As the sound curves up to the sea surface, it reflects back down, then curves up once again, and reflects again, at about 33 mile intervals. This is called a Convergence Zone.

These complexities go on and on, and require a wide range of sensors by depth and distance to detect and resolve the location of a sound source. The computers come in handy to do the filtering ID work, so you don't mistake a squid or a beluga for a Typhoon or Krasnodar...

You know, you can purchase every Amateur Scientist column ever on CDROM now? And don't forget some of my favorites from the Amateur Scientist column: a homemade atom smasher (a 300keV electrostatic linear accelerator), a homebuilt cyclotron (lacking plans), all manner of cloud and bubble chambers for particle detection, a gel electrophoresis setup, a CuBr pulsed laser, a 100kW-1MW pulsed Nitrogen laser, etc. The list goes on and on. Shawn Carlson, where are you now?

The pressure in the ocean increases by about 1 atmosphere for every 10 meters of depth. The average depth of the ocean is about 4 km, so the pressure on the sea floor is about 400 atmospheres.

That's good, but one could make the case that this approach uses only one side of one's noggin.

This is the kind of stuff the infamous "school of the americas" provides:

http://larc.sdsu.edu/humanrights/rr/PLAarticles/mc sherry.html

(Ever heard about plan condor? US trained military killing their own people??)

As noted in other comments, the longevity of new media forms has actually been decreasing with each new technology.

But we won't need our media to last any longer than it takes The Singularity to arrive.

So, would these be the same "experts" who predicted we'd have flying cars, robotic maids, commercial space flight and a moon colony by 2000?

Based on the past track record of technology related predictions, I'd say predictions are worth the paper they're printed on.

Besides, just because the hardware complexity reaches the necessary stage doesn't mean the software will. Being able to build a digital brain that equals or exceeds the human brain in complexity and power doesn't mean the software engineers can write code to run it. There are a lot of advances in psychology that need to be made before we can start wiring up our digital successors.

Google news is not exactly the best place to look for a company. They do have a darpa contract, so they can't be too insane. And they have been around and getting grants since 1999. http://eisg.sdsu.edu/PIER%20area/..%5Cshortsums%5C shortsum0216.htm so I think they are perhaps marketing, but not outright crackpots or liars.

ditto! I have always been curious and dissappointed about the lack of pretty emerald stars.

fortunately, since moving to the midwest (Kansas City) and seeing the sun set over flat land instead of the mountains where I used to live, I have now seen sunsets with discernable green bands in them. That was my other hope for green.

Now, if I can just witness a green flash sometime....

In this picture taken by Spirit early in the mission, you can see "Husband Hill" labeled as "E", about 3km away. It's on this hill right now. Opportunity has spent more time carefully looking around a dangerous crater instead of going for distance.

Sojourner only moved about 100 meters and was a huge success. Its most popular accomplishment was taking this picture before it even left the lander.

Vinge, and others, have played with this concept in a sci-fi arena, but I wonder - what happens when, to take your example, garbage men hit the wall on efficiency at disposing garbage? (This implies the whole supply chain - or perhaps I should say the removal chain - of garbage mitigation specialists hitting a limit, including recyclers, dumpers, shippers, lobbyists, specialist accountants, etc.) Inputs to the garbage industry will likely be still capable of increasing demand (or, again oddly for this example, an aspect of supply), so economics start kicking in, raising costs of disposal. With garbage, we're seeing the start of this already, and in some extreme cases, lots of noise (a certain mountain in Navada, for instance).

This has, in turn, second order effects for lots of other industries and people, and almost nobody understands the problem, other than the people who are the maxed out specialists, for a given social, technological and economic milleu. Problems, solutions and examples of poor communication and scams start to multiply.

It is fun stuff to think about, especially because I think we're getting a little close in certain areas. I hope to have a paper out on this soonish.

The fundamental principle in capitalism is to minimize costs and maximize profits, you learn this the first day of business school. And consumers are pretty much only concerned with getting the cheapest products (which is also a fundamental principle of capitalism), so what happens is that the market actually *encourages* immoral behaviour. Media coverage of immoral behaviour rarely has any impact, and this is especially true for multi-national corporations where you would need massive, global media coverage.

A good example is food production - treating animals good is costly, the most effective way is to have large "factories" where animals barely have any room to live, are drugged with all sorts of weird growth hormones, and are slaugthered as soon as possible. And since consumers want the cheapest food, they most often buy these products, and thereby promote this animal abuse.

I think Milton Friedman, a Nobel prize winning economist, said it best in his essay "The Social Responsibilty of Business is to Increase Its Profits". Let me give you a few quotes:

"[B]usinessmen believe that they are defending free enterprise when they declaim that business is not concerned "merely" with profit but also with promoting desirable "social" ends; that business has a "social conscience" and takes seriously its responsibilities for providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers. In fact they are--or would be if they or anyone else took them seriously--preaching pure and unadulterated socialism. Businessmen who talk this way are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades."

"In a free-enterprise, private-property system, a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible[...]"

"[T]he corporate executive would be spending someone else's money for a general social interest. Insofar as his actions in accord with his "social responsibility" reduce returns to stockholders, he is spending their money. Insofar as his actions raise the price to customers, he is spending the customers' money. Insofar as his actions lower the wages of some employees, he is spending their money. The stockholders or the customers or the employees could separately spend their own money on the particular action if they wished to do so. The executive is exercising a distinct "social responsiblity," rather than serving as an agent of the stockholders or the customers or the employees, only if he spends the money in a different way than they would have spent it."

"[T]he doctrine of "social responsibility" involves the acceptance of the socialist view that political mechanisms, not market mechanisms, are the appropriate way to determine the allocation of scarce resources to alternative uses."

"I have called [the doctrine of "social responsibility"] a "fundamentally subversive doctrine" in a free society, and have said that in such a society, "there is one and only one social responsibility of business--to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud."

Steam Power

Yes, that's what I'm talking about :) With normal (non-Sonic) games, you'll get a single bonus level. When you add Sonic 1 to it, you get a progressive game where you can complete some ungodly number of them in a row (I heard it was over 3000). For some reason I find the endless number of the bonus-round-like puzzles to be very relaxing.

When I've been bored, I've been trying to compile a list of the bonus codes (so you can skip to where you left off). If anyone has any additions or knows of any other list, let me know.

http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~cleaver/sonic.html

Acknowledging that undergraduate advising and mentoring programs at the university fall "below the standards" set in other undergraduate education reforms, Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education John Bravman announced several new initiatives that should significantly alter the experience for students and their advisers. ...

Bravman cited a number of issues that have contributed to disappointing experiences for many.

-Faculty participation in advising has dropped from as much as 48 percent in the late 1970s to 12 to 15 percent today, partly due to ever-increasing demands on their time.

-Some advisers complained that they were matched with groups of students with nothing in common with each other or their adviser and felt uncomfortable participating in the standard socialization events. He said some faculty also complained about having too much information to digest when they became advisers.

-Many students do not take full advantage of advising opportunities or resources. He said his own experience since 1992 has shown that 23 percent of students who had scheduled appointments with him didn't show up.

-Students are increasingly arriving at the university with complex personal issues, including many who take psychotropic medications, which add another challenge to a sound advising program.

-Too many over-corrective efforts for advising have resulted in too many specialized groups and a general sense of confusion for many students. Bravman said programs have been offered through residential education, the advising center and the office of the Dean of Freshmen and Transfer Students, as an example.

"We have added layer upon layer upon layer and one of the results of that is that there's a total information overload and a total block about where to go to get even the most basic questions answered," Bravman said.

Sounds like they don't know what they are doing.

President John Hennessy looks like he'll get even richer in this Stanford Daily article of May 21, 2004, by Michael Miller (emphasis mine, not in the original article):

In a separate development, University President John Hennessy took a position on the board of Google in late April, as one of three company outsiders that Google added to its corporate board before its IPO. Hennessy was granted 65,000 shares of stock when he joined the board. These shares could potentially be worth millions of dollars, depending on the eventual stock value.

Hennessy took the position--his third corporate board membership--based on his experience with Silicon Valley and technology companies, Stanford spokesperson Gordon Earle said. Hennessy cofounded MIPS Computer Systems in 1984, and he now also serves on the boards of Cisco Systems and Atheros Communications. Earle added that Hennessy would remove himself from any dealings that connect Google and Stanford.

Does anybody seriously believe that there's no conflict of interest? Hennessey's textbook (coauthored with Dave Patterson of the University of California, Berkeley) on computer architecture is taught using MIPS assembly language (MIPS is Hennessey's company). So in addition to earning something like $461,656 a year (http://advancement.sdsu.edu/marcomm/news/clip

Been there done that. If Newton did it why we won't?

It's odd that someone would mention Esperanto in the context of a machine translation project and not mention this project. It was designed to use Esperanto as its pivot language.

It's odd that someone would mention Esperanto in the context of a machine translation project and not mention this project. It was designed to use Esperanto as its pivot language.

Hard to say. Except for earth, we don't have any examples yet, which means there could be only very rude educated guesswork.

But i'd say the chances are pretty good, since it's known (or at least highly possible) that primitive live like one-cell-organism could survive in space for a long time through hybernating. And it is known that planetary material could be ejected into space (like from meteor impacts or violent vulcanic explosions like in Krakatau - see here and here and land on another planet like mars.

Although the chances of survival for one-cell-organisms in a single incident are fairly small, there must have been thousands - if not millions - of these catastrophic events in earths past. One of the biggest was presumably the asteroid that created a thermonuclear winter about 65 million years ago. This one is known to have ejected material out of earths orbit.

So, all things considered, chances are that some bacteria could have survived an ejection from earth, the travel through interplanetary space, reentry into mars' atmosphere and adaption to mars' climate.

For the chances of complex life-forms: Well, it pretty much depends on many factors: The past climate of mars, if the first life-forms were native or not - and if not - how sucessfull presumed introduced life-forms from other planets adapted to the given and changing climate on mars.

As for fish, i'm don't really know, i'll rather bet on plant-life and rather primitive water-based or sand-based animal life-forms.

I haven't heard about plans to store it in a mine. I have heard several times about sinking it to the bottom of the ocean. That seems like a bad idea to me though. What if something disturbed the ocean like an asteroid strike or nuclear blast? If a lot of CO2 came to the surface at once (in addition to the methane currently locked in ice) it could asphyxiate millions depending on how much was released. Similar things happen frequently in volcanic regions. A CO2 eruption in Camaroon in 1986 killed thousands of people and animals. http://www.geology.sdsu.edu/how_volcanoes_work/Nyo s.html

"Qualitative" and "quantitative" are well established words not of my choosing. They are often portrayed as opposites but they are not.

In my case, while I confess to using a stereotype it turns out to not affect my point ;-), so I'm glad you clarified the history. (Often, when the details don't matter to me I don't go look them up, since they have no affect on my point.)

I suggest you see your optician. The sky is infact blue, mainly because of light diffraction (that light coming from the sun). Sometimes the sky may have many interesting colours called the northern lights, or there may be a change in the deffraction when the sun sets but the sky should not be red at midday.

"Impressive" to your uncle must mean something along the lines of "capable of destroying all humanity." Which is, I admit, one possible definition. A bit sick, though.

Ebola is so scary because of how little would have to change for it to become "impressive". Ebola is an incredibly efficient killer, way more than smallpox's 30%-50% fatality rates. The Ebola that's around right now would be nothing compared to that incubated in an (infectious) victim for 6 months before the victim bled out. You could see epidemics wipe out entire countries in just a few years, if such a virus existed.

There are some interesting models for Ebola infection. They're all pretty scary.
Here's one, in an Excel spreadsheet. Your uncle may have higher standards, but I get a bit freaked out when mathematical models start predicting 80% population losses.

FWIW, there are alot of interesting papers out there, if you want some hair-raising science...

P.S. AIDS is not a virus, its a syndrome caused by the HIV.

"Impressive" to your uncle must mean something along the lines of "capable of destroying all humanity." Which is, I admit, one possible definition. A bit sick, though.

Ebola is so scary because of how little would have to change for it to become "impressive". Ebola is an incredibly efficient killer, way more than smallpox's 30%-50% fatality rates. The Ebola that's around right now would be nothing compared to that incubated in an (infectious) victim for 6 months before the victim bled out. You could see epidemics wipe out entire countries in just a few years, if such a virus existed.

There are some interesting models for Ebola infection. They're all pretty scary.
Here's one, in an Excel spreadsheet. Your uncle may have higher standards, but I get a bit freaked out when mathematical models start predicting 80% population losses.

FWIW, there are alot of interesting papers out there, if you want some hair-raising science...

P.S. AIDS is not a virus, its a syndrome caused by the HIV.

I'm sure the first fire starters were considered sorcerers...

Yes they were. Have you ever read the myth of Prometheus, and how the gods punished man by giving him woman, in the form of Pandora?

Here or Here you can get the story.

Oh, yes I do agree that technology is neutral. The problem seems to be that humans are not.

The description in the article sounds analogous to the way muscle fibers work. Mother nature is a great structural engineer, and she's been at it a lot longer than we have. Human technology has been inspired repeatedly by nature. One easy example is the Wright Brothers. Others may follow in replies. (I hope so, anyway. I'm sort of in the mood to hear a few more...)

An explanation here: UIC

A cool animation here: San Diego S.U.

What I feel is the most important concept for people designing edutainment games is the hierarchy fo learning. This hierarchy is also called "Bloom's Cognative Taxonomy." Rote memorization and drilling are good for immediate responses, but of very little value in the real world. If I remember correctly, its been theorized that knowledge is held longer as it is used in higher and higher level learning.

In the current edutainment area, there are two fields of game design. The first is a quiz and reward system. The student is presented with a quizing system and the actual game. The learning is supposed to come from the quiz. Depending on how well the student does, permission is given to play the game part for a little while, rewarding the player for doing well. It's a basic operant conditioning design. Learning here is very basic rote; trial and error learning.

The second common design is basic skills drilling. Number munchers, math blaster and that little spelling game where words marched down the castle wall and you had to type them before they got to you are all included in this area. Basically the game is timed drilling. The computer is used to encourage and engage the student, as well as to time them. Again the learning here is by trial and error. These sorts of games serve best as a reinforcement/recollection activity. If you know how to multiply numbers then they can help you instantly recall facts.

What I'd like to see more of these days is problem solving game design. This type merges the learning with the gameplay. It encourages experimentation, and extrapolation. Most REAL games operate in this manner these days; edutainment games should focus on making sure the lessons learned reflect reality accurately (or at least as best we know ;)). MIT's games-to-teach project is such a group of people working on edutainment games. If my friend Kurt is reading this, I'm sure he'll post more about their success stories. I'd just like to mention Hephaestus, a game based on engineering robots (I'm guessing remote controlled rather than AI)from lego like parts, although it looks like they've jumped on the current trends marketing bandwagon and its now an MMORPG of some sort, with energy as currency.

If your relative is looking for a good textbook for this type of course, check out Basse's A Gift of Fire.

It's been used in a couple of comp sci ethics courses I've taken, and it's got a lot of covereage of current ethical topics and lots of thought experiments/questions.

Overall, a pretty good textbook for such a course.

Vernor Vinge wrote a much better (well, more rounded) analysis of this here

That is really cool stuff. The amount of ingenuity and excellence of design involved in making machinery that can generate DNA from a given sequence with an error rate of .01 percent is quite remarkable.

So (this is a genuine question) please explain why it is that the cellular level machinery which does this same task (assembly of DNA) but with more inherent complexity (built in error correction for example) is not viewed as a result of design but of stochastic processes?

Actually, such an effect is predicted by general relativity. It's called gravitomagnetism. If NASA ever launches Gravity Probe B, it should be able to measure it.

Incidentally, the Doppler effect for gravity is more complicated than just compression, because the gravitational field is a tensor, not a scalar. Not only does it "compress", it also "twists", which makes it act differently on fast particles than it does for slow ones. A very similar effect holds for the electric force - when an electron moves very fast (i.e. generates a current), the electric force begins to twist in such a way that it affects moving charges (especially charges moving parallel to the original charge) in a different way from static charges. This is of course just the familiar phenomenon of magnetism, and what I just described is a simple consequence of Ampere's law.

And yes, magnetism travels at the speed of light too. Have you heard of "electromagnetic radiation"? What do you think light is, anyway?

Terry

webquest.sdsu.edu/

webquest.sdsu.edu/matrix.html

Or, see what you find by searching Google for "webquest."

webquest.sdsu.edu/

webquest.sdsu.edu/matrix.html

Or, see what you find by searching Google for "webquest."

I agree with you, I used the same package somewhere in between you two, and my son used it two years ago. Same results every time.

I heard the problem they are having is that the new versions of their software does not run with the present hardware. They hope the Coming Singularity will solve the problem and allow the new version to be launched.

But are the flatbed scanners good enough for thick hardcover books? I guess the scans would get messed up near the seam.

The SDSU Library has a couple of photocopiers that do just this sort of thing. It works remarkably well.

Your sig page is down!

I can't get to http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~stremler/sigs/sigs.html

Just an FYI :)

A common misconception. Studies have shown repeatedly that the human eye is generally able to read quicker and comprehend more when the text is presented in narrow columns of about 65 to 75 characters each, or about as wide as you can actually read at once with no eye motion.

Optimum column width may also be affected by the 7-plus-or-minus-2 rule. Narrow columns mean that there are just enough words on a single line to be easily held in short term memory, thus easily 'digested' during reading.

Setting text on a computer display, however, is a different matter, especially when the display is configurable by the user. The assumption with the web is that the user will reconfigure both display size and text size to suite their circumstances. The fact that this guy thinks he knows better than his reads how they can best read text on screen, does not bode well for his qualifications as a user interface expert. (the first rule of user interface design is to listen to your users. This guy would rather dictate: it's no suprise that he worked for M$)

drat, fixed URL

The other machine was a g4 400 or 450. Mine is an 867 with 640 mb of ram. So actually my box is the faster of the two. In any case, QE is still a huge improvement, even if it isn't "perfect."

As someone else commented the link is now dead. It was killing my T1. I left it up as long as I could stand it! :-)

There was a guy who had a mirror but I just checked and it wasn't responding. That was at:

http://calnet.sdsu.edu/jaguardemo.mov ... YMMV.

If anyone has a copy (a LOT of people downloaded the file) please mirror it.

Cheers,
John

P.S. I'm SO dissapointed that I posted this nifty video and didn't even get modded up! :-) Oh well.

Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky" was brilliant and his early work "True Names" predated "Snow Crash" and a lot of the cyber-punks. His theory of the singularity might have been enough to cement his place 50 years from now, assuming that the singularity doesn't actually occur of course, in which case none of this will be relevent.

Naw, surrealism was never really my cup of fur

(ok, I admit I ripped that off of fortune)

But what of the iMac girl? Yes, only Japan could come up with somethinglike this.

Here's the link if you want to check out their peice.

Jainith

Titan of light

Yea, You could also try Toolshed51.com The owner of the site was kicked out of my University for posting "offensive" stuff about the university president on his webpage! He's been out to get school administrators since then, so let him know who you are and he will certainly get you a special deal on hosting...

"Salk saw an opportunity to develop a vaccine against polio, and devoted himself to this work for the next eight years....When news of the discovery was made public on April 12, 1955, Salk was hailed as a miracle worker. He further endeared himself to the public by refusing to patent the vaccine. He had no desire to profit personally from the discovery, but merely wished to see the vaccine disseminated as widely as possible. "

How many thousands of lives were saved as a result of this decision?

W
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