Slashdot Mirror

A painstaking study of obscure British military policy documents, released last month by the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex, demonstrates that the government and some of its partners in the defense industry, like Rolls-Royce and BAE Systems, think a robust civilian nuclear industry is essential to revamping Britain’s nuclear submarine program.

The study includes much more substantive claims than the weak article, would be nice to have seen those presented more thoroughly instead and discussed.

Ok, this is getting a little ridicules but it appears people are not even willing to copy/paste article titles. Brains are not "shrinking". Part of brain associated with certain traits, like cognition is,

Higher media multi-tasking activity is associated with smaller gray-matter density in the anterior cingulate cortex

If you have no CLUE what "anterior cingulate cortex", you can't just delete it and substitute BRAIN in its place.

So how about "Multimedia Multitasking Associated with Structural Changes in the Brain" ?? "The Brain" didn't shrink. That specific cortex shrunk. As to what it doesn, it's in the article too!

The observer effect may not be what we thought it was. Likewise, quantum entanglement produces results that appear to be faster than light based on our mundane understanding of distance. As everything we know -- so far -- tells us that can't happen, it may be that we are not observing the same distances, or perhaps even the same systems. But we can *certainly* fully model rates and synchrony (or lack thereof) of information transmission, so even this weirdness this is likely to be a complete non-issue.

Molecular simulation: There is no evidence this is required. One example: You can model a spacecraft trajectory quite simply, and very accurately; you don't need to model the molecules in the spacecraft and the fuel and the energy states of all of them to do it. Another: You can model balance quite simply, and very accurately; you don't need anything but a little math. Another: You can model a pitched baseball, and you don't need a human or an arm to do it. Another: You can closely model electron flow in many circuits without being too worried about the low level details of the materials themselves. And so on.

Emulations and simulations do not generally suffer the requirement to recreate the modeled system at the atomic level, or anywhere near it; instead, emulations and simulations go after the highest level model that will get the job done, and typically, those are *far* above the atomic level. There's no reason at this time to assume that modeling an intelligence would require such a low level approach -- and many reasons to think it won't. One simple relevant example is that a single neuron can already be accurately modeled at a much higher level than molecularly. It may be that the behavior of groups of neurons can as well; we don't know yet. But we *do* know that molecular level emulation isn't going to be called for.

Here you go:

http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Users/adrianth/ices96/paper.html

I first read about this in a Pratchett book - one of the Science of Discworld ones but never looked it up further.

Mr. Newton would have understood that as a scientist, and if he could be conjured up from the dead to utter a few words on this, he'd likely agree.

I doubt it. Newton dwelt A LOT in prophecies and such, just glance over the index of his works on the subject available at Newton's Views on on Prophecy, Revelation and the End of Times. He'd be right at home in any of the not-too-crazy millenarist churches of today.

It was intentional. Style guides will say it's incorrect, but it's common to pluralize numbers with an apostrophe.

See the bits about dates and numbers:
http://www.informatics.sussex.ac.uk/department/docs/punctuation/node21.html

I make plenty of other, genuinely awful mistakes to pick over.

I knew the chap who founded SPRU, looking into just such things back when it was largely being ignored. I also worked briefly with a colleague of his on technology bubbles and the positive transformative effects they can have in the long term, despite 'short-term' financial crises.

Firstly, they are of course of the opinion that R&D is vital. Indeed my limited understanding of their position is that almost all 'real' economic growth can be said to come from technological change. Everything else is either population growth or accumulating fixed assets like materials; the former dilutes per capita growth and is effectively a wash (distribution of wealth aside - yes that's a big issue too, but bear with me...), the latter only have value because of how they are used in technology (market value is of course determined by perception, and that's another reason it gets out of kilter from time to time).

More significantly, perhaps, is their way of looking at tech bubbles: they exist because of R&D, and all sorts of people get overexcited and there's a bubble followed by a collapse but, in the meantime, some entire infrastructure has been replaced. Rail bubble is a good example, the transition to mass production is another, various colonial bubbles etc. In these cases, the real economic growth (of the kind that benefits everyone, not just a financial elite) tends to occur only after the collapse.

I think we are in the middle of this collapse right now, and it may be protracted. Arguably the last similar collapse involved WWII before upward movement was restored. Anyway, the point is this fellow from IBM is absolutely correct, but if history is anything to go by there may well be a serious hiatus in R&D before the next wave of real growth starts, and him saying it ain't so might not do a hell of a lot...

(Just as an aside, a lot of R&D post Wall Street crash started as part of the military-industrial complex, effectively funded by governments as part of the war effort. There are many economists who suggest that, when private enterprise fails, governments have to step in and spend spend spend, but the reactionary governments such crises often engender have difficulty justifying this sort of expense without, say, a huge war. A more positive alternative might be putting large parts of the world economy onto a 'war footing' against climate change: printing money, creating jobs, building infrastructure and so on. Even if climate change isn't happening, this could be no more pointless than developing ways of actively destroying people and infrastructure...)

Yes, now all they need to do is fix the lag which can be quite high, maybe even 200ms:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weZOjotbuSU

Something really low like 16ms or better is needed so that we don't notice, according to this article:
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Users/km3/hfes.pdf

Someone had used a programmable curcuit board and let it evolve using some simple evolutionary algorithm. After thousands or perhaps millions of iteration where only the best design solution(s) were allowed to survive they examined the final results. Strangely, one of the finalist could not be understood by the circuit board analysis program. So, they took to analyses the device manually. What they eventually found was that it had designed a little radio telescope of sorts which had sent its signal across an unconnected, empty area without wiring! I have tried several times to find the article again. If someone else remembers it, please, reply and gives us a link.

Here you are, sir.

See also this comment by Dachannien.

Bird, Lazyell reference Thompson's work, and show how this kind of hardware development can lead to novel sensors:

IV. UNCONSTRAINED INTRINSIC HARDWARE EVOLUTION

Unconstrained intrinsic HE design usually comprises a computer running an EA and a reconfigurable device, such as an FPGA, on which individual genotypes are instantiated as physical electronic circuits. The fitness of a given circuit is determined solely by its real time behaviour and other factors, such as topology, are not considered. For example, Thompson [9] evolved a circuit on a small corner of a Xilinx XC6216 FPGA that was able to discriminate between two square wave inputs of 1 kHz and 10 kHz without using any of the counters/timers or RC networks that conventional design would require for this task. The evolved circuit contained several continuous-time recurrent loops and the timing mechanism relied on a subtle analogue property - possibly parasitic capacitance - which affected delays in the internal signal paths according to the input frequency [23]. Both the loops and the timing mechanism would have been forbidden under conventional design procedure, but the evolved circuit made more parsimonious use of the silicon.

Unconstrained, intrinsic HE therefore shows potential for the design of analogue dynamical systems that may prove more successful for certain tasks than conventional design. This approach may also lead to the discovery of novel electronic ‘tricks’ not yet exploited by conventional design. Layzell [24] developed the Evolvable Motherboard (EM) to investigate some of the key issues in intrinsic HE, in particular to evaluate the relative merits of different basic components, methods of analysis and interconnection architectures. The next section gives an overview of this testbed and describes an experiment where he intrinsically evolved the first oscillators to reach their target frequency.

Evolution is then free to explore very unusual designs: circuits with structures and intricate dynamical behaviours beyond the scope of conventional design. In unconstrained HE, the circuit primitives do not have their behaviour constrained within specific input and output ranges or by temporal coordination, nor are they restricted to playing specific functional roles. Consequently, the process of unconstrained intrinsic HE is more like tinkering than conventional engineering [10,11] and in some key aspects is analogous to natural evolution.

In particular, this paper details an unconstrained, intrinsic HE experiment where a network of transistors sensed and utilised the radio waves emanating from a nearby PC. Essentially, the EA led to the construction of a radio...

G3ckoG33k: Perhaps you're referring to Adrian Thompson's work on FGPAs. See http://considerthefuture.com/Computing/CompArticles/comp2_evolve.html for a 2001 article which was featured on Slashdot. Also check out http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/adrianth/ascot/paper/paper.html and http://www.informatics.sussex.ac.uk/users/adrianth/ices96/paper.ps for relevant papers by Thompson on FGPA-based evolution.

This paper, amongst others produced by SPRU, might interest you: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/documents/sewp176. I helped with the software.

If you web search for the text, you will find it quoted in various web pages and books (not all recent).

You're right, e.g., this page seems to have the whole text of the book. However, (a) it is kind of cool to see it so directly, as written by one of Newton's contemporaries, and (b) very few people probably know about it. I'm a physics teacher, and I've been telling people for years that the story was probably true because Newton's niece remembered him telling it to her. I'd never heard that Stukeley also attested to the story. Here's my own transcription of the relevant page.

After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden and drank tea under the shade of some apple trees, only he and myself. Amidst other discourse, he told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself, occasioned by the fall of an apple, as he sat in a contemplative mood. Why should it not go sideways, or upwards? but constantly to the earth's center? Assuredly the reason is, that the earth draws it. There must be a drawing power in matter. The sum of the drawing power in the matter of the earth must be in the earth's center, not in any side of the earth. Therefore does this apple fall perpendicularly or toward the center. If matter that draws matter, it must be in proportion to its quantity. Therefore the apple draws the earth as the earth draws the apple.

There's also the question of whether the story was actually true. This page quotes Gauss as saying, "Undoubtedly, the occurrence was something of this sort: There comes to Newton a stupid importunate man, who asks him how he hit upon his great discovery. Newton. . . wanted to get rid of the man [and] told him that an apple fell on his nose; and this made the matter quite clear to the man, and he went away satisfied." Actually the Stukeley quote doesn't sound like that at all. It sounds more like Stukely was hanging out with his friend Newton, who was probably somewhere on the Asperger-autism spectrum, and Newton suddenly saw something that triggered a memory, and proceeded to give his friend a total core-dump on his scientific theory.

One of the reasons historians tend to be skeptical about this kind of thing is that scientists tend to rewrite history in order to make themselves seem more original, and their accomplishments more amazing. It's more glamorous to think that Miles Davis played jazz based on pure inspiration. It's less glamorous to imagine Miles Davis practicing scales and arpeggios for hour after hour. You get into similar issues when you try to figure out whether or not Einstein was really influenced by the Michelson-Morley experiment or not.

Newton was quite a character. He was actually more interested in alchemy and arian theology than in physics. If his religious views had been public, he'd have been prosecuted as a heretic for sure. He may have been gay (which would have been another way to get in big legal trouble in that century). (But don't believe the B.S. meme that he was an astrologer. He specifically went on record as saying that he looked into astrology and thought it was stupid.)

I remember reading a paper (can't find it now though - darn it) about a guy who was doing neural net research with Xilinx chips

I believe you're talking about Adrian Thompson's paper An evolved circuit intrinsic in silicon entwined with physics..

I remember reading a paper (can't find it now though - darn it) about a guy who was doing neural net research with Xilinx chips

I believe you're talking about Adrian Thompson's paper An evolved circuit intrinsic in silicon entwined with physics..

Oh I wouldn't be so sure. Most of it was covered here although no fear of a lawsuit. Academic works are great for providing prior art to thwart patents as they are time stamped public disseminations. The new version looks a more high tech, and after eight years it just takes a team of two to massively improve on the hundreds of authors on that paper.

Here's a pretty solid quote from Alun Anderson, New Scientist editor, "Science writing used to be slightly apologetic: [puts on whiny voice] "this is all going to be terribly difficult, but I'll try and make it easy for you". Like they've sugar coated something you don't really want to take. Our goal was to really change that - change the people and the ideas - to be self-confident. Science often suffers from this sort of cringe factor - "I'm a boring scientist, you probably don't want to talk to me". My policy was if you're talking to someone else the approach is: "what's happening in science is the most interesting thing in the world, and if you don't agree with me just fuck off, because I'm not interested in talking to you". You had to have that kind of attitude." Teh article here--> http://www.sussex.ac.uk/alumni/notablealumni/interviews/alunanderson/

theRegister has this story and a link, http://www.lifesci.sussex.ac.uk/cmvcr/Domestic%20cats.html. I have two female Siamese, Tinkerbell has this purr behavior and Ariel doesn't yet they are litter mates. Ariel manipulates me in other ways that Tinkerbell doesn't. They do seem to put an effort into the manipulation.

That would be the evolvable hardware paper by Adrian Thompson.

Why did the explosion not occur uniformly? In other words, why did it not explode in perfect spheres of energy, never to have enough in a single area again to form mass?

You know, this is a classic example of a layman assuming that scientists are somehow dumber than they are. Honestly, what makes you believe researchers haven't known about this precise problem since the big bang theory first came on the scene? Do you really think you somehow caught on to a problem that no one else spotted? Really?

Here, read this. To quote:

In particular, if the process was so efficient at smoothing out the Universe, how could irregularities as large as galaxies, clusters of galaxies and so on ever have arisen? But when the researchers looked more closely at the equations they realised that quantum fluctuations should still have been producing tiny ripples in the structure of the Universe even when our Universe was only something like 10(exp-25) of a centimetre across -- a hundred million times bigger than the Planck length.

In short, good ol' quantum mechanics strikes again: random quantum fluctuations during inflation ultimately produced the variation we see in the universe today.

I know this isn't a popular answer, but I believe that there are forces at work which guide our existence that we will never be able to grasp on our plane of existence.

That's because it's not an answer.

Muslims are not a race

True. But who's the moron, him or the people who would (despite that fact) call him a racist?

Perhaps the real moron is the one who doesn't understand the use of scare quotes.

"Smart electrical outlets could tell us things like increased current use over time for appliances like your fridge or pc etc."

My research lab has done some preliminary work in that area,

http://www.informatics.sussex.ac.uk/research/groups/interact/kuckuck.htm

I don't think it's ongoing, though I'm sure we haven't heard the last of this idea.

The notion that the use of regulation over competition is against "American business philosophy" is just wrong. Regulation does run counter to what CEOs say American business philosophy is all about, but it's all just rhetoric. They say these things to appease voters and stockholders; to keep them voting for the politicians and board members that keep the cash flow going. Look at all the corporate lobbyists out there. Look at all the corporate lawsuits. These things wouldn't exist if your claim were true. Modern corporations will use any legal method they have to win in the marketplace, and many of them will use illegal methods when the pros outweigh the cons. "Pretexing", backdating of stock options, cooking the books, bribery, SLAPPs, patent abuse-- I could go on.

It reminds me of this paper on evolved circuit design. On the surface, it works just the way you expect it to-- but underneath, there's a completely different story. Any physical characteristic that gives some advantage is utilized, even if the end result relies on components that are wildly out-of-spec or the blatant breakage of accepted design practices. Human behavior is the same deal in my mind. Laws, codes of ethics, yada yada, are certainly a part of the equation, but they are also just as certainly not the key determinants.

The New Scientist had a cover article in 1997 about Adrian Thompson http://www.informatics.sussex.ac.uk/users/adrianth /ade.html who was evolving FPGAs to do tone discrimination. The evolvable motherboard also comes to mind. Michael Garvie is also known for this sort of thing - but for high availability on long distance space missions (for example). Interesting article, given that it was evolving face recognition chips, but not the first.

Replying to note that another Slashdotter has gone me one better and provided a link to the story I remembered.

My favourite bit:

Yet somehow, within 200ns of the end of the pulse, the circuit `knows' how long it was, despite being completely inactive during it. This is hard to believe, so we have reinforced this finding through many separate types of observation, and all agree that the circuit is inactive during the pulse.

Maybe this is slightly off topic, but did anyone see that episode of Penn & Teller: Bullshit!? where they went after the environmentalist movement and rebutted alot of their myths? (note: This film is slightly old and science in general has moved on bit)

Point being, Those that campaign for groups such as Oxfam and alike on issues such and "corprate ethical responsibility" the majority generally don't have a clue as to the real "facts" behind the issues and just jump on the bandwagon because its "cool" to do so. This video put out by Starbucks is exactly what P&T did, and called bullshit on Oxfam. Now I'm not saying Oxfam, like allot of charities don't do a good job at helping many people in the third world by providing clean drinking water and basic medical assistance and such. but the issues they bring against Starbucks has the strong wiff of anti-capitalism which Oxfam shouldn't be focused on.

The same kind of people (not Oxfam) managed to get coke banned at our university campus (Sussex) by using the exact same moral-bullying tactics and manipulating the Student Unions 'Democratic' voting procedures despite them being in the minority of opinion.

Just my two cents worth....

  The expansion of space itself is not constrained by the speed of light, only the matter/energy within it.

  Read Inflation for Beginners which is an excellent, relatively (argh) non-technical treatment of the subject.

  Relevant quote: "One of the peculiarities of inflation is that it seems to take place faster than the speed of light. Even light takes 30 billionths of a second (3 x 10(exp-10) sec) to cross a single centimetre, and yet inflation expands the Universe from a size much smaller than a proton to 10 cm across in only 15 x 10(exp-33) sec. This is possible because it is spacetime itself that is expanding, carrying matter along for the ride; nothing is moving through spacetime faster than light, either during inflation or ever since. Indeed, it is just because the expansion takes place so quickly that matter has no time to move while it is going on and the process "freezes in" the original uniformity of the primordial quantum bubble that became our Universe."

  I don't know what you mean by "information coming from apparently nowhere."

  snarkth

Inflation for beginners

I agree, just look how stupid the Swedish keysetting is compared to the english one: here.

1. Run http://www.informatics.sussex.ac.uk/users/mmg20/dh e/ on all the boxes.
2. Evolve and use Skynet to run the business.
3. ?????
4. Profit!!!

Actually, a rather smart fellow by the name of Einstein theorized that time travel was indeed possible.

Want to travel in time? Hop into your spaceship, head out for a leisurely cruise at or near the speed of light. Turn around after six months and return to Earth. You've aged a year, but quite a few more than that have passed on Earth.

Want to go backwards in time? I leave that as an exercise to the reader. Hint: think black holes.

(and a 3rd guy in England)

Or, Harold Kroto of the University of Sussex as "a 3rd guy in England" is also sometimes known.

(and a 3rd guy in England)

Or, Harold Kroto of the University of Sussex as "a 3rd guy in England" is also sometimes known.

Aside from taking people with >5 years industrial programmamming experience, and then forcing them to do a basic Java course using BlueJ, the standard of the markers is questionable.

Imagine my surprise when I recieved my final assignment back with the comment "No Comments!" (which there were). Perhaps the ultimate irony was that "No Comments!" was actually written over a comment.... muppets....

Coming from London, and having studied at Sussex Uni for the last few years,(so i use the southern mainline quite a bit) I can say that i've not had any real problem with the service.
Over the last two years they've replaced the rolling stock with new trains (tho not as nice as the Virgin Trains). I've not noticed the trains getting over crowded (only sometimes at peak hrs between East Croydon + London Victoria ... about 15mins). And there's usually someone walking up/down the train collecting rubbish.
The only gripes i've had are the weekend engineering works, which always seem to fall on days i want to travel. But since the bus driver's are normally happy to drop us off before the station, its a shorter walk home :)

For those that are interested in this sort of thing, the paper was published in ALife IX and is online.

You would probably appreciate the Distributed Hardware Evolution project. The project uses evolution and competition to design circuits with self-checked outputs (if the logic fails for some reason, built in error checking detects the error. This is particularly useful for critical systems).

The circuits discovered by this project are published for anyone to use under the GPL.

This project attempts to evolve more efficient circuit designs than those designed by humans through genetic algorithms. In fact they already have evolved a few circuits that are better than human designs, just check the goals section on the page.
http://www.informatics.sussex.ac.uk/users/mmg20/dh e/

However, you could be responsible for evolving Skynet someday.

However, this is not the end of the world. In fact, it might help save it because it makes alternative energy a lot more attractive.

If the end of cheap oil was the only problem happening at once it would be an enviromentalist's dream come true. Unfortunately, it's part of a clusterf--k that an that is why it is so dangerous.

The human population is bulging at the seams and requires cheap energy to transport food from factory farms to supermarkets. It requires fertilizers and pesticides made from petroleum to grow it. It requires plastics from petroleum to package it. If petroleum costs go up it will have an impact on the price of food and food is not an optional product. Right now there's a decline in per-capita food production.

There's still the environmental impact you hope that expensive oil will fix to deal with. Environmental degradation is an issue which is causing harm to the earth and making it more expensive for corporations to operate right now.

Specific to the US is the ever-growing national debt. The US is maintaining levels of debt and trade imbalance that no other country is. Oil is purchased around the world in US dollars and the World Bank and IMF loan and get paid for loans in US dollars. That is causing an artifical demand for US dollars and that demand is what's holding the country together despite the national debt.

Then there's the Iraq war which is turning into a money-and-human-life blackhole. It has created an anarchy where Bush had his sites set on a stable source of oil.

I help the Distributed Hardware Evolution Project because it produces results (robust error detecting logic circuits) that can be used by anyone.

Before I became a computer geek, I was a Chemistry geek at Sussex Uni.

Sussex being home to Prof Sir Harry Kroto - one of the discoverers and subsequntly Nobel laureates with Smalley and Curl.

My final year project was on high temp superconducting C60 intercalates. There could be some fullerenes in your PC one day!

the karma. But I have been on slashdot for over 4 years now and this is the first story I have seen about my old University.

Point of interest:
One of our Profs got the (joint) Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1996 for Buckminsterfullerene - the third form of solid carbon. My final year project was based on the stuff. Woo!

Yay to Sussex - it is a lovely place and some of the happiest times of my life. Any campus with 8 seperate bars has to be a cool place to spend a few years.

Well, not that surprising - Leggett joined in 1983, by which time he'd already done the work for which he has now been awarded the Nobel Prize. So if you're congratulating institutions, congratulate the University of Sussex, where he did the work.

Well, not that surprising - Leggett joined in 1983, by which time he'd already done the work for which he has now been awarded the Nobel Prize. So if you're congratulating institutions, congratulate the University of Sussex, where he did the work.

I wonder if Ariel Sharon will ever be tried for war crimes, then.

OK, I got lazy and looked up some figures. At the Earth's surface, the gravitational time dilation for each km of altitude is 1 part in 10^-13 (source), or 100 ticks/s. This is a linear approximation, so that translates into 1 tick/s gained for each 10m of altitude.

C60 was first discovered by some chaps studying interstella chemistry/chemical physics. One of them Prof Harry Kroto had the bright idea of placing two carbon rods end to end in a vacuum a very small distance apart and putting a massive potential difference across them which yielded an arcing effect. They shoved the resultant black dust into a mass spectrometer and found massive peaks at 60 (x12) and 70 (x12) units. At first this was dismissed as contaminants, but then Kroto had the 'falling of the toilet and imagining the flux capacitor moment' of thinking about the Geodesic sphere created by R. Buckminster-Fuller at the Montreal expo 67 to which he went with his son.

It was first isolated, by putting the black dust in benzene (J. Hare - then a research student of Krotos did this) which yielded a red solution that when dried yielded red C60 crystals.

An explosion of research happened around the world, most notibly from the UK (Sussex Uni - guess where I studied :-)) Japan, and the US.

There is loads of stuff on the web, and in a wierd way this is what got me into computers... Looking for papers 3 years ago turned me back to computers after I left them when my Amiga got packed away.... Then I realised that Chem grads got about 14,000 gbp a year in their first few years in Chem, and I was way too mercenry for that! :-)

(Ex Chem geek)

maybe www.sussex.ac.uk will have to get another name for itself :-)