Slashdot Mirror

some more follow up stuff:

Also see: Googling Your TV - Prototype software from Google Research could listen to your TV and send back useful information -- and ads of course. By Wade Roush. Technology Review (August 24, 2006). "A system recently outlined by researchers at Google amounts to personalized TV without the fancy set-top equipment required by previous (and failed) attempts at interactive television. Their prototype software, detailed in a conference presentation in Europe last June, uses a computer's built-in microphone to listen to the sounds in a room. It then filters each five-second snippet of sound to pick out audio from a TV, reduces the snippet to a digital 'fingerprint,' searches an Internet server for a matching fingerprint from a pre-recorded show, and, if it finds a match, displays ads, chat rooms, or other information related to that snippet on the user's computer. ... When word of the research first appeared in the media, some bloggers and other technology watchers reacted with horror; many assumed that the background conversation picked up by the microphone in Google's system would be uploaded to Google. But the technology makes it impractical; at four bytes, the fingerprints don't contain enough information to reconstruct the original sounds in a room. 'Some people did get the impression that we had an open microphone that was going to listen in on them,' says [Peter] Norvig. 'Clearly, that was not what we were doing. We are transmitting a key that can be matched but not reversed. That said, users are giving up some information -- and that's something they have to decide about.'"

from
http://www.aaai.org/aitopics/assets/AIalerts/curre nt.html

see also http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx? id=17354&ch=infotech

http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx? id=14591&ch=infotech

Computers have infiltrated nearly every field of business and science, and they keep getting faster. Nonetheless, researchers routinely encounter problems impossible for even the most powerful supercomputers to solve. The remedy could be quantum computers, which would use the fantastic properties of quantum mechanics to crack such problems in seconds rather than centuries. Since the 1980s, physicists in academic labs and at firms such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and NEC have pursued a variety of quantum computing approaches, but none seems likely to deliver a working machine in less than 10 years.

Company: D-Wave Systems

Headquarters: Vancouver, British Columbia

Amount invested: $22 million Canadian (about $17.5 million U.S.)

Lead investor: Draper Fisher Jurvetson

Key founders: Geordie Rose, Alexandre Zagoskin, Bob Wiens, Haig Farris

Technology: Quantum computers

Vancouver startup D-Wave Systems, however, aims to build a quantum computer within three years. It won't be a fully functional quantum computer of the sort long envisioned; but D-Wave is on track to produce a special-purpose, "noisy" piece of quantum hardware that could solve many of the physical-simulation problems that stump today's computers, says David Meyer, a mathematician working on quantum algorithms at the University of California, San Diego.

The difference between D-Wave's system and other quantum computer designs is the particular properties of quantum mechanics that they exploit. Other systems rely on a property called entanglement, which says that any two particles that have interacted in the past, even if now spatially separated, may still influence each other's states. But that interdependence is easily disrupted by the particles' interactions with their environment. In contrast, D-Wave's design takes advantage of the far more robust property of quantum physics known as quantum tunneling, which allows particles to "magically" hop from one location to another.

Incorporated in April 1999, D-Wave originated as a series of conversations among students and lecturers at the University of British Columbia. Over the years, it has amassed intellectual property and narrowed its focus, while attracting almost $18 million in funding, initially from angel investors and more recently from the Canadian and German governments, and from venture capital firms. The company plans to complete a prototype device by the end of 2006; a version capable of solving commercial problems could be ready by 2008, says president and CEO Geordie Rose.

The aggressiveness of D-Wave's timetable is made possible by the simplicity of its device's design: an analog chip made of low-temperature superconductors. The chip must be cooled to -269 C with liquid helium, but it doesn't require the delicate state-of-the-art lasers, vacuum pumps, and other exotic machinery that other quantum computers need.

The design is also amenable to the lithography techniques used to make standard computer chips, further simplifying fabrication. D-Wave patterns an array of loops of low-temperature superconductors such as aluminum and niobium onto a chip. When electricity flows through them, the loops act like tiny magnets. Two refrigerator magnets will naturally flip so that they stick together, minimizing the energy between them. The loops in D-Wave's chip behave similarly, "flipping" the direction of current flow from clockwise to counterclockwise to minimize the magnetic flux between them. Depending on t

http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx? id=14591&ch=infotech

Computers have infiltrated nearly every field of business and science, and they keep getting faster. Nonetheless, researchers routinely encounter problems impossible for even the most powerful supercomputers to solve. The remedy could be quantum computers, which would use the fantastic properties of quantum mechanics to crack such problems in seconds rather than centuries. Since the 1980s, physicists in academic labs and at firms such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and NEC have pursued a variety of quantum computing approaches, but none seems likely to deliver a working machine in less than 10 years.

Company: D-Wave Systems

Headquarters: Vancouver, British Columbia

Amount invested: $22 million Canadian (about $17.5 million U.S.)

Lead investor: Draper Fisher Jurvetson

Key founders: Geordie Rose, Alexandre Zagoskin, Bob Wiens, Haig Farris

Technology: Quantum computers

Vancouver startup D-Wave Systems, however, aims to build a quantum computer within three years. It won't be a fully functional quantum computer of the sort long envisioned; but D-Wave is on track to produce a special-purpose, "noisy" piece of quantum hardware that could solve many of the physical-simulation problems that stump today's computers, says David Meyer, a mathematician working on quantum algorithms at the University of California, San Diego.

The difference between D-Wave's system and other quantum computer designs is the particular properties of quantum mechanics that they exploit. Other systems rely on a property called entanglement, which says that any two particles that have interacted in the past, even if now spatially separated, may still influence each other's states. But that interdependence is easily disrupted by the particles' interactions with their environment. In contrast, D-Wave's design takes advantage of the far more robust property of quantum physics known as quantum tunneling, which allows particles to "magically" hop from one location to another.

Incorporated in April 1999, D-Wave originated as a series of conversations among students and lecturers at the University of British Columbia. Over the years, it has amassed intellectual property and narrowed its focus, while attracting almost $18 million in funding, initially from angel investors and more recently from the Canadian and German governments, and from venture capital firms. The company plans to complete a prototype device by the end of 2006; a version capable of solving commercial problems could be ready by 2008, says president and CEO Geordie Rose.

The aggressiveness of D-Wave's timetable is made possible by the simplicity of its device's design: an analog chip made of low-temperature superconductors. The chip must be cooled to -269 C with liquid helium, but it doesn't require the delicate state-of-the-art lasers, vacuum pumps, and other exotic machinery that other quantum computers need.

The design is also amenable to the lithography techniques used to make standard computer chips, further simplifying fabrication. D-Wave patterns an array of loops of low-temperature superconductors such as aluminum and niobium onto a chip. When electricity flows through them, the loops act like tiny magnets. Two refrigerator magnets will naturally flip so that they stick together, minimizing the energy between them. The loops in D-Wave's chip behave similarly, "flipping" the direction of current flow from clockwise to counterclockwise to minimize the magnetic flux between them. Depending on t

MIT's Technology Review magazine used to run a great set of market contests, called Innovation Futures. They had great prizes, of which I won a few (Sony DVD burner, HP Tablet PC, oodles of gift certificates, etc.).

That was important because if you want people to really make these markets work, there has to be some incentive for them to do so.

Solar cells are really bitchin', but it takes a very long time to make your money back or save money on electricity equal to the initial cost of the units, which is rather prohibitive for most people. Small applications, like these little repeater/router stations is on an entirely different scale than powering one's home. If this weren't so, the simple economics of it would probably see cells installed on all new homes. Not the best link, but the best one I could find in two minutes: http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx? id=16736&ch=biztech

I'm thinking that problem will be solved with the advent of holographic memory http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx? id=14742&ch=infotech. No moving parts, light speed access and 60X info density per unit volume. Didn't the original Star Trek use memory cubes? The past shall become the future!

Here's my problem with your statement, you ask me to provide cold hard facts that global warming isn't all it's cracked up to be. Well, I can do that with a dozen studies and web sites http://www.junkscience.com/, http://www.john-daly.com/, http://www.climateaudit.com/ are all quick and easy to pull off the top of my head.

In addition, it's recently been pointed out that there's no Nobel Prize waiting for the person who proves anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is a crock, in fact it's like a death knell to your carreer to pursue global warming skepticism, even if you are totally right.

McIntyre and McKittrick, the two people who have (respectively) a PhD in Statistics and PhDs in Math and Geology were told that they had no qualifications to argue the quality of Mann's "Hockey Stick". This work was done by climate change scientists who had degrees in, hmmm, one has a PhD in Math and Geology (Mann) and the other has a degree in Statistics (the et. al. of the report.) McIntyre and McKittrick have received dozens of death threats from the AGW crowd, especially after they proved that Mann's equation would produce a hockey stick, even with totally random data.

The reason gravity, and relativity, and evolution haven't been "shot down" is very simple. They are falsifiable theories. It takes a single fact that lies outside their purview to devastate the theory. Gravity - at least Newton's version - was ruined by the fact that the planet Mercury was in the wrong place. Look up the Planet Vulcan sometime and see why Relativity knocked Newton out of the ballpark.

The current AGW debate is based on two facts. CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has increased by approximately 80PPM over the last 160 years, and during the last 140 years, there's been an increase in temperature of about 0.6 degrees C. However, there's a big caveat in these two pieces of data. It's called "Correlation does not imply causality." It's one of the first things any good statistician should be taught. However, it's plain that the climate scientists decided to jump on the bandwagon and scream "CO2 is wrecking the Earth!".

To "prove" this, they've turned to computer models of the atmosphere. These, they say, prove that global warming is real, yet even they admit that most of their models "go runaway" and have to be thrown out. I'm sorry, but if your model is so fragile that given the same inputs it can "go runaway", then the model isn't accurate. It's equivalent to tossing a coin. It's meaningless. Who decides what is a "runaway result". Climate Prediction even admits that they threw out any run of their model that showed cooling with an increase in CO2.

Even the most powerful simulator in the world, the NEC Earth Simulator, only works on 50 kilometer wide grids. They had never even seen a hurricane on their "simulated Earth" until two years ago, and even then, they didn't call it a hurricane, they called it a "hurricane precursor" known as a "curl" because the simulation wouldn't support the actual hurricane formation and flow. Now, hurricanes are responsible, annually, for 30-40% of the rainfall in portions of the Southern United States. Their model admittedly doesn't handle this, those areas never receive that rainfall, and precipitation is responsible for a large amount of ground-cooling in models, as well as hundreds of other effects that simply aren't modeled. And that's just one of a dozen things I could list that are wrong with computer models. I've had this argument before. (And it's dropped off my lis

In case you don't already know here's the advantage of Fusion power over fision: The waste product.

D-T fuel cycle Fusion produces Helium.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power

Fission power produces low radioactive waste which can be buried
and also high radioactive waste (cesium-137 and strontium-90) which is too radioactive to be buried (they give off enough heat to boil ground water into steam. Steam could corrode the containers or break up surrounding rock, raising uncertainty about secure burial.)
The cesium and strontium has to be kept in a storage pool that circulates cooling water for 150 years, before they cool down enough to be able to be buried.
http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx? ch=biztech&sc=&id=13992&pg=1

Both fission and fusion produce neutrons as well, which makes the reaction chamber radioactive and means that the power plant has to be buried after it's decommisioned

Aren't they confusing the prismatic wiggle pictures with Holograms"?
I assume Technology Review , an MIT Enterprise means a prismatic or freznel lense.

I was referring to an article I read in Technology Review - an MIT publication. It was a couple of Canadians who actually did the first work.

Technology review
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/04/10/wo_ muller101504.asp

October 15, 2004

Global Warming Bombshell
A prime piece of evidence linking human activity to climate change turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics.

By Richard Muller

Progress in science is sometimes made by great discoveries. But science also advances when we learn that something we believed to be true isnt. When solving a jigsaw puzzle, the solution can sometimes be stymied by the fact that a wrong piece has been wedged in a key place.

In the scientific and political debate over global warming, the latest wrong piece may be the hockey stick, the famous plot (shown below), published by University of Massachusetts geoscientist Michael Mann and colleagues. This plot purports to show that we are now experiencing the warmest climate in a millennium, and that the earth, after remaining cool for centuries during the medieval era, suddenly began to heat up about 100 years ago--just at the time that the burning of coal and oil led to an increase in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide.

I talked about this at length in my December 2003 column. Unfortunately, discussion of this plot has been so polluted by political and activist frenzy that it is hard to dig into it to reach the science. My earlier column was largely a plea to let science proceed unmolested. Unfortunately, the very importance of the issue has made careful science difficult to pursue

But now a shock: Canadian scientists Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick have uncovered a fundamental mathematical flaw in the computer program that was used to produce the hockey stick. In his original publications of the stick, Mann purported to use a standard method known as principal component analysis, or PCA, to find the dominant features in a set of more than 70 different climate records.

But it wasnt so. McIntyre and McKitrick obtained part of the program that Mann used, and they found serious problems. Not only does the program not do conventional PCA, but it handles data normalization in a way that can only be described as mistaken.

Now comes the real shocker. This improper normalization procedure tends to emphasize any data that do have the hockey stick shape, and to suppress all data that do not. To demonstrate this effect, McIntyre and McKitrick created some meaningless test data that had, on average, no trends. This method of generating random data is called Monte Carlo analysis, after the famous casino, and it is widely used in statistical analysis to test procedures. When McIntyre and McKitrick fed these random data into the Mann procedure, out popped a hockey stick shape!

That discovery hit me like a bombshell, and I suspect it is having the same effect on many others. Suddenly the hockey stick, the poster-child of the global warming community, turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics. How could it happen? What is going on? Let me digress into a short technical discussion of how this incredible error took place.

In PCA and similar techniques, each of the (in this case, typically 70) different data sets have their averages subtracted (so they have a mean of zero), and then are multiplied by a number to make their average variation around that mean to be equal to one; in technical jargon, we say that each data set is normalized to zero mean and unit variance. In standard PCA, each data set is normalized over its complete data period; for key climate data sets that Mann used to create his hockey stick graph, this was the interval 1400-1980. But the computer program Mann used did not do that. Instead, it forced each data set to have zero mean for the time period 1902-1980, and to match the historical records for this interval. This is the time whe

fair enough... but aren't handoff issues already being worked for wiFi/wiMax? http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/ 16/1727225&tid=193&tid=215&tid=218 http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/04/iss ue/synopsis_info.asp?p=3

I recently moved, and came across a stash of floppies from 10 years ago. Curious as to what was on them, I tried to read them. Not a single one was readable. I even tried a sector recovery tool on a couple. No dice.

I would hope that anything of value has already been transferred to another archive format. Of course, CD-R's would not be a good format to use because their longevity is estimated to be only 2-5 years.

How much does CD-ROM creating equipment cost?

>The only reason most LEDs use so little power is that they emit so little light.

Your facts are WAYY wrong. If you want to refute something, at least do a lazy Google search and you could have saved yourself a bad post.

1) LEDs approach 100% efficiency.
2) Florescent lights are about 50% efficient (and varies.. compact Edison style bulbs are less efficient... LED doesn't care about the form factor)
3) Incandescent lights (including halogen) are about 5-10% efficient. That is NOT a typo they are 90% heat waste.

Not sure where the heck you live, but in most US cities they have begin using TWENTY WATT LED lights to replace TWO HUNDRED WATT traffic bulbs. The LED lamp uses 90% less power but has 100% the same brightness.

The LED bulbs longer and does not burn out all at once -- lowers the accident rate and requires less maintenance.

cite:
MIT Technology Review: http://www.technologyreview.com/InfoTech/wtr_13179 ,294,p2.html
http://alt-e.blogspot.com/2005/04/energy-efficienc y-led-lights-to.html
etc.

> Not only that, but white LEDs cost so damned much that even if they were more efficient it would be a REALLY LONG TIME before you ever saw return on your investment.

I'll concede that point.

It also takes a REALLY LONG TIME to recover the investment in a hybrid.

It's gonna get cheaper now that China is in the manufacturing game. Their government has "selfishly" decided they don't want to export their newfound wealth to Saudi Arabia they want to keep those energy costs at home (something a lot of Americans would shrug off unfortunately).

I'd expect something competitive with CF bulbs in 4 years tops.

>There's a reason you can't by LED lightbulbs for your home lamps.

Good thing I did not ask you before I bought one. And yes, I only bought one they ARE expensive.. like $35 when I got one and down to like $25 now. The nice thing about it is there's no heat waste. When the cost goes down, I expect air conditioning to be cheaper since you're not fighting waste heat generation.

The early adopter applications will drive this down... think of all the bulbs running in car lights and RV's and motorcycles. LED replacements for those are just as bright and not much more. Bright LED brakelights are already standard on many commercial trucks.

Well IBM had come up with privacy preserving authentication some time ago. MIT Tech review article

When Microsoft decides to kick ass in an area, here's what they do, in a nutshell (according to Charles Ferguson):

In all of Microsoft's successful battles, it has used the same strategies. It undercuts its competitors in pricing, unifies previously separate markets, provides open but proprietary APIs, and bundles new functions into platforms it already dominates. Once it has acquired control over an industry standard, it invades neighboring markets.

Charles Ferguson created the company that produced FrontPage. He sold out to MicroSoft when he realized that Netscape would lose, due to their own faults. He wrote a great book on his story dealing with VCs and selling out to MicroSoft.

In the book, he describes how MicroSoft slept through the early 'net, until the Netscape Wunderkind (can't remember his name) said Windows would be reduced to a bunch of buggy device drivers by the web. Then Bill woke up. He writes about it like Sauron has been up in Redmond, sleeping away, until the Netscape guy wakes him up. And then Bill wakes up, like a big pissed off Sauron, turns Ballmer loose so he can get medieval on Netscape and so on.

Charles Ferguson also happens to have a PhD, and has done a lot on high tech competition. Here's something he's written on the topic of Microsoft fighting Google -- for real.

"... But if Microsoft gets serious about search--and there is every reason to believe that it will--Google will need brilliant strategy and flawless execution simply to survive..."

Which is an amazing think to consider.

Here's the article where discusses this:
http://www.technologyreview.com/InfoTech/wtr_14065 ,308,p1.html

one strand or multiple strands is a good question.
What about this? Do we have systems that can accept around a terabyte of data in its storage? Google has an operation speed of 4 tera-ops/sec source:http://cache.technologyreview.com/articles/ 04/04/wo_garfinkel042104.0.asp . Assuming each byte takes an average of 2 cycles (which is a very low estimate), google cant use the entire bandwidth, even with their world's largest distributed system infrastructure!
. Are we getting to a state where we are going to finish off the remaining ISPs, now that telephone companies are all already done!.

RFID's in passports are one of the dumbest anti-terrorism ideas to make it past the drawing board. It has already been demonstrated that so-called "short-range" RFID tags can be read up to 70 feet away with easily attainable current technology, the tools will only get more sensitive as time passes.

The "anti-skimming material" that the Dept of State references will make it harder to get exact bits off the RFID, but it sure won't stop someone from being able to at least tell if you have one of these RFID passports in your pocket.

Carrying your passport around with you (as you are required to do in most foreign countries) will be the equivalent of wearing a big sign on your back that says, "Get Your Grudge On! Kidnap Me! I'm an American!"

Short of sending hundreds of legit blank passports directly to Osama, I can't think of a passport plan likely to enable more terrorism than this cockamamie scheme.

Do you really WANT to live 300 years?

Yes. I'd like to live 3 million. Heck, as long as I'm not alone after universal heat death, I'd be happy to live forever. Easy enough question. :)

each decade is compounded by more health problems

Which eventually kill you (or are symptoms of other effects that eventually lead to your death). If you're living for prolongued periods of time, those health problems are obviously being addressed.

every body part wears out with time

Then replace or regrow.

Amazing what's already out there already in the lab, isn't it?

If you can't live it up in the first 70 years

It may surprise you to learn that A) many of us aspire to much more than "living it up", and B) there are many kinds of "living it up" that the average person not born to a billionare/who doesn't become a billionare can't do in 70 years.

As for the former, I write software for fun. I can produce it at a finite rate. I see years tick by on projects. I also like to write (as in literature), make artwork, and tinker with "physical" devices. I want to raise a child or two as well. It is doubtful that in 70 years I could finish everything that I want to accomplish *thusfar*, let alone that I will come up with in the rest of my life.

Two obvious points

1. Primarly now... think about how (audio) erotica podcasts are the sound equivalent to amateur /homegrown porn.
2. The other obvious kicker is that women are stimulated/excited by sound/voice much more than sight/looks (with respect to men).

Two obvious points

1. Primarly now... think about how (audio) erotica podcasts are the sound equivalent to amateur /homegrown porn.
2. The other obvious kicker is that women are stimulated/excited by sound/voice much more than sight/looks (with respect to men).

Very interesting given questions of how porn drives technology. The article, and the graph.

Very interesting given questions of how porn drives technology. The article, and the graph.

There's an article on MIMO in the latest physical issue of Technology Review magazine. Fortunately, the article's on-line.

There's an article on MIMO in the latest physical issue of Technology Review magazine. Fortunately, the article's on-line.

While this laptop may be bogus, holographic storage is not:

http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/07/iss ue/dealflow.asp?p=1/

Here's the deal: we need to live with nature. One aspect of this is that cities will get destroyed - the ruins of destroyed ancient cities ring the Earth.

New Orleans as it is should be adandoned. The high ground of the french quarter might be preserved. The deep water port and industrial areas like Michoud are restored. These areas have proper seawalls built with regard to natural silt flows, the rest of the city becomes Delta again. People that live in the area live the way you're supposed to in a swamp: in boats and house-barges. The swamp dwellers seem to have faired well, and came out of the woods to help evacuate the city. If the population was competent enough to live in the swamp instead of against it, they could flourish. As it is, they have probably crippled the shrimping and subsidence issues doom much of the city. Imagine a million houseboats stretching through a restored river system. People commute to work by boat, work in hi-tech, shipping and restored shrimp industries. Let the Mississippi wander as it needs, build the deep-water port out in the ocean and have lighter barges for carrying containers and oil in-shore. If people want to live there, they should adapt to life on the water.

I want to see a JMOB/SeaHub container facility in the Gulf of Mexico. This technology can be applied to housing, shipping, huge mobile hospitals, etc. http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/01/07/wo_ schrope072501.asp

Josh

TG should've written "The Associated Press has an article about a recent study (English PDF) released by a Chinese Internet research group that shows Google losing market share to their Chinese rival, Baidu.com. From the article: 'The survey, conducted by the Beijing-based China Internet Network Information Center, reported that Baidu.com Inc. boosted its market share in Beijing by 10.8 percentage points to 52 percent. Google Inc.'s share was at 33 percent, as the American Internet search engine kept its customer base steady while the overall market grew, said the survey, seen Tuesday on CNNIC's Web site.'" Factual analysis or results driven by self interest? Or just another interesting article posted to Slashdot with editorial opinions but no editorial checking?

The report itself has a pie chart with the following breakdown: Baidu 51.5%, Google 32.9%, Sohu 4.6%, Sino 4.0%, Yahoo 3.7%, and 3.3% other in Beijing; 43.9% Baidu vs. 38.2% in Shanghai; and 48.0% Baidu vs. 28.7% Google in Guangzhou.

However, the next page breaks down searches by category, and Baidu is only in the lead (55% vs. 15% Google) in downloadable music. In all other categories, Google is in the lead. Indeed, 60% of users who use Google primary and Baidu secondary say that the reason is Baidu's music search.

This confirms that Google is a better (more popular at least) search engine, of course, but Baidu is either better at searching Chinese music or, as another poster said, Baidu can link to MP3s without the RIAA being able to do anything about it.

http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/08/ap/ ap_083105.asp?trk=top

Is no-one worried also about the relatively high power consumption of hugeass plasmas? We're trying to lower our power usage here, people - if America switched over to 60" plasma displays, power usage would shoot up. More pollution, unless you manage to switch to environmentally-friendly energy (haha).

Interacting with the environment in a manner like C-3PO is not neccessary in order to be intelligent. Otherwise, Steven Hawking and Christopher Reeves would not be considered intelligent.

That's why the Turing Test was specified to take place over a teletype. It didn't take long for a program to pass the Turing Test either. Anecdotally Eliza fooled a leading scientist in the field of AI. She is still fooling people today.

AI programs are being used to sentence criminals, split assets after a divorce, and approve legal aid applications according to a recent article in the Tech Review.

I remember reading about a program in the eighties that proscribed antibiotics. It was a difficult problem for physicians because infections often involve multiple types of bacteria, antibiotics vary in how effective they are and what they are effective against, many antibiotics are contra-indicated by others, and there are many reasons to want to use the minimum number and dosages. The program was able to create better prescriptions than the doctors, and it was able to explain why it choose what it did.

I couldn't find the paper that described the prescription program, but the Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine probably has plenty of descriptions of AI making choices in a "real capacity".

You cannot define "truely human thought and thought processes", so you cannot judge when machines have reached that level. The history of AI is filled with people claiming some skill or ability required human-level intelligence, and then deciding that the software didn't have human level intelligence when it aquired that skill. There was the Turing Test in the beginning, chess now, poker and Go are next.

This guy set up Microsoft's China Research lab, considered by some to be one of the World's Hottest Computer Labs. And he's being paid to do pretty much the same thing for Google.

I don't think this is just a case of trying to scare off others from joining Google. He's got some serious experience in this area. If Google were to set up a competing lab of this quality, I'd be worried too.

Like, say, if technology magazines start saying the world's hottest computer lab is in China?

"Microsoft Research Asia has become a powerhouse of infotech R&D. Far faster than even Microsoft's top brass expected, the Beijing research outpost is influencing the company's global business."

The real problem is explained in this article
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/04/10/wo_ muller101504.asp?p=1 "A Global Warming Bombshell" by [[Richard A. Muller]], ''Technology Review'' , Oct. 2004; calls into question famous graph by Michael Mann

Big problems with creditability of this calculation.

That second graph you point out has long since been discredited. The algorithm used to create it will always create similar looking graphs, no matter what data it is fed. Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/04/10/wo_ muller101504.asp

"Corporate America"? What about "political America funding science thus resulting in completely false results like the graph you cited"? Most global warming studies are funding by groups dedicated on proving that global warming exists. Yeah, that doesn't harm the results. No, no.

Lastly, nothing has been shown to link pollution with global warming. It is much more likely that global warming is part of natural climate cycles (but why would chicken little let fact get in their way?).

Next time would be better if:

• There's enough fuel on the mother ship to drop the impactor and then get out of harm's way to turn around to match speeds with the comet. The mother ship can linger over the crater for years watching the newly formed crater evolve.
• The mother could land another drop ship in the newly excavated crater to give us a closeup of the comet's interior.
• Deploy several microprobes that have little seismometers on them. As the comet outgasses, the seimic waves will give us information as to how the comet's interior is structured. Each seismometer could be powered with a small atomic battery which would enable it to operate for years and provide ample power to broadcast the seismometer's readings to the mother ship.
• Make sure the equipment functions properly before it's launched. Blurry hi res photos because someone forgot to calibrate the equipment or parachutes that fail to open over Utah because they're installed backwards aren't ok.

If your going to continue to add to your archive, then how about d-Space. Its an open source project over at http://www.dspace.org/

Might be overkill maybe not. Theres a good article over at MIT Technology Review this month.

http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/07/iss ue/feature_mit.asp

You've just gotta love Brazil's response:

"We're against software piracy. We believe Microsoft's rights should be respected. And the simplest way to respect their rights is for Brazilians everywhere to switch to free software."

This was a Technology Review debate-in-print between Lessig and Epstein. To appreciate Lessig's argument you really need to follow Lessig's article with a reading of Epstein's answer and then Lessig's rebuttal.

Enjoy,
Richard

This was a Technology Review debate-in-print between Lessig and Epstein. To appreciate Lessig's argument you really need to follow Lessig's article with a reading of Epstein's answer and then Lessig's rebuttal.

Enjoy,
Richard

And if you can't get your friends to read all nine pages, the 9th is particularly worthwhile. Talk about a stunning portrait of democracy.

when I submitted this story back on the 6th, it was rejected. You should read Lessig but note that in the same issue of TR, there is a rebuttal of sorts to Mr. Lessig's interpretation authored by Richard Epstein.

There is a response to this article by a Professor of Law from the University of Chicago (who holds a more moderate view about this -but nevertheless agrees to some of Lessigs view) here

See MIT Technology review article: http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/07/iss ue/feature_intel.asp The silicon laser, being made from the same material as the rest of the chip, would replace the copper wires that need to connect cores, thus letting Intel 'keep Moore's Law alive for decades', the article says. It would do this by permitting many, many cores in fast communication with less heat and less energy required than current copper-wired chips. Question: will Intel's possession of si-lasers shut AMD out?

Yes nuclear power has seen vast strides in saftey to a point where a green icon broke a taboo and is now openely advocating its use.

One of the stories recently was what one environmentalist had to say about this:

Environmental Heresies: Let's Go Nuclear

At $5 per month, that's $60 per year. Given that Aubrey de Grey figures we can live for 500 to 1000 years, it seems to me that a $12,000 fine is cheap, although RIAA is requesting the money up front.

A Field emission display. Technology Review Had an article on it back in november with some explination of the technology and the hurdles involved. The big one as it sounds that Moto can not get over is how you support the glass in the middle so it does not touch (front to back) as the display requires a vacuum to operate, fairly easy with a 5" diagonal very difficult with a 40" screen. This is surely not the first, but first for Moto.
-Me

Show me on scientific study that proved a beneficial mutation of a species?

Try here for an article that mentions the US govt over-riding the Wright brothers aircraft patents during WW1.