Slashdot Mirror

The technology's a bit older, according to this very nice article on Stanford spinoffs. Canon loaned Stanford a small laser printer in 1979, and Stanford folks integrated a microprocessor with it and then spun off Imagen to commericialize it.

Another point is that some Western companies do act responsibly. They include both Reebok and Nike . Reebok is a major supporter of Amnesty International. Of course, the best example is all the American companies (except one, Marathon) which signed the Sullivan Principles. The Sullivan Principles is an agreement to treat all employees in South Africa equally, regardless of skin color.

Westerners and Western companies are far more responsible than any Taiwanese company.

Now, consider Stanford University. It recently divested investments in 4 companies doing business in Darfur, where the worst government-sponsored genocide has occurred. What is clear is that much of Western society believes that business and human rights should not be separated although some (like some writers in SlashDot) in Western society believe otherwise.

Nonetheless, contrast the attitudes and behavior of Americans and Taiwanese. The difference is stark.

Everytime I need some scholarly information I know that I head to Amazon and immediately look in the college textbook section, don't you?

"I have a dream... to observe learning in schools."

Please read the chinese room argument.

Methinks this earlier blog that analyzed the same device was perhaps even more informative. I trust this other blogger's explanation more because it's pictures look more attractive.

1. Type movie name into search box, click enter.
2. Download movie.
3. Watch.

P.S. Video capture card + Winamp plugin to capture output to DirectSound and write to disk + editing/compression software of choice = digital quality piracy.

P.P.S. You never need to "crack" the encryption when someone gives you the cyphertext, the cypher specification, and the secret key.

Oh dear-
One might well ask why NASA makes false color images from infra-red cameras - or better yet, why the results from the Chombo x-ray observatory aren't visualized in their natural wavelength. Even optical telescope images would be nearly black if they were presented as a precise representation of the photons received - instead, they are brightened by several orders of magnitude.

The whole precept of scientific visualization is to use the human visual system to detect patterns in complex data. Whether or not those data represent naturally visible phenomena is immaterial. Consider the case of atmospheric simulations. I recently worked with a group visualizing the results of a severe storm which spawned a tornado. Leaving aside the question of the validity of such a simulation, our job was to help the scientists figure out, from their simulation, how a tornado forms (the exact details of which are unknown even today). To do that, they wanted to see the movement of air well before the tornado forms. Of course, once an actual tornado forms, it picks up all sorts of dust, and thus air movement is visible. However, the rotational movement that spawns a tornado is relatively mild, and in the natural world would be unobservable. By releasing virtual (i.e. fake and massless) particles into the simulation, the scientists were able to see horizontal vorticity up to 30km away from the storm center. In essence, we made invisible (to the naked eye) air molecules visible.

Now vorticity is a difficult thing to quantify - like pornography, you 'know it when you see it', but traditional analytic techniques (measuring curl of a vector field) yield an awful lot of noise. Using the human visual system, it is rather easy to detect. Whether anything will come from this particular visualization remains to be seen (it's early days yet). However, the scientists we worked with were excited by the discovery, and hopefully it will yield at least some small new insights, which could help improve weather models and tornado prediction.

Just like making invisible air movements visible may yield new insights into tornado formation, viewing dark matter distribution may yield new insights into galaxy/universe formation. Rendering the invisible is not just a neat trick, it is intended to engage the highly evolved pattern recognition system of our eyes and brain to provide insight into an unsolved problem.

As an aside, in some cases, we are very lucky, and complex problems present themselves naturally to our visual system, such as vorticity in a tonado funnel. Or, sometimes scientists are able to manipulate nature to provide what Pat Hanrahan calls "self-illustrating phenomena". One example of that would be a cloud-chamber for particle physics experiments. To see more examples of self illustrating phenomena, go to:
http://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs448b-04-win ter/lectures/selfillustrating/

--matt

You don't have to run Google Compute to fold, even if you want to fold for Google...

If you want to fold for team Google, install the Folding@home client from http://folding.stanford.edu/, and set your team to 446.

Why you'd want to do that, though, is beyond me. Fold for team 2630, instead - that way, you actually get to fold for a real team (The Tech Report). While you're at it, fold for the subteam (basically, a shared username) "dont_ya_mean_type" (without the quotes).

Oh dear-
One might well ask why NASA makes false color images from infra-red cameras - or better yet, why the results from the Chombo x-ray observatory aren't visualized in their natural wavelength. Even optical telescope images would be nearly black if they were presented as a precise representation of the photons received - instead, they are brightened by several orders of magnitude.

The whole precept of scientific visualization is to use the human visual system to detect patterns in complex data. Whether or not those data represent naturally visible phenomena is immaterial. Consider the case of atmospheric simulations. I recently worked with a group visualizing the results of a severe storm which spawned a tornado. Leaving aside the question of the validity of such a simulation, our job was to help the scientists figure out, from their simulation, how a tornado forms (the exact details of which are unknown even today). To do that, they wanted to see the movement of air well before the tornado forms. Of course, once an actual tornado forms, it picks up all sorts of dust, and thus air movement is visible. However, the rotational movement that spawns a tornado is relatively mild, and in the natural world would be unobservable. By releasing virtual (i.e. fake and massless) particles into the simulation, the scientists were able to see horizontal vorticity up to 30km away from the storm center. In essence, we made invisible (to the naked eye) air molecules visible.

Now vorticity is a difficult thing to quantify - like pornography, you 'know it when you see it', but traditional analytic techniques (measuring curl of a vector field) yield an awful lot of noise. Using the human visual system, it is rather easy to detect. Whether anything will come from this particular visualization remains to be seen (it's early days yet). However, the scientists we worked with were excited by the discovery, and hopefully it will yield at least some small new insights, which could help improve weather models and tornado prediction.

Just like making invisible air movements visible may yield new insights into tornado formation, viewing dark matter distribution may yield new insights into galaxy/universe formation. Rendering the invisible is not just a neat trick, it is intended to engage the highly evolved pattern recognition system of our eyes and brain to provide insight into an unsolved problem.

As an aside, in some cases, we are very lucky, and complex problems present themselves naturally to our visual system, such as vorticity in a tonado funnel. Or, sometimes scientists are able to manipulate nature to provide what Pat Hanrahan calls "self-illustrating phenomena". One example of that would be a cloud-chamber for particle physics experiments. To see more examples of self illustrating phenomena, go to:
http://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs448b-04-win ter/lectures/selfillustrating/

--matt

Unfortunately genome sequencing projects don't really lend themselves to a BOINC like infrastructure - what you're doing is assembling millions of short strands of DNA into a contiguous sequence. Consequently you need all the avaialable strands close by to compare each other against and fit them into the scaffold. Thats why these things tend to be done on big localised compute clusters and not distributed.

Genome annotation (actually marking out features in the DNA) is a different matter - it would be quite sensible to farm out "chunks" of assembled DNA to multiple machines for various gene prediction algorithms.

If you're interested in doing genome based distributed computation I'm sure Genome@Home w ould be delighted to hear from you.

Kaplan is hardly a kook. He is claiming that new information has come out in the recent antitrust trials, in particular, that Gates pushed Intel into dropping plans to invest in Go.

``I guess I've made it very clear that we view an Intel investment in Go as an anti-Microsoft move, both because Go competes with our systems software and because we think it will weaken the 386 PC standard. . . I'm asking you not to make any investment in Go Corporation,''

In his book, Startup, Kaplan describes how they shared trade secrets with Microsoft, something they were not keen on doing, but Microsoft promised to set a "Chinese wall" between their app division and the OS division, so only the applications people would know and that they'd be able to produce software in support of Go. In this excerpt from Startup, Kaplan details how Microsoft's app division made us of confidential information Go had shared with them to create Pen Windows, which, even as vapourware, effectively killed Go.

You may want to consider using idle CPU power for something that will help, then, such as Stanford's Folding@Home or one of the cancer distributed projects.

Your other concerns are still valid, and I'm not trying to belittle those, but you may be able to provide more help to others and to yourself than you think.

Hmm, where have I heard about this before again?
Exciting to read a paper on this fanastic new idea.

No way dude, What is life without flying cars to look forward to, I wont give that one up, Im waiting for these to be cheap enough to amuse me in a decades time personal jetpack and why not?

... the group--may be a mechanism for the evolution of ultruism...Readers will be impressed by the breadth of the analysis ...

more hits from: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/reviews/SOBUNT_R.html"

IIRC Stephen Gould, in his book "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory", also uses the variant spelling, although, knowing Gould's penchant for neologisms and his mastery of english, I wouldn't bet heavily on it.

Moiche

It's not really a vectorial coprocessor, more suited for large scale stream processing. I'm not sure what extra opening of specs would help in this area though, the programming specifications seem to be quite easily available (people know how to write shaders, afterall) and work has been done on using the GPUs as generalised streaming processors http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/brookgpu/ind ex.html being a prime example. Within the hardware limitations (of which there are many) they are freely programmable.

Indeed, qsort is known to be slow. See:

http://theory.stanford.edu/~amitp/rants/c++-vs-c/

A comparison with the much faster STL sort should be interesting.

Have a go at Roshambo.

Hm, as for the rat population maybe they need to sell off some of those many millions of sheeps (40+ million, IIRC) and get some cats

Which would screw our native species even more.

Introduced predators, especially cats and ferrets, have decimated out national icon the Kiwi (as in bird, not fruit) http://xenon.stanford.edu/~rsf/kiwi.html

Not to mention the coolest insect, the weta http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weta An insect that can grow close to the size of a rat (not a freaking cool animation studio that had a little to do with the movie-isation of some Tolkein books!)

As an island nation we have had our unique native fauna absolutely screwed over by introduced animals: rats, cats, ferrets, dogs etc. Our flora screwed by opossums, deer, goat(se), vegeterians, etc.

The only winners are the sheep, who have moved to Aussy to look for boyfriends. ;-)

Jeri Ellworth recently gave a talk at Stanford. She hacked on Commodore 64s as a kid, switched over to racing cars as a teenager, ran a computer store for a couple of years, and taught herself VLSI design, which she's used to do things like Commodore 64 emulators. It was a really cool talk, and it was interesting to see somebody who did a lot of car hacking as well as computers.

It depends. How thin you can make the solar sail is of critical importance. For example, a 12 micron solar sail will be superior to chemical rockets, mass-wise, for missions of longer than 2 months, and superior to ion drives for missions longer than two years. A one micron solar sail, however, will become superior to chemical rockets in just over five days, and ion drives in two months. I have some issues with their calculations (they assume constant solar flux, for example), but it still drives home how, if you can get a very thin sail, your accelerations can be incredible. Also, at least in theory, they'll be cheap to produce and difficult to have just fail on you. Not that I don't like the concept of M2P2 ;)

For comparison, Cosmos 1's sail is 5 microns (although it's not designed to be permanent). I was thinking the other night about a possibility (who knows if it is realistic). You could produce your sail in three layers:

1) A heavy, strong, flexible backing a dozen or so microns thick that will erode with sun exposure

2) A thin, durable, structurally weak layer less than a micron thick

3) An atomic-scale coating of aluminum

Of course, at regular intervals, you'd have to lay down a thick durable layer to keep the structure from tearing. The reasoning behind my idea is that you can create, stow, and deploy the sail in a heavy, durable fashion; however, once it has been in space for a few days/weeks, it becomes incredibly lightweight from solar exposure (but doesn't tear because it is no longer experiencing any significant forces beyond the uniform solar radiation pressure). You would unfurl with the heavy backing to the sun, and only switch to the aluminized side once the craft has lost mass.

In case you were curious. I'm posting the link to The Solarcar Project's website. (I'm the webmaster for the project).

http://www.stanford.edu/group/solarcar/site.htm/

If you just HAVE to see these shacks for your self. They are located on 180 Stock Farm Road. And what kind of a guy would I be if I didn't give you a map to it.

Speaking of Stanford, that photo looks suspiciously like it is on the Stanford campus, near where the Stanford solar car project is housed. Maybe its also where the truck that was used for the Stanford CityBlock project is stored. It would explain the origins of the photo without all the mystery. Here's a Google Earth image of what I think is the garage (lower-left) with the road and parking structure in the upper half of the photo. Maybe they are using this project's equipment. Or maybe this little garage is Stanford and Google's headquarters for plans of world domination.

http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/cityblock/

IAAP (I am a physicist), and here's the deal:

There are suggestions out there that one way to test for the existence of extra "compactified" spatial dimensions (the kind of stuff needed in string theories) is to look for deviations from Newton's 1/r^2 gravity at small distance scales. See, for example, here.

The problem is, it's very hard to measure just the gravitational interaction between two objects separated at micron scales. Gravity is incredibly weak compared to common forces like electrostatics and magnetic interactions, and even more exotic things like Casimir forces (related to the van der Waals interaction).

The Purdue team has shown that the measured Casimir force in their experiment acts just as expected, setting a new limit on how screwy gravity can be at these distance scales.

For what it's worth, there are two other big efforts in this area. The one at Stanford is led by Aharon Kapitulnik, and is so sensitive that their apparatus can detect the different forces on Au and Si in the earth's magnetic field due to diamagnetism (!). The one at Washington is reportedly even more sensitive, and there are rumors circulating that they may have seen something exciting.

The really cool thing here is how table-top solid state experiments may have something profound to say about high energy physics, without any big accelerators.

From the Folding@Home FAQ:

Who "owns" the results? What will happen to them?

Unlike other distributed computing projects, Folding@home is run by an academic institution (specifically the Pande Group, at Stanford University's Chemistry Department), which is a nonprofit institution dedicated to science research and education. We will not sell the data or make any money off of it.

Moreover, we will make the data available for others to use. In particular, the results from Folding@home will be made available on several levels. Most importantly, analysis of the simulations will be submitted to scientific journals for publication, and these journal articles will be posted on the web page after publication. Next, after publication of these scientific articles which analyze the data, the raw data of the folding runs will be available for everyone, including other researchers, here on this web site.

dont know about you but were i live electricity costs for running folding@home on a computer comes out to about 10 cents a day http://folding.stanford.edu/faq.html#misc.power

Why would people do this? So their Clan would get a higher score! If winning is not important, Commander, why keep score? Don't underestimate the average gamer's fascination with scores and rankings. In fact, I think this is crucial to the process.

Seriously, if this is like Folding@Home that gets out of the way when the CPU is being used, it would still get some crunching done in the game chat rooms and the in-between-the-levels limbo modes. If there's enough computing power left over for live TeamSpeak stuff, then there's power to spare (and to be used when you aren't speaking -- those who sing in TeamSpeak need not apply).

If the distributed computing organizations really wanted this to fly, all they'd have to do is partner with Amazon to offer a $1 off coupon on the game if you buy the version with the distributed client built-in.

Of course cancer or aliens isn't all that sexy to some of these folk, so the client would have to be computing something like NASCAR aerodynamics, or fractal-based lingerie for Lara Croft, or some hooey to capture Joe 6-pack gamer mindshare.

http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/ jobs-061505

very amusing, but not very helpful.

in terms of IT people giving you advice, Steve Jobs gave a commencement speech at Stanford this past week. I had a very high opinion of Jobs before this, but after reading the text here I think he's in exalted territory. Maybe something he says might be able to help you.

http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/ jobs-061505.html:
'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says
This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5 deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was t

Not quite. "Fair use" is a deliberately subjective four-part test that considers:

1. the purpose and character of your use
2. the nature of the copyrighted work
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion taken, and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market.

This is hardly a "new" theory. At best it is a restatement of the decades old theories that are expressed here:http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time-travel -phys/

1. http://www.iep.utm.edu/t/timetravel.htm

Time travel is a fairly new topic of scientific and philosophical investigation. In science, different models of the cosmos and the natural laws governing the universe imply different possibilities for time travel. Theories about time travel have changed as the dominant cosmological theories have evolved from classical, Newtonian conceptions to modern, relativistic and quantum mechanical conceptions. Philosophers were quick to note some of the implications of the new physics for venerable issues in metaphysics: the nature of time, causation and personal identity to name just a few. The subject continues to produce a fruitful cross-fertilization of ideas between scientists and philosophers as theorists in both fields struggle to resolve confounding paradoxes that emerge when time travel is pondered seriously. This article discusses both the scientific and philosophical issues relevant to time travel.

2. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time-travel-phys /

Time travel has been a staple of science fiction. With the advent of general relativity it has been entertained by serious physicists. But, especially in the philosophy literature, there have been arguments that time travel is inherently paradoxical. The most famous paradox is the grandfather paradox: you travel back in time and kill your grandfather, thereby preventing your own existence. To avoid inconsistency some circumstance will have to occur which makes you fail in this attempt to kill your grandfather. Doesn't this require some implausible constraint on otherwise unrelated circumstances? We examine such worries in the context of modern physics.

3. http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00001673/0 1/TMArchive.pdf

We discuss the possibility to build and operate a time machine, a device that produces closed timelike curves (CTCs). We specify the spacetime structure needed to implement a time machine and assess attempted no-go results against time machines in classical general relativity, semi-classical quantum gravity, quantum field theory on curved spacetime, and in Euclidean quantum gravity. Such no-go theorems for time machines would show that, under physically reasonable conditions, CTCs cannot develop in spacetimes initially free of these pathologies. Our review indicates that an investigation of the prospects of achieving no-go results has not been entirely successful in establishing such generality. At the same time, the pursuit of chronology protection results has proved to be a fruitful way to probe the foundations of classical GTR and the interface between general relativity and quantum field theory.

All attempts at Knuthian fascicles are limited to a "nice try" status, at best.

The article dedicates only a couple of paragraphs to PageRank, the main algorithm that Google uses, and about 2.5 pages to the rest. If anyone wants to know more about PageRank, here's Page and Brin's original paper: http://www-db.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

It kind of blows me away that they are allowing players to script their own objects, or so it seems.

I am a researcher in Astronomy and I have found that Google Schalor is very lacking in my field. They have bigger competition in Astronomy than in most fields ...

I am a researcher in a humanities discipline and I find the Web of Science, Scopus, Citeseer, and eBizSearch to be completely useless to me.

Clearly if they're no use to me, these tools must be of no use whatsoever to anyone at all!

I should hope that, with a little thought, it's obvious to all here present that different tools suit different fields. In my field Google Scholar is of some use - perhaps not as useful as HighWire Press, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and Google Print - but still of some use.

Here's an answer for you:
http://mosquitonet.stanford.edu/mip/
http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/mobileip-charter .html
http://www.eeng.dcu.ie/~jnoonan/mobileip/mipwork.h tm

overview: Your IP address is rooted with one provider who, when you're within his network sends traffic directly to you. When you're in a foreign n/w he forwards your traffic to an 'foreign agent' in the other n/w that sends it on to you. A mobile-ip daemon on your host takes care of all the automatic registration/deregistration.
The difficulty: As you said, agreements between operators :-(

Here's an answer for you:
http://mosquitonet.stanford.edu/mip/
http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/mobileip-charter .html
http://www.eeng.dcu.ie/~jnoonan/mobileip/mipwork.h tm

overview: Your IP address is rooted with one provider who, when you're within his network sends traffic directly to you. When you're in a foreign n/w he forwards your traffic to an 'foreign agent' in the other n/w that sends it on to you. A mobile-ip daemon on your host takes care of all the automatic registration/deregistration.
The difficulty: As you said, agreements between operators :-(

So who wants to rent this bad boy out to fold for team slashdot on folding@home? Then you can brag about your score to the.... um.... like 10 slashdotters who actually fold.

http://vspx27.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=t eampage&teamnum=11326/

Here's a link to a video of the speech so all those naysayers out there can actually inform themselves instead of reading a hack job by Wired.

My girlfriend (the smarter one of the two of us) was there.

Jobs didn't go on about dropping out of school to tell people that its the right thing to do. He was driving at that we should do what we enjoy because life is too short to live someone else's dream. It just so happened that he mentioned dropping out of school in the course of explaining his life story.

This article apparently explains it a lot better.

Personally (although every time I post in a thread related to education, I get moderated into oblivion), tell the kids to stay in school unless they know damn well what they want to do,and not because they're frustrated with it. That degree can be a fallback, and you can always go back to school if the need arises.

Here.

I'm always using my CPU, so I don't want it to go into low power mode. I support the Folding At Home and IBM's World Community Grid projects.

Even if I wasn't, I'm often still using my CPU for keeping Azereus running (Fedora distros).

I don't want it going offline. I want it doing my bidding full time.

If power management is disabled, what prompted you to do so?

Some of them are servers. The rest run Folding@Home.

and what would make you enable power management?

Being completely unable to afford not to. We've got quite a ways to go before energy becomes that expensive.

I hate idle computers, and by definition a computer in power-saving mode is idle.

It's been found that GPUs, despite their impressive floating point capabilities, can't compare to heavily-optimized and cache coherent CPU implementations of large matrix operations, such as ATLAS. The exception is when the result is to be displayed anyway, as in scientific visualization and Scout. The real drawback of GPUs is the readback speeds. When the result is done, if it isn't to be displayed, it must be read back into the CPU memory. This is notoriously inefficient. PCIe is improving this, but it's still a serious problem.

Check out SCPD over at Stanford University.

Still, I hope this will have a positive impact on FAH.