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Domain: stir.ac.uk
Stories and comments across the archive that link to stir.ac.uk.
Comments · 13
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Ya big Jessie
get with it, run a manly operating system ya big Jessie.
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Re:"didn't appear likely to pose a threat"
The patented fish are diploid and fertile. Female triploid salmon are sterile and cannot cross-breed with wildtype stocks. They are produced by heat shock and other methods (they have to be produced, as they are sterile). The female triploids are produced from the diploids for production purposes, so that if they escape, they cannot reproduce. Triploids even occur naturally but rarely (0.6%) in natural salmon populations.
However, several questions come to my mind:
1.What if someone, sometime, accidentally releases the diploid GMO fish? These fish grow faster than the normal salmon and therefore might have introduce a selective advantage to the introduced genes, even if the original GMO fish are reportedly less fecund.
2. Is the triploid production method 100% effective or might you have 0.1% diploids in there, capable of reproduction?
3. Male triploid salmon do have gonads and are are potentially (even if at a very low rate) slightly fertile. How long until a male escapes? I know that the males appear obviously different than the females (I used to fish for salmon in Canada as a youth) nevertheless, I cite Murphy's Law
A bit of reading for the interested:
A simple, clear presentation:
http://www.salmotrip.stir.ac.uk/downloads/SSPOpresentation.pdf
More hardcore molecular biology:
http://www.nature.com/hdy/journal/v104/n2/full/hdy2009108a.html -
Re:runbot homepage
Watch the speedchange2 video. The scientist sure has a sense of humor
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runbot homepage
The researcher's page on the robot http://www.cn.stir.ac.uk/~tgeng/research.html. Check the videos they are quite amazing.
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Gait generation, White paper
This thing walks in a circle and is connected to a boom - it can't walk freely. All the legs have to worry about is front/back balance, and not side to side. Of course, making that obvious in the headline or summary would make the article seem much less interesting, and we couldn't have that, now could we?
Accepted. But that wasn't really the point of the research. If you RTFA and RTFWP (white paper), these guys are more interested in neuroscience. So what they did was design a simple mechanical system and a simple controller that both mimic the actual physical/physiological function of human legs. Balancing has alot to do with the structure of the foot and our ability to shift weight and is more of a dynamics issue. What these guys did was gait generation, which sounds simple (one foot after the other), but when you sit down and start trying to work out the details, its not so easy.
A similar (theoretical) study which actually addresses balancing (this time for insects with six legs):
J.E. Seipel, P. Holmes and R.J. Full (2004) Biological Cybernetics 91, 76-90. Dynamics and stability of insect locomotion: a hexapedal model for horizontal plane motions. -
Re:Only a matter of timeFirst, define intelligence for me. I dare say there is not much more to our own supposed intelligence than can be accomplished with programming. Of course, I do not mean the rule based AI-like systems used for instance in games and most industrial applications. I mean self organising and/or learning systems powered with algorithms like Reinforcement Learning and/or Neural Networks. I have myself programmed such algorithms to find solutions on tasks I would have never been able to find. Usually these tasks are control based, but hierarchically extending them, you can find solutions for arbitrarily hard problems, including - I believe - the problem of living.
Another question is whether we want to do that. Will it increase overall human happiness?
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Re:Static code verifications, anyone?
Well, it appears to be worth next to nothing. What we have there is some guy looking at a few of his projects and deciding he doesn't need static type checking. And it's not completely clear if he makes this claim because he's not making type errors, or because his type errors are being caught by his unit tests.
He also makes a somewhat odd set of claims that:
a) He doesn't make type errors.
b) Dynamically typed code is easier to develop because he doesn't have to deal with build time type issues.
But... if he wasn't making type errors, then why would he have build time issues with static type-checking? I suppose I might be missing something, but what?
In any case this isn't even up to the fuzzy quality of Haskell vs. Ada vs. C++ vs. Awk vs. -
Re:PARC?
Oops. Right you are.
here's a list of which GUI invention was made where. -
Re:Something you should know
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Re:State law and product warrantiesIt's a delicate balance between the inflexibility of precedent and the caprice of the individual judge. Many, perhaps most, businesses would prefer to work in an unfair but predictable legal arena than an unpredictable one, even if the latter were somewhat fairer on average. Even when you disagree with the prevailing standards, you can at least make coherent plans for risk management. When individual judges have too much discretion, liability suits become too unpredictable to plan for. Managing an uncertain risk can easily cost more than managing a greater but more consistent risk because what kills you in financial risks are the tails of the distribution (That's why Long Term Capital Management averaged a positive return on investment in 1998-1999, but went bankrupt in 1998 because of very improbable fluctuations.)
Conservative thinkers tend to prefer slow change and predictability, which is why they push for mandatory sentencing laws, caps on civil awards, and other measures to limit judicial discretion. Since this nation is strongly conservative at the moment, you may have to wait some time before liberals return to power and push for greater judicial independence.
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PCA analysis
Search for PCA analysis and "eigenfaces". Here are some "average" faces and some morphs.
http://www.stir.ac.uk/Departments/HumanSciences/Ps ychology/Staff/pjbh1/facepcai1.htm -
Re:question
There's actually been some interesting work done on that based on this nonlinear phenomenon called stochastic resonance. There's a link to a paper here.
BTW, the phenomenon is called hyperacuity, and it specifically refers to having higher resolution than should be allowed by the size of the photoreceptor cells in the retina. I state this explicitly because it is not something due to a more optics-related phenomenon like the fundamental wavelength limit of the light or anything like that. -
Re:Protecting Intellectual Propertycheck out this, this, this, or this, this.
Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, on being asked if they stole from PARC, or if Microsoft stole from the Mac:
"Steve Jobs made the case to Xerox PARC execs directly that they had great [though immature] technology but that Apple knew how to make it affordable enough to change the world. This was very open. In the end, Xerox got a large block of Apple stock for sharing the technology. That's not stealing at all. Apple didn't get any stock from Microsoft. Nor was Apple dealt with openly in this area by Microsoft."
Here is another link to google. 14,000 matches.
It always annoys me to hear the old Apple stole from Xerox, so it was ok for M$ to steal from Apple line. Get a clue. M$ steals from everyone. Which is why open source is so effective against them. It is easy to steal things cloaked in shadow (closed source), however stealing something that is in broad daylight (open source) is much harder.