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There has been some work on using graphics cards for computation. The tough part is figuring out how to rephrase your algorithm in terms of what the GPU can handle. You'd expect matrix math to work out but people have tried to implement more interesting algorithms too. :-)

You don't support American Multinationals working out of foreign countries because it's colonialism, economic albeit - but the same difference.

Go read No Logo by Naomi Klein.

For the most part, multinationals working out of Economic Protection Zones (EPZ's) attempt to get the highest rate of young girls from the countryside to work for them. This allows them to::: treat their workers like shit, pay them little, threaten them easily if they try to unionize, etc etc. - all leading to poor working conditions wherein the girls feel threatened and scared, wherein the girls feel they _have_ to keep working and sending piddly change home to mom and pop, all the while suffering so we can get Gap shirts and all sorts of consumerist b.s. for as cheap as possible.

So no, you are not supporting the Chinese. You are bringing them into economic slavery... Chinese gov't loves it.. the jobs bring in technology profit - but for the workers it is not an advancement.

Go read Small is Beautiful by E.F. Shumacher to see how I think one should work to bring the Third World to a good standard of living.

And as if they dude in the battery factory in the U.S. is living the large life. Give me a break. At least he may have a proper working environment where he is safe, he doesn't work his ass of for jackshit, and he may even be able to join one of those union thingies.

Too bad sweatshops are on Big Al's T.V.

And during that time, did you upgrade the kernel from 2.2.18 to patch the ptrace root exploit?

Dude, Don't you know? Type R stickers automatically adds 10HP to any car!

Here's the proof

In my opinion, the orgy/dance scene was reminiscient of the opening dance scene from "Blade", only longer and less effective. I wish they had cut this sequence down, as I felt it was unnecessary....

Overall though, a decent sequel with some nice CG treats.

If you've taken a philosophy class, you'd have recognized the Matrix as a new incarnation of Plato's allegory of the cave from The Republic, later expressed as "The Evil Deceiver" by Descartes and later still as the "brain in a vat" scenario by Hilary Putnam.

In the sequel, the filmmakers move on to questions of free will vs. determinism vs. fate. These issues were also nicely articulated in one of the segments of the animated Art Linklater film "The Waking Life", for anyone who's interested.

So it was cool to have a new philosophical issue raised. To "What is the nature of reality... and is it all a sham?" has been added "What is the nature of choice... and is it all a sham?"

Plus, the freeway chase scene was incredible ;)

W

And try this one if you can view raw postscript.

It happens.

...sexist scientific research to me. The usual men are better than women crap.

I work in this field of psychology and believe it or not, this is one of the few areas of human performance where genuine sex differences are observed - repeatedly and reliably.

You can see this principally in the visuo-spatial section of IQ tests. Some authors (e.g. Kimura) argue that this is because IQ tests tap a particular aspect of visuo-spatial awareness and that men are naturally superior in this regard, but that women excel in other visuo-spatial tests which tap different facets of the skill.

If you go back forty years, IQ tests used to "show" that ethnic minorities were less clever - now it is known that those early tests were highly culturally-specific ("If you give the maid twenty items of clothing to press but she already has another thirty-two from your Ma and Pa, what time can you arrive at your tennis lesson?") - I think in a couple of decades we'll be seeing IQ tests that are a whole lot less gender-biased.

At one time, the Earth was substantially flat.

Actually, the idea that most people believed the earth was flat is a true "willful suspension of disbelief". Some quick sources I found googling are here here and here

Obviously the 'who started the myth' question does not have a clear answer, and there have been groups that have believed the Earth to be flat (such as the Hebrews, apparently). But there are so many things that give evidence of the earth's roundness (easy example: stand on a tall hill and look towards the horizon) that of course most people have never believed the Earth to be flat. Saying otherwise is usually just standard "Isn't (Western) modern man so clever and civilized!" propoganda.

Hoax # 8:

"Alabama Changes the Value of Pi
The April 1998 issue of the New Mexicans for Science and Reason newsletter contained an article claiming that the Alabama state legislature had voted to change the value of the mathematical constant pi from 3.14159 to the 'Biblical value' of 3.0. Before long the article had made its way onto the internet, and then it rapidly made its way around the world, forwarded by people in their email. It only became apparent how far the article had spread when the Alabama legislature began receiving hundreds of calls from people protesting the legislation"

That hoax is has been done before!!! Read more in Bailey, Borwein, Borwein, and Plouffe's 1996 article "The Quest for Pi". Here is the abstract: This article gives a brief history of the analysis and computation of the mathematical constant Pi = 3:14159..., including a number of the formulas that have been used to compute Pi through the ages. Recent developments in this area are then discussed in some detail, including the recent computation of Pi to over six billion decimal digits using high-order convergent algorithms, and a newly discovered scheme that permits arbitrary individual hexadecimal digits of Pi to be computed." But, in the article one may also read:

"In the annals of Pi, the nineteenth century came to a close on an utterly shameful not. three years prior to the turn of the century, one Edwin J. Goodman, M.D. introduced into the Indiana House of Representatives a bill that would introduce "new Mathematical truth" and enrich the state, which would pofit from the royalties ensuing from this discovery. Section two of the bill included the passage "disclosing the fourth important fact that the ratio of the diameter and circumference is as five-fouths to four"


Thus, Pi is 3.2... It almost became an Indiana law had it not been for a last-minute intervention by an observant prof Purdue!!! I strongly suspect this Bailey et al. article was a source of inspiration for the 1998 perpretrator, 101 years later, but alas then not in good faith.

Hoax # 8:

"Alabama Changes the Value of Pi
The April 1998 issue of the New Mexicans for Science and Reason newsletter contained an article claiming that the Alabama state legislature had voted to change the value of the mathematical constant pi from 3.14159 to the 'Biblical value' of 3.0. Before long the article had made its way onto the internet, and then it rapidly made its way around the world, forwarded by people in their email. It only became apparent how far the article had spread when the Alabama legislature began receiving hundreds of calls from people protesting the legislation"

That hoax is has been done before!!! Read more in Bailey, Borwein, Borwein, and Plouffe's 1996 article "The Quest for Pi". Here is the abstract: This article gives a brief history of the analysis and computation of the mathematical constant Pi = 3:14159..., including a number of the formulas that have been used to compute Pi through the ages. Recent developments in this area are then discussed in some detail, including the recent computation of Pi to over six billion decimal digits using high-order convergent algorithms, and a newly discovered scheme that permits arbitrary individual hexadecimal digits of Pi to be computed." But, in the article one may also read:

"In the annals of Pi, the nineteenth century came to a close on an utterly shameful not. three years prior to the turn of the century, one Edwin J. Goodman, M.D. introduced into the Indiana House of Representatives a bill that would introduce "new Mathematical truth" and enrich the state, which would pofit from the royalties ensuing from this discovery. Section two of the bill included the passage "disclosing the fourth important fact that the ratio of the diameter and circumference is as five-fouths to four"


Thus, Pi is 3.2... It almost became an Indiana law had it not been for a last-minute intervention by an observant prof Purdue!!! I strongly suspect this Bailey et al. article was a source of inspiration for the 1998 perpretrator, 101 years later, but alas then not in good faith.

The problem is that college educated people who have decided to pick a career to help children rise to their full potential are not immune to that stuff.

Let me quote what happened in 92 at Concordia University, Montreal.

Concordia Shootings
Concordia University is rocked when Dr. Valeri Fabrikant opens fire at the Mechanical Engineering department, killing four faculty colleagues and a secretary.

and

(page 2)
"In August 1992, after twelve years of bullying tactics, harassment and physical threats against colleagues and administrators, Dr. Valeri Fabrikant of the Mechanical Engineering dpartment killed four faculty colleagues and a secretary at Concordia University."

Original post:

The embedded videos are nifty, and render nicely in Mozilla.

Furthermore, HTML does not render. A browser renders HTML.

The original poster is using the verb render in an unaccusative construction, which is common in English. (For example, The door opened is the unaccusative counterpart to the passive form The door was opened.) I've used render this way myself and it's perfectly grammatical to me. Of course your lect may differ from mine.

fyi, you do an fft any time you view a .jpg, or listen to an .mp3, or watch a dvd, etc.

You use a FFT anytime you ENCODE a .jpg, or an .mp3, or a DVD. When you view or listen or watch you are using an Inverse FFT.

And to be very specific, I think all your examples use DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform) and not FFT. JPEG definitely does. Very good overview here

Especially since it includes his phone, address, email, picture and also a history of grade school exploits. I don't think this guy's going to have much trouble getting a job though.

You can find an excellent article here. Although there has actually been a fair amount of coverage in the media, it doesn't stay in the news long, and most of it does not cover what I would think would be the most important issue to Americans, which is the possible American involvement in the April 11, 2002 coup, and the continual "tacit approval" by both the Bush adminstration and a lot of Western media of the current _management_ led strike and the opposition politics it represents. If you try Googling for information, most of the articles seem to accuse Chavez of mismanaging the economy. I don't know enough about his policies to say anything, but the country has been in steady decline for 20 years, and the seemingly constant political turmoil is probably a big part of that. He certainly is not a communist, marxist, or even a socialist. The economy is very much capitalist, and very much a democracy. In fact, his reaction to these protests seems a lot more measured than what it would be in the US.

Actually, it so happens one of my good friends emigrated from Venezulea in the early 90s. He's pretty proud of his heritage, and a strong supporter of Chavez. Anecdotal evidence might not be scientific, but it still does a lot for me.

World Forum for Acoustic Ecology

Silence and Noise

World Soundscape Project

There was an analysis written regarding the phrase "Life, Liberty and Persuit of Happiness" and it essential boiled down to this. Those words were chosen very specificaly and placed in the order that they were specificaly.

If I recall correctly, these words were actually a modification to philosopher John Locke's writings on human rights.

W

"No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session." - Mark Twain

There is some archaeological evidence of the tragedy of the commons in the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia. The general tenor of this evidence is that much of Mankind's earliest cradles were well forested with coniferous or deciduous trees. Since these trees were a common resource, everyone cut them freely for fuel and building materials. Now, these regions of the world are scrubland with only tended crop trees (nuts, olives) and very few stands of wild wood.

If you're interested in learning more about the large body of literature in this area, be sure to visit the INSNA web site. I think you'll find it much more informative than reading popular books on the subject.

-Carter

So does blogging cause unemployment, or is blogging an outlet after you've been unemployed?

Btw, check out my blog. It makes me feel special. Especially if you have a job for a dude that has 4+ years of C++ experience and 2+ years of OpenGL. Not to mention other stuff in my CV.

So does blogging cause unemployment, or is blogging an outlet after you've been unemployed?

Btw, check out my blog. It makes me feel special. Especially if you have a job for a dude that has 4+ years of C++ experience and 2+ years of OpenGL. Not to mention other stuff in my CV.

So does blogging cause unemployment, or is blogging an outlet after you've been unemployed?

Btw, check out my blog. It makes me feel special. Especially if you have a job for a dude that has 4+ years of C++ experience and 2+ years of OpenGL. Not to mention other stuff in my CV.

I bought Santana's Shaman last month and it has the wonderful tracking technology built in. I was curious as to what the "Bandlink" thing did when I bought the cd (never heard of it before). Luckily, I went to their website first and saw the usage statistics crap and decided against installing it.

I read part way through the EULA (which is apparently available on their website but I couldn't find it) but I didn't see anything about allowing them access to all information.

I support the idea of adding content to cd's to make them more attractive to purchase ... but I don't want to have to give up personal privacy for those extras. If I just had to install and register I wouldn't mind, tracking is going too far IMHO.

Since I couldn't find the EULA online (as promised) i've taken the liberty of posting it online (hopefully its not illegal but oh well).
Its available here
It weighs in at a hefty 12.8kB ... for text file!.

The practical answer is that it can be used to verify the accuracy of the supercomputer it is run on.

The other answer is why not. Its a challenge just like any other. The mathematics behind the formulas that are used to generate thse digits are exremely elegant and can be very interesting. Many of the most startling discoveries of formulas to compute the digits of pi were made by the indian mathemetican Ramanujan who died in his twenties and had no formal mathematical training.

A good start at exploring why this can be interesting can be found at The PI Pages

There are many methods that can be used to calculate pi, including some listed by others in this thread, although those do not get a lot of digits "fast" enough; better methods are used today. See The Pi Pages for more information.

But then, pi would be in breach of copyright, or at least calculating it would. Mathematics would be set back hundreds of years ;)

Just in case you are interested and havn't found it yet, SFU's machine is a beowulf cluster and is called bugaboo.

Offtopic, the Peak (the school "newspaper" of SFU for those who don't know) wouldn't publish anything unless it portrayed the injustice of students / homeless / leftwingers etc being beaten down repeatedly by "the man", so I don't know why they would publish this.

no imagining needed: Beowulf...

For the benefit of anyone unfortunate enough to have visited this poster's home page using Mozilla, you'll probably have the urge to find out how to disable Mozilla's new marquee support.

Get a digital effects module with a delay feature
.

I have an Alesis Nanoverb that I use for sound design work. You can get them on Ebay for under $100. Acording to the specs you can get over 1200ms delay per channel (loop left out to right in for 2400ms or about 2.5 seconds). Correcting the delay involves turning a nice analog knob.

The Alesis QuadraVerb has a full 5 seconds of delay per channel and should do the trick for you for about $130 .

SD

I just recently graduated from the Comp Sci department at SFU. My impression: The business faculty is very pro-Microsoft. Everything is done using Word, PPT, IE, etc. The problem is that the people making the decisions have gained their skills on MS platforms.

A good chunk (probably about 2/3) of the professors in the Comp Sci department despise MS products and are *nix guys. In other terms, prefer to use *nix on their primary machine. But, and a big but, a lot of stuff that is taught that is platform specific, is taught with respect to MS products. For example, GUI development is taught using MFC.

And that is the problem. When general computing methodolgies/techniques are taught, they apply to *nix platforms without much tinkering. But when you try to apply techniques to MS platforms, there is a poop-load of exceptions that you have to be aware of.

For example:

This how you code in C++, but this is how VC++ implements for-scoping.

These are the techniques to design "good" user interfaces, but this is how you would implement them in Windows.

There is a lot of pressure from industry for students to learn to be efficient on the Windows platform and other "high demand" tools/methodoligies (such as Java/extreme programming/XML/etc). What usually happens is that companies screen based on "buzz words". And there is a lot of pressure from industry to produce graduates that have training in licking the flavour of the month, rather than having solid understanding of Comp Sci principles. They seem to want MCSEs, that can get the particular task done now and do not care about the future; rather than people who understand general principles that will apply for decades to come.

For example, a local Vancouver company [cough]Crystal Decisions[/cough] did not want to hire me for a position because I had not programmed in Java. Despite the fact that I have been writing Object-Oriented C++ code for 5+ years and that I'm currently teaching my sister Java who is taking CS101.

The problem is that CS departments are very heavily influenced by industry. And who is the biggest heavy-weight in industry? (That question was rhetorical).

Kim Rossmo got his Ph.D. in criminology at SFU. The ideas in his thesis weren't just sudden inspiration -- they came from his many years as a police detective working on investigations, and from rigorous academic study and research.

but just to be clear, my name is Matt.

The articles are linked on my website.

Set yourself up with a webserver with httpd, irc, a maillist server, and a newserver. Then you have what is equivalent to webct. You can even get around the newserver by using a discussion board.

You will need to deal with security issues if you want your students to be able to check grades online. There are other security issues as well. I've been on a few maillists that got signed up to pr0n lists. This weren't webct lists though. Since webct uses a webmail type interface where only other members of the class can send mail to.

So, the question to ask yourself is: What will cost you more? Getting some monkey to set up standard software for you or shelling out some cash so that WebCT can set up proprietary software for you. Don't forget the maintainence costs.

If I were you and I'd have the IT department at your school set everything up for you. Use http for all the general stuff. Let people post questions to a discussion board. And hold tutorials over irc. Use the maillist for announcements.

If it isn't already, 1G ought to be standardized at 10.0 m/s2, to simplify calculations.

Can't reach Canada.
Internet Traffic Report pronounces the internet "dead"!

Collobarative Recommendations such as Amazon.com uses, (or Eigentaste or RecTree in academia) finally have algorithms that make it fast enough for an average PC to perform the operations. A decentralized version would not only foil spoofing and spamming, but would let you discover new things beyond the industry marketing machine. Does anyone have information on such work?

-Carter

social network analysis began in 1934 when the first sociogram was drawn by hand. the field grew in the 60s and 70s when mainframes began to crunch matrices to find cliques and figure out who was best connected. with a pc you can now do network visualization and network analysis in your bedroom using data from the web:

First Monday

for academic papers on social network analysis see their journal:

Connections

yes, it has been done since 1934 when the first 'sociogram' was drawn by hand. the field grew in the 60s and 70s when mainframes began to crunch matrices to figure out who was best connected. with a pc you can now do this in your bedroom using data from the web: First Monday for academic readings on this topic see: Connections

I've been in Australia for the last 3 months (where Farscape is filmed, I believe) and now that I'm back in Canada (where SG-1 is filmed... a few eps filmed up at SFU, I might add) I'm aching to watch some Farscape. A while back, the only canadian channel to have it was YTV (Youth TV), but they cancelled it when they realized that it wasn't really a youth program merely because of the Henson puppets. SPACE (our cool ass sci-fi channel) only has ep 2 for this summer :(. So does anyone know of anystation that we can get with basic/extended cable up here in Canada (the left-coast) that carries Farscape?

Do I have to resort to downloading the episodes again?

Woops, did I mention bad proof-reading skills. The correct link is: SFU

These kinds of skills would help tremendously in the work force and in graduate school. You always here complaining about coders not knowing how to comment code. Not being able to stick to schedules. Not being able to write good documentation. Not being able to attain correct specifications from the customer. Etc, etc, etc.

Try this out! It's a PHP script using the Google API. Now you can discover if the world likes dogs better than cats, and sex better than love (duh).

[Off-topic: I don't know what happened to IPv5. Maybe they follow kernel-numbering guidelines: odd numbers are for experimental use, even numbers for stable standards.]

This pretty much sums it up:

http://www.ensc.sfu.ca/~ljilja/ENSC835/Tools/FAQ.t xt

General relativity is fine, but we have no way of reconciling it with quantum physics.

Basically that's my point. Whatever happens general relativity won't be affected in any *substantial* way at long distances. That means no anti-gravity devices, etc.

Quantum effects will become importent at *SMALL* distances, like 10^{-20} cm.

Discovery magazine listed as one of it's 11 unanswered questions for modern physics [doe.gov] "What is gravity?". Maybe you should write in and explain it to them? :)

They're trying to sell copy. I'm not going to fault pop-sci publications for trying to do that. But from a *PRACTICAL* point of view we understand gravity at large distance scales. Just like we understand mechanics at large distance scales.

The Standard Model of particle physics does not account for gravity. It is assumed there is a carrier particle for gravity called the gravitron, but this has not been detected.

This is not an assumption of the standard model. The standard model simply ignores gravity altogether. And yes I know that many pop-sci sites talk about gravitons, etc. but there not a part of the standard model.

If anyone is still reading this thread, many many illuminating links can be found from this google search

Random webpages are not a good place to learn particle physics. I've collected a number of links on my webpage which have good quality material. I'd particularly recommend the particle adventure for a quick review of the basic facts.

The easiest way to demonstrate this is to note that NASA has invested in research [space.com] to try to replicate Podkletnov's [amasci.com] results.

And have been uncessful. Further NASA apparently gave support to Puthoff (the guy who proclaimed Uri Geller legit). His ``paper'' can be found here (download the pdf and check the acknowledgements). That doesn't exactly inspire confidence in NASA's jusdgement.

The interesting thing about gravity is that it isn't well understood by modern physics.

Totally untrue. General relativity is understood very well. Predictions for Binary pulsar systems agree very well with observation (many decimal places).

We know how it behaves (we think) but we don't know what causes it really.

The curvature of spacetime. We've known that since 1915.

This makes it equally ripe for psuedo-science as for breakthrough science.

Any breakthroughs are going to come in an extreme regime, much like the deviations from newtonian physics. You're not going to see macroscopic violations of GR.

Matthew Nobes (website)

What you're basically proposing is a way to share bibliographic metadata -- not the book itself, but table of contents information, library holdings, etc. There are standards amongst libraries for doing this (ISO Z39.50 and AACR2--both of which are horribly abstruse and generally a pain to deal with). Dr. Rob Cameron, along with a small group of Simon Fraser University students, has been working on the seeds of a system for sharing bibliographic metadata -- see http://www.usin.org. This basically extends the URI standard to support ISBN and ISSNs, initially to support scholarly communication, but also making it possible to create what we call "personal bibhosts" with support for annotations, shared notes, etc. Among other things, we've implemented searches across various worldwide libraries to obtain and compare bits of bibliographic info, and so forth. Yes, you still run into the problems of inconsistent data for a given ISBN/ISSN (as a previous poster pointed out), but hey...you have to start somewhere!

I am currently in highschool right now (graduating), and I am probably going to go to on to University at SFU (British Colombia, Canada) in CS, obviously. I was wondering if any /.-ers go there, and if so, is there anything to look out for such as what this articles talks about? I have read the statement on intellectual dishonesty and I dont find any CS related stuff, but it would be good to know from a first-hand source. And no, I dont plan on cheating when I go there, but this type of thing gives an idea on what kind of a school it is.