Slashdot Mirror

I would highly recommend checking out Bill Schottstaedt's snd.

You also may want to look at Mix. Some of the software here is also great.

You can do anything you want with 10 lines of code for the same reasons you can do anything with an excerpt out of the paper or a book. It's called fair use.

If you write a 4-line memory compression algorithm - it's just that, an algorithm. There probably wouldn't be that many ways if any to rewrite it. You'd have better luck protecting it with a patent.

10 lines is just a guideline I've heard over and over. There is, of course, no clear definition of fair use in the US, and recent Congresses wish to keep it that way. Check http://fairuse.stanford.edu/.

Genomic (and anti-genomics) Links [To Top]

Mapping the Icelandic Genome. "An Anthropology of the scientific, political, economic, religious, and ethical issues surrounding the deCode Project and its global implications." Contains useful pointers.

Indigenous people's coalition against biopiracy.

The Human Genome Diversity Project as explained by Stanford Professor and posted on the U.N. website.

Various UN reports on the Genome question.

An Outline : Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP) Background.

Cultural Survival has issue 20.2 (sum 1996) dedicated to 'Genes, People, and Property' issues.

The archive for discover magazine. Nov. 1994 issue has a few articles about genome and diversity.

The gene letter. The Nov. 96 issue has an HGDP article.

High school lesson plan for teaching students about the HGDP.

"The Gene Wars: Science, Politics, and the Human Genome." An excellent book review with bibliography and online resources.

National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) has a Bibliography Page about the HGP.

Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications (ELSI) of the HGP.

The Human Genome Diversity Project: Scientific, Social and Ethical Issues .

A list of articles from Native-L mailing list, listing all articles related to HGDP posted to the list.

Six papers given at various genome-related conferences. Topics include:

*"Why Human Genetics is a Social Science"
* "Racism, Eugenics, and the Burdens of History"
* "Scientific and Folk Idea About Heredity"
* "The Spectrum of Human Variation"
* "The Human Germ-Plasm Project: Eugenics in the 1920s and the 1990s."

Native net letter to HGDP scientists.

Pilot Projects for a Human Genome Diversity Project - Special Competition.

Molecular Anthropology Symposium at Stanford.

Seeds of Destruction. A must read for anyone who eats french fries or is concerned with genetically modified crops.

Also see Patents and Jumpstations.

Comics [To Top]

Angels of Health/Medicine Cartoon by Quino. Here is another one of a dis-orderly girl.

Patent$ and Thing$ [To Top]

An Upside article discussing patents and its history. Very informative.

Gene Patents and Bioethics.

6,000 human gene patents sought in BBC News and also the Washington Post.

American Society of Human Genetics Position Paper on Patenting of Expressed Sequence Tags.

of course the list is continually updated, ... hope this helps, bobbaqATyouknowHOO

Codon Usage Database
DNA is encoded as a series of nucleotides (G,A,T,C), but interpereted in groups of three, called "codons." This is a database of the frequencies of all 4^3 combinations for various species.

Info on Blast and FastA
We can also compare the genomes of various species to see how similar they are. The above link is a short description of how two of the major programs work, BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) and FastA (not an acroynm). There's some theoretical background on genome sequence comparison on Dr. Just's page.

If you want use BLAST to search for for things with similar genomes, just grab your favorite chunk of DNA and take it on down to the BLAST homepage at the NCBI, and let it search for chunks of DNA that are similar.
Don't know any gene sequences for you favorite organism? Then head to NCBI and type its scientific name into the "Search GenBank" box at the top.

If you're tired of this computer stuff, learn how actual DNA is scanned onto microarrays for analysis. Or, better yet, learn to build your own!

(And to think I was browsing Slashdot because I wanted to take a break from studying this.)

``Uncle'' McCarthy (the inventor of Lisp and co-founder of the MIT AI Lab, foster uncle to all hackers in the world) has written this document about sustainability of human progress. Many who play Cassandra should do well to read it. (Note: I am not taking position myself one way or another, but it is certainly worth reading.)

Feel free to buy an evaluation kit and see what experimentation shows. They've had them for two years, and there's mention on the net of a 1998 video describing and showing their technology. If you really like the tech, the article says they're auctioning it soon so you can get the whole package...

It is possible that users of lbnamed, the Perl DNS server, have done things like this for assorted reasons. Particularly as it's a little easier to modify lbnamed to do odd pattern things than it is to modify bind. I know that I considered this same DNS poisoning technology a year ago (as an SSL obfuscated verification trick...a hidden tripwire) but didn't need it yet.

To truly impress, they should have included any of the following features in the tech demo:

Real-time bezier surfacing
real-time reflection/refraction
properly weighted clothes
properly weighted hair
extremely detailed 3D scene
dynamic lighting
inverse kinematics
dynamic soft-body animation
hypertextures
amazingly detailed characters (e.g. this)
3D morphing
Behavior synthesis
Depth of field/motion blur/heat warping

As it stands, they merely showed off a nice version of the Unreal Tournament engine. 8 shadow-mapped lights (and the shadow map was pre-computed!), 2 motion-captured (and Shen Mue resolution, at that) characters, environmentally bump-mapped clothes, a texture mapped arena, and minimal facial animation. Every one of Sony's demos were far more impressive.

There's a slim chance of this not being a crackpot's work, but I seriously doubt it

Here is a proposal:

0) You identify yourself in as verifiable a way as have I.

1) I'll grant $1000 to the www.sourceXchange.com for the open source software project of your choice (or specification) if, by the end of the year 2000, a paper on the disputed idea authored by one of the disputed authors is not published by a scientific periodical to which most major university libraries are subscribers (at least 3 of Stanford, Cal Tech, MIT, CMU and Princeton).

2) Otherwise you'll grant $10,000 to www.sourceXchange.com for the open source software project of my choice (or specification).

Note that I'm setting 1 in 10 odds when the strong wording of your assertion could easily justify setting 1 in 100 odds. But it would be unfair of me to take advantage your willingness to disclose the exact measure of your confidence for public benefit when I haven't done so (except to state my assertion as fact). So 1 in 10 seems quite fair and $10,000 should be within your means if you are a high technology professional.

I await your reply here.

There's a slim chance of this not being a crackpot's work, but I seriously doubt it

Here is a proposal:

0) You identify yourself in as verifiable a way as have I.

1) I'll grant $1000 to the www.sourceXchange.com for the open source software project of your choice (or specification) if, by the end of the year 2000, a paper on the disputed idea authored by one of the disputed authors is not published by a scientific periodical to which most major university libraries are subscribers (at least 3 of Stanford, Cal Tech, MIT, CMU and Princeton).

2) Otherwise you'll grant $10,000 to www.sourceXchange.com for the open source software project of my choice (or specification).

Note that I'm setting 1 in 10 odds when the strong wording of your assertion could easily justify setting 1 in 100 odds. But it would be unfair of me to take advantage your willingness to disclose the exact measure of your confidence for public benefit when I haven't done so (except to state my assertion as fact). So 1 in 10 seems quite fair and $10,000 should be within your means if you are a high technology professional.

I await your reply here.

Now next stage has been reached where the core laws of quantum mechanics (the weird ones) have been shown to be theorems of a statistical theory that includes negative probabilities, rather than "laws of nature" per se, in the same way that Shannon's information theory is properly thought of as a domain of statistical philosophy rather than an a priori natural phenomenon.

It is reasonable to suspect that many profound consequent discoveries, such as those reported in this article, are waiting to be unearthed as the depth of weird statistical philosophy sinks in.

From Stanford: Pointer Fun With Blinky. Available for C, C++, Pascal, Java, and Ada. Stresses the importance of not dereferencing NULL pointers -- Blinky's clay head flies off. The only problem is it's distributed in QuickTime; I'm not certian if it's a free codec.

I decided not to mod this comment down, but rather post this comment . . . . otherwise, nobody would understand.

This is propaganda. There is no basis, no links, no hard evidience. Punch the CDA and McCain through your favorite search engine and see what it finds.

In FACT, McCain was reported to say any new measure that resembled the Communications Decency Act probably would not survive his committee, which oversees telecommunications. Furthermore, he's quoted as saying:

"I'm the father of small children, they all are far more computer literate than I am, and I've seen some of the stuff that they see and it disturbs me terribly. But I didn't know how you would implement that [law]. I didn't know who would decide what's decent."

McCain did endorse a bill that required schools and libraries with federally funded internet access, which I won't debate here. A bit more info on that bill is located here

In reality, the original sponsor behind the 1996 CDA was Senator Pressler. More information on authors of specific portions of the CDA are here.
McCain did add a lot of amendments to the bill, but so did everyone in the Senate. How else did the thing pass?? I'm not sure exactly what his changes entailed, but you can find out here.

Somebody mod the parent comment down into the flamebait category. It's nothing more than a sweeping piece political propaganda without backing at all.

I see little evidence for this, and there are lots of hints otherwise. Previous versions of the SRP license contained the warning

"Some of the algorithms in this distribution may be covered by patents in some countries; it is up to the user to ensure that any required licenses are obtained."

Two years ago I sent email to Thomas Wu asking if it was patented and got no response. Other people I've talked to also are concerned about this.

So while I can't point to clear evidence of patents, I urge great caution with SRP until a definitive answer on this question is provided. I like SRP, but the advantages over SSH are marginal enough that the intellectual property questions are far more important.

On another front, SRP is promoted because it allows users to choose their own easily-remembered passwords. But Bruce Schneier notes that computers are already fast enough to basically search the entire space of passwords that are easy for humans to remember. So if the password file on an SRP server is compromised, the passwords can be cracked if you try hard enough. I'm sure it is very expensive now, but over time the cost of doing this will drop since human memory capacity is not increasing.

--Neal

SRP clients are available currently on the UNIX, and WIN32 (names previouslly mentioned in other posts) platforms, among others. An SRP enabled telnet client for the MacOS, dataComet, will be released within a month from databeast.. Java, Phython, PERL and SSH modules/implementations are also available now. SRP is well on it's way to standardization, as more and more SRP aware clients/servers are being released on a constant, and consistant basis, in addition to the rapid vendor acceptance it has lately received.

http://srp.stanford.edu/srp/h istory.html#inconvenient

There is a project that has started recently here at Stanford to investigate the possibility of using distributed web caches as a means of preserving information on the Web. The project is called "LOCKSS" (Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe), and more information can be found at lockss.stanford.edu.

This project definitely does not address all the issues with digital-document preservation; it definitely does _not_ solve the document-format problem. Its goal is to make digital publishing "immutable" so that publishers cannot modify or withdraw their work after it is published.

Disclaimer: I work for one of the groups which is participating with the LOCKSS project, but I'm not working directly with it.

Lots of people have criticized the study on the social effects of Net use without looking at the study itself. That's understandable, given the overwhelming amount of press coverage it's gotten. But since a few people have asked for more substantial analysis, here are a few of my thoughts. Some of the most important flaws in the study.

(The study can be found here:
ht tp://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/report/news/februa ry16/internetsurvey-216.html.)

(1) Know the researchers. Norman Nie, the study's lead author, is a Stanford political science professor who has a vested interest in proving that people are uninterested in one another: he has substantially based his career on showing how Americans are detached from civil society. He has done several studies on voter participation - with the understanding that low voter turnout is a bad thing (instead of a sign of voter contentedness). Look at the list of his publications for yourself - it is rife with his belief that Americans are forgetting what "citizenship" is all about.

Nie's work is reminiscent of the work of Robert Putnam, who argued that American society was in steep decline because more people are - get this - bowling alone. These goofy, academic simpering simpletons believe that there is always a cloud to every silver lining, and if they took a few moments to bring their heads out of the oxygen-deprived ivory tower, they would see how wrong they are - and they would be laughed to death.

(2) The question is suspect. From the outset, the study intends to frame the question inappropriately, asking whether we will "live in a better informed and connected, more engaged and participatory society" (the sort of society Nie would prefer, based on his previous leanings), or will live in a society "of lonely ex-couch potatoes glued to computer screens, whose human contacts are largely impersonal and whose political beliefs are easily manipulated."

Whoa! Why is that framed in black or white, one or zero, with nothing between? Are citizenship and society simple on-or-off characteristics, which you've either got or you haven't? From the very first page, the study betrays its authors' intent: to show that anything less than ideal citizenship is dangerous.

(3) Is a quantitative study the best way to answer these questions? The study is a product of Stanford's "Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society." The study reflects their juvenile belief that human society, in all its complexity, can be summed up in numbers: "For answers to these questions, we must move from ideological claims to empirical evidence."

Again, false! Empirical evidence - putting numbers on human social behavior - does not answer the underlying questions at all. As the discussions on Slashdot have shown, the important questions here are ideological. It is not enough to say that people have gone from spending X hours with friends to spending Y hours with friends. Knowing the simple numbers tells you bubkus - you still need to know whether and why spending time with your friends is good, and which aspects are being preserved as technology changes our society.

(4) Extreme conclusions are reached with minimal data. The study says that the people who have used the Internet the longest report that they spend more time online. The authors conclude that the data therefore, "strongly suggest a model of social change with not only a growing number of Internet users, but with web users doing more and more things on the internet in the future."

O, the surprise! People who have done something for a while may want to do more of it? That seems pretty natural - but where is the evidence for "a model of social change"? The only way to squeeze significant "social change" out of these data is by extrapolating - and that is dangerous with data so sparse, and especially with data of a developing scenario. My favorite example of a misguided extrapolation is this: At the time of Elvis's death, there were under 300 Elvis impersonators. By 1996, there were over 7,000. By extrapolating that rate of increase, we can know that one out of every four humans on the planet will be Elvis impersonators by 2020.

(5) So What? The study's conclusions are hardly alarming.

Look at the chart that purports to show that "Social Isolation Increases" as Net use increases.

The first flaw in this chart is that "social isolation" supposedly is what happens when you don't talk on the phone, or talk to your family, or attend events outside the home. If, however, you go shopping regularly, e-mail your family, and go to school or work every day, you are considered "socially isolated." Huh?

The second obvious flaw is in the dotted lines, which don't actually represent anything. The only real data are the dark, plotted points; lines representing trends really shouldn't be drawn with so little data. It's just a sloppy representation of the data.

Finally, so what? Less than one out of six people who use the Internet more than ten hours a week (the highest category on the chart) said they spend less time with their family or their friends, or spend less time at events outside of the house. Those are hardly numbers to cry about? Come on, now! I'd be concerned if, say, 60 percent of the people who use the Net that often report that they occasionally kill their neighbors' pets, but staying off the phone is hardly an apocalyptic signal.

(6) Human behavior doesn't fit into neat little check boxes. The professors conclude vehemently (they wrote it in bold and italics) that, "Clearly the media are competing... You can't surf the web and watch TV at the same time."

What silliness. As James Gleick showed in his brilliant Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, we are animals especially able to multi-task. We absorb media from wherever we can, and can successfully navigate between television, radio and the Web simultaneously - because we can mentally tune between them during commercials, or during those painful minutes as we wait for the X-Men trailer to download. Claiming that we cannot concurrently absorb input from multiple media is plain silly! We adapt easily - we can watch television, carry on phone conversations and flip through Playboy all at once - so why pretend we are handicapped when it comes to newer media?

(7) The study relies on people's perceptions, not facts. A typical flaw in quantitative studies is that they purport to show facts about behavior - while they only really show facts through the filter of people's perceptions.

So does the study actually show that people spend the same amount of time in traffic, or more time at work? No, the study's authors didn't follow people around to measure time spent at home and time spent in the office - they asked people to report on themselves. Everybody knows how difficult self-assessment is; how accurate can these results be?

What's more, we should be suspicious about this "Internet is making us work more" claim. Is it true that time spent "at work" is the same as time spent working? Hasn't everybody who has access to the Web at work used some of that time (a lot of time, for some of us) fooling around online? We don't need a study to prove it - just look at all the companies that are spying on employees' computer use and even firing them because of "inappropriate" Net visits while on the job.

(8) Surveys can give you any answer you want. It is well known in political circles that polls can be tweaked to elicit any desired answers from respondents. In particular, the placing of key questions in a long list can affect the responses.

Here's a silly example of what I mean. Try it on a friend or coworker (if you still interact with friends or coworkers, which might surprise these academics). Ask the following questions. What color is grass? What color is money? What color do people supposedly turn when they are envious? What color is a cucumber? What color is at the top of a streetlight?

If the questions follow in rapid succesion, the answerer will be so accustomed to the pattern - all the answers would seem to be green - that they would probably mindlessly answer "green," for the last question, although the correct answer to the last question is red.

That is an oversimplified way of representing a serious problem with quantitative research that depends on answering questions. When you look at the questions (here) asked in the study, you get a similar feeling - the questions could be tweaked to get alternative results. In particular, Question 19, the question which has generated all the grand debate here on Slashdot and elsewhere, is a question that, perhaps accidentally, makes respondents feel self-pity and guilt. It asks respondents to rate whether using the Internet has affected each of these behaviors:

Working at the office
Working at home
Shopping in stores
Commuting in traffic
Reading newspapers
Watching television
Spending time with your family
Spending time with your friends
Watching television
Attending events

Imagine if the questions were framed in the way that the authors of this study are framing the results now. Imagine if the question asked: "Do you feel that using the Internet has isolated you socially?" or "Do you feel lonely because of the Internet?" or "Do you contribute less well to society because of the Internet?" or "Do you feel like your life is missing something, and you are now a pawn of corporations that pour their crass commercialization into your cranium over the Net without the buffering effects of friends and family?"

Conclusion: If you out to prove something statistically, you'll succeed. This study, which got hundreds of hours and thousands of column-inches of press coverage, is not serious or significant: it is an attempt by supposedly impartial professors to prove an ideological point while ostentatiously disdaining ideology.

I would be delighted to hear others' further criticism of the study itself - its aims and methodolgy.

Yours,
A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society

Lots of people have criticized the study on the social effects of Net use without looking at the study itself. That's understandable, given the overwhelming amount of press coverage it's gotten. But since a few people have asked for more substantial analysis, here are a few of my thoughts. Some of the most important flaws in the study.

(The study can be found here:
ht tp://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/report/news/februa ry16/internetsurvey-216.html.)

(1) Know the researchers. Norman Nie, the study's lead author, is a Stanford political science professor who has a vested interest in proving that people are uninterested in one another: he has substantially based his career on showing how Americans are detached from civil society. He has done several studies on voter participation - with the understanding that low voter turnout is a bad thing (instead of a sign of voter contentedness). Look at the list of his publications for yourself - it is rife with his belief that Americans are forgetting what "citizenship" is all about.

Nie's work is reminiscent of the work of Robert Putnam, who argued that American society was in steep decline because more people are - get this - bowling alone. These goofy, academic simpering simpletons believe that there is always a cloud to every silver lining, and if they took a few moments to bring their heads out of the oxygen-deprived ivory tower, they would see how wrong they are - and they would be laughed to death.

(2) The question is suspect. From the outset, the study intends to frame the question inappropriately, asking whether we will "live in a better informed and connected, more engaged and participatory society" (the sort of society Nie would prefer, based on his previous leanings), or will live in a society "of lonely ex-couch potatoes glued to computer screens, whose human contacts are largely impersonal and whose political beliefs are easily manipulated."

Whoa! Why is that framed in black or white, one or zero, with nothing between? Are citizenship and society simple on-or-off characteristics, which you've either got or you haven't? From the very first page, the study betrays its authors' intent: to show that anything less than ideal citizenship is dangerous.

(3) Is a quantitative study the best way to answer these questions? The study is a product of Stanford's "Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society." The study reflects their juvenile belief that human society, in all its complexity, can be summed up in numbers: "For answers to these questions, we must move from ideological claims to empirical evidence."

Again, false! Empirical evidence - putting numbers on human social behavior - does not answer the underlying questions at all. As the discussions on Slashdot have shown, the important questions here are ideological. It is not enough to say that people have gone from spending X hours with friends to spending Y hours with friends. Knowing the simple numbers tells you bubkus - you still need to know whether and why spending time with your friends is good, and which aspects are being preserved as technology changes our society.

(4) Extreme conclusions are reached with minimal data. The study says that the people who have used the Internet the longest report that they spend more time online. The authors conclude that the data therefore, "strongly suggest a model of social change with not only a growing number of Internet users, but with web users doing more and more things on the internet in the future."

O, the surprise! People who have done something for a while may want to do more of it? That seems pretty natural - but where is the evidence for "a model of social change"? The only way to squeeze significant "social change" out of these data is by extrapolating - and that is dangerous with data so sparse, and especially with data of a developing scenario. My favorite example of a misguided extrapolation is this: At the time of Elvis's death, there were under 300 Elvis impersonators. By 1996, there were over 7,000. By extrapolating that rate of increase, we can know that one out of every four humans on the planet will be Elvis impersonators by 2020.

(5) So What? The study's conclusions are hardly alarming.

Look at the chart that purports to show that "Social Isolation Increases" as Net use increases.

The first flaw in this chart is that "social isolation" supposedly is what happens when you don't talk on the phone, or talk to your family, or attend events outside the home. If, however, you go shopping regularly, e-mail your family, and go to school or work every day, you are considered "socially isolated." Huh?

The second obvious flaw is in the dotted lines, which don't actually represent anything. The only real data are the dark, plotted points; lines representing trends really shouldn't be drawn with so little data. It's just a sloppy representation of the data.

Finally, so what? Less than one out of six people who use the Internet more than ten hours a week (the highest category on the chart) said they spend less time with their family or their friends, or spend less time at events outside of the house. Those are hardly numbers to cry about? Come on, now! I'd be concerned if, say, 60 percent of the people who use the Net that often report that they occasionally kill their neighbors' pets, but staying off the phone is hardly an apocalyptic signal.

(6) Human behavior doesn't fit into neat little check boxes. The professors conclude vehemently (they wrote it in bold and italics) that, "Clearly the media are competing... You can't surf the web and watch TV at the same time."

What silliness. As James Gleick showed in his brilliant Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, we are animals especially able to multi-task. We absorb media from wherever we can, and can successfully navigate between television, radio and the Web simultaneously - because we can mentally tune between them during commercials, or during those painful minutes as we wait for the X-Men trailer to download. Claiming that we cannot concurrently absorb input from multiple media is plain silly! We adapt easily - we can watch television, carry on phone conversations and flip through Playboy all at once - so why pretend we are handicapped when it comes to newer media?

(7) The study relies on people's perceptions, not facts. A typical flaw in quantitative studies is that they purport to show facts about behavior - while they only really show facts through the filter of people's perceptions.

So does the study actually show that people spend the same amount of time in traffic, or more time at work? No, the study's authors didn't follow people around to measure time spent at home and time spent in the office - they asked people to report on themselves. Everybody knows how difficult self-assessment is; how accurate can these results be?

What's more, we should be suspicious about this "Internet is making us work more" claim. Is it true that time spent "at work" is the same as time spent working? Hasn't everybody who has access to the Web at work used some of that time (a lot of time, for some of us) fooling around online? We don't need a study to prove it - just look at all the companies that are spying on employees' computer use and even firing them because of "inappropriate" Net visits while on the job.

(8) Surveys can give you any answer you want. It is well known in political circles that polls can be tweaked to elicit any desired answers from respondents. In particular, the placing of key questions in a long list can affect the responses.

Here's a silly example of what I mean. Try it on a friend or coworker (if you still interact with friends or coworkers, which might surprise these academics). Ask the following questions. What color is grass? What color is money? What color do people supposedly turn when they are envious? What color is a cucumber? What color is at the top of a streetlight?

If the questions follow in rapid succesion, the answerer will be so accustomed to the pattern - all the answers would seem to be green - that they would probably mindlessly answer "green," for the last question, although the correct answer to the last question is red.

That is an oversimplified way of representing a serious problem with quantitative research that depends on answering questions. When you look at the questions (here) asked in the study, you get a similar feeling - the questions could be tweaked to get alternative results. In particular, Question 19, the question which has generated all the grand debate here on Slashdot and elsewhere, is a question that, perhaps accidentally, makes respondents feel self-pity and guilt. It asks respondents to rate whether using the Internet has affected each of these behaviors:

Working at the office
Working at home
Shopping in stores
Commuting in traffic
Reading newspapers
Watching television
Spending time with your family
Spending time with your friends
Watching television
Attending events

Imagine if the questions were framed in the way that the authors of this study are framing the results now. Imagine if the question asked: "Do you feel that using the Internet has isolated you socially?" or "Do you feel lonely because of the Internet?" or "Do you contribute less well to society because of the Internet?" or "Do you feel like your life is missing something, and you are now a pawn of corporations that pour their crass commercialization into your cranium over the Net without the buffering effects of friends and family?"

Conclusion: If you out to prove something statistically, you'll succeed. This study, which got hundreds of hours and thousands of column-inches of press coverage, is not serious or significant: it is an attempt by supposedly impartial professors to prove an ideological point while ostentatiously disdaining ideology.

I would be delighted to hear others' further criticism of the study itself - its aims and methodolgy.

Yours,
A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society

Lots of people have criticized the study on the social effects of Net use without looking at the study itself. That's understandable, given the overwhelming amount of press coverage it's gotten. But since a few people have asked for more substantial analysis, here are a few of my thoughts. Some of the most important flaws in the study.

(The study can be found here:
ht tp://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/report/news/februa ry16/internetsurvey-216.html.)

(1) Know the researchers. Norman Nie, the study's lead author, is a Stanford political science professor who has a vested interest in proving that people are uninterested in one another: he has substantially based his career on showing how Americans are detached from civil society. He has done several studies on voter participation - with the understanding that low voter turnout is a bad thing (instead of a sign of voter contentedness). Look at the list of his publications for yourself - it is rife with his belief that Americans are forgetting what "citizenship" is all about.

Nie's work is reminiscent of the work of Robert Putnam, who argued that American society was in steep decline because more people are - get this - bowling alone. These goofy, academic simpering simpletons believe that there is always a cloud to every silver lining, and if they took a few moments to bring their heads out of the oxygen-deprived ivory tower, they would see how wrong they are - and they would be laughed to death.

(2) The question is suspect. From the outset, the study intends to frame the question inappropriately, asking whether we will "live in a better informed and connected, more engaged and participatory society" (the sort of society Nie would prefer, based on his previous leanings), or will live in a society "of lonely ex-couch potatoes glued to computer screens, whose human contacts are largely impersonal and whose political beliefs are easily manipulated."

Whoa! Why is that framed in black or white, one or zero, with nothing between? Are citizenship and society simple on-or-off characteristics, which you've either got or you haven't? From the very first page, the study betrays its authors' intent: to show that anything less than ideal citizenship is dangerous.

(3) Is a quantitative study the best way to answer these questions? The study is a product of Stanford's "Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society." The study reflects their juvenile belief that human society, in all its complexity, can be summed up in numbers: "For answers to these questions, we must move from ideological claims to empirical evidence."

Again, false! Empirical evidence - putting numbers on human social behavior - does not answer the underlying questions at all. As the discussions on Slashdot have shown, the important questions here are ideological. It is not enough to say that people have gone from spending X hours with friends to spending Y hours with friends. Knowing the simple numbers tells you bubkus - you still need to know whether and why spending time with your friends is good, and which aspects are being preserved as technology changes our society.

(4) Extreme conclusions are reached with minimal data. The study says that the people who have used the Internet the longest report that they spend more time online. The authors conclude that the data therefore, "strongly suggest a model of social change with not only a growing number of Internet users, but with web users doing more and more things on the internet in the future."

O, the surprise! People who have done something for a while may want to do more of it? That seems pretty natural - but where is the evidence for "a model of social change"? The only way to squeeze significant "social change" out of these data is by extrapolating - and that is dangerous with data so sparse, and especially with data of a developing scenario. My favorite example of a misguided extrapolation is this: At the time of Elvis's death, there were under 300 Elvis impersonators. By 1996, there were over 7,000. By extrapolating that rate of increase, we can know that one out of every four humans on the planet will be Elvis impersonators by 2020.

(5) So What? The study's conclusions are hardly alarming.

Look at the chart that purports to show that "Social Isolation Increases" as Net use increases.

The first flaw in this chart is that "social isolation" supposedly is what happens when you don't talk on the phone, or talk to your family, or attend events outside the home. If, however, you go shopping regularly, e-mail your family, and go to school or work every day, you are considered "socially isolated." Huh?

The second obvious flaw is in the dotted lines, which don't actually represent anything. The only real data are the dark, plotted points; lines representing trends really shouldn't be drawn with so little data. It's just a sloppy representation of the data.

Finally, so what? Less than one out of six people who use the Internet more than ten hours a week (the highest category on the chart) said they spend less time with their family or their friends, or spend less time at events outside of the house. Those are hardly numbers to cry about? Come on, now! I'd be concerned if, say, 60 percent of the people who use the Net that often report that they occasionally kill their neighbors' pets, but staying off the phone is hardly an apocalyptic signal.

(6) Human behavior doesn't fit into neat little check boxes. The professors conclude vehemently (they wrote it in bold and italics) that, "Clearly the media are competing... You can't surf the web and watch TV at the same time."

What silliness. As James Gleick showed in his brilliant Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, we are animals especially able to multi-task. We absorb media from wherever we can, and can successfully navigate between television, radio and the Web simultaneously - because we can mentally tune between them during commercials, or during those painful minutes as we wait for the X-Men trailer to download. Claiming that we cannot concurrently absorb input from multiple media is plain silly! We adapt easily - we can watch television, carry on phone conversations and flip through Playboy all at once - so why pretend we are handicapped when it comes to newer media?

(7) The study relies on people's perceptions, not facts. A typical flaw in quantitative studies is that they purport to show facts about behavior - while they only really show facts through the filter of people's perceptions.

So does the study actually show that people spend the same amount of time in traffic, or more time at work? No, the study's authors didn't follow people around to measure time spent at home and time spent in the office - they asked people to report on themselves. Everybody knows how difficult self-assessment is; how accurate can these results be?

What's more, we should be suspicious about this "Internet is making us work more" claim. Is it true that time spent "at work" is the same as time spent working? Hasn't everybody who has access to the Web at work used some of that time (a lot of time, for some of us) fooling around online? We don't need a study to prove it - just look at all the companies that are spying on employees' computer use and even firing them because of "inappropriate" Net visits while on the job.

(8) Surveys can give you any answer you want. It is well known in political circles that polls can be tweaked to elicit any desired answers from respondents. In particular, the placing of key questions in a long list can affect the responses.

Here's a silly example of what I mean. Try it on a friend or coworker (if you still interact with friends or coworkers, which might surprise these academics). Ask the following questions. What color is grass? What color is money? What color do people supposedly turn when they are envious? What color is a cucumber? What color is at the top of a streetlight?

If the questions follow in rapid succesion, the answerer will be so accustomed to the pattern - all the answers would seem to be green - that they would probably mindlessly answer "green," for the last question, although the correct answer to the last question is red.

That is an oversimplified way of representing a serious problem with quantitative research that depends on answering questions. When you look at the questions (here) asked in the study, you get a similar feeling - the questions could be tweaked to get alternative results. In particular, Question 19, the question which has generated all the grand debate here on Slashdot and elsewhere, is a question that, perhaps accidentally, makes respondents feel self-pity and guilt. It asks respondents to rate whether using the Internet has affected each of these behaviors:

Working at the office
Working at home
Shopping in stores
Commuting in traffic
Reading newspapers
Watching television
Spending time with your family
Spending time with your friends
Watching television
Attending events

Imagine if the questions were framed in the way that the authors of this study are framing the results now. Imagine if the question asked: "Do you feel that using the Internet has isolated you socially?" or "Do you feel lonely because of the Internet?" or "Do you contribute less well to society because of the Internet?" or "Do you feel like your life is missing something, and you are now a pawn of corporations that pour their crass commercialization into your cranium over the Net without the buffering effects of friends and family?"

Conclusion: If you out to prove something statistically, you'll succeed. This study, which got hundreds of hours and thousands of column-inches of press coverage, is not serious or significant: it is an attempt by supposedly impartial professors to prove an ideological point while ostentatiously disdaining ideology.

I would be delighted to hear others' further criticism of the study itself - its aims and methodolgy.

Yours,
A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society

Lots of people have criticized the study on the social effects of Net use without looking at the study itself. That's understandable, given the overwhelming amount of press coverage it's gotten. But since a few people have asked for more substantial analysis, here are a few of my thoughts. Some of the most important flaws in the study.

(The study can be found here:
ht tp://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/report/news/februa ry16/internetsurvey-216.html.)

(1) Know the researchers. Norman Nie, the study's lead author, is a Stanford political science professor who has a vested interest in proving that people are uninterested in one another: he has substantially based his career on showing how Americans are detached from civil society. He has done several studies on voter participation - with the understanding that low voter turnout is a bad thing (instead of a sign of voter contentedness). Look at the list of his publications for yourself - it is rife with his belief that Americans are forgetting what "citizenship" is all about.

Nie's work is reminiscent of the work of Robert Putnam, who argued that American society was in steep decline because more people are - get this - bowling alone. These goofy, academic simpering simpletons believe that there is always a cloud to every silver lining, and if they took a few moments to bring their heads out of the oxygen-deprived ivory tower, they would see how wrong they are - and they would be laughed to death.

(2) The question is suspect. From the outset, the study intends to frame the question inappropriately, asking whether we will "live in a better informed and connected, more engaged and participatory society" (the sort of society Nie would prefer, based on his previous leanings), or will live in a society "of lonely ex-couch potatoes glued to computer screens, whose human contacts are largely impersonal and whose political beliefs are easily manipulated."

Whoa! Why is that framed in black or white, one or zero, with nothing between? Are citizenship and society simple on-or-off characteristics, which you've either got or you haven't? From the very first page, the study betrays its authors' intent: to show that anything less than ideal citizenship is dangerous.

(3) Is a quantitative study the best way to answer these questions? The study is a product of Stanford's "Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society." The study reflects their juvenile belief that human society, in all its complexity, can be summed up in numbers: "For answers to these questions, we must move from ideological claims to empirical evidence."

Again, false! Empirical evidence - putting numbers on human social behavior - does not answer the underlying questions at all. As the discussions on Slashdot have shown, the important questions here are ideological. It is not enough to say that people have gone from spending X hours with friends to spending Y hours with friends. Knowing the simple numbers tells you bubkus - you still need to know whether and why spending time with your friends is good, and which aspects are being preserved as technology changes our society.

(4) Extreme conclusions are reached with minimal data. The study says that the people who have used the Internet the longest report that they spend more time online. The authors conclude that the data therefore, "strongly suggest a model of social change with not only a growing number of Internet users, but with web users doing more and more things on the internet in the future."

O, the surprise! People who have done something for a while may want to do more of it? That seems pretty natural - but where is the evidence for "a model of social change"? The only way to squeeze significant "social change" out of these data is by extrapolating - and that is dangerous with data so sparse, and especially with data of a developing scenario. My favorite example of a misguided extrapolation is this: At the time of Elvis's death, there were under 300 Elvis impersonators. By 1996, there were over 7,000. By extrapolating that rate of increase, we can know that one out of every four humans on the planet will be Elvis impersonators by 2020.

(5) So What? The study's conclusions are hardly alarming.

Look at the chart that purports to show that "Social Isolation Increases" as Net use increases.

The first flaw in this chart is that "social isolation" supposedly is what happens when you don't talk on the phone, or talk to your family, or attend events outside the home. If, however, you go shopping regularly, e-mail your family, and go to school or work every day, you are considered "socially isolated." Huh?

The second obvious flaw is in the dotted lines, which don't actually represent anything. The only real data are the dark, plotted points; lines representing trends really shouldn't be drawn with so little data. It's just a sloppy representation of the data.

Finally, so what? Less than one out of six people who use the Internet more than ten hours a week (the highest category on the chart) said they spend less time with their family or their friends, or spend less time at events outside of the house. Those are hardly numbers to cry about? Come on, now! I'd be concerned if, say, 60 percent of the people who use the Net that often report that they occasionally kill their neighbors' pets, but staying off the phone is hardly an apocalyptic signal.

(6) Human behavior doesn't fit into neat little check boxes. The professors conclude vehemently (they wrote it in bold and italics) that, "Clearly the media are competing... You can't surf the web and watch TV at the same time."

What silliness. As James Gleick showed in his brilliant Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, we are animals especially able to multi-task. We absorb media from wherever we can, and can successfully navigate between television, radio and the Web simultaneously - because we can mentally tune between them during commercials, or during those painful minutes as we wait for the X-Men trailer to download. Claiming that we cannot concurrently absorb input from multiple media is plain silly! We adapt easily - we can watch television, carry on phone conversations and flip through Playboy all at once - so why pretend we are handicapped when it comes to newer media?

(7) The study relies on people's perceptions, not facts. A typical flaw in quantitative studies is that they purport to show facts about behavior - while they only really show facts through the filter of people's perceptions.

So does the study actually show that people spend the same amount of time in traffic, or more time at work? No, the study's authors didn't follow people around to measure time spent at home and time spent in the office - they asked people to report on themselves. Everybody knows how difficult self-assessment is; how accurate can these results be?

What's more, we should be suspicious about this "Internet is making us work more" claim. Is it true that time spent "at work" is the same as time spent working? Hasn't everybody who has access to the Web at work used some of that time (a lot of time, for some of us) fooling around online? We don't need a study to prove it - just look at all the companies that are spying on employees' computer use and even firing them because of "inappropriate" Net visits while on the job.

(8) Surveys can give you any answer you want. It is well known in political circles that polls can be tweaked to elicit any desired answers from respondents. In particular, the placing of key questions in a long list can affect the responses.

Here's a silly example of what I mean. Try it on a friend or coworker (if you still interact with friends or coworkers, which might surprise these academics). Ask the following questions. What color is grass? What color is money? What color do people supposedly turn when they are envious? What color is a cucumber? What color is at the top of a streetlight?

If the questions follow in rapid succesion, the answerer will be so accustomed to the pattern - all the answers would seem to be green - that they would probably mindlessly answer "green," for the last question, although the correct answer to the last question is red.

That is an oversimplified way of representing a serious problem with quantitative research that depends on answering questions. When you look at the questions (here) asked in the study, you get a similar feeling - the questions could be tweaked to get alternative results. In particular, Question 19, the question which has generated all the grand debate here on Slashdot and elsewhere, is a question that, perhaps accidentally, makes respondents feel self-pity and guilt. It asks respondents to rate whether using the Internet has affected each of these behaviors:

Working at the office
Working at home
Shopping in stores
Commuting in traffic
Reading newspapers
Watching television
Spending time with your family
Spending time with your friends
Watching television
Attending events

Imagine if the questions were framed in the way that the authors of this study are framing the results now. Imagine if the question asked: "Do you feel that using the Internet has isolated you socially?" or "Do you feel lonely because of the Internet?" or "Do you contribute less well to society because of the Internet?" or "Do you feel like your life is missing something, and you are now a pawn of corporations that pour their crass commercialization into your cranium over the Net without the buffering effects of friends and family?"

Conclusion: If you out to prove something statistically, you'll succeed. This study, which got hundreds of hours and thousands of column-inches of press coverage, is not serious or significant: it is an attempt by supposedly impartial professors to prove an ideological point while ostentatiously disdaining ideology.

I would be delighted to hear others' further criticism of the study itself - its aims and methodolgy.

Yours,
A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society

The correct way to pronounce it is Ka-NOOTH. You can verify it here.

that their research methods probably are skewing their data! Reading through the Stanford site I noticed that they distributed WebTV consoles to their test subjects (see methods used). As I see it, this will cause (a) a decrease in TV viewing proportional to Internet use due to the use of the television and (b) a decrease in telephone conversation proportional to the time spent using the line as a dialup connection. And then they act surprised that such a trend shows up in their data. I wonder how many of the people who said they do more work at home and the same amount at the office are telecommuters?

I'm surprised that they didn't do a better job of analyzing their methods. Their publication doesn't seem to even consider the possibility of these variables confounding each other. At best, it shows a lack of awareness of the medium, at worst a blatant disregard for standard self - analysis procedures. It seems to me that their research itself may have been the cause for some of the percieved trends. At this point it would take a lot of explanation to convince me that this survey wasn't entirely inconclusive.

"Space exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit"
-Buzz Aldarin

TAOCP homepage

Put it this way, volume 5 isn't estimated to be done until 2009, when work on vol 6 and 7 will start:)

-----------------------------------

Maybe you are referring to the (quite common) misinterpretation of the Church-Turing hypothesis. There is a fairly good explanation here in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction

The policies on Linux shifted from no official regognition or support to actually producing a (RH-based) distribution. This actually makes a lot of sense and is one of Linux's prime advantages. Its a *lot* easier for them to make their own distribution than to support the myriad others. What's also great is that they are willing to make requested changes...

a) They were able to produce a CD/download that installs *preconfigured* for Stanford. This eases support headaches enourmously with tough things like AFS.

b) This gives them more indirect control over the openness of boxes running on campus (remember - no firewall). This is important because a compromised Unix box could break security on even a routed internal network (such as my dorm).

Anyway... Not all that exciting, but if you want to check out SULinux. Actually the distribution should work very well for places like MIT and Cornell too (based on AFS/Kerberos too - and a similar strain). The specific RPMs they customized are available for seperate download.

--nullity--

I am nothing

Projector technology right now sucks for the high end. The CAVE uses CRT projectors (much like the ones in the old big screen TV's) instead of a brighter technology such as LCD, DLP, or Digital Light Valve. Unfortunately, the manufacturers of these brighter products have not pushed the refresh rate limit. In order to use the StereoGraphics shutter glasses, you need at least 100 Hz refresh rate out of your projectors. Currently, the only types of projectors that can handle 100 Hz are CRT's.

These CAVE's are not really multiuser. There are some real problems with perspective in these environments. Only one person can have a corrected view frustrum, and everyone else has to put up with a warping and shearing scene. Of course, this is assuming you are trying to visualize something floating in front of you. This is very hard to describe, but if you think about it, imagine projecting an object floating in front of you, while trying to give your user the ability to walk all around it. Anyhow, this is impossible in any multiuser mode.

CAVE are small. 10'^3 may seem like a lot of space, (as most people's dorm rooms are 12'^3), but oftimes people are limited in movement. This also limits the number of people who can share this experience.

The Electronic Visualization Lab at University of Illinois, Argonne National Labs Futures Lab, and NCSA all have major research going on in CAVE technology.

-Stryemer
We are the music makers,
and we are the dreamers of the dream.

If you want to misunderstand me, please do it correctly. :-)

I don't believe that WYSIWYG is the best way to present information when you are using it. Maybe before you print it, but not while you are working with it.

Take a look at Engelbarts sessions at http://stanford- online.stanford.edu/engelbart/colloquium/main.html

``...two sets of functions are of special--although certainly not exclusive--interest. These are the functions that are computable by an idealized human being who is unaided by machinery, and the functions that are in principle computable in the real world, which is to say, are computable by machines, or organs, or in general entities, that physically could exist, given the resources on offer in the real world, even if they do not actually exist, nor ever do so. Turing argued, we think persuasively, that the first of these sets is coincident with the set of Turing-machine-computable functions. We believe that the extent of the second set is an open, empirical question. [...]

...it would--or should--be one the greatest astonishments of science if the activity of Mother Nature were never to stray beyond the bounds of Turing-machine-computability.''

Copeland believes, like Penrose, that the mind is NOT a Turing machine! On the other hand the best analysis of modern physics indicates that any finite physical process, understood by modern physics, can be simulated efficiently, i.e. with a number of gates polynomial in the size of the system, by a Quantum network. Copeland believes that Deustch is wrong not because he is too radical but because he is too conservative. (A Turing machine can perfectly simulate a Quantum computer although it is VERY UNLIKELY it can do it efficiently-- if it could we could crack RSA in real-time on your linux box.)

A. Wait.

I don't dispute what you claim for Quantum Computing, I was only asserting my view that Biology - as implemented on this planet up to now, at any rate - is explicable entirely in terms of classical physics.

With regard to David Deutsch, he made one elementary common error in his interpretation of the famous Church-Turing hypothesis about computability, undermining most of his subsequent conclusions about the computability of the human mind (that's unfortunate because I'm planning to get uploaded before I die...). The error is a common one apparently. You can read about it in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy here.

Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction

For those versed in computer science, all you need to do really is go back to Codd's assumptions about relational databases, change his normalizations to allow duplicate rows and then allow negative rows in cases where a row is deleted before it is present. The theorems of such a relational calculus turn out to encompass the essential "weirdness" of quantum physics.

But they encompass much more:

They describe an entire range of relational objects which are neither quantum nor classical. That we might end up with strange things like synchronicities is no more surprising than that the ripples from a stone thrown in the middle of a pond strike all sides simultaneously -- except that we have to admit the "inverse Markovians" in which "effect" seems to precede "cause".

There have been many studies of identical twins separated at birth exhibiting synchronicities that, when confronted, make "skeptics" of the universal weirdness of things start sounding more like fundamentalist adherents to a new form of religion than intellectually honest scientists. The fact that these studies are on such macroscopic entities as human beings, involving complex behaviors over extended time and space separations is a clue as to just how far we are from appreciating the relationship between DNA and universal weirdness deriving, not from "nature" but from from the fundamental laws of relationships.

Of all the new acquisitions tested, 89% were printed on acid-free paper. Approval orders--books arriving as part of a vendor selection plan--were printed on acid-free paper 97% of the time. Only 1% of hardcover approval orders were acidic. Compare this with 30% of softcover approval orders and the difference is marked. Of firm orders--orders placed by the library to a vendor or publishing house--82% were acid-free. Hardcover books (which accounted for 70% of the firm orders) were 93% acid-free while 80% of the softcover were printed on acid-free stock.

Maybe I'm just a female who could care less about playboy . . .

But maybe you should care a little bit more about your history.

The point is, if you don't know where you come from, you don't know where you're going. Do you know when and where computer-based video-conferencing was first demonstrated? (Try 30 years ago, Stanford and SF.) How about what the first personal computer was? (Guess again.) Can you identify the first clamshell-style laptop? (Or the second?)

Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it. If you want to learn more, check out the Vintage Computer Festival. (You can also check out my collection.)

I don't have a real comparison for you, but check out this comparison, which might be a starting point for your comparison. Basically, if you use built-in types (int, array) in Java, it can go fast, but when you start using classes, Java slows down while C++ STL stays roughly the same speed.

The Dish also has a long history of satellite rescues, including one of the OSCAR ham satellites. As the Valley grew up and started becoming a broadband RF noise source, the Dish fell somewhat into disuse until a group at STARLAB devised a signal washing system (nice work Ivan and Co.). It has seen quite a bit of astronomical work since.

You can find the STARLAB Page here.

Here's a list of links to online books:

Books On-line, Listed by Title

Free Books from Samizdat Press

Free Online Books At The Free Well

Hard Sci-Fi Stories

ITLibrary

Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing

PROJECT GUTENBERG - ETEXT LISTINGS

The On-Line Books Page

The page with these links is:
http://members.axion.net/~enrique/book.html
and if anyone would like to add links to that list, please email me at:
perez_enrique@yahoo.com

--Brett

The vast majority of data in databases is relational, which means no hierarchies which are what "come naturally" to XML. Consequently, databse vendors (thats relational database vendors) are focussing on mediating data access via XML rather than data storage. There are various XML-and-database tools available for example Oracle's XSQL Servlet,and I know that DB2 offers storage support for XML documents (as in store an XML document in the database, not use XML to store relational data)but a lot more work needs to be done on data modelling and querying with XML in mind before it'll be ready for prime time as a database format (Speaking of which you might want to take a look at Lore and XML-QL )

Can these non visible galaxies be counted?

Dark matter is a bit more local observation - by looking at the rotation speed and mass distribution of OUR OWN galaxy, we can conclude that most of its mass is not visible as stars. So it is not directly related to observing far away galaxies. - But it affects our estimate of the average density of matter in the universe.

These new galaxies were not visible because x-rays dissipate less over distance. New gamma ray observatory (GLAST) will see even more distant objects.

Of course this leaves the question: how did the frickin' logic get there?

It was a human-made invention of Aristotle. There's plenty of logic defying randomness in nuclear decay, the Uncertainty principle, and heck, one fellow used the Gödel theorm to show that there's randomness in arithmetic!! The atomic API is still not completely defined.

Actually, this is basically how the scientific publication process works now. Scientists submit papers to journals, then those articles are reviewed by other scientists ("peer review"), and the papers are either rejected (usually with comments on what it would take to get the paper accepted) or accepted, in which case they get posted. The big problem is that this process takes way too long, which is one of the reasons why preprint archives like arXiv.org (the premier online physics archive, formerly xxx.lanl.gov) have become popular.

In any case, I know a lot of journals (at least in the biological sciences, which is where my familiarity is) are working on ways to speed up the review and publication process. Some interesting stuff is happening very soon.

Disclaimer/info: I work for an organization that does online publishing for biological journals: see HighWire Press for more info...

Stuart Cheshire already patched Linux to improve modem latency 4 years ago, but it wasn't accepted into the distribution. It's on this webpage.

Ok, you can get your webcasts now! :-) Have fun, I saw the first 10 mins before I had to go to class this morning and he seems to be very intelligent and funny.

Thank you for your message. I just checked. You are correct, the Stanford registration server seems to be down. The seminar-on-demand server is up and going, though.

Ordinarily, you are supposed to be registered first before they will provide you with the password for access. However, we have made it so that during these first few days, the colloquium content page is NOT password protected yet.
I'll give you that link right now (goto http://stanford -online.stanford.edu/engelbart/colloquium/index.ht ml), if you promise me two things: (i) that you go register when the registration server comes back up (if you haven't already done so), and (ii) provide us feedback on your access experience by doing the survey at http://www.bootstrap.o rg/colloquium/col_webcast_survey1.html after you have had a chance to access the webcast. [The former is serious, the latter is just kidding, but would definitely appreciate it nonetheless.]

Presently, the colloquium is not available in other formats (as it is not just video stream we are talking about here) and not mirrored anywhere yet. If demand keep building, we might have to do the latter.

Thanks for the encouraging word. Look forward to your participation.

Have fun, PPY

He's aiming at a wide section of people.
Personally I'm looking forward to catching this online.

a poor little AC who finally choose a nick.....

An anonymous coward pointed me at Stuart Chesire's home page which has a lot of interesting rants, including a technical white-paper on latency that almost exactly matches what John Carmack just wrote.

(Lots of other good rants as well...)

Cheers,
Ben

Thanks to the ever-handy Google I quickly tracked down his home page with all sorts of things like his Latency rant. Lots of other reading material...

Cheers,
Ben

Thanks to the ever-handy Google I quickly tracked down his home page with all sorts of things like his Latency rant. Lots of other reading material...

Cheers,
Ben

Stuart Cheshire, IP guru and author of Bolo, investigated these issues very thoroughly 4 years ago, and wrote it up as It's the Latency, Stupid , which you shoudl read. He also wrote a second paper Latency and the Quest for Interactivity , which is also well worth reading, but I'll quote the conclusion for those too lazy to click a link (remember this was written in 1996):

To improve the quality of computer network interaction, we need to do two things:
1. We need to aggressively eliminate all causes of unnecessary latency in our computer hardware and software.
2. For interactions with the other side of the planet, we can never beat the speed of light, so we need to develop latency-hiding techniques that give us the illusion of interactivity when true interactivity is not possible.
As long as customers think that what they want is more throughput, and they don't care about latency, modem makers will continue to make design decisions that trade off worse latency for better throughput.
Modems are not the only problem here. In the near future we can expect to see a big growth in areas such as ISDN, Cable TV modems, ADSL modems and even Wireless 'modems', all offering increases in bandwidth. If we don't also concentrate on improved latency, we're not going to get it.
One first step in this process would be for the industry to adopt a modem latency rating scheme. TEN, MPath, Catapult, Sandcastle and the other network gaming companies could collaborate to set this up. Modems that can achieve a round-trip delay below say, 100ms, could be authorized to place a sticker on the box saying "Gameplay approved" and the gaming companies could encourage their customers to buy only modems that are "Gameplay approved".
If we don't start caring about latency, we're going to find ourselves in a marketplace offering nothing but appallingly useless hardware.

The best security software tend to be the ones that get the most peer review. The credit card industry still has a lot to learn and they could learn alot by following the examples of such works as Secure Remote Password. The problem is that credit card verification is still "secured" via obsecurity of method. The use of a closed method to maintain the obsecurity doesn't keep someone who is willing to put forth enough resources from discovering the method used. If anything, it only limits the amount of peer review and the ability of peers to provide fixes. But if you think about the goals of credit card verification it is exactly the same goals that SRP was written to solve. Credit card verification protocols should authenticate knowledge of a certain piece of information without compromising the obsecurity of the information and the protocol should be univerially usable even in areas of the world which might not allow strong data encryption. But while credit card protocols tend to use "obsecurity" to keep the information secret, SRP uses an open zero knowledge method of verification.

That statement ("we have no new intelligentsia") is, of course, wrong. Philosophy and the pragmatic disciplines have been forced to recede to a strongl and pervasive switch to literary theory and humanities in general. Observe the switches in temperament in great thinkers such as Jurgen Habermas and Thomas Kuhn, the sometimes-antiscience of Paul Feyerabend. There are large-scale social migrations in these areas, and they are not performed sloppily or illegitmately. Unfortunately (I use that word too much), literary theorists are amazingly elitist and consequently you'll see broad trends and individual statements that wish to ignore the new intelligentsia (almost out of spite or something).

I don't have that all figured out yet (duh), but I'm a technologist (software developer and IT manager) with education in philosophy and theology, while my wife is just now finishing the first of her graduate degrees in education and literary theory, so she gives me some insight from an insider's perspective. ...the cool part is that much of this is readily available and accessible to us geeks (that's why earlier, I thought that it was unfortunate that not more technologists participate as members of the intelligentsia).

Remember The Matrix? Neo kept some disks inside a hollowed-out book "Simulacra and Simulation" ...Jean Baudrillard's eerily-convincing book about fabricated reality which foreshadowed one of the plot structures for the movie... a technological one. What you have here is one of the great minds of post-modernist movements and a geek (well, I guess he was a "cracker", eh?) posited as together and somehow sharing a context, making statements about reality.

That said, this article unwittingly (it seems) places a gulf between technologists and the current reigning intelligentsia by at once misunderstanding technologists' sphere of involvement and social participation, and by ignoring powerful and complex intellectual movements which circulate around clear individuals.