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Who reads BBC news for scientific discovery?

Summary:
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/12112/
pdf:
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/12112/01/2006_Kham_ Record_fT.pdf

Here is an excellent one: link.

One exerpt: 21. Like myopia, the higher one's intelligence, the more likely one is to be allergic to inhaled substances and, thus, to have asthma. For example, in the study of 2,720 gifted people conducted by this author, more than 80% of those who reported having asthma also had allergies; here, the gifted females were also far more likely than the males to have these disorders, and myopes were nearly twice as likely as non- myopes to have severe or multiple allergies (see section 6.4).

I'm curious about this now that you bring it up. I checked out its description on amazon, and it seems to cover only prescriptivist grammar. In that case, it could hardly be considered complete.

For instance, does it mention the rule that "if a language has both derivational suffixes (which create new words from old ones, like -ism) and inflectional suffixes (which modify a word to fit its role in the sentence, like plural -s), [such as English] then the derivational suffixes are always closer to the word stem than the inflectional ones"? In other words, "in English one can say Darwinisms (derivational -ism closer to the stem than inflectional -s) but not Darwinsism." ( 'Darwinsism' being "the concept of one ideology based on two Darwins (say, Charles and Erasmus)". the text I am quoting from is here.

Here's a classic example from Pinker:

"The baby seems sleeping."

What rule does this sentence violate? I'm not asking for a corrected version of the sentence; all I'm asking for is the general grammatical rule that it does not conform to ( or rather, to which it does not conform ). I'll be very impressed if you find the rule in the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.

The site uses many (dozens, even) of different algos to make the comparison.

...and many of them are biassed. In particular, any "same way" test is going to discriminate against some language. This is especially true of the more declarative languages. In such a language, for example, mutable arrays are usually less elegant and less efficient, but such languages almost always have other higher-level data structures which are more appropriately used in places where you'd use an array in C.

IMO, a much fairer benchmark is something like Pseudoknot, which takes a nontrivial real-world problem and lets each language solve it in an idiomatic way. Unfortunately, the results are ten years old now. It'd be interesting to see how Java does.

My application area has almost always been what I would describe as "engine" work. That is, I'm creating huge number-crunching black boxes. Akin to a database. That might help you to appreciate my biases...

My previous job was on developing a high-performance database server. Believe me, I know where you're coming from.

Database servers, linear algebra systems, operating system kernels and the like all have several features in common. First, performance almost always really matters. Secondly, and more importantly, they're all useless on their own. A database server is useless without an application, a linear algebra library is useless without client code, and an operating system kernel is useless without user tasks to manage.

Yeah, your black boxes are, no doubt, very important. But someone, eventually, has to feed information into those boxes and extract and interpret the results. That's a high-level task, for which raw performance may not be as important as flexibility.

From the wikipedia article on continental drift: "South America and Africa are moving apart at an average of 5.7 cm per year, due to the seafloor spreading along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. This is comparable to the growth speed of a fingernail. The fastest recorded seafloor spreading takes place along the East Pacific Rise at 17.2 cm per year"

Using the lower number gives us a distance of 2850 kilometers in 50 million years. Not quite far enough for major climate change just based on distance. However, this amount of drift could severely alter the Atlantic Conveyor, a heat pump that moves tremendous amounts of heat from the equator to the poles. It is also enough distance to affect the amount of light available to trees.

It should also be noted that using the higher figure would result in a movement of 8600 kilometers, nearly the distance from the equator to the poles.

I just added some material to the Wikipedia article on self-heating cans.

In 1941 a ''New York Times'' food column reported:

Yesterday, we had our first cup of coffee, our first baked beans and our first spaghetti out of the amazing self-heating cans now being introduced by a department store in Manhattan... There's a fifteen-minute wait while the canned food, enclosed in an outer tin, heats without benefit of gas, electricity, or flame of any sort. This trick is accomplished by a chemical inside the first container, and the action is started when four holes are punched in the bottom. The whole mysterious apparatus is turned upside down for the stipulated number of minutes, then righted, and presto! there is your steaming coffee, or food, all ready to serve.

Holt, Jane (1941) "News of Food: War Emphasizes Benefit of Prune Vitamins--Hammering Opens Oysters," ''The New York Times,'' March 26, 1941, p. 19

In 1947, the same column reported "Food in Self-Heating Cans Reappears" (their having been reserved for the military during the war). Referring to the cans as "Hotcans," the columnist noted that "Chocolate is made with milk and is delicious (65 to 72 cents). Four hamburgers in tomato sauce with mushrooms are small but good, and the sauce is ample (89 to 98 cents). Coffee tastes something like the instantly brewed type, leaving something to be desired (49 cents)." (49 cents in 1947 is approximately equivalent to $4.64 in 2005).

Nickerson, Jane (1947), "News of Food: Food in Self-Heating Cans Reappears Here; Recommended for Motorists and Campers," ''The New York Times,'' November 26, 1947, p. 28

I have to wonder why the technology never took off. Of course, the Wikipedia article links to a 2001 article touting the "world's first" self-heating coffee, and it does say that the calcium oxide reaction is "nowhere near as straightforward as chemistry text books suggest and that the thermal design was critical to the efficient operation of the device."

To plug a few projects where I have gotten a lot of help when my knowledge of the subject has been limited. By all means they could have given me a RTFM response but instead they answered my questions throughly and respectfully.

Zope http://www.zope.org/
OpenNMS http://www.opennms.org/index.php/Main_Page
MailScanner http://www.sng.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailscanner/
MailWatch http://mailwatch.sourceforge.net/doku.php
SipX http://sipx-wiki.calivia.com/index.php/Main_Page

Before Suse for Sparc died:
http://lists.suse.com/archive/suse-sparc/
(Too bad that is gone, it was a nice Sparc based distro)

From Southampton rather than some random blog.

It wasn't all cheesy. Scientists really are looking into the possibility that fresh water from melting glaciers might be diluting the ocean's salinity. That makes it increasingly difficult for cooling water to sink and return south towards the poles to pick up more heat. This kind of disruption could cause Europe's climate to cool down. We're already seeing signs that a component of the current system powering the Gulf Stream might be slowing down. Besides, the subject could use a publicity, and a high profile film provides just that.

If you're interested in the subject, check out Klaus-Peter Zauner's publication: Robot Control: From Silicon Circuitry to Cells

yes, there is.

http://www.mailscanner.info/

it's redirected to http://www.sng.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailscanner/, but it's legitimate in the sense that mailscanner.info is a lot easier to remember

Look up the "ugly duckling theorem". It is of use for understanding.

http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Found ations.Cognition/0056.html

hotlink

Look up the "ugly duckling theorem". It is of use for understanding.

http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Found ations.Cognition/0056.html

hotlink

this point has been made before,
by cognitive scientist john searle in his paper:

    is the brain a digital computer?

in the summary, searle puts it this way:

--| Summary of the Argument |---

This brief argument has a simple logical structure and I will lay it out:

On the standard textbook definition, computation is defined syntactically in terms of symbol manipulation.

But syntax and symbols are not defined in terms of physics. Though symbol tokens are always physical tokens, "symbol" and "same symbol" are not defined in terms of physical features. Syntax, in short, is not intrinsic to physics.

This has the consequence that computation is not discovered in the physics, it is assigned to it. Certain physical phenomena are assigned or used or programmed or interpreted syntactically. Syntax and symbols are observer relative.

It follows that you could not discover that the brain or anything else was intrinsically a digital computer, although you could assign a computational interpretation to it as you could to anything else. The point is not that the claim "The brain is a digital computer" is false. Rather it does not get up to the level of falsehood. It does not have a clear sense. You will have misunderstood my account if you think that I am arguing that it is simply false that the brain is a digital computer. The question "Is the brain a digital computer?" is as ill defined as the questions "Is it an abacus?", "Is it a book?", or "Is it a set of symbols?", "Is it a set of mathematical formulae?"

Some physical systems facilitate the computational use much better than others. That is why we build, program, and use them. In such cases we are the homunculus in the system interpreting the physics in both syntactical and semantic terms.

But the causal explanations we then give do not cite causal properties different from the physics of the implementation and the intentionality of the homunculus.

The standard, though tacit, way out of this is to commit the homunculus fallacy. The humunculus fallacy is endemic to computational models of cognition and cannot be removed by the standard recursive decomposition arguments. They are addressed to a different question.

We cannot avoid the foregoing results by supposing that the brain is doing "information processing". The brain, as far as its intrinsic operations are concerned, does no information processing. It is a specific biological organ and its specific neurobiological processes cause specific forms of intentionality. In the brain, intrinsically, there are neurobiological processes and sometimes they cause consciousness. But that is the end of the story.\**

--

regards,
j.

Wow, you know your a geek when you download a 200MB file to play barbie.

And you know that you have no life when you take the time to check the filesize just to berate geeks on Slashdot ;).

In any case, a geek would just use Kisekae Set System, a computerized paper doll system. Yes, my sweet Ranma doll that changed between male and female when I put a bucket of water on it ;)...

And, of course, here's a Linux version - GnomeKISS.

These photographs taken by one of my colleagues, which have been linked elsewhere from this topic, clearly show the structure c. 1600 yesterday. The BBC photographs were taken before noon, while the 200m cordon was still in place around the building.

The bulk of the flammable chemicals were stored in an outbuilding. In particular, the external hydrogen store was not affected by the fire, having been upwind of the building.

ps: "despise", not "dispise" (sic). Hope this helps.

Better link! http://www.soton.ac.uk/~totl/

They've got the website back up on ISS's servers - I believe the reason why the sites are out is, although the servers are fine, running in Zepler, the connectivity ran through Mountbatten so got cut off from the outside world.

http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/

This has updates and a few more photos.

however the ecs (electronics and computer systems) website http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ is down

looks like they kept their backup servers in the same building (doh!)

however the ecs (electronics and computer systems) website http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ is down

looks like they kept their backup servers in the same building (doh!)

Southampton University has a handful of campuses, the largest being the Highfield Campus at the north-east end of the Common, towards the outskirts of the city (the others are the Avenue Campus, Oceanography Research Centre, New College, Winchester School of Art and Chilworth Science Park). The Highfield Campus map is here: http://www.soton.ac.uk/about/campusmaps/highfieldm ap.html. The burnt-out building is building 53 just north of Salisbury Road in Square C1. At present there is reduced access to the cluster of buildings immediately south of Salisbury Road.

If you google "southampton university fire", you will see amongst other things, adverts for a Fire Safety Officer!!

From http://www.jobs.soton.ac.uk/adminweb/jsp/jobs/sJob view.jsp?function=View&id=05B0046

"Following a review of its provision of fire safety services, the University of Southampton has established a post of Fire Safety Adviser. This is a significant role in one of the UK's most successful Universities. With in excess of 100 major buildings, and a range of work from laboratories and workshops through to offices and teaching spaces, the post will provide a stimulating and varied challenge.

The successful applicant will be involved in all aspects of fire safety including fire risk assessments, developing associated compliance strategies and policies, and delivering training. Considerable knowledge and experience in the practical application of fire precautions legislation and standards is essential. You are likely to have held a similar position in a large organisation, or will have extensive experience of advising on meeting the requirements of the Building Regulations, or will have undertaken the role of Fire Safety Officer with a Fire and Rescue Service. Candidates who possess membership of the Institute of Fire Engineering and/or hold Fire Service Modules A - E will be at an advantage. Good interpersonal and communication skills are essential, and additional training in the role will be provided as required. You must be able to travel off site to provide services to all parts of the University.

University benefits include pleasant working environment, generous annual leave and pension scheme, sport and social activities.

Salary in the range of £22,774 - £28,007 per annum"

From the information that I have seen, the building in question is marked number 53 on this map: http://www.orc.soton.ac.uk/contact/campus.php However, this section is actually 3 buildings, 1 of which is ECS academic, 2nd is ORC and the 3rd houses a newly formed venture called INNOS, its their website which is currently down. I am still trying to get confirmation as to exactly which building is destroyed as there seems to be conflicting reports.

that's odd because the actual building in questions website: http://www.orc.soton.ac.uk/ is still up.

The building is/was part of Electronics and Computer Science (http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/, but the servers are down at the moment). It was a postgrad/research building (no undergrads). I did my PhD research there 7 years ago.

I know there is computer science research being done in the building, which is shaped like a 'U'. From what I saw on the news, the fire started in (and destroyed) the other side of the building (the opposite leg of the 'U') where the the clean rooms and laboratories are. It seems to have burned the side of the facing leg of the U off too.

I was working in the Optoelectronics Research Center (http://www.orc.soton.ac.uk/) when I was there. The sort of research they do isn't going to be restored from backup tapes. Some past results may be, but even without fires I often heard stories about people losing years of work when their hard disk crashed or laptop was stolen.

The building is/was part of Electronics and Computer Science (http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/, but the servers are down at the moment). It was a postgrad/research building (no undergrads). I did my PhD research there 7 years ago.

I know there is computer science research being done in the building, which is shaped like a 'U'. From what I saw on the news, the fire started in (and destroyed) the other side of the building (the opposite leg of the 'U') where the the clean rooms and laboratories are. It seems to have burned the side of the facing leg of the U off too.

I was working in the Optoelectronics Research Center (http://www.orc.soton.ac.uk/) when I was there. The sort of research they do isn't going to be restored from backup tapes. Some past results may be, but even without fires I often heard stories about people losing years of work when their hard disk crashed or laptop was stolen.

Even with the data backed up, the major loss will be their equipment - this is not a computer lab, rather it is a hardware fabrication lab with likely millions of dollars worth of semiconductor and optical processing equipment, clean rooms, etc. - research samples taking months to grow may have been lost as well.

And the point of sprinklers is to prevent a fire from becoming devastating in the first place, by limiting the wide-area temperature to the boiling point of water. One notable case where they don't work is with metals like magnesium and aluminum, for which water is an oxidizer.

Hmmm... Google's cache of http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/admissions/pg/history.p hp (the original page being gone forever) says the Mountbatten building was finished in 1991.

It looks like the website is still around
http://www.orc.soton.ac.uk/

i really like this new project ... but let me explain before you interpret this wrongly:

i'm semi-professional photographer and my need for an image processing application are not the same as for an artist in digital arts. i do not play with filters and all the cool features that are available.

in the last ~5 years, i tried almost every software for image processing around. at university i have access to photoshop. with ms windows i used to use corel photopaint and i'm gimp user since the early days.

an easy UI helps doing things more quickly saving you time for the creative parts of photography and image processing. on the other hand, i found out that you can get used to different UI's quickly, if you really have to use the app as an essential tool in some creative work you do at the moment. of course, if you try working for days with photopaint and then want to do the same tasks in gimp, you are lost in the first 10 minutes searching for menus where features are.

depending on HOW you use the image processing applications, you can like/dislike it's UI or not. if you are a newbie in image processing or you were restricted to only ms windows or only mac UI's, you have some deficits and switching UI's is not easy for you. the others from you, who are faced from time to time with other widgets and UI's (qt, gtk, swing, ...) have it easier to switch.

sooner or later, you even learn to use all this different UI's without problem switching from one to the other... like knowing to type dvorak and qwerty with same speed ;-) ... the reason lies in the plasticity of our brain and the capacity of learning - we are more intelligent than computers, right?

of course, people may come with the argument that they hate different UI's and only like . my reply to this is easy: if you are serious with image processing, you do not spend hours playing with UI's but after using the one you have atm installed for some work you do, believe me, you will automatically learn where the features and options are hidden of this app. once you are forced to work with photoshop after working with gimp a long time, if you are just someone who wants to play with some photos taken on last holidays, you may argue about UI's and hate the one or other UI. if you want to do image processing, you do not care what UI you use if the process and result are the same.

i really like the gimp UI, because every image has it's own menu, the widgets are gtk2 and can be teared appart. you can have separate menus in separate windows and so on...

on the other hand, i use nip2 for tasks that are not possible with gimp. it has a completely different UI but also this UI has its advantages.

for converting or resizing images, i would suggest all of you to use the command line, as it is much easier than any UI available (imagemagick)

am i telling that photoshop or photopaint have a bad UI? no, not at all. their UI's are also very much usable. so what is it i want to explain here? for subject i have choosen "i like gimpshop", so that's what i want to explain.

photoshop, photopaint and other closed source image processing apps you have to pay for to have them. if you want to use them, you have to learn their UI. paying for it, you are also motivated to get along with the UI to use also all their features. as newbie in image processing, you spent some money and now you want to get a long with it. you begin to like the UI. - you write history in your mind in this field learning this UI.

gimp, nips2, imagemagick and others that are opensource, have the advantage, that their UI can be addapted to the person who knows how to modify them. gimpshop is exactly one such approach. the community of photoshop users who wants to use gimp has now a nice approach to have photoshop behaviour in gimp.

i myself will probably never use gimpshop. as told, i like gimp as it i

This showed up earlier this year Self Heating coffee Now if our friends in Japan would just do the same with Sake' More info here

Yes WWW created at CERN by a British person who now lives in the USA.

So his professorship at the University at Southampton will be conducted over the phone from the USA?

Someone took apart a Nescafe Hot can, which is the same technology Puck has licensed.

An earlier approach appears in the Japanese self-heating sake cans. It's the same calcium oxide/water reaction as the others, but the mechanism for setting it off is clunkier.

The idea is old, but the trick was to develop a simple, reliable way to start the reaction. The Japanese sake cans required that the user push a big pointed pin through a hole in one end of the can. Early versions had the pin attached externally to the can; later versions integrated the pin into a plastic cover. Thermotic Developments worked out an improved triggering mechanism with no loose parts. That's a neat trick, since it has to be idiot-proof, survive dropped cans and cases, and be manufacturable at high speed at very low cost with a near zero defect rate.

The next generation of the technology runs hotter and can do soup and small packaged meals.

John Searle - Is the Brain a Digital Computer?

The sense of information processing that is used in cognitive science, is at much too high a level of abstraction to capture the concrete biological reality of intrinsic intentionality. The "information" in the brain is always specific to some modality or other. It is specific to thought, or vision, or hearing, or touch, for example. The level of information processing which is described in the cognitive science computational models of cognition , on the other hand, is simply a matter of getting a set of symbols as output in response to a set of symbols as input.

We are blinded to this difference by the fact that the same sentence, "I see a car coming toward me", can be used to record both the visual intentionality and the output of the computational model of vision. But this should not obscure from us the fact that the visual experience is a concrete event and is produced in the brain by specific electro-chemical biological processes. To confuse these events and processes with formal symbol manipulation is to confuse the reality with the model. The upshot of this part of the discussion is that in the sense of "information" used in cognitive science it is simply false to say that the brain is an information processing device.

Summary of the Argument

This brief argument has a simple logical structure and I will lay it out:

1. On the standard textbook definition, computation is defined syntactically in terms of symbol manipulation.

2. But syntax and symbols are not defined in terms of physics. Though symbol tokens are always physical tokens, "symbol" and "same symbol" are not defined in terms of physical features. Syntax, in short, is not intrinsic to physics.

3. This has the consequence that computation is not discovered in the physics, it is assigned to it. Certain physical phenomena are assigned or used or programmed or interpreted syntactically. Syntax and symbols are observer relative.

4. It follows that you could not discover that the brain or anything else was intrinsically a digital computer, although you could assign a computational interpretation to it as you could to anything else. The point is not that the claim "The brain is a digital computer" is false. Rather it does not get up to the level of falsehood. It does not have a clear sense. You will have misunderstood my account if you think that I am arguing that it is simply false that the brain is a digital computer. The question "Is the brain a digital computer?" is as ill defined as the questions "Is it an abacus?", "Is it a book?", or "Is it a set of symbols?", "Is it a set of mathematical formulae?"

5. Some physical systems facilitate the computational use much better than others. That is why we build, program, and use them. In such cases we are the homunculus in the system interpreting the physics in both syntactical and semantic terms.

6. But the causal explanations we then give do not cite causal properties different from the physics of the implementation and the intentionality of the homunculus.

7. The standard, though tacit, way out of this is to commit the homunculus fallacy. The humunculus fallacy is endemic to computational models of cognition and cannot be removed by the standard recursive decomposition arguments. They are addressed to a different question.

8. We cannot avoid the foregoing results by supposing that the brain is doing "information processing". The brain, as far as its intrinsic operations are concerned, does no information processing. It is a specific biological organ and its specific neurobiological processes cause specific forms of intentionality. In the brain, intrinsically, there are neurobiological processes and sometimes they cause consciousness. But that is the end of the story.\**

I wonder if this might be a case of prior art from 1995?
http://www.soton.ac.uk/~newrep/vol13/no4news.html

Scroll down to the article "Jukebox is a sound success"

Does anyone have any more details about this? Does it cover the same claims as the Contois patent?

This is typical of the articles I've found on scholar.google.com. (This was cited a lot.)

Here is from nature(!) reviews:
Intelligence research is more advanced and less controversial than is generally realized.

Let us make this easier -- can you give references that show that intelligence measurement has fallen out of vogue among the real researchers? (What is the majority opinion?)

I am not in that field, but I have never heard anything like that has happened.

Again, you claim that Gould wasn't full of sh!t. Well, he did make large claims. They should be visible in the literature. I can't find any, but I'm not a researcher.

(In case you don't understand why I am arguing. I don't really care about IQ measurements. What gets my goat is intellectual dishonesty. I don't really care that much about politics. My strongest opinion is a hate for religion.)

I meant to say energy. If I'm not talking to another electrical engineer I tend to slip into layman's terminology.

Then there are the people who say "kilowatts per hour" and arrogantly assert that they actually know something; they're either trolls or ignoramuses and I'm heartily sick of them. It's good to prove that you aren't one of them at the outset.

A battery with a capacity of 60KWH is not neccessarily fully charged if you run 200A @ 300V for an hour, as a significant portion of the incoming energy is dissipated as waste heat.

So, do you have any figures as to the charging efficiency of said batteries?

• 70% coulomb efficiency for NiCd, nearly 100% for Li-ion.
• Another claim of 100% coulomb efficiency for Li-ion, and 85-90% overall efficiency.

I understand that lead-acid efficiency is particularly poor because of the need to overcharge them to prevent sulfation, but my cursory search found nothing on that. Familiarity with their web site did let me find the efficiency graph on page 41 of this paper, but I doubt that a search engine would have. Those figures are interesting, showing small-cycle efficiency no lower than 90% over the entire charge range even for lead-acid batteries.

Is the Brain a Digital Computer?
John Searle

There is a well defined research question: "Are the computational procedures by which the brain processes information the same as the procedures by which computers process the same information?"

What I just imagined an opponent saying embodies one of the worst mistakes in cognitive science. The mistake is to suppose that in the sense in which computers are used to process information, brains also process information. To see that that is a mistake contrast what goes on in the computer with what goes on in the brain. In the case of the computer, an outside agent encodes some information in a form that can be processed by the circuitry of the computer. That is, he or she provides a syntactical realization of the information that the computer can implement in, for example, different voltage levels. The computer then goes through a series of electrical stages that the outside agent can interpret both syntactically and semantically even though, of course, the hardware has no intrinsic syntax or semantics: It is all in the eye of the beholder. And the physics does not matter provided only that you can get it to implement the algorithm. Finally, an output is produced in the form of physical phenomena which an observer can interpret as symbols with a syntax and a semantics.

But now contrast that with the brain. In the case of the brain, none of the relevant neurobiological processes are observer relative (though of course, like anything they can be described from an observer relative point of view) and the specificity of the neurophysiology matters desperately. To make this difference clear, let us go through an example. Suppose I see a car coming toward me. A standard computational model of vision will take in information about the visual array on my retina and eventually print out the sentence, "There is a car coming toward me". But that is not what happens in the actual biology. In the biology a concrete and specific series of electro-chemical reactions are set up by the assault of the photons on the photo receptor cells of my retina, and this entire process eventually results in a concrete visual experience. The biological reality is not that of a bunch of words or symbols being produced by the visual system, rather it is a matter of a concrete specific conscious visual event; this very visual experience. Now that concrete visual event is as specific and as concrete as a hurricane or the digestion of a meal. We can, with the computer, do an information processing model of that event or of its production, as we can do an information model of the weather, digestion or any other phenomenon, but the phenomena themselves are not thereby information processing systems.

In short, the sense of information processing that is used in cognitive science, is at much too high a level of abstraction to capture the concrete biological reality of intrinsic intentionality. The "information" in the brain is always specific to some modality or other. It is specific to thought, or vision, or hearing, or touch, for example. The level of information processing which is described in the cognitive science computational models of cognition , on the other hand, is simply a matter of getting a set of symbols as output in response to a set of symbols as input.

We are blinded to this difference by the fact that the same sentence, "I see a car coming toward me", can be used to record both the visual intentionality and the output of the computational model of vision. But this should not obscure from us the fact that the visual experience is a concrete event and is produced in the brain by specific electro-chemical biological processes. To confuse these events and processes with formal symbol manipulation is to confuse the reality with the model. The upshot of this part of the discussion is that in the sense of "information" used in cognitive science it is simply false to say that the

You really think someone's going to choose a math degree because they couldn't play on the football team?

At my office I have MailScanner configured with Postfix, SpamAssassin, and ClamAV. Every bit of this configuration is free (beer and speech) and works very well. I have the rules set fairly loosely, yet it still manages to catch >80% spam and I have yet to see a virus make it passed. It is a bit of a bear to set up, but for those who would rather not, all of those packages can be found in openprotect (with or without commercial support).

Now, for the caveat. As is the case with any type of email scanner, it is very resource intensive. As such, I have a dedicated dual Athlon machine which handles scanning for 50-100,000 emails/day and it stays very busy (load over 1, >50% processor utilization).

I've just found some more here and here

I've just found some more here and here

About a year or so ago, I and three other Masters students worked on a similar project at the University of Southampton.

I've not RTFA (not had the time), but our approach was to split the images into segments (based on colour and texture) which were assumed to be objects. The segments would then be analyzed for various feature vectors, such as shape, texture, colour etc. These vectors would then be added into a database of numbers, and finally the segments grouped, giving a collection of classified sections which (hopefully) represent similar objects.

From related metadata such as keywords, you could then hope to build up an idea of what keyword matches which section. You could also come up with a relevance between two images, and thus search for similar images.

We didn't have enough time to make it bulletproof by any means, but our limited results were very promising.

Sorry I can't find the paper, but we've got some screenshots of the application here and here (you can see false colouring applied to the original image to display the segments)

About a year or so ago, I and three other Masters students worked on a similar project at the University of Southampton.

I've not RTFA (not had the time), but our approach was to split the images into segments (based on colour and texture) which were assumed to be objects. The segments would then be analyzed for various feature vectors, such as shape, texture, colour etc. These vectors would then be added into a database of numbers, and finally the segments grouped, giving a collection of classified sections which (hopefully) represent similar objects.

From related metadata such as keywords, you could then hope to build up an idea of what keyword matches which section. You could also come up with a relevance between two images, and thus search for similar images.

We didn't have enough time to make it bulletproof by any means, but our limited results were very promising.

Sorry I can't find the paper, but we've got some screenshots of the application here and here (you can see false colouring applied to the original image to display the segments)

--| John Searle - Is the Brain a Digital Computer? |---

The sense of information processing that is used in cognitive science, is at much too high a level of abstraction to capture the concrete biological reality of intrinsic intentionality. The "information" in the brain is always specific to some modality or other. It is specific to thought, or vision, or hearing, or touch, for example. The level of information processing which is described in the cognitive science computational models of cognition , on the other hand, is simply a matter of getting a set of symbols as output in response to a set of symbols as input.

We are blinded to this difference by the fact that the same sentence, "I see a car coming toward me", can be used to record both the visual intentionality and the output of the computational model of vision. But this should not obscure from us the fact that the visual experience is a concrete event and is produced in the brain by specific electro-chemical biological processes. To confuse these events and processes with formal symbol manipulation is to confuse the reality with the model. The upshot of this part of the discussion is that in the sense of "information" used in cognitive science it is simply false to say that the brain is an information processing device.

--

has been discussed before.

Steve Harnad posted this to describe the problem. Text reproduced below.

[The following concerns refereed research report publication.]

What is wrong with the following picture?

(1) A brand-new PhD recipient proudly tells his mother he has just
published his first article. She asks him how much he was paid for
it. He makes a face and tells her "nothing," and then begins a long
complicated explanation.

(2) A fellow-researcher at that same university sees a reference to
that same article. He goes to their library to get it: It's not
subscribed to here; can't afford that journal; subscription budget
already overspent.

(3) An undergraduate, same university, sees the same article
cited on the Web; clicks on it. The publisher's website demands a
password: only paid subscribing institutions can have access.

(4) The undergraduate loses patience, gets bored, and clicks on
napster to grab an MP3 file of his favorite bootleg music CD to
console him in his sorrows.

(5) Years later, the same PhD is being considered for tenure; his
publications are good, but they're not cited enough; they have not
made enough of a research impact. Tenure denied.

(6) Same thing happens when he tries to get a research grant: his
research findings have not had enough of an impact: not enough
researchers have read and cited them.

(7) He decides to write a book instead. Publisher declines to
publish it: It wouldn't sell enough copies because not enough
universities have enough money to pay for it -- their purchasing
budgets are tied up paying for their inflating annual journal
subscription costs.

(8) He tries to put his articles up on the Web, free for all, to
increase their impact; his publisher threatens to sue him for
violation of copyright.

(9) He asks his publisher who the copyright is intended to protect.

(10) His publisher replies: You!

What is wrong with this picture? (And why is the mother of the PhD
whose give-away work people cannot steal, even though he wants them
to, in the same boat as the mother of the recording artist whose
non-give-away work they can and do steal, even though he does not
want them to?)

Libraries already pay BIG bucks for overpiced journal subscriptions from for-profit publishers. Not to mention having to build new extensions for all the shelf space.

If free online journals (aka eprints)

http://www.eprints.org/

can be hosted by the universities and their libraries, the cost will be much less than the present.

See http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.h tm

for details.

Nano surfaces could slash cost of solar energy

Nanotechnologies which can artificially change the optical properties of materials to allow light to be trapped in solar cells could greatly reduce the cost of solar energy.

Research being carried out by the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton is focusing on nanopatterning as the way to design effective solar panels.

'By drawing features that are much smaller than the wavelength of light, photons can be confused into doing things they normally wouldn't do,' says Dr Darren Bagnall, of the School of Electronics and Computer Science. 'By creating diffractive nanostructured arrays on the surface of solar cells we ensure that optical asymmetries are created that prevent light from escaping the solar cells.'

According to Dr Bagnall the light-trapping technologies could reduce the thickness of semiconductor materials needed in solar panels, and this would directly reduce the cost. The first challenge is to prove that the technology works in practice, the second key challenge will be to develop cost effective ways to produce nanopatterned layers.

The ECS approach is being applied to the £4.5M 'Photovoltaic Materials for the 21st Century' project which is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). Other university partners in this project are Durham, Bangor, Northumbria, Bath and Loughborough. They have teamed up with industrial partners to develop solar cells which will make it possible for manufacturers to slash the cost of solar energy by half.

Dr Bagnall comments: 'We have already shown that we can use arrays of chiral nanostructures, such as swastikas, to change the polarisation of light, now we want to apply the same technology to photovoltaics.'

More Information. Posted by Joyce Lewis on 03 Feb 2005.

Nano surfaces could slash cost of solar energy

Nanotechnologies which can artificially change the optical properties of materials to allow light to be trapped in solar cells could greatly reduce the cost of solar energy.

Research being carried out by the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton is focusing on nanopatterning as the way to design effective solar panels.

'By drawing features that are much smaller than the wavelength of light, photons can be confused into doing things they normally wouldn't do,' says Dr Darren Bagnall, of the School of Electronics and Computer Science. 'By creating diffractive nanostructured arrays on the surface of solar cells we ensure that optical asymmetries are created that prevent light from escaping the solar cells.'

According to Dr Bagnall the light-trapping technologies could reduce the thickness of semiconductor materials needed in solar panels, and this would directly reduce the cost. The first challenge is to prove that the technology works in practice, the second key challenge will be to develop cost effective ways to produce nanopatterned layers.

The ECS approach is being applied to the £4.5M 'Photovoltaic Materials for the 21st Century' project which is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). Other university partners in this project are Durham, Bangor, Northumbria, Bath and Loughborough. They have teamed up with industrial partners to develop solar cells which will make it possible for manufacturers to slash the cost of solar energy by half.

Dr Bagnall comments: 'We have already shown that we can use arrays of chiral nanostructures, such as swastikas, to change the polarisation of light, now we want to apply the same technology to photovoltaics.'

More Information. Posted by Joyce Lewis on 03 Feb 2005.

To some of your points

an ontology isn't being used in this demo. We wanted to design code that could take advantage of extant rdf without requiring an ontology. but can support one if you have one.

if you look at another demo on our site (http://www.mspace.fm) you'll see a link to http://cs.aktivespace.org. That's a pre-mspace'y mspace that does use an ontology to support inference, such as determining in that case things like community of practice - who works with who - by looking at projects, paper authors and so on.

so mspace can be lightweight - rdf only - and then use an ontology where available. we want to help grow the semantic web, grow the use of rdf, not put unnecessary road blocks in the way.

we're also interested in interaction models. This simple lay out we've seen improve access to information that was previously experienced as inaccessible. that's a huge benefit for real people wanting to gain access to domains. The combination of preview cues and spatial layout made a huge difference. so, what you say is "seeing yahoo a few levels in advance" - the spatial rather than temporal layout has particular advantages. We've seen this have a strong age correlation effect, too.

you're right: the person does not see all the possible attributes of the domain at once (they don't in flamenco or endeca either). We're not sure whether or not that's critical in terms of improved access/exploration. Part of our work is to look at how best to expose the possible dimensions available.

the appearance of forced hierarchy and direction is also something we haven't had user issues with in terms of our access to info goals. This may be because people can change and reorganize these temporary hierarchies.

glad you're interested in the papers. the mspace, zzstrucutres, polyarchies paper (http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/9230/) talks about the hiearchies as temporary flattened projections through an n-dimensional space. It's a way proven to make managing navigation through large dimensional spaces manageable.

this is only one visualization however. the endeca approach of choosing attributes is also an approach that builds hierarchies but does so by exposing lists of attributes (what we refer to as dimensions) in advance.

We've found that approach to be more effective when people know what the attributes are they wish to select. but it would be interesting to do a formal comparison.

Again, one of the big challenges, which you've hit upon, is how to expose the dimensional space in a meaningful way. This may be ok when you're dealing with one domain, but when you begin to deal with associated domains as well, the scope of the space can become unweildy. but it's a problem we're looking forward to wrassling.

thanks for your first look feedback. much appreciated. mc - from mspace.fm, research team