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It may be due to less money involved in Canadian elections. Checking opensecrets.org I see:

2000 US Presidential election - $528.9 million dollars
2004 US Presidential election - $880.5 million dollars

Predictions for 2008 say the final two candidates will need over 500 million to be competitive . That is a lot of money... And where there is money there is potential graft, embezzlement, and lots and lots of power.

Checking http://www.sfu.ca/~aheard/elections/laws.html I see:

2004 Canadian elections - ~93.5 million Canadian
2006 Canadian elections - ~100 million Canadian

The difference is that Canada seems to limit how much the political parties can spend rather than how much people can give. So If a party spends a lot of money on one candidate for office then there is less money for other candidates from the same party. Thus there appears to be less money in all Canadian elections than there is in the US presidential election.

Also Canada has many parties so "winning" an election may not give an absolute majority there may still be coalitions of parties able to wrest control and that gives the minorities more power to bargain with and leads to more review of the winning parties laws. Compare that to the "winner take all" system that in the US. Many laws are proposed and voted on without senators being allowed to review the full body of the law. They just know if their pork projects were included and they are told by the leadership which way to vote if they want their pet projects to get in the next time...

USA political system needs a fix. One fix would be to pass many smaller bills instead of monolithic bills with many riders attached. But that means less pet projects to make constituents happy. It is a vicious cycle currently where the US parties are both striving to break the bank as fast as possible so they get the most for themselves.

This sounds like a natural fit with the original vision of the World Soundscape Project, especially since these are ambient field recordings. Too bad they ran short of funding and the momentum faded, I think they would have taken it somewhere like this. I like the fact that they're hoping to showcase changing soundscapes over time. It would be great if the GE community can contribute. If this stuff interests you, check out the literature on acoustic ecology.

Yeah, its not like a bunch of Comp Sci students couldnt figure out an algorithm to break them.

http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~mori/research/gimpy/

http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/05-0 2-06.htm#frpaa
http://pkp.sfu.ca/
http://ijoc.org/ojs/index.php/ijoc/issue/view/1

Looks like shortly academics and scientists will have their own open access journal if their work is paid by a federal agency that pays out more than $100 million a year in grants. The problem is that I didn't even know this existed 5 minutes ago. Apparently, the bill allows each agency to make their own central deposit of info. I can see why they did that to get less anti-lobbying against the bill from those organizations, but as an average citizen, I'd love one federal research site that I could go to and have easy access to all federally sponsered research. That'll kill some sections of wikipedia when it really hits full steam. Wikipedia won't die. It has a place mainly in cataloging pop culture and things that would otherwise drop below academics radars.

These things improve the reading experience, and I appreciate them, but I don't think they're truly necessary. The arXiv does just fine with an almost fully-automated system.

I think the arXiv project has been highly successful, and is a great example of what instituional repositories should look like. But like it or not, there is still a market and expectation among many academics for glossy-looking journals. They explicitly want the things that improve the reading experience - in particular, they want to be able to print good-looking paper (ie. PDF) versions of papers, and are willing to pay extra for that. Maybe things will develop where the journal as medium becomes extinct, but not ay time soon.

Right now, the arXiv's goal is not to replace journals, but to be as fast and as efficient as possible at hosting preprints. If they set out to replace journals outright, and added a slighly more sophisticated review system and automated validation of input, they could do what most journals do with about 90% of the quality for about 10% of the cost.

What you're describing is exactly what OJS does: sophisticated review/workflow system with a little automated validation. It provides about 90% of the quality of the journals you're describing with almost zero cost. It has been wildly successful, especially in the developing world, where starting and hosting a journal is expensive. If we're going to really break it down, how would this review/validated arXiv system you describe differ from a journal? Not much, it seems.

I don't know too much about XML journal article formats, and would appreciate more info. PubMed's explanation didn't really help much. Why bother with XML? Why not just require authors to submit in LaTeX? ... Why re-invent the wheel for publishing? My best guess so far is to accomodate authors who can't be bothered to learn LaTeX and insist on submitting Word docs, but that's about all I can think of. Why not just tell the Word users to suck it up and learn LaTeX?

Authors submit to specific journals for two main reasons: exposure and prestige. Whether this is a flawed system or not (I think it is), the fact is that, if you're a large successful journal, you can force authors to submit in whatever format you want - but then of course, you probably don't have money/cost problems. Smaller journals trying to survive or start-up journals don't have the luxury of telling authors to "suck it up". The authors will simply submit to another journal of the same class that's more lenient about their submission requirements.

Like I said, whily you may be comfortable with LaTeX and willing to take on much of the layout, etc. the vast majority of authors are not - whether through being too lazy, too busy, or simply not technically-inclined enough. Bear in mind that there are plenty of social science researchers out there who have a hard enough time with Word, much less LaTeX. If you make submission too difficult, authors will go elsewhere.

XML - and in particular the NLM format (by far the most comprehensive, in my experience), is a format that lends itself much better to multi-layout transformations than LaTeX. It also has the advantage that it can be fairly easily generated from source files, such as .DOC, via things like OpenOffice and XHTML. There is still some manual work required, but I've spent the past 3 years working on automated ways to convert articles in formats authors are comfortable with (like .DOC, but some even use .RTF or weirder) into XML. It's doable, and we're getting much closer.

The simple fact is, journals still take work, and work costs money. The Internet (and in particular, the Web) has brought an alternative for academics to expose their research other than journals (eg. IR like arXiv), but the journal paradigm still exists, and for the most part, it is the main venue for academic publicat

My university, SFU, is in one of the rainiest regions of Canada and is built almost entirely out of concrete. We have some problems with leaks in the older buildings, but overall I haven't seen a whole lot of problems with mold...

Unless prior written and signed permission is obtained, submitting the same essay, paper or other term work for credit in more than one course constitutes self-plagiarism, a situation similar to complete plagiarism.

[...] Submitting the same essay, presentation, or assignment more than once whether the earlier submission was at this or another institution, unless prior approval has been obtained.

Not intending to be funny here, but this really sounds like Xerox had one of those didn't-work-but-we'll-sell-it-anyway accidents. Maybe they were just trying to make some nice cyan or magenta ink and suddenly, 'oh my... it faded! It wasn't supposed to do that. I wonder... maybe we could sell it?'
On the other hand, there have been people working on photochromism for UV-activated switches recently for light based memory systems (quite a buzz among some materials chemists). Maybe they picked up on the idea from that... perhaps they did it on purpose from the start.

Call all you want: http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~mori/research/gimpy/

Of course recognizing these images has little to do with OCR programs.

Certainly your skydiver is paying for the cost of his energy, as the charter company wouldn't be around very long otherwise. However, the arguement made by most environmentalists is that the price of gasoline does not include the full social costs of it's use (which is true) and they argue that they are very large (which is subject to further research and debate). From your examples and tone, I'm guessing you may have read this already, but for others, here's by far the best look at the subject. http://www.sfu.ca/~allen/CoaseJLE1960.pdf

A similar (but much less notable) situation happened in Canada - a journalist's credentials, posted in wikipedia, were questioned - and I was interviewed by our "National Newspaper" (the Globe & Mail) on the same theme: "isn't this an example of how wikipedia is broken?"

The journalist doing the interview had absolutely no sense of the irony of that question - how it is the very openness of wikipedia that encouraged her to ask that question, and enter into the discussion to "correct" the misinformation if she saw fit. The Washington Post is part of the solution - many eyes make bugs (errors of fact) shallow - and it doesn't even know it.

I posted my thoughts about the issue here: http://arago.cprost.sfu.ca/smith/Members/admin/wik ipedia . My main argument is that wikipedia is about the social production of knowledge, and it should be regarded (and celebrated) as such.

Mainstream media cannot seem to get their heads around that someone else, other then them, could be involved in the production side of media and that it might have some value. It is the obvious challenge in wikipedia, but they continue to get sidetracked with nattering about the final product and forget about the process. ...r

If you're interested, drop me an email, or contact the head of the lab.

If you're interested, drop me an email, or contact the head of the lab.

If you're interested, drop me an email, or contact the head of the lab.

Memoirs is essentially a satire about a society with too many self-deceptions, and how reality has a way of unraveling even though society refuses to notice or acknowledge any problem. Vacuum is a collection of book reviews -- reviews of books that never existed; in fact some could not possibly exist. These brief descriptions don't do Lem's books credit. Read them yourself; they're devilishly clever.

Some interesting tidbits about supercritical water.

From http://www.sfu.ca/~science/media/water.html

Eventually, when the pressure reaches 220 times or more beyond normal atmospheric pressure, the liquid and vapor densities are identical. The liquid and vapor have become supercritical water.

"Supercritical water has some very unusual properties," explains Percival. "Oil can't be dissolved in normal water. But supercritical water behaves like an organic solvent. Organic materials can be dissolved in it. You could even add oil or methane to it, pump in some oxygen and burn them - without using a match to ignite them. Supercritical water will even dissolve organic molecules containing halogens, such as chlorine, fluorine and bromine.

Excellent sites... I know the folks who run both & we fully support their efforts. ASPO is also a credible site of course. Dr. Campbell (who coined the phrase) also has a website which is associated with ASPO. Check out http://www.sfu.ca/~asamsamb/sb.htm which is from an Iranian academic who publishes on the topic.

This: ` is a backtick. It is neither an apostrophe: ' nor an opening single quote: ‘.

If you're really going to be typographically correct, you should use LDQUO and RDQUO entities “like this” or LSQUO and RSQUO entities ‘like this’.

It doesn't look "distinct", it looks like a UNIX nerd never realised that the world stopped being an xterm in about 1996.

If you're displaying HTML, use entities. If you're displaying plain text, use typewriter quotes. Anything else is typographical bollocks.

Some reading for you, that you may become enlightened:

http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ ruby-talk/3010

Interesting stuff!

I used an ASR-33 teletype terminal for 5+ years. Doing that has stuffed my hearing. Now, 30+ years later, I have horrible squealing tinnitus. Please youngsters, take care of your hearing. Once you damage the micro-hairs in your cochlea you have damaged them and your hearing for ever. End of sentence. Period. They will not heal. Listen to the programs while you still can.

that author may be

"Cosmas Indicopleustes wrote a book called "Christian Topography" in which he claimed the earth is flat. Below are appended 1 translation, the (original?) Latin and another translation."

see discussion below:
http://www.sfu.ca/philosophy/swartz/flat_earth.htm

"Medievals regularly cited with approval Aristotle's statement that the earth is round. An example is Adam de Wodeham: terra rotunda est"

By the way contradicting Aristotle during the medieval period could be get you killed.

If fact the myth that Medieval scholars thought the earth flat may be one created recently in order to add prestige to Columbus' discovery. Revisionist history in other words.

The book "The Prism and the Pendulum" by Robert P Grease has a great chapter on the measuring of the earth circumference by Eratosthenes around 200 BC. His results very pretty dam close. Not only did they know the earth was round they had a good idea of the size.

The Romans got their science from the Greeks. The medieval period go their science from the Romans. The renaissance added back the Greek into the mix.

This is a canard. Almost all the written evidence, from the Greeks onwards, shows that everyone knew the earth was round. More details here.

</pedantry>

Try CoolStreaming. Although I haven't seen it in action, some of my friends have (mostly while visiting Europe or Asia), and they say the quality is near-perfect. And this isn't a stupid academic exercise -- it's a real implementation, with up to 10,000 simultaneous users recently. The academic paper, providing the general algorithm, can be found here. Google for more on the implementation.

- shadowmatter

Our audio environments are so suffused with fans and other hums that our bodies are adapted to these sounds. Without them the soundscape feels empty and eerie. Think of it as an extension of chronic industrial disease, however. Case studies in the Sahel discovered that 70 year-olds showed no significant hearing loss, due to typically healthy blood and an extremely quiet environment.

Some of that deep discomfort people feel when they're camping away from honking traffic is also due to ideology that's sunk down into the bones over a few industrial generations. Silence, not just quiet but really quiet, is deathlike, an absence of life, an absence of civilization. It's dangerous.

Interesting how I can always hear these "silent" computers. It really is relative.

http://pkp.sfu.ca/ocs/

There you go. They also make the premiere open-source academic journal workflow and publishing system (http://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs/)

http://pkp.sfu.ca/ocs/

There you go. They also make the premiere open-source academic journal workflow and publishing system (http://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs/)

There's been a lot of postings about this tournament being bunk due to a lot of misconceptions about the game of poker. As a successful poker player of quite a few years and also a geek, I do believe I have an informed opinion here when I say that A) poker is profitable B) poker bots can and have been created C) the effort to code a high level poker bot is incredibly, incredibly difficult.

A team at the University of Alberta has been working on with a poker research group that has been researching and coding poker bots for years. One look at their page should tell you that there is definitely some high level thinking and analysis required to develop a poker bot. More importantly, is that fact that they *have* delivered a bot called Poki Poker that has an impressive record at beating human opponents in 1 vs 1 heads-up matches. Brian Alspach, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics and Statistics at Simon Fraser University has also contributed numerous publications to the field, giving credence to the fact that there is a genuine science behind creating an AI that can play good poker.

So, before anyone else spouts off about poker being a game of chance or poker bots being mindless hundred line pieces of code, please do your research. A lot of people have worked very hard on this subject to simply have it dismissed as beneath them. Just ask yourself this: If you could create a poker bot so easily, one that could generate at the very least, a poker bot that made $2/hr playing the low limit games, what would stop you from launching thousands of these bots upon the online world? Because unlike a human, you can replicate a bot innumerable times, which in this case would be the equivalent of finding the goose that lays golden eggs. If you understand this, you may begin to understand why there is so much interest in the creation of poker bots..

I never knew that the simpsons also asked NASA for the the 40,000th digit of Pi. But I've known for a while that they asked David Bailey for it as well (Bailey is one of the B's from BBP numbers... which is the formula to calculate an arbitrary digit of Pi in Hex). You can actually see a picture of the fax that the simpsons sent him on the 4th page of this pdf http://www.cecm.sfu.ca/personal/jborwein/pi-slides .pdf
I always thought that it was pretty cool that they took the trouble to just find out what the right digit was but now I know they actually decided to confirm it as well. That's pride in ones craft right there.

Or they could have just Googled up the digits themselves, as they exist as files on the net, in locations such as this one.

Several years ago I came across a little project by Colin Percival to calculate Pi to an obscene number of digits called PiHex. I thought it was pretty cool and I think this guy is damn bright. I expect to hear more about him in the future. A lot of people here seem to be dogging him because he has been critical of Linus, but I think what he wrote was fair. At least everything I saw. It isn't like he was saying Linus sucks or anything, just that he isn't taking a threat as seriously as Colin would like him to. Hey, part of open source is collaboration and that sometimes means people are not going to agree.

Links for the PiHex project:
http://www.cecm.sfu.ca/projects/pihex/index.html
http://www.cecm.sfu.ca/projects/pihex/colin.html

Several years ago I came across a little project by Colin Percival to calculate Pi to an obscene number of digits called PiHex. I thought it was pretty cool and I think this guy is damn bright. I expect to hear more about him in the future. A lot of people here seem to be dogging him because he has been critical of Linus, but I think what he wrote was fair. At least everything I saw. It isn't like he was saying Linus sucks or anything, just that he isn't taking a threat as seriously as Colin would like him to. Hey, part of open source is collaboration and that sometimes means people are not going to agree.

Links for the PiHex project:
http://www.cecm.sfu.ca/projects/pihex/index.html
http://www.cecm.sfu.ca/projects/pihex/colin.html

Is this the same Colin Percival who ran the Pihex project a while back?
Clever boy.

You might want to check out my mutt config: http://www.sfu.ca/~kkisiel/mailconfig/. There's no HTML email I haven't been able to view thus far with these settings.

And this isn't the first time he has come up with some interesting research that has been mentioned on Slashdot before. Sure, he seems to be a little arrogant, but with his record so far, I think he's earned the benefit of the doubt here...

And this isn't the first time he has come up with some interesting research that has been mentioned on Slashdot before. Sure, he seems to be a little arrogant, but with his record so far, I think he's earned the benefit of the doubt here...

This is the same guy who calculated the 1 Quadrillionth hexadigit of Pi (no, not digit. It is in base 16). His project was called PiHex. According to his currently short but illustrious trackrecord, along with this current announcement, he is destined for being a big-name IT security guru.

And you forgot to mention that this is just turn-around: http://www.peak.sfu.ca/the-peak/98-3/issue1/mmt.ht ml

Not only that, but the five trillionth, forty trillionth, and the quadrillionth bits of Pi are all zero... I did all that work, and it all came to naught.

Not only that, but the five trillionth, forty trillionth, and the quadrillionth bits of Pi are all zero... I did all that work, and it all came to naught.

Not only that, but the five trillionth, forty trillionth, and the quadrillionth bits of Pi are all zero... I did all that work, and it all came to naught.

Perhaps the short description here on slashdot is misleading, but I've seen systems with motion tracking using special gloves myself more than 10 years ago. Here's a big list of such or similar products.

I am pretty sure that Battlestar Galactica is filmed in Canada as well.

Yes. The city on Caprica in the pilot was Simon Fraser University.

When Boomer and Helo are walking through the abandoned city in an early episode, it's a CGI-enhanced downtown Vancouver. The quasi-future-Roman building is the library.

The cinematic masterpiece The Sixth Day used both of those locations as well.

Blatantly Copied from:
http://css.sfu.ca/update/digital-copyright.htm

Most computer professionals will tell you that bits simply cannot be protected from copying. So what can individuals or companies do to protect their digitized works? San Jose, CA information security expert Bruce Schneier says, "It's not so much about what people can do, it's more about how they think. There's nothing anyone can do; trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet. The sooner people accept this, and build business models that take this into account, the sooner people will start making money again." Schneier is the author of Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World (John Wiley & Sons, 2000).

I could swear that was the building where I bought my morning coffee! :-)

It's really weird for me watching the Occupied Caprica scenes. They keep showing shots of downtown Vancouver and I keep going "But that's not an alien world! Hey, that's the building I work in!!"

The worst cog-diss was in the pilot at the Market scene. That was the AQ of my alma mater, Simon Fraser University. Nothing ruins the mood of an alien world than locating the benches you used to take naps on between classes. :-)

Do you guys in NY and LA have the same cognitive dissonance when watching your towns subbing for other parts of the world?

This is a great idea, and I remember it being the subject of research of Dr. Kori Inkpen in the EDGE lab at my university in this project. I recall one of the main points being that it can be used very well for collaborative play and education for young children.

One such incident is high school teacher Chris Kempling who was reprimanded and suspended without pay for writing a letter to the editor critical of homosexual behaviour. He wrote this letter as a private citizen and did not share these views in a classroom. Yet he was suspended.

Another such incident was the BCCT's refusal to certify Trinity Western University to train teachers due to requirement that students refrain from "practices which are biblically condemned" including homosexual behaviour. (Along with pre-marital sex & adultery). This was the BCCT's only reason for refusing to certify TWU and they were unable to find a single case of a TWU trained teacher creating a hostile environment for homosexuals. (TWU students were teaching thanks to a 1 year post-degree training course at SFU. Caveat: I went to TWU. The BCCT was forced by the Supreme Court to certify TWU eventually which is one reason why I don't think that Christianity is "being outlawed".

But between high profile events like these and Foreign Minister Pierre Pattigrew's suggestions that religious leaders should stay out of policy debates, (specifically the one over gay marriage), Christians are beginning to get somewhat distrustful that full freedom of religion will be granted to them in the future.

What ever happened to "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."?

Perhaps this would be a good time to mention the No Killer Robots movement.

This is probably a good place to mention the No Evil Robots campaign...

And for a glimpse, if somewhat longwinded, of what lengths DARPA will go to to make this happen, check out this article: http://villagevoice.com/news/0337,baard,46901,1.ht ml

In the 1500s neither scientists nor other educated people believed the Earth was flat. This is a myth. It had been proven long before that the earth was round. Here are some links to get you started or do a search yourself.

3.1415926535897932384626433832795

sqrt(163) ~=
12.7671453348037046617109520097808923473823637 8030 12588512126029838487261728902392595594234838675318 724

pi ~=
3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375 10582097494459230781640628620899862803482534211706 79

sqrt(163) * pi ~=
40.1091699911325197553500836229041400539005348 1224 58734406107015404701087892483085085878768851896494 372

e ~=
2.718281828459045235360287471352662497757247093699 95957496696762772407663035354759457138217852516642 74

e ^ (sqrt(163) * pi) =
262537412640768743.9999999999992500725971981856 888 79353856337336990862707537410378210647910118607312 6534265238592035364