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Some big projects are generating too many data that they have problems to deal with all that.
For example the Folding@home is implementing a distributed storage mechanism for their data and we'll likely have a new @home project soon - Storage@home.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage@home
http://www.stanford.edu/~beberg/Storage@home2007.pdf
http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Papers#ntoc7

Some big projects are generating too many data that they have problems to deal with all that.
For example the Folding@home is implementing a distributed storage mechanism for their data and we'll likely have a new @home project soon - Storage@home.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage@home
http://www.stanford.edu/~beberg/Storage@home2007.pdf
http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Papers#ntoc7

Here's another thought for you. How many universities run supercomputing clusters based on open source operating systems, with open source clustering tools, open source compilers, open source visualization suites, and open source analytics tools? Lots of good research comes out of these setups, at a fraction of the cost it would take to implement them using closed platforms.

Also reference projects like Folding@Home. Although their core engine isn't open source software, virtually everything that supports it is. Additionally, their plugin engine is written specifically to encourage open source addons. No innovation there, of course...

Incorrect.

This is why Don Knuth stopped using email in 1990. Before this he had 15 years of email interruptions, which were presumably disorientating:

"It's impossible to shut email off! You send a message to somebody, and they send it back saying "Thank you", and you say "OK, thanks for thanking me..."

Email is wonderful for some people, absolutely necessary for their job, and they can do their work better. I like to say that for people whose role is to be on top of things, electronic mail is great. But my role is to be on the bottom of things. I look at ideas and think about them carefully and try to write them up... I move slowly through things that people have done and try to organize the material. But I don't know what is happening this month."

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html
http://tex.loria.fr/historique/interviews/knuth-clb1993.html

So now some organization has deemed that this is the year the phenomenon has gone mainstream. It's kind of strange that they mention the problem as information overload when inbound communication overload is a more accurate description of that particular problem. Information overload is a problem too. It's easy to just keep researching, because the signal to noise ratio is so good that research becomes addictive and the amount of material is virtually endless.

Some people handle these things well, some people don't. The sort of people who didn't weren't all playing solitaire 20 years ago, a lot of them were workaholics. A workaholic is almost always a star employee, simply because he is addicted to the work. But the thing was, eventually researching something used to get boring because eventually the info that they were researching dried up and they moved on to actually solving their problems (if in an imperfect but still very good way).

Unfortunately now, in the process of doing your research the most efficient way, a workaholic is very tempted to develop web addiction, which turns an excellent worker into a poor worker.

I remember byte magasine discussing this 15 years ago ... this is the reference that I can find quickly .

There are much more efficient ways to use silicon than building microprocessors... say, a 1-million-neuron mixed-mode simulator that can be chained to take real-time input from an artificial retina or other neural input. From the site: "When it is completed in 2008, Neurogrid will emulate a million neurons in the cortex in real-time, rivaling the performance of two-hundred Blue Gene racks - at under a thousandth the cost."

Couple that cost reduction with power consumption orders of magnitude lower than other solutions, and you've got some serious potential.

Universities have patent licensing programs for this, and often support their facultry or students in founding companies based on their research.

I'm sure Stanford has made a killing by licensing to or investing in companies. Here's a list of their startup investments - not necessarily patent related, but I'm sure many were founded by Stanford professors or alumni with patents licensed back from the university...

http://otl.stanford.edu/about/resources/equity.html

They probably made over a billion on Google alone...

People are machines. Meat-machines. Being a machine doesn't necessarily eliminate the possibility for emotion. We have emotions because we say we do. Feelings are feelings because we perceive (experience would be a better word) them as feelings. Fear and joy exhibit different physiological phenomena within the brain, yet we call them both emotion.

However, computer operations do not occur, in any way, similarly to the operations of a meat-brain. If you raise the possibility that something along the lines of emotion occurs within commonplace commodity computers,then either you're severely stretching the definition of 'emotion' to the point where it no longer resembles an emotion at all, or you're just wrong. There is no distinctly analogous operation within a PC to what happens in a human brain.

This is similar to what happens in the inevitable "If you're vegetarian, how do you know that plants don't feel pain" argument. They don't feel pain because they don't have brains. I don't think it's that ridiculous to place the requirement of a brain (let's be generous, let's say it could even be a large collection of nerve ganglia) as necessary for pain or any other type of feeling because it provides the necessary physical condition for similar function to take place. A piece of broccoli doesn't have the hardware for feeling. Nor do commodity computers.

There has been work to replicate emotion, however. And I do think it will eventually be successful in producing something with a level of complexity that allows the function of human-like emotion. The key is in the operation, not the medium. It is very likely that emotion will be simulated relatively soon. I may be wrong, but hasn't a mosquito brain already been simulated virtually?

I don't know if I'm a "self-aware mathematical entity in a mathematical universe." I very much doubt it, but it really doesn't make any difference if I am. If I discovered that my world has simply been a simulation all along, then I find out that I've been wrong about a lot of things. This, however, IMHO, does not change the function of my consciousness (though you could make the argument that one's consciousness is dependent on methods of embodiment, to an extent).

Anyhoo.
Fun Links:
http://www.cs.umu.se/kurser/TDBC12/HT99/Dennett.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_in_a_vat
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/brain-vat/

I grew up in Hannibal, Missouri. We studied Mark Twain for 13 years in public school there, for obvious reasons. I'm not familiar with Mark Twain as the source of this quote, although he may have repeated it. I've always heard it attributed to Blaise Pascal, but it seems he may have been paraphrasing someone earlier. Pascal lived well before Sam Clemens.

It possibly dates back to St. Augustine or even Cicero, but the most common wording of the idea in English is a straightforward translation from Pascal's.

Odd how people think humans have stopped evolving.

A huge evolution experiment is sadly taking place in Africa, with the Aids epidemic.

The flu pandemic of 1918 was a significant evolutionary event, estimated deaths of up to 40 million people worldwide. http://virus.stanford.edu/uda/

The next big flu pandemic will also cause evolutionary change. Read "Collapse" by Jared Diamond for many examples of pandemics in recent history - including the 95% wipeout of North and South American natives who had never been previously exposed to the many diseases brought over from Europe and Asia.

If we end up with something like Aids or SARS that spreads from a simple sneeze, then we just might find that natural selection favours a society completely isolated from air travel.

The individual cases you mention in a rich western society are just a noise floor in the bigger picture.

Note that the site mentions that comScore is part of the Windows Feedback Program. ("Microsoft, comScore, and MarketTools employees are not eligible to participate.") Also note that comScore has in the past been involved in very pernicious man-in-the-middle HTTPS attacks that have allowed them to sniff bank passwords (and everything else, of course) by installing a special certificate in end-user's browsers. If it were me, I wouldn't install any executables that may have been authored by comScore until there's been enough time for them to be thoroughly vetted by independent third parties.

Thanks for the listing. I'm currently running folding at home http://folding.stanford.edu/

I only wish you'd regroup them so that people would easily see which projects have open results that benefit the all of us. I think that participating in a closed project is almost as bad as not participating at all. And while SETI@home is a nice project (the biggest and most famous distributed project), which I used to participate in myself, I think there are better projects, which are guaranteed to make useful results.

Get in the game! It's fun!

I mean, seriously, the 8800 GT has a theoretical floating-point performance of 520 GFlops (http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/gf8800_4.html). A single computer with dual 8800's could potentially out class Iran's "super computer". This is not totally crazy, either. The GPU Folding@Home client is two orders of magnitude more productive than the average Windows client. (http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=osstats)

That map looks like it charts wind power at ground level -- which is not where you would put the actual wind turbine.
Here's a map that charts wind power at 80m. It looks a lot more promising; note how many windy spots are in coastal areas that also happen to be heavily populated.
http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/winds/global_winds.html

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/cohen.html Bernard L. Cohen is the source of the 5 billion years figure.

As the parent says, when you reach a peak on U-235, you switch over to breeding U-238 or Thorium, or use an Energy Amplifier (accelerator driven system). And once you reach the peak on those, well, given that estimates for U-238 reach from a thousand years and up, by that time you should have fusion.. or parallel universe extraction, or a ZPM, or who knows?

It's not nearly as dire as that, unless we keep using light-water reactors... take a look at a brief summary of the situation that jibes with what I've heard from various sources. Can't seem to find anything peer-reviewed at the moment, but I'm sure it's out there.

Cyg

Why are people on the internet always so eager to think that highly qualified economists at world class Universities will have failed to consider the one blindingly obvious thing to consider about a situation, simply based on reading a one line summary of the relevant paper, in order to prove some clearly stupid point?

I'm sorry, but I'm just not buying it. When you get to a certain age, you start to realize that statistical studies like this are just so much crap. I don't care if the report comes out of Stanford or some community college. The issue is not that simple no matter how much people who hate non-competes, including myself, want to believe it is.

I think academia is especially prone to producing such spurious claims due to the confluence of the "publish or perish" mentality of the faculty and the volume of students trying to find something novel to study for either their Masters or Doctoral theses.

By the way, Ronald Gibson, the paper's author, is a Law professor, not an economist. Is it hardly surprising that he thinks there's a legal cause for the disparity? This could be a "when your only tool is a hammer ..." kind of thing if you ask me.

I suspect the prevalence of statistical analysis in these papers is that the causality they fail to prove is equally hard to disprove.

There are lies, damned lies, and statistics. No amount of statistical correlation can prove causality.

First of all, the article I linked is not a single study. It is a comprehensive, peer-reviewed synthesis of numerous previous studies. I'll take that over a wikipedia article any day.

Second, "debatable" doesn't really rebut anything, because in science everything is debatable. (If you want to get philosophical, nothing in science is ever 100% settled.) But as a useful summary of the expert consensus, I stand by what I said. There is very little independent, peer-reviewed evidence that supports the Rorschach, even the supposedly "objective" Exner scoring system; and there is a lot of evidence that challenges its reliability and validity.

PwdHash: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1033

Based on work from https://www.pwdhash.com/ or http://crypto.stanford.edu/PwdHash/

Check out the Stanford password hash ("PwdHash") program. It already does what you want, complete with extensions for Firefox and IE:

https://www.pwdhash.com/ or http://crypto.stanford.edu/PwdHash/

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1033

When away from your computer, you can use their website (or a copy of their code on your website) to generate the hashed passwords.

An equally compelling case can be argued that we have evolved from ancestors who formed societies of mutual co-operation. Our drive to altruism may be inherited biologically as can be seen in many animals that form complex social interactions (see http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/altruism-biological/ top pick from google).

Both are simplistic. We are more complex than a simple 'violent-pacifistic' spectrum and given the degree to which our behaviour is modified by learning and environment it is entirely reasonable to look at social conditions that are teaching, encouraging or even just triggering violent or agressive behaviour.

If he took 200 lines from a 560,000 line work, that would weigh in favor of a finding of fair use but wouldn't make it fair use automatically.

On the other hand, if the source code was posted in a public forum, that might make it less likely that a court would find that reusing it would deprive the owner of revenue, and that's another prong.

It's probably still fair use

ROFLMAO!!! It's not fair use - not even close.

The exception is for materials put to work under the "fair use rule." This rule recognizes that society can often benefit from the unauthorized use of copyrighted materials when the purpose of the use serves the ends of scholarship, education or an informed public. For example, scholars must be free to quote from their research resources in order to comment on the material.

Source

You really should quit before you get any further behind. You ignorance of copyright is astounding!

Have a look at this article in which Kamil Dada from Stanford University probes the MPAA for more information about their decision to promote the bill and what the academic world's response to it has been. It is one of the more in depth articles about the proposed bill:

http://daily.stanford.edu/article/2007/11/27/govtActsOnFileSharing

It's Roland the Plogger again, trying to drive traffic to his blog. It's not like he actually understands what he posts.

Here's the actual paper, Supplying Baseload Power and Reducing Transmission Requirements by Interconnecting Wind Farms. The authors have been crunching on wind speed data to try to figure out if a widespread enough set of wind farms would statistically be able to consistently produce power.

Their definition of "consistently produces power" is 79% to 92% uptime. This figure is based on the uptime for a typical single coal-fired generation unit. But they're using those numbers for a whole collection of widely distributed wind farms. That's not an appropriate comparison.

They have some moderately encouraging numbers for a set of 19 wind farms spread across a thousand kilometers, from New Mexico to Kansas. But look at Figure 3. 92% of the time, at least a quarter of average output is available. The output reliably available 99+% of the time is near zero.

What this paper actually demonstrates is that "baseload wind" isn't going to consistently provide power, even with a big grid. You need peaking plants or energy storage.

Exactly. But you can take steps to limit the lifetime of sensitive data in memory.

See Shredding Your Garbage: Reducing Data Lifetime Through Secure Deallocation http://www.stanford.edu/~blp/papers/shredding.pdf

see ubergeek Chuck Thacker's powerpoint from a recent seminar at stanford -- they (microsoft *research*) has put some real effort in to looking in to all of this http://yuba.stanford.edu/~nbehesht/netseminar/seminars/10_25_07.ppt i attended the talk and chuck claimed only 25% cost improvement (not sure if he meant ongoing operational cost OR initial cap cost or blended).

Diagrams or pictures probably rank among the oldest forms of human communication. They are not only used for representation but can also be used to carry out certain types of reasoning, and hence play a particular role in logic and mathematics. However, sentential representation systems (e.g., first-order logic) have been dominant in the modern history of logic, while diagrams have largely been seen as only of marginal interest. Diagrams are usually adopted as a heuristic tool in exploring a proof, but not as part of a proof.... (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/diagrams/)

I wonder how A Fair(y) Use Tale would be flagged by the "Video DNA" system. For those who don't know, this is a video consisting entirely of tiny clips from Disney movies. Most clips provide only a single word. When strung together, they explain what Fair Use is and why it's important. The use of the Disney copyrighted material clearly falls under Fair Use, yet Video DNA might flag it (and thus AT&T might block it) simply because the material is copyrighted.

Yes, we have so many roadblocks in place to stop new nuclear power plants from becoming a reality like a $500 million dollar insurance subsidy to anyone willing to build new plants with $250 Million per year for five years after, and credits for nuclear energy production...

I hope someone does something to stop them and their overhyped fears of nuclear materials, so we can start making new nuclear weapons. Everybody knows we have solved any technical issues with dangerous nuclear power production!

What happens if you repeat the cycle of: {snip}
an infinite amount of times? You run out of water.

If you can write a program that will find a cure for cancer given enough computing power, I'm sure people would be happy to donate it.

Ask and ye shall receive:

http://folding.stanford.edu/

Dr. Pande's group will find cures for diseases given enough computer power. Download the client today and start Folding!

Obviously SETI isn't limited to SETI@Home, but there is the point that the distributed computing power being applied to SETI@Home could be applied to projects like Stanford's Folding@home which promises to yield much more directly applicable knowledge about protein synthesis.

Many of the distributed projects via BOINC have more directly applicable results than SETI@Home.

That said, any basic research is defined by its lack of direct results. Early research into the atom looked like it had very little use until we discovered x-rays (accidentally) and nuclear power (intentionally). Saying "why is Benjamin Franklin bothering to fly that kite, what good is this 'electricity' he talks about?" would cut off a lot of research that later proves useful in completely unanticipated ways. And, yes, I know the story of the kite is partially folklore (a Frenchman may have been the first to use the electricity from lightning), but it's good folklore that makes the point.

Because the sources I have seen call bullshit.

http://wais.stanford.edu/Iraq/iraq_deathsundersaddamhussein42503.html

"Along with other human rights organizations, The Documental Centre for Human Rights in Iraq has compiled documentation on over 600,000 civilian executions in Iraq. Human Rights Watch reports that in one operation alone, the Anfal, Saddam killed 100,000 Kurdish Iraqis. Another 500,000 are estimated to have died in Saddam's needless war with Iran. Coldly taken as a daily average for the 24 years of Saddam's reign, these numbers give us a horrifying picture of between 70 and 125 civilian deaths per day for every one of Saddam's 8,000-odd days in power"

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=392881

"During the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88), 730,000 Iranians died. You will
recall that Hussein was the aggressor in this war, because he wanted
full control of the Arvand/Shatt al-Arab waterway at the head of the
Persian Gulf. (For more information on the war, see "Iran-Iraq War,"
at Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/i/irani1raq.asp
) Approximately 1,000 Kuwaiti nationals were killed in the Iraqi
invasion of Kuwait. It's estimated there were 1,500,000 refugees from
this war, displaced by Iraq's occupation of Kuwait. 750,000 "endured
brutalities, oppression, and torture." Although the date for the end
of the war is usually given as 1988, the struggle continued, and
500,000 Iranians were late killed (the Iranians say it was closer to 1
million), 100,000 by Hussein's chemical weapons. In one day, 5,000
men, women, and children were gassed. ("Sadaam's Other Crime," In The
National Interest: http://www.inthenationalinterest.com/Articles/Vol3Issue29/Vol3Issue29Askari.html
  and "Charges Facing Saddam Hussein," BBC:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3320293.stm )"

So, we have to make a decision about what you did here. Either the numbers, as a whole, are so unreliable that they fail to be useful, or you're cherrypicking numbers you like and ignoring the ones you don't.

In either case, your opinion is worthless.

A few years back Donald Knuth wrote a very enlightening open letter to the editorial board of his Journal of Algorithms. It gives a fascinating insider view of the process of journal publishing. My interpretation of Knuth's arguments is that traditional journals are now next to useless. Scientists already do all the typesetting and peer-reviewing of articles, and the internet means anybody can get together and start a free online journal with a very modest investment.

Ati's 1950 cards can do 30 times much work then your super uber cpu. Dont you feel stupid now?

Hmmmm....using video card GPUs for scientific number crunching. I wonder why no one has thought of that one...
http://folding.stanford.edu/English/FAQ-ATI

The millions of watts of wasted energy for distiributed computing non-sense is pushing the earth to global warming.

[citation needed]

That wasted watts also mean wasted money, go give your money to a fund or university, so they could buy dedicated hardware and do the required job much quicker.

Uhh, no. I am reluctant to donate money to 'charities' because a small slice of every dollar gets lost to "overheard" (salaries for administrative staff, expenses incurred by those staff, etc.). If I donate to the Folding@home project at Stanford by running Dr. Pande's software on my PCs, I know *exactly* what my donated dollars are being used for.

Not exactly new, is it. I was running a distributed cancer protein matching app six or seven years ago. Oxford University did it.

The Folding@home project at Stanford has been around that long as well.
http://folding.stanford.edu/

I am serious wondering why they dint think of the PS3s. 700,000 PS3s recently subscribed to a network that ended up in Peta Flops peak performance.

I think you are thinking of the Folding@home project at Stanford:
http://folding.stanford.edu/English/FAQ-PS3

I'm not talking about spare cycles. I'm talking about the naive notion that gets repeated in the press "the combined power of all these computers equals one of the fastest supercomputers in the world"

If you know so much about the topic, why aren't you at Stanford telling Dr. Pande and his group that they are wasting their time with all those desktops and PS3's? I'm sure Dr. Pande would love for you to point out how his research would be much better off if he'd just go buy some time on aupercomputer.

http://folding.stanford.edu/

Modeling biology is complicated. Very very complicated. Sure, we may develop better algorithms at some point, but even proving that they're correct takes massive computing power. Do a little reading on the Folding@Home project for example.

Sounds somewhat like the Prisoner's Dilemma. Of course, game theory covers other types of situations, of which PD is just one. But it's a pretty relevant one. I stand to gain by screwing everyone else, but only if they don't do the same to me. The difference here, though, is that the consumers become collateral damage.

This article was based on research published in 2004; see Got Game. Seems like there might be more recent thinking available...

A quick googling reveals Prof puts gaming to work, which was actually published today.

Also, the authors and their publisher have republished the "Got Game" book this year with a different title (The Kids are Alright:...) but the same content. Seems a bit underhanded, says one recent reviewer.

Sure, sure... mod down for relevance to topic...

but in the end they're still asking us to use our money to fund their research

It's not "their". Results are published in peer-review journals (see here). Benefits go to all mankind.