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Just a few very well known samples. That is not even the tip of the iceberg. http://www.geek.com/science/robot-swarms-self-assemble-into-flying-units-of-any-shape-or-size-1562961/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkvpEfAPXn4
http://naturalrobotics.group.shef.ac.uk/research.html

(Pay-walled articles) http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=4108264&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fxpls%2Fabs_all.jsp%3Farnumber%3D4108264
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11431-012-4748-2

This is a pretty popular research topic nowadays. I have no idea why this MIT news is literally in every tech-blog on the net(other than their excellent PR department, I wished the PR guys in my university had the same enthusiasm...). I'm not trying to discredit them or anything, but while their approach is somewhat novel, similar results have been achieved in many different ways.

http://www.shef.ac.uk/mediacentre/2010/1662.html

There's a soundcloud link on that page as well (which I can't get to because I'm at work, but I imagine it has a load of 'sun music').

It really irks me that newspaper websites don't link to original sources... its not like putting a URL in print... it'd mean if people were interested, they could simply click and find out more.
Silly newspaper website making people.

Perhaps both human and "ferret" anti-smuggling techniques will be used. Although, I'd be pretty pissed if I lost my job to a ferret.

According to the research site, this is going to replace dogs and dog handlers the most:

The team are developing a device that matches the sensitivity of a sniffer dog yet avoids the problems of becoming distracted, tired or confused associated with using an animal. The compact robot, or 'cargo screening ferret', will be able to navigate cargo loads, and detect multiple illegal substances, even in low concentrations, using a series of specially-developed sensors.

From their government grant:

In this proposal we aim to develop a new approach to cargo screening where we take sensors to the contraband within cargo containers using mini-robots, providing rapid and highly sensitive detection of a range of contraband. A variety of technologies and methods are available and routinely used for the screening and detection of illegal substances and materials within cargo containers. These external screening systems are typically bulky, expensive and require ultra-high sensitivity as the sensor is remote from the cargo. Further, detailed investigation requires either time consuming unpacking of the cargo or the need for staff to enter the cargo putting them at risk of contamination from the contraband. This proposal addresses both the development of novel sensors and their delivery to the point of detection through the use of a robotic system / thus the sensing devices must be compact, low power and lightweight to be best tailored to use in this way. The development of effective sensors is designed to "make a difference" / to be able to detect specifically (and in very low concentrations) given illegal substances. The sensors developed are targeted to match the sensitivity of dogs in detecting substances, but not having the problem of distraction, tiring or confusion, with a much longer on-duty time, due to the inanimate nature of the sensor. The key advantage is that the sensors are able to detect multiple specific substances in compact devices ideally suited to mounting on the small robotic vehicle to be used for the delivery of the sensors to the region where the measurement has to be made.

So if you're a dog that relies on sniffing out cargo containers, you have about five years to look for other work.

90%+ of all things treated at the hospital have a regimented treatment laid out by mountains of research.

Acutally, little of medical practice is "evidence-based".

Somebody, has generally already done the research.

Quite possibly not - and even if some research on the condition in question has been done, it almost certainly wasn't done on this patient. Human beings have this annoying tendency to be quirky, to respond differently to the same treatment: one man's cure proves fatal to another.

Science only works with control groups.

Which, of course, you don't have in clinical practice. You've got one patient, you can't put him or her in the matter duplicator and use one of them as a control and one as a test case.

And that refueling infrastructure is exactly why the general public gives a damn about what fuels their cars. One manufacturer phasing out a fuel is only a step in the right direction; we then have to actually get that fuel everywhere. In 2002, there were literally more than half a billion cars out there. That article doesn't give specifics as to the number of gas-powered cars, but with 590 million total there are definitely a lot. The cost to support the current gas refueling infrastructure is only going to hold back building even more infrastructure for alternative fuels.

This is not just about Jodrell. The funding for a lot of UK astronomy projects is being cut.

• Deadline looms for science cuts
• UK astronomers on 'rollercoaster'
• Astronomers given Gemini reprieve
• Space weather science rues cuts
• Skies dim for British astronomers
• UK woes could impact Euro physics

At the moment, no one really seems to know why .
Disclaimer: I work for one of the projects under threat, so I might be a bit biased.

Perhaps most relevant to this article is this particular simulation made last year which actually demonstrates flocking birds.

http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~paul/publications/boids/index.html

You can even play with the settings panel on the right side and set off "gunshots."

But yeah, this stuff is far from news.

The bad news is that it will probably only offer streaming

You mean I can watch iPlayer content without that obnoxious bit of bandwidth stealing almost-malware Kontiki crap? Can I do this on Windows as well? Where do I sign up?

Basically, once you install iPlayer it runs a filesharing service - kservice.exe - even after you've exited the program fully (by default it starts on system boot as well). A solution to this can be found here but I am really disapointed in the BBC for installing this crap on peoples machines.

The obvious advantages are that it doesn't need refrigeration, can be transported in a thick paste to be rehydrated later, and doesn't use any biological precursor that might carry unknown pathogens.

Besides, here's the press release : http://www.shef.ac.uk/mediacentre/2007

Some brain tasks are linear/feedforward (V1, for example), while tasks such as language are inherently nonlinear. Postulating a single mechanism for both seems nonintuitive to me.

I'm not sure if this is what you were referring to, but there was actually a paper back in 2000 where visual inputs were rerouted to a ferret's auditory cortex, which then developed the architecture found in visual cortex:

Induction of visual orientation modules in auditory cortex

Modules of neurons sharing a common property are a basic organizational feature of mammalian sensory cortex. Primary visual cortex (V1) is characterized by orientation modulesÐgroups of cells that share a preferred stimulus orientation which are organized into a highly ordered orientation map. Here we show that in ferrets in which retinal projections are routed into the auditory pathway, visually responsive neurons in `rewired' primary auditory cortex are also organized into orientation modules. The orientation tuning of neurons within these modules is comparable to the tuning of cells in V1 but the orientation map is less orderly. Horizontal connections in rewired cortex are more patchy and periodic than connections in normal auditory cortex, but less so than connections in V1. These data show that afferent activity has a profound inuence on diverse components of cortical circuitry, including thalamocortical and local intracortical connections, which are involved in the generation of orientation tuning, and long-range horizontal connections, which are important in creating an orientation map

I'd even take this a little deeper and suggest that the main benefit is to the germ line cells - in a sense, the body is really just a complex vehicle for the reproductive cells. Human ova are partially developed - partially through meiosis - even before the female fetus is born. Although there has been some recent contention, it is generally thought that new female reproductive cells do not develop after birth (or are limited in number relative to the quantity that develop while in the womb). So, the fetal environment doesn't just affect the fetus - it affects that fetus' offspring, too. Furthermore, sociological research (like the Human Life History Project) shows that "the longer a woman lived after the end of her reproductive years, the more successfully her children's reproductive lives would be."

http://www.shef.ac.uk/assem/3/3chamb.htm

This is about a BBC Horizon docu from 1997 I saw a couple of days ago.

Ok, so who else thinks this thing looks like Thunderbird 2?

http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~ajhs/hobbies/tbird2.htm l

The colour and shape remind me of another old heavy-lift vehicle: Thunderbird 2. Coincidence?

If you're just going to zoom in on voice, you might as well just record the voice and look at a plot of it. That would be far more repeatable. However, I don't think a human will be able to look at a time-domain representation and match it to the speaker. Looking at a spectrogram (ie a decimated short-time fourier transform plotter as an image map) would be better, but still isn't quite there. You can see formants and such, but each speaker will essentially look the same still.

Some more info on dynamic time warping as it applies to speech recognition; it's not too different from speaker recognition

Brett

Sorry, but it is the female worker bees, and not the male drones, that sometimes clone themselves. AFAIK, this has only been observed in queenless colonies and has been explained as a genetic escape mechanism. Without a queen, a hive would otherwise be a reproductive dead end. When unfertilized workers lay haploid eggs in response to lack of queen pheromones, all of the eggs become male drones. Although the colony remains doomed, the drones can go out and mate with queens from other colonies and continue the genetic line. See this article for a general description of this phenomenon. So you might ask why workers don't cheat and clone themselves more often. Well, they do, but their sisters don't stand for it.

Maybe when you can write your home page without making any even little mistakes in a foreign language like Flemish (the author of that webpage has Flemish as his native language, not English), we won't think of what you said as being Flamebait. For that matter, if your own home page, which was supposedly written in your native language of English, didn't have such obvious howlers as "writing ... with the advice of ...", "[A] and [B] and [C] and [D]", "short-comings", and wasn't plagued by verbosity, you might be taken as a serious scholar.

In the UK, all foreign students from countries deemed "a bit dodgy" are required to register with their local police station. For this pleasure, they are charged are 34 pounds and are required to notify the police of any change of address, otherwise face a 5000 pound fine. One wonders why the police are doing the duties of the immigration service.
Maybe the Automatic Immigration and Crime Policy Generator is becoming a little too bit realistic.

Given that appearing on TV can make you a crap load of money doing random shit, I think no one is going to care a rats ass about piracy except the networks worrying about advertising figures.

CF13 does this by simply comparing all the 'words' in the subject line and body of an email against Grady Ward's Moby single word list and a second, smaller 'spamword' word list derived from the first word list by the user. Both word lists will deem email containing misspelled words or 'spammy' words as spam. Thus....

One more avenue to spam is denied usage by spammers.

By attacking this type of spam technique in this manner, all the overhead associated with Bayesian filtering is 100% completely unecessary.

My credentials are years of programming experience and months of research invested in CF13(TM), my solution to English-language spam.

Part I of the article:

Identity theft - The ones I got were relayed through a 3rd party machine and deemed spam. Should I ever get a 'real one' that would mean either a spammer is using a stolen/throwaway account at a domain with mailserver(s) and easily traceable, or, worse yet, an 'inside job' by someone unscrupulous at the sender domain. The rule of thumb is to not give out sensitive information via email no matter how convincing said email is.

Viruses - All attachments are treated as 'text files' by my program and are 'harmless' provided a certain registry key affecting Notepad hasn't been changed/hijacked (see my website for more details). Also, all email is downloaded and treated as text files, making HTML related exploits impossible as well.

Sender - Anonymous senders are treated as spam. No exceptions. I've only gotten spam from such senders the rare times I recived them before I wrote my program.

Recipient - No 'BCC:' email if desired. In the past, such email I've recieved were spam.

Word lists - My program uses two of them. One of them is the single word list from Grady Ward's Moby project. The other file contains 'spam words' that appear in the first file. Both lists make 'hashbusting' and 'L33T' spelling, two tried and true spammer tactics, impossible.

Black/White lists - Supported at the email address and email domain level. I decided not to support IP level black/whitelisting since the IP source of spam is irrelevant--it is the content of spam that is relevant. Likely, such spam is deemed spam at the email header level anyway--or at the email message content level if need be.

Hash-tables - Pointlest due to 'hashbusting' and 'L33T' spelling. Unecessary in my program.

AI/Probabilistic systems - I researched the Bayesian approach and decided not to use it in my program. Though effective at first, spammers have thoroughly 'poisoning' this method of spam detection. Also, this method requires additional disk storage space, processor time (to do the math calculations on top of the pattern matching), and training time to be effective.

Bypassing filters - A default install of my program should catch almost all spam. Should any get through, one could read through the spam and identify new 'spam words' to be added to that list.

False-positives - Alas, to avoid deleteing such email at the server level, All such email is downloaded and processed. My program displays the subject lines of email messages it process and logs them to a separate file for further review if needed.

Spam filters do not stop spam - Agreed, but they can be as effective as my program which only has one known form of spam it cannot detect sent by a spammer from a stolen/throwaway account.

Reverse lookup - Not supported in my program to avoid slowing my program down and not overburdening the (likely) overtaxed DNS server system. This should be handled at the mailserver level to head off the sending of spam in the first place.

Part II of the article:

Challenge-Response - I considered using this but decided against it. In doing so I avoid 'mail loops' with another Challenge-Response system and outright rejection by email correspondents who hold a dim view of this antispam system.

Computational challenge: Another idea that fell by the wayside due primarily to the wide disparity in the CPU clock speeds of user's systems.

Cryptography - Not used by my program to process incoming email and thus unecessary. The 'bu

Hmm... if fellatio would be on something too small and/or too high, you must be referring to a knee job then?

Imperative languages are based on the Von Neumann machine.

Functional langauges are based on the lambda calculus.

Declartive langauges are based on some extension of propositional logic.

Is it just me that finds this stance on cloning at odds with the stance on DNA research and the patanting of genes and genetic sequences.

Now I know the current administration is conservatively christian and while I dont necessarily follow that train of thought I consider a general ban on human cloning a good thing. Note I say general. There should be circumstances where it must be permitted. The research oppertunities for the benefit of us all are too great for an outright ban. And is it so far a step away from the precedence of granting artificial fertility licenses to a couple in the UK for the sole purpose of providing matching tissue for an ill son or daughter?

I digress, sure, the current Bush administrations' stance on an outright ban is on moral grounds? The sanctity of the human body is gods creation and who are we to copy his work. Well I happen to think were just an odd accident that happened but surely by this argument, our genes, our very indivduality and specific beauty are our own? If it is moraly undesirable to clone a human being to the extent that there should be a global ban then does this not extend to the very thing that makes us human,our DNA? And by what right of law, what pious greed and what gauling arrogance does a commercial organisation have to claim patant rights over something so innate in all of us? Would you sell us the air we breath?

It's fucking disgusting

Actually, this method (3 dimensional reconstruction of musculature and flesh upon skulls) has been used within anthropology. Here's a site with some interesting photos and explanations of the process used. Pretty informational. Enjoy.

Writing styles can be matched reasonably well with cusum analysis. Obviously it does get extremely difficult (if not impossible) with large numbers of participants. But the more people write, the easier it is to tag their writing style.

Here's someone's paper regarding cusum analysis and authorship attribution: The Computerized Determination of Disputed Authorship: Cusum Method.

the SETI@home screensaver analyzes the data many times over trying a great variety of possible doppler accelerations. Actually, the screensaver first takes the raw data and mathematically "undoes" a specific doppler acceleration or "chirp". It then feeds the resulting "de-accelerated" data to the FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) routines. This is called "De-chirping" the data. SETI@home tries to do this at many points between -50 Hz/sec to +50 Hz/sec. At the finest frequency resolution of 0.075 Hz we check for 5409 different chirp rates between -10 Hz/sec and +10 Hz/sec!

-- "About the SETI@Home screensaver

That seems horribly inefficient!

Have the SETI people ever heard of cepstral techniques?

There should be no need to iterate thousands of times over the pattern recognition algorithms when you can just take anouther FFT of the log magnitude spectrum to eliminate doppler shift (the same as what audio engineers would call 'pitch.') Cepstral analysis has been eliminating pitch in audio signal processing for decades. Too bad nobody told the astronomers.

What a waste of all those CPU cycles!

I'd really like to see a simple plug-in that adds only one visible element to the standard interface, a smiley/frownie face, ala iCab [www.icab.de], that indicates whether the HTML of the page actually validates to the DTD declared in the document itself. Clicking on a frownie face would bring up a list of validation errors.

There is a simple solution, and it is to use JS favelets that connect to the W3 server with the URL details. Basically, you need a link to a JS link, such as this: javascript:window.open('http://validator.w3.org/ch eck?uri='+location);void%200 (and I'm just copying and pasteing from my website). You can put this in the navigation bar, and off you go :-)

There are plenty of bookmarklets which are quite useful. Some of them:

• Accessibility favelets
• Slimeland favelets (show tables and divs)

• I am sure there are many more cool uses around

  --
  Free as in freedom

Having said that, CSS makes it difficult to do some things that tables can do easily (columnar layout), which is why many people still use very simple tables for basic layout, without going to the extremes of spacer gifs, multiply-nested tables, etc.

A problem with CSS layouts is that the table hacks (by now pretty much standarised in most usual browsers) need to be translated into CSS hacks. Stuff like Gecko, newer IE, Opera and all are making progress, but still hacks are needed. The beauty of XHTML+CSS layouts is that if you don't have the latest compliant browser, the page should still be useable in your browser. As an example, a website I put up for some course I taught in the past at skint.shef.ac.uk is still useable if you for example disable JS (I use a very crude hack to select what CSS to serve depending on the offending browser).
And yes, I know it is a crass way of doing things, but I don't have time to do all the hacks so that the site works in NN4, Gecko, Opera and IE.

Ok, so far we're talking about either Charles Perrow-type normal accidents here, or we're trying to build a high reliability system and failing. However, since large, catastrophic events in unusual areas (such as space travel) draw a lot of attention, public risk perception may be higher than the actual risk. I don't know. Personally, even a catastrophic 2% "normal accident" rate is too high for my taste when it comes to space travel.

Unfortunately, as everyone who works in occupational health and safety (as I do) knows, good safety practice is expensive, and requires a lot of good safety theory and research behind it, which is also expensive. NASA has a history of having funding taken away from it, and according to recent press statements, NASA has been having trouble (of one variety or other) retaining safety personnel.

The upshot is, of course, that unless anyone doing space is willing to pay the extraordinary overhead costs of space safety, people, both on the ground and in the air, are going to keep dying.

There is an Astronomy project called Ultracam that uses special CCDs to capture astronomical events at highspeed.
Interestingly the computer interface that they use for the special CCDs uses Linux.

I am sure that you can get an idea of what is involved from Ultracam and use it in other real world applications (patents not withstanding).

I've been reading (slowly) the book "The Symbolic Species" by Terrence W. Deacon, which covers the evolution of language in humans. It goes into the selective pressures that could have worked in favour of language development. Without these, any single mutation would not have gone very far towards our current language abilities. You can check out a summary of the book here.

Indeed -- look closely at the side of the white vehicle if you want to know how people will view you if they see you driving one of them.

-Sou|cuttr

This is the best entrant in my opinion. It isn't the "most" fuel efficient entrant but, it is the most practical.

This stealth car not only gets great mileage, it is also invisible to radar. No more worries about those pesky speed traps. Of course, at 20 MPH the only speed trap you'll have to worry about is a school zone. But, no worries in this puppy.

None of the links in the story provide any useful information at all, as far as I can see. The first is for a "Mileage marathon society" which doesn't appear to have any information about a particular recent contest. The second is for the location at which the event was held; the third links to a blank page inside Shell with some plugin that doesn't work in my Mozilla. Searching Shell for "Mileage Marathon" produces lots of results in other languages and from 1998-99, but nothing topical.

A few links in, there's more information. Here are the contest rules:

http://www.shef.ac.uk/~mms/rules.html

They have to do 6 laps of a 1.64 mile course with a minimum _average_ speed of 15 miles per hour. The vehicle with the lowest fuel consumption wins.

The vehicles have people in them, which puts a lower limit on their size. Engine technology can be anything that qualifies as a heat engine and runs on unleaded gasoline.

From the pictures, it looks like one rule was left out.

The car shall fit non-midgets such that they do not need back surgery after the journey.

Hmm, but does that little tin-toy robot have any connection with a certain other red robot?

And to think, in the article, the Professor had been saying "don't worry, they won't be taking over yet"... I think he's in on it with them! Conspiracy!

God, I really need to sleep now. Careful! Brazil tomorrow!

This was my final year project thesis. Just remember the golden rule unstructured 2 structured == convert 2 XML I wrote a [very bad] program in C++/Perl/tcsh IPC=pipes to add XML tags to English, and then index them into a search engine which would use the lingual data stored in the XML tags to help the search.

NIST does a MASSIVE competition on this annually. I don't want to be an XML-buzzword whore <Arnold Schwarzenegger accent> (XML commando eats Green berets, C++, Java, Perl, COBOL for breakfast)</Arnold Schwarzenegger accent> but you can't beat XML for easily converting anything that you can make sense out of into computer readable format. Real h3cKoRs use SGML, but us underlings have to stick with things we can understand like XML. As for expandability, if we want to encode something else into the document, then just tag-it-and-go

It took me 200 hours to fish out all these links (before the Google days), I don't want anyone to have to waste as much time as I did feeding the search engines exotic foods. It's a year old so pardon me for the odd broken link, armed with these you could probably turn jello into XML ;-)

My favourite bookmarx
PROJect[21 links]
Beginners' Guide[13 links]
Berkeley Linguistics Dept. Course Summaries, general stuffzzzzzzzzzzzzzzCryptic IR Vocabulary defined
Explanations of weird words like hypernym zzzzzzzzzzzzzzHow do we produce and understand speech
How Inverted Files are Created - Univeristy of Berkeley zzzzzzzzzzzzzzNLP Univ. of Indiana, very good basics e.g. word sense d
Simple langauge - useful.... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWhat is Natural Language Processing, links
What is POS tagging........ zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWord Sense Disambiguation defined
Word Sense Disambiguation in detail, scroll down far zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWord Sense Disambiguator - LOLITA (tested at MUC-7 and SENSEVAL competition as best)
XML for the absolute beginner

HTML, XML stuff + parsers[19 links]
Apache plug-in that uhhh does stuff with XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzConvert COM to XML
convert XML, HTML to Unix pipeable formats zzzzzzzzzzzzzzconverters to and from HTML
expat XML parser zzzzzzzzzzzzzzHTML Tidy - converts HTML 2 XML + source code!!
Parse DB (RDBMS, whatever) to XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPerl-XML Module List
PHP Manual XML parser functions - what the hell are they talking about, PHP Virtual M... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPublic SGML-XML Software
Pyxie - XML Processor for Python, Perl, etc. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzSGML+XML tools.org
The XML Resource Centre - massive number of links zzzzzzzzzzzzzzW4F wrapper - wrapper converts XML to HTML
XFlat - convert flat file into XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzXML Parsers and other XML stuff
XML.com - Parsers, etc. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzXML-Data Catalog System - uhhhh looks close
XTAL's general converter - convert anything 2 XML

other Background[8 links]
Is Linux ready for the Enterprise, scalable... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzLinux reliability
Linux Versus Windows NT, Mark(sysinternals bloke) zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPC reliability (pcworld)
SPEC - Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzSystems benchmarks
TPC - Transaction Processing Performance Council zzzzzzzzzzzzzzUnix Beats Back NT In EDA Workstation Arena
Proper TREC(-8) QA systems[2 links]

pg. 387 LIMSI-CNRS pretty deep parsing[2 links]
More links....
NLP, IR links - lots to corpii, etc.

pg. 575 U. of Ottawa and NRL (shit system, got 0%)[1 links]
LAKE Lab
pg. 607! University of Sheffield (crap system, but OPEN SOURCE!)[2 links]
GATE - FREE IE app w`source code
LaSIE - ER, coreference, template (cv)

pg. 617 Univ of Surrey (inconclusive matches)[2 links]
System Quirk - Or is this their search system..... Hmmmmmm
Univ of Surrey - pointers (hopefully this is their WILDER search system...)

SMU - Pg. 65[1 links]
Natural Language Processing Laboratory at SMU

Textract[2 links]
Cymfony - Technology
Textract - State of the Art Information Extraction

Xerox uhhhhh maybe[1 links]
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
(OVERVIEW) 1999 TREC-8 Q&A Track Home Page
NLP bloke, Univ Sussex


Tcl-Tk[4 links] Tcl tutorial
Tcl-Tk Contributed Programs Index
Tcl-Tk Resources, sources
TclXML - manipulating XML using Tcl-Tk
Artificial Natural Language - Is this what I'm trying to parse into...
Comparison of Indexers - Prise vs. Inquery vs. MG, etc.
Eagles - Language Engineering Standards
Language Technology Group - lots of modules!
LDC - Linguistic Data Consortium, lots of corpora
Lexical Resources
Links 2 resources, indexers.....
Lots of IR stuff, University of uhhh
Managing Gigabytes Indexer
Managing Gigabytes Manuals and stuff
Htdig search system
NLP & IR (NLPIR, NIST) Group
OVERVIEW OF MUC-7-MET-2
Perl XML Indexing - XML search engine type thing
Phrasys Language Processing Software Components (money)
QA HCI bullshit
SIGIR - TREC-type thing, resources
SMART indexer system documentation
Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) Home Page
The Natural Language Software Registry
Thunderstone IE and IR products
WordNet - FREE DOWNLOADABLE lexical English database

Page created with URL+, nice utility for working with internet shortcuts

This was my final year project thesis. Just remember the golden rule unstructured 2 structured == convert 2 XML I wrote a [very bad] program in C++/Perl/tcsh IPC=pipes to add XML tags to English, and then index them into a search engine which would use the lingual data stored in the XML tags to help the search.

NIST does a MASSIVE competition on this annually. I don't want to be an XML-buzzword whore <Arnold Schwarzenegger accent> (XML commando eats Green berets, C++, Java, Perl, COBOL for breakfast)</Arnold Schwarzenegger accent> but you can't beat XML for easily converting anything that you can make sense out of into computer readable format. Real h3cKoRs use SGML, but us underlings have to stick with things we can understand like XML. As for expandability, if we want to encode something else into the document, then just tag-it-and-go

It took me 200 hours to fish out all these links (before the Google days), I don't want anyone to have to waste as much time as I did feeding the search engines exotic foods. It's a year old so pardon me for the odd broken link, armed with these you could probably turn jello into XML ;-)

My favourite bookmarx
PROJect[21 links]
Beginners' Guide[13 links]
Berkeley Linguistics Dept. Course Summaries, general stuffzzzzzzzzzzzzzzCryptic IR Vocabulary defined
Explanations of weird words like hypernym zzzzzzzzzzzzzzHow do we produce and understand speech
How Inverted Files are Created - Univeristy of Berkeley zzzzzzzzzzzzzzNLP Univ. of Indiana, very good basics e.g. word sense d
Simple langauge - useful.... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWhat is Natural Language Processing, links
What is POS tagging........ zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWord Sense Disambiguation defined
Word Sense Disambiguation in detail, scroll down far zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWord Sense Disambiguator - LOLITA (tested at MUC-7 and SENSEVAL competition as best)
XML for the absolute beginner

HTML, XML stuff + parsers[19 links]
Apache plug-in that uhhh does stuff with XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzConvert COM to XML
convert XML, HTML to Unix pipeable formats zzzzzzzzzzzzzzconverters to and from HTML
expat XML parser zzzzzzzzzzzzzzHTML Tidy - converts HTML 2 XML + source code!!
Parse DB (RDBMS, whatever) to XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPerl-XML Module List
PHP Manual XML parser functions - what the hell are they talking about, PHP Virtual M... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPublic SGML-XML Software
Pyxie - XML Processor for Python, Perl, etc. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzSGML+XML tools.org
The XML Resource Centre - massive number of links zzzzzzzzzzzzzzW4F wrapper - wrapper converts XML to HTML
XFlat - convert flat file into XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzXML Parsers and other XML stuff
XML.com - Parsers, etc. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzXML-Data Catalog System - uhhhh looks close
XTAL's general converter - convert anything 2 XML

other Background[8 links]
Is Linux ready for the Enterprise, scalable... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzLinux reliability
Linux Versus Windows NT, Mark(sysinternals bloke) zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPC reliability (pcworld)
SPEC - Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzSystems benchmarks
TPC - Transaction Processing Performance Council zzzzzzzzzzzzzzUnix Beats Back NT In EDA Workstation Arena
Proper TREC(-8) QA systems[2 links]

pg. 387 LIMSI-CNRS pretty deep parsing[2 links]
More links....
NLP, IR links - lots to corpii, etc.

pg. 575 U. of Ottawa and NRL (shit system, got 0%)[1 links]
LAKE Lab
pg. 607! University of Sheffield (crap system, but OPEN SOURCE!)[2 links]
GATE - FREE IE app w`source code
LaSIE - ER, coreference, template (cv)

pg. 617 Univ of Surrey (inconclusive matches)[2 links]
System Quirk - Or is this their search system..... Hmmmmmm
Univ of Surrey - pointers (hopefully this is their WILDER search system...)

SMU - Pg. 65[1 links]
Natural Language Processing Laboratory at SMU

Textract[2 links]
Cymfony - Technology
Textract - State of the Art Information Extraction

Xerox uhhhhh maybe[1 links]
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
(OVERVIEW) 1999 TREC-8 Q&A Track Home Page
NLP bloke, Univ Sussex


Tcl-Tk[4 links] Tcl tutorial
Tcl-Tk Contributed Programs Index
Tcl-Tk Resources, sources
TclXML - manipulating XML using Tcl-Tk
Artificial Natural Language - Is this what I'm trying to parse into...
Comparison of Indexers - Prise vs. Inquery vs. MG, etc.
Eagles - Language Engineering Standards
Language Technology Group - lots of modules!
LDC - Linguistic Data Consortium, lots of corpora
Lexical Resources
Links 2 resources, indexers.....
Lots of IR stuff, University of uhhh
Managing Gigabytes Indexer
Managing Gigabytes Manuals and stuff
Htdig search system
NLP & IR (NLPIR, NIST) Group
OVERVIEW OF MUC-7-MET-2
Perl XML Indexing - XML search engine type thing
Phrasys Language Processing Software Components (money)
QA HCI bullshit
SIGIR - TREC-type thing, resources
SMART indexer system documentation
Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) Home Page
The Natural Language Software Registry
Thunderstone IE and IR products
WordNet - FREE DOWNLOADABLE lexical English database

Page created with URL+, nice utility for working with internet shortcuts

• 
  NA Software (and I don't work for them)
  
• Wageningen Agricultural University
  
• Some cool radar images of wheat
  

No way! Noel Sharkey was my professor at Sheffield University! He also judges the UK Robot Wars. And that's all the useless information I have for you today.

Wahey, I feel famous. ;-) Blatant Karma Whoring (suckey, suckey?)
Noel Sharkey

Homepage

Google Cache

I think the Comp Sci web server is down so you should probably check the cache first cause you don't want to slashdot it.

No way! Noel Sharkey was my professor at Sheffield University! He also judges the UK Robot Wars. And that's all the useless information I have for you today.

Wahey, I feel famous. ;-) Blatant Karma Whoring (suckey, suckey?)
Noel Sharkey

Homepage

Google Cache

I think the Comp Sci web server is down so you should probably check the cache first cause you don't want to slashdot it.

It discusses in scientific detail what is wrong with the radioactive dating methods

The Creationists like to point out so-called "flaws" in dating techniques that are based on "assumptions." While they can sometimes confuse the scientifically illiterate with this terminology, there is now a dating technique that doesn't rely on knowledge of radioisotopes that is very effective in showing the foolishness of their arguments.

Dendrochronology is the science of dating by the use of annular tree rings. Nothing too confusing here, it's school kid stuff. However, by piecing together the "fingerprint" of a sequence of years, we can put overlapping material from live trees and trees used in construction or preserved in peat bogs, etc. to create a calendar of the past 9000 years, well beyond the Creationist "age of the earth."

For GaAs (III-V) research in the UK, check out the EPSRC UK central facility webpage at the Electrical Engineering department of Sheffield University.

For GaAs (III-V) research in the UK, check out the EPSRC UK central facility webpage at the Electrical Engineering department of Sheffield University.

Ok, here's the scoop. H2SO4 is sulfuric acid. The thread I responded to mentioned SO2 and SO3 as being silicate biproducts of vaporizing the rocks in the borehole.

The Web Table of Elements shows silicon's symbol is Si and sulfur is S, so I think he really meant SiO2 and SiO3 otherwise it looked like that laser drill was going to make plenty of nasty sulfuric acid between the water in the drilling mud and the SO2 to which he was incorrectly referring.

I'm flattered that I was the MOST of anything to anybody. It clashes with being mediocre. Darn.

The US government aren't the only people to have cottoned on to the power of convertnig spoken words into text. The THISL project aims to provide broadcasters and other news gathering organisations with a powerful tool using this tchnique.

Firstly the news archive is passed through a speech recognition system which basically produces transcripts of every news item. Then a powerful text search may be applied to the database to locate information relevent to a particular topic. If this is being done for research it is most likely all the information required can be gleened from the transcript however the original recording may also be retrieved using the archive reference stored in the database.

I remember reading about this over a year ago when somebody realized that it should be possible and began snapping up all the tiger fetuses in jars he could find.

Two points:
- This story is at least a year old, I think it was originally in either New Scientist, or the Times of London.

- It is NOT a tiger, it is a striped, dog-like marsupial, that happens to have stripes. The reason it was called a tiger simply relates to it being striped and carnivorous, not a cat or carnivore at all.

More info is available from the Australian National Museum here, or from Sheffield Univerisity here.

Actually, according to WebElements, there is one, and only one, naturally occuring thorium isot ope: Th232. So, apparently, naturally occuring thorium is not a mix of isotopes, but one isotope.

There are other "man-made" radioisotopes. A couple have fairly long half-lifes (in the thousands of years). The longest (Th230) is about 75,400 years. But that's a mere blink of the eye, in cosmological and geological terms, which explains why there's only a single naturally occuring isotope (all others have long since decayed into something else). The probability of finding a significant number of "natural" atoms in the entire earth of any isotope of thorium other than Th232 is probably very, very small (but nonzero).