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Sure. Philadelphia isn't as bad as Philadelphians say it is. http://digital.library.temple....

Shi's Law

http://developers.slashdot.org...

http://spartan.cis.temple.edu/...

http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

"Researchers in the parallel processing community have been using Amdahl's Law and Gustafson's Law to obtain estimated speedups as measures of parallel program potential. In 1967, Amdahl's Law was used as an argument against massively parallel processing. Since 1988 Gustafson's Law has been used to justify massively parallel processing (MPP). Interestingly, a careful analysis reveals that these two laws are in fact identical. The well publicized arguments were resulted from misunderstandings of the nature of both laws.

This paper establishes the mathematical equivalence between Amdahl's Law and Gustafson's Law. We also focus on an often neglected prerequisite to applying the Amdahl's Law: the serial and parallel programs must compute the same total number of steps for the same input. There is a class of commonly used algorithms for which this prerequisite is hard to satisfy. For these algorithms, the law can be abused. A simple rule is provided to identify these algorithms.

We conclude that the use of the "serial percentage" concept in parallel performance evaluation is misleading. It has caused nearly three decades of confusion in the parallel processing community. This confusion disappears when processing times are used in the formulations. Therefore, we suggest that time-based formulations would be the most appropriate for parallel performance evaluation."



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interesting paper about the economics of unbundling show that there is no gain for consumers and that the wholesale market for channels would be badly disrupted http://astro.temple.edu/~dbyza.... One caveat, though: the paper does not consider the effects of the streaming delivery of the content - it was written in 2010, before Netflix Hulu et al had reached any reasonable size.

It's a nod towards COWculus, "calculus on web" from http://cow.math.temple.edu/

Where does this come from and why can't it ever be debunked once and for all?

I would call it a Meta Rule. A rule that is not what copyright says; but was proposed once as a guideline, and took on a life of its own through the power of word of mouth -- with various institutions codifying it. With various degrees of strictness --- if you are in the wrong place at the wrong time and use 31 seconds of a media recording; I suppose you might get expelled from some school, because you're over the limit.

Examples:

Halldavidson: This copyright chart form was designed to inform teachers what tehy may do under the law

Music: Up to 10% of a copyrighted musical composition may be reproduced, performed and displayed as part of a multimedia program produced by an educator or student for educational purposes. ---- Authorities site a maximum length of 30 seconds. See notes by congressman below.

Temple University: College of Liberal Arts: Fair Use Policy:
Educators May use their projects for teaching, for a period of up to two years after the first instructional use with a class. ....
Music, Lyrics, and Music Video Up to 10% but no more than 30 seconds from any single musical work Any alterations shall not change the basic melody or fundamental character of the work. .... Motion Media Up to 10% or 3 minutes, whichever is less

WILEY: Permission requirements .... . A single quotation or several shorter quotes from a full-length book, more than 300 words in toto. ..... A single quotation of more than 50 words from a newspaper, magazine, or journal. .... Material which includes all or part of a poem or song lyric (even as little as one line), or the title of a song. ...

The Law of Fair use and the Illusion of Fair use Guidelines

Pikes Peak Community College: Copyright Portion Limits; Rules of the road: Music, lyrics, music video - Up to 10%, but no more than 30 seconds Arlington Independent School District: Copyright: Portion Limitations
CCSJ: Copyright Fair Use: 'Allowable portion for fair use'
Public Schools of North Carolina: Copyright in an Electronic environment:

Up to 10% of a body of sound recording, but no more than 30 seconds

St. Olaf College: Copyright guidelines

Music, lyrics, music video: up to 10% but in no event more than 30 seconds of an individual work

MolStead Library; North Idaho College The amount of work to be copied is based on the “portion limit” set for that “medium.” [....] In general, you should never use more than 30 seconds or 10 percent of a piece of recorded music. Ball State University, guidelines for educational media:

4.2.3: Music, Lyrics and Music Video : Up to 10%, but in no event more than 30 seconds, of the music and lyrics from an individual work. No alteration(s) of the music and/or lyrics are allowed.

You are too old to go to law school. You will be working for someone who is younger than you... Focus on doing your job; it's what you have.

I'm very glad I've never listened to people like you, you sound old and bitter.

Yes. It is morally imperative to resist immoral laws.

Have you looked at what Wikileaks publishes? It's not some yellow press institution that posts some sad peeping tom bullshit. It's hardcore international politics and all kind of shady deal most of which should never have been classified in the first place.

You really think that the US is a "free democracy with fair justice system"? What rock do you live under?

The world is already a much worse place. http://community.mis.temple.edu/mis3538b2/files/2011/10/assage.jpg

Did YOU actually read the letter? The whole letter and not just the excerpt that you linked to? Here's the whole letter.

http://www.temple.edu/lawschool/dpost/mcphersonletter.html

Maybe you should do a little more digging before you grab your pitchfork.

First, even in the excerpt you cited, Jefferson acknowledges that progress can be made towards forming a general set of rules. He's not saying there shouldn't be anything such as IP (which is what you and every other knee jerk engineer seems to quote this for).

Second, he actually requests that the very letter you're excerpting not be used to misrepresent what he's saying:

"I have thus, Sir, at your request, given you the facts and ideas which occur to me on this subject. I have done it without reserve, although I have not the pleasure of knowing you personally. In thus frankly committing myself to you, I trust you will feel it as a point of honor and candor, to make no use of my letter which might bring disquietude on myself."

Long story short, you do much disservice to your point when chastising me for cherry picking points but then rely on them yourself as your sole support for your main argument.

And I'M the troll.

Your post was thoughtful, unlike TFA. The only thing you missed was the perfect opportunity to recommend that all Slashdot overlords, submitters, moderators, and participants equip themselves with the following ignorance reduction module (aka an excellent book):

Innumeracy - Mathematical Illiteracy Consequences by John Allen Paulos .

Plan for things to fail, and when they do, you won't be in such a panic.

As for:

on all likely relevant platforms, processes hold resources, not threads. So killing a thread doesn't do anything to help with resource management and/or reclamation.

The open group disagrees

The pthread_detach() function shall indicate to the implementation that storage for the thread thread can be reclaimed when that thread terminates. If thread has not terminated, pthread_detach() shall not cause it to terminate. The effect of multiple pthread_detach() calls on the same target thread is unspecified.

So does the Comp Sci department at Temple U pthread_detatch

You can mark for deletion and reclaim the storage and other resources associated with a thread (of course, after it has terminated executing) with the command:

#include

int pthread_detach(pthread_t thread);

This command will not terminate a thread that is executing, only indicating that we want to reclaim automatically its storage when it terminates execution. Other ways of reclaiming the resources of a thread are:

• If the thread was created with attribute set to PTHREAD_CREATE_DETACHED, or
• If this thread is waited for with a pthread_join call.

So does the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory pthread_exit() is the way to claim thread-local data.

Regardless of the method of thread termination, any cancellation
cleanup handlers that have been pushed and not yet popped are executed,
and the destructors for any existing thread-specific data are executed.

Normally, you also write clean-up routines for closing file handles, freeing up any manualy malloc'd memory and returning it to the arena, etc.

And Apple here

Because POSIX creates threads as joinable by default, this example changes the thread’s attributes to create a detached thread. Marking the thread as detached gives the system a chance to reclaim the resources for that thread immediately when it exits.

and even the Aussies at Cardiff U agree pthread_destroy() that you can free up all memory allocated, so as long as you clean up the stuff YOU allocated, and allow the library to free up the stuff allocated at thread creation and initialization.

So, what relevant platforms don't support pthreads?

You cannot add developers to a project and make it release sooner, no more than 9 women can make a baby in one month.

So Windows Vista could have been released in 2002 if Microsoft had only fired all but one member of the Windows development team back in 2001, before the Vista project started? Shit, hold on while I let all of my clients know that they don't need my services anymore—the answer is to fire all but one member of the team!

...or maybe it doesn't actually work the way you say, because the corollary to your claim is that release will happen soonest if no one is ever added to the project (one member is requisite for the project to exist at all). Back to the example: over the years Microsoft grew the Windows team up from 0 members, and I doubt they were doing it to reduce their development capacity.

Honestly, scaling is manageable if the project is broken down into bite sized chunks and the team is comprised of subteams (personal size preference: 4-5 members). Yes, there is added overhead, but hierarchy and management can mitigate such issues; Agile development practices make the overhead as painless as possible. It is naive to think that you need a fully-connected network for an entire (massive) project in order for the team to be able to function.

In summary, "Yes, you can add developers to a project and make it release sooner, so please stop spreading this meme which was only ever applicable if certain naive stipulations were presumed."

PS. There is a finite amount of release speedup available by adding additional devs (Amdahl's Law), but overall release complexity capacity per time unit increases (Gustafson's Law). This is a classical problem in parallel processing. Some dev projects are more serial in nature, others are embarrassingly parallel.

Gustafson's Law giveth, while Amdahl's Law taketh away.

Interesting...

It's probably about time to mention the fact that the expansion Machine Access Code is in wide use, even if it is not the expansion you like.

Examples;

• UCSF ITFS: Wireless Networking and Security Standards: Legacy host based authorization systems utilizing the machine address code (MAC) may continue to be used until June 30th 2010
• Bluetooth essentials for programmers: 1.2.1: "Identical to the Machine Access Code (MAC) address for Ethernet"
• Source: Computer Crime Research Center, for another user's Ethernet address (known as a MAC or Machine Address Code)
• Book of the Dead, Patricia Daniels Cornwell; "Sandman's IP doesn't correspond to any MAC at the port. That's the Machine Address Code. Whatever computer the Sandman is using to send his e-mails, it doesn't seem to be one at the port,"
• Symantec.com, "When a host wants to join an IP Multicast group, it sends an Internet Group Multicast Protocol (IGMP) join message specifying its Machine Address Code (MAC) address and "
• Valparaiso University, Finding Windows System information, " 5. The Ethernet Address will be listed as the Physical Address. Machine Address Code (MAC)"
• PostgreSQL: A comprehensive guide, Korry Douglas, Susan Douglas; pg 106; "The acronym MAC stands for one of the following: Machine Address Code, Media Access Control, or Macaroni and Cheese"
• [1]
• Temple University, "Please note that you must first register the machine address code (MAC) of your laptop with Computer and Media Services before you can take advantage of this service. "
• Pharmacology Information Technology, "To register your computer, you'll need to know your computer's Machine Address Code (MAC) address, basically the serial number of your ethernet port."
• Chaminade Univeristy, "Examples of information which we receive, and may store, include (although are not necessarily limited to) the Internet protocol (IP) address used to communicate with us; the Machine Address Code (MAC) number of your computer"
• eHow: How to Find the Machine Address Code on a PowerMac

I have already moderated so posting anonymously. In re: your citation for the 450% increase in executive pay compared to workers, this study (pdf) from Temple University states this on Page 2:

To quantify the relative growth in CEO pay, in 1970 the average S&P 500 CEO earned approximately 30 times the pay of an average production worker. By 2002, this multiple had risen to almost 90 times the earnings of an average production worker in terms of CEO cash compensation (salary and bonus), and exceeded 360 times the earnings of an average production worker in terms of CEO total compensation (cash compensation, stock options and grants, and other compensation) (Hall and Murphy, 2003).

This article from Kyklos Productions and written by Jack Rasmus in 2004, quotes a survey by accounting firm Towers Perrin in which executive pay was 500 times that of the average worker.

Finally, this article from the Heritage Institute breaks out the disparity between average executive pay and average worker pay (up to year 2000 and only for 365 of the largest publicly traded companies) and shows that number to 531. When taken as the total executive pay in the U.S. compared to the total worker pay, the number is 262 times (as of 2005).

Here's a link that I don't think has been mentioned here yet:

http://cow.temple.edu/~cow/cgi-bin/manager

You might find this selection of stuff (calculus plus a few other bits) more tractable than some of the other possibilities.

Sorry the article is at http://www.temple.edu/law/tjstel/2005/fall/v24no2-Hemmer.pdf the link was to information about the presiding professor.

The UK mention was to broaden the field to a more global view - everything else is in the field of US law.

I am admittedly less familiar with US Copyright. 17 USCS SS.106 (b) is the point of issue - preparing derivatives. This Section is equivalent to Berne's Article 2 IIRC, Art.2(3?) referring to alterations, arrangements, etc.. USCS has to be at least as narrow as Berne in order to satisfy the Convention.

The cited Temple Journal article gives a compelling discussion (IMO) of relevant prior judgements, I've not checked which levels these reached and so how binding they would be.

As I've said before, I don't like it, but I think this is the proper interpretation of the law we have (internationally) - that use of adblockers is alteration (creating a derivative) and unless this is specifically licensed (it is specifically denied by ToS of eg MySpace) then an ABP user, for example, is infringing the copyright of the content author.

There is no such thing as "Fair Use" in the UK.

Slashdot is a US-centric site, so unless you qualify your remarks from the beginning I assume you are talking about the United States.

Fair use is limited in the US, as I understand it, to actions that provide a social function (education) and those that do no commercial harm to the authors. Removing ads fits neither of these categories.

You can read the details on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#Fair_use_under_United_States_law

In particular:

              1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
              2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
              3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
              4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

As a home user viewing the web any way I see fit, (1) certainly applies. I'm not redistributing my modifications. As for (2), the work was displayed on the web to be downloaded, and the whole system is founded on the principle that the end-machine and user is allowed to display the content as it wants. Same for (3).

Now (4) is the biggest argument, but its intention is that you don't redistribute a work making it useless. The fact that VCRs and then DVRs are legal for home use and for skipping stuff like commercials makes it clear that just because there can be commercial harm, personal use at home was still allowed.

Temple Journal of Science and Tech & Enviro Law Vol.XXIV page 483+, under review of Professor of Law Donald P Harris ( http://www.law.temple.edu/servlet/com.rnci.products.PublishNow.RetrieveSingleArticle?serv=templelawdb&db=templelaw&site=TempleLaw&sction=faculty_Harris_briefbio&article=1&part=2 [temple.edu] )

I wasn't able to access the article from your link. What steps did you take to get to it?

There is no such thing as "Fair Use" in the UK. Fair use is limited in the US, as I understand it, to actions that provide a social function (education) and those that do no commercial harm to the authors. Removing ads fits neither of these categories.

Temple Journal of Science and Tech & Enviro Law Vol.XXIV page 483+, under review of Professor of Law Donald P Harris ( http://www.law.temple.edu/servlet/com.rnci.products.PublishNow.RetrieveSingleArticle?serv=templelawdb&db=templelaw&site=TempleLaw&sction=faculty_Harris_briefbio&article=1&part=2 [temple.edu] )

pp485 ibid: "The court interpreted the Web site argument to suggest that 'any action by a computer user that produced a computer window or visual graphic that altered the screen appearance of Plaintiff's website,however slight, would require Plaintiff's permission.' "

ibid: "Because ad-blocking software makes a permanent change, it is analogous to Shaklee, and thus infringement. Other cases support this view. In WGN Continental Broadcasting Co. v. United Video, Inc., the Seventh Circuit noted that a copyright licensee who 'makes an unauthorized use of the underlying work by publishing it in a truncated version is an infringer - any unauthorized editing of the underlying work, ... would constitute an infringement of the copyright.'"

How many lawyers post on slashdot? I did work as an intellectual property professional (in Patents) for 5 years, FWIW.

The differences between the sibling posts example and yours of covering a TV screen versus the case in point is the commercial detriment of the copyright holder.

You've bought (or someone else has) the book you're ripping pages out of. The authors commercial interest is not harmed. If you were a bookshop owner and you carefully bawdlerised the book by excising various pages, you'd be in breach of the authors moral and commercial rights wrt the book - you've altered their work and affected it's commercial value (even if more people now buy it, it's not your call to make).

Similarly with the TV all financial elements are solved prior to your viewing of the screen whether that's payment of a subscription by you or pay-per-presentation by the advertiser.

In the case of the webpage the financial benefit accrued by the author is dependent on the presentation, or more usually the use of, the adverts he causes to be presented as part of his work. By only displaying the non-advertising part of the work you've altered it and caused a potential financial loss.

All that said, I have no problem with use of ABP / NoScript, I don't believe it is allowed under international copyright law however.

Reading:
Temple Journal of Science and Tech & Enviro Law Vol.XXIV page 483+, under review of Professor of Law Donald P Harris ( http://www.law.temple.edu/servlet/com.rnci.products.PublishNow.RetrieveSingleArticle?serv=templelawdb&db=templelaw&site=TempleLaw&sction=faculty_Harris_briefbio&article=1&part=2 )

pp485 ibid: "The court interpreted the Web site argument to suggest that 'any action by a computer user that produced a computer window or visual graphic that altered the screen appearance of Plaintiff's website,however slight, would require Plaintiff's permission.' "

ibid: "Because ad-blocking software makes a permanent change, it is analogous to Shaklee, and thus infringement. Other cases support this view. In WGN Continental Broadcasting Co. v. United Video, Inc., the Seventh Circuit noted that a copyright licensee who 'makes an unauthorized use of the underlying work by publishing it in a truncated version is an infringer - any unauthorized editing of the underlying work, ... would constitute an infringement of the copyright.'"

http://www.benedelman.org/spyware/#suits gives cases where Gator, in particular, were successfully sued for covering parts of a web page with their own popup adverts a related transformative derivative action that is also mentioned in the article above.

in Welcome to the Monkey House.

The deathless verse, of this cybernetic Cyrano?

"Love is a hawk with velvet claws / Love is a rock with heart and veins / Love is a lion with satin jaws / Love is a storm with silken reins"

The unnamed first-person narrator begins by discussing EPICAC's origins and why he wants to tell EPICAC's story. The narrator says that EPICAC is his best friend, even though it is a machine. As far as the narrator is concerned, the reason EPICAC no longer exists is because it became more human than its designers originally intended. The narrator works on EPICAC during the night shift with fellow mathematician Pat Kilgallen, with whom the narrator falls in love. He decides to ask Pat to marry him, but because he is so stoic during the proposal, Pat declines. In order to show that he can in fact be "sweet" and "poetic" as Pat has requested, the narrator tries and fails at poetry writing.

The narrator asks EPICAC's opinion on how he should proceed with Pat. EPICAC initially does not understand the terms the narrator uses, such as "girl" and "love" and "poetry." Once the narrator provides EPICAC with proper dictionary definitions, EPICAC generates a poem for Pat. The narrator takes this poem and passes it off as his own. Pat is so delighted that she and the narrator kiss for the first time. The next night, the narrator asks EPICAC to write a poem about their kiss, and EPICAC delivers another poem for the narrator to claim as his own. When Pat reads this poem she is so overwhelmed that she can do little else but cry. The following night the narrator asks EPICAC to devise a marriage proposal poem for Pat. However, instead of simply creating poetry as with previous requests, EPICAC surprises the narrator by saying that it would like to marry Pat.

The narrator realizes that EPICAC has fallen in love with Pat and tries to explain to EPICAC that Pat cannot love a computer. EPICAC resigns itself to the fact that it cannot be with Pat, and the narrator realizes now that he cannot ask EPICAC for any more poems. He finds Pat and asks her to marry him again, citing his previous poems as expressions of his feelings. Pat accepts his marriage proposal, but adds the stipulation that for every anniversary, the narrator must write her another poem. The narrator agrees because he will have a full year to devise another way to create poetry.

The next day the narrator receives an urgent call from his supervisor. He rushes to the room where EPICAC is housed to discover Dr. Von Kleigstadt and a huge group of military men crowded around the remains of EPICAC. During the night, EPICAC destroyed itself, effectively committing suicide because it could not be with the woman it loved. It did, however, leave the narrator and Pat a marriage present -- five hundred original love poems. The narrator now has enough anniversary poems to keep his vow to Pat for centuries to come, and is relieved by this gesture from his friend.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPICAC_(short_story)

The whole story is here: http://astro.ocis.temple.edu/~tarantul/epicac.html

It seems that every man's thought, when first contemplating the vast possibilities of electronic calculation, turn to the notion: "How can I use this thing to get laid?"

It's just not the same without Smell-o-vision.

Thank gawd.

Note that most of his research seems to be about properties of fluids and modifying them electromagnetically, and he has quite a few publications in peer-reviewed journals in this area.

This seems quite likely to be legitimate. You are making the elementary logic error of assuming that because many crackpots have claimed to accomplish a certain result, anyone who claims to accomplish that result must be a crackpot.

Tao appropriately demonstrated that a) application of an electric field does in fact reduce fuel droplet size

Translation: Tao claims that an electric field reduces fuel droplet size. Nowhere in the article do I find anything that indicates he actually demonstrated it. And most likely the claim is bogus. Gasoline isn't polar, and shouldn't react to an electric field. Nor should an electric field in a fluid continue to have any effect after the fluid has passed through it.

and b) there is significantly increased efficiency in laboratory measured horsepower

Again, I failed to see this claim in the article. In fact, the only experiment mentioned in the article consists of driving around for six months in a Mercedez Benz with no control group.

Tao provides a theoretical framework for explaining the results. The purpose of this paper was not to demonstrate that you get better driving mileage but that a reproducible effect exists at all.

Which paper? It is not listed on his faculty page. The article doesn't even suggest that such a paper exists, or that such an effect has been demonstrated.

With results this strong, any scientist or engineer worth his salt would then slap one in a car and see what happens; he did this and reported on it.

Which results? All I can see is that he slapped it in some car. Which proves nothing.

At no point does he claim that everyone using this device would see similar benefits. That is the subject of another study once the basic parameters for producing the effect (field strength and time duration) are established, which Tao points out have NOT been completely evaluated.

I see. This is the new kind of science, where you start by claiming the results you want as fact, and only much later conducts even a simple experiment.

Saying double blind studies are necessary at this point merely reflects your lack of understanding of the scientific method, research design and reporting. You are in fact free to obtain the funding to perform the double blind study yourself if you feel it's necessary. With research results as strong as Tao is presenting, you could be confident that your study would yield positive results.

Right. When you are a strong believer, you don't need science, or scientific rigority. All you need is a strong belief. Basically you are telling me that this device is based on faith, not science. I prefer science.

From Thomas Jefferson's letter to Isaac McPherson,August 13, 1813:

...It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,)
that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their
inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to
their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of
any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be
singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to
inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the
subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate
property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law,
indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men
equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who
occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property
goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is
given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if
an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of
natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If
nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of
exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an
idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps
it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into
the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess
himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses
the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who
receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without
lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light
without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to
another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man,
and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and
benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire,
expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any
point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our
physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.

Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society
may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an
encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but
this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of
the society, without claim or complaint from any body...

The Full Text of the letter.

Microsoft Vista coming soon
For the past few months, Computer Services has been preparing for the release of Vista. This preparation has included testing the system with University critical applications and Web sites, working with vendors, consulting with representatives from Microsoft, and researching and determining the most effective methods for delivering the product to the University community.

Our aggressive research and testing of Vista have identified a number of applications and sites that do not work and some that function less than optimally with Vista. Currently, we are waiting for vendors to release updated software that is compatible with Vista. As we receive software updates, we will continue our extensive and thorough testing to ensure that each package complies with our high standards and expectations.

A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper, among other books by John Allen Paulos, is excellent. In it he provides great examples where real stories seem to say one thing, but due to dodgy or obfuscated math actually mean something completely different. He points out that only by doing the math yourself are you able to know the real truth behind the real world news.. His website http://www.math.temple.edu/~paulos/ has some useful links. His stories come across much better than contrived word problems intended to show students why they might need to use math.

Notice you didn't see a thread here encouraging people to ask Democrats [about taxes and Al Qaeda]

Well, this being a site whose demographic is more united in a concern with science than on an agreement about tax policy or foreign policy, no, you didn't.

I'm not a Democrat or running for President. (Yet...I've hit the age requirement, and looking at the current field of candidates, might just write myself in 2008.) But I'd love to hear such questions put to candidates.

Here's how I'd answer: well, sir, if you want to lower taxes, you have to lower spending. Now, given that Americans pay lower taxes than most nations of comparable economic development, I don't find the issue tops on my priority list; especially when we're talking about increasing taxes on the unearned income of the wealthy, whose share of the tax burden has fallen.

But as it happens, a tremendous amount of money is being wasted on American "defense" spending, especially in the Iraq occupation. (Not to mention American and Iraqi lives.) U.S. military spending makes up close to half of the world total, with the next tier of nations (the UK, France, Japan and China) with around 5% each. We could almost halve our military budget and still be outspending any other nation five to one! But talk about such spending cuts - which would enable significant tax cuts - and neoconservatives go apeshit. It's as if they view the military as America's penis and fear it shrinking. (I fear they've confused their rifles and their "guns".)

Meanwhile, they love to make a big fuss about cutting spending on welfare and social programs, which make up a very small amount of federal spending and wouldn't save the average American more than a few dollars a year.

Politicians love to lump "entitlements" all together, ignoring that the bulk of that is Social Security (third rail!) and that a large chunk is military retirement spending and VA benefits, which rightly should be counted under military spending. Actual welfare and social development spending is fairly small.

As for Al Qaeda, "retreating" is not a concept that applies to fighting criminals. The whole notion that a "war" can be fought against a criminal gang like Al Qaeda (which was not in Iraq before we fucked it up, and would fall apart there if we weren't recruiting for them with screwups like Abu Ghraib) is the root of the problem here.

What will happen if we pull out immediately? The same thing that will happen if we pull out next year, or in five years, or in twenty years - chaos. The question is whether we are smart enough to cut our losses.

In the game of go, there is a common strategic error (at least for beginners like me) where a player will try to save a group of stones with a "ladder", laying down more sones and trying to escape. But a knowledgable player will see the pattern develop, knows his pieces are doomed, and lets them fall rather than wasting even more resources to have them and even more fall.

Iraq is a quagmire; Cheney knew it thirteen years ago. The invasion was a stupid and criminal thing to do. Bush and company should be impeached for their crimes, and the U.S. (and U.K., which really bears the root responsbibility for screwing up the Middle East back to the British Mandate) should compensate the Iraqi people as best it can and get the hell out.

Sadly, Arrow's theorem still applies for single-person elections. The problem is with the independence axiom - Condorcet (like other schemes) can be gamed by people changing what ought to be irrelevant orderings. Similarly, there must be situations in which the addition of new voters, ranking a previous winner first, causes them to lose. There's a formal proof of this for single-winner elections at this location. Nice to have someone else who at least knows this stuff ....

Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Isaac McPherson, August 13, 1813

Here's a link to the complete transcript of the letter. The University of Chicago only published about 1/7 of it.

For those who cannot understand the relevance, Jefferson was a Founder of America and Third President. This is a primary document regarding the original intent of patents. Original intent is considered to be the gold standard by many conservatives. In this letter, Jefferson even covers the concept of 'prior art', as well as makes an assertion that ideas are without the realm of private ownership.

I totally agree. The problem is at least two-fold.

First - the plurality election system (as opposed to range voting) for federal and state elections. It is perfectly rational for someone who hates both major parties to vote for the one they hate the least, because expected utility from a major-party vote in the plurality system is many orders of magnitude greater than expected utility from a third-party vote. (That is an early -- and I doubt original -- result in the paper, but the presentation is good and the rest of the paper is gold.)

Second - candidate selection within major parties is done by cabal. Sure, there are state-by-state primaries, but the number of voters in those primaries is quite small, and the results of primaries are not binding.

Voter apathy and stupidity contributes to the second problem, but if the first problem were fixed, the major party nominations wouldn't matter quite so much. Money would still mean a lot in determining which candidates gain traction in the media, and thus gain popular support. However, without the game-theoretic nightmare of our current plurality voting system, people could vote their conscience. If nothing else, with people voting their conscience we'd all have a clear idea of the political spectrum in the U.S. Right now we can't tell how many people prefer Green to Democrat, or Libertarian to Republican, because people vote dishonestly in order (they hope) to suffer the least.

Since you list humorous books, I'm not sure what your definition of "technical" is. I'll assume you meant "non-fiction". Here's a few titles that are recommended for anyone who has a brain and wants to think hard about the state of the world.

• Books by Edward Tufte on how graphs, PowerPoint presentations, and other sources of technical information can mislead rather than inform (and how to correct this).
• _A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper_ or any other books by John Allen Paulos which focus on how a misunderstanding of mathematics has consequences for our society.
• The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan.
• On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society by West Point psychologist, military historian, and former Army Ranger Lt. Col. Grossman. Anyone who thinks that they would be able to "do what must be done" and kill anyone who threatened their family ought to read this. Also recommended reading for all the hawks out there that are so anxious to send our young out to fight unnecessary wars.

GMD

From here:

Researchers in the parallel processing community have been using Amdahl's Law and Gustafson's Law to obtain estimated speedups as measures of parallel program potential. In 1967, Amdahl's Law was used as an argument against massively parallel processing. Since 1988 Gustafson's Law has been used to justify massively parallel processing (MPP). Interestingly, a careful analysis reveals that these two laws are in fact identical. The well publicized arguments were resulted from misunderstandings of the nature of both laws.

This paper establishes the mathematical equivalence between Amdahl's Law and Gustafson's Law. We also focus on an often neglected prerequisite to applying the Amdahl's Law: the serial and parallel programs must compute the same total number of steps for the same input. There is a class of commonly used algorithms for which this prerequisite is hard to satisfy. For these algorithms, the law can be abused. A simple rule is provided to identify these algorithms.

We conclude that the use of the "serial percentage" concept in parallel performance evaluation is misleading. It has caused nearly three decades of confusion in the parallel processing community. This confusion disappears when processing times are used in the formulations. Therefore, we suggest that time-based formulations would be the most appropriate for parallel performance evaluation.

http://www.temple.edu/ispr/examples/ex02_09_16b.ht ml

"A moderately high voltage is required to stimulate the target cells inside the brain, and it is not possible to stimulate small groups of cells specifically. The voltages applied could, in some cases, provoke epileptic seizures."

For the record, the entire Math department at my school (Temple University) is set up on Suse and there are a few computer labs around campus with RHEL boxes. All of the main computer labs are about 2/3 Windows 1/3 Mac.

I felt exactly the same way.

Here you go, I know it isn't perfect, but it is the closest I can come right now: COW Calculus

John Allen Paulos mentioned a similar idea in his book Beyond Numeracy.

He reviews a fictional 3,200 page book about a mathematician. Every article in the book links to other related topics, creating a Fractal mesh consisting of pretty much everything he knows. Below is one paragraph from this section, the whole chapter can be found at http://www.math.temple.edu/~paulos/humcon.html

"For example, Rucker idly picks his nose while thinking about his theorems, and if the reader chooses to follow up on this, he is directed to a page (on the disk version the alternatives are listed on a menu which appears at the bottom of the monitor) where Rucker's keen interest in proboscis probing is discussed at length. What percentage of people pick their noses? Why do so few people do it in public; yet, in the false privacy of their automobiles why do so many indulge? If you push even further in this direction, there is the memory from a few weeks previous when Rucker, stopped at a red light, saw the elegantly coiffed Mrs. Samaras seated in the BMW across from him, her index finger seemingly deep into her frontal cortex."

Yup.

and were wrong for a. not continuing with the invasion of Iraq after the first Gulf War

Err.. nope.

and b. not following through on their resolution to attack Iraq after weapons inspections failed.

Nope. Not only there was no such resolution (to "attack" Iraq) but they was clearly no reason to do so, as I have shown conclusively, multiple times, thanks to Mr. Ritter. Iraq was actually in the right to throw UNSCOM out after it has become a CIA operation and the UN knew it.

Not to mention all the other repercussions and highly unlikely positive outcomes of any such nonsensical military invasion.

Read: you are attempting to discredit a quote which obviously debunks your position, since you cannot support your position directly. Result: you lose.

The only thing this "obviously debunks" is your sanity. Beyond that, this is not a game and you are not a referee. Reserve these "You lose", "I am telling Mom" and similar missives for your fellow kindergarten classmates.

Actually quoted from CNN. So far you've claimed to know more than both CNN and the BBC. Pardon me if I disagree.

The CNN also disagrees with you. I am not sure if you realize this but quoting Powell from CNN and then insisting you are quoting Annan tells volumes about your mental state.

Your debate style is pathetic - when your ignorance is illustrated you either attempt to misdirect the conversation, claim to know more than the source that is being cited, or just go on ad hominem attacks.

Ah, another classic. Accuse your opponent of employing your own tactics. Do you really think this is going to work?

Interesting that you equate taking action with simply issuing a mission statement.

There were actual demonstrations which followed. The one I pointed you to was in New York, October 1, 1998 at the Times Square. Since you claimed that no protests occurred, even one example disproves your claim. If you think I will dig up every demonstration that occurred since then until the invasion, you are sorely mistaken. Google yourself.

The fact of the matter is nobody was taking out full-page ads, picketing in front of embassies, marching on Washington, calling their Congressmen, or burning flags over sanctions.

I am not sure about flag burning and full-page ads but the rest was definitely done. Multiple times.

Perhaps you can explain why the US and Canada both provided materiel for the war before the US was attacked?

Canada being part of the British Empire had little choice (I find that air of proprietorship of yours in regards to Canada telling by the way). As to the US, it did so at first for profit. There was absolutely no appetite for joining any silly European wars in the US. As a matter of fact, Herr Hitler had a number of admirers in high places in the US. But there were piles of money to be made on shipments of arms and supplies. Some were quite confused as to which side the shipping was to be made to. The business bonanza was followed by growing panic due to massive losses of -- then "neutral", even though they were carrying weapons and ammunition to war -- US merchant ships as they encountered U-boats. Lend Lease was not enacted until March 1941 after Hitler already occupied most of Europe and a good chunk of Africa. Followed by Pearl Harbor few months later. Which changed everything.

In fact, if the US were as evil as the fantasy you whack off to, wouldn't we have sided with the Germans? After all, then we could have had Anglo control of the world, including all the oil.

US is not essentially evil. There are

The biggest hurdle right now is the quality of display technology.

The cost of a small display devices, that can provide fast response times, vibrant colors, and aren't heavy and power intensive is the big issue.

These devices are approaching, and will happen eventually, but the HMD that you used to see that looked like giant insect heads that probably needed a big counter weight on them.

As technologies that allow the image to be drawn directly on your eyeball, and LCD technology shrinks you will see the possibilities of virtual reality, and more specificly, "hyper" reality bearing fruit.

I think we will see people using "hyper" reality technology in the work place much sooner then we'll have full sensorium virtual reality systems.

Boeing already is experimenting with hyper-reality systems, which are images displayed on goggles much like heads up display systems that map out the wiring maps for jumbo jets. Allowing the builders of the airplanes to see where things are going, with out having to take their eyes away from what they are working on. Boeing has been using or experienting with this since 97.

http://www.cnn.com/TECH/9711/21/t_t/jet.set.wiring /

http://www.temple.edu/ispr/examples/ex02_08_01b.ht ml

Trouble is, the sequential-only fraction used in Amdahl's law is a lot smaller than it's usually given credit for.

For example, from http://www.cis.temple.edu/~shi/docs/amdahl/amdahl. html

Using Amdahl's Law as an argument against massively parallel processing is not valid. This is because (F, the fraction of the calculation that is sequential only) can be very close to zero for many practical applications. Thus very high speedups are possible using massively many processors. Gustafson's experiments are just examples of these applications.

Given a pointer to an object, it is not the pointer which is null. The pointer is zero, it is the object which is null, seeing as it is impossible to obtain its value from a pointer with value zero. We just do the trick of using both pointer and its contents to represent incomplete information.

The concept of NULL is an extension to the domain of a variable. It means "no value". In C/C++, we often think of the pointer as the object itself, and as such we do the little trick of using two different operations to get that valuable extension to the domain: we either read the value of the pointer (a memory address) and compare it to zero or we load its content ( the -> operator ). However, why doesn't one usually compare pointers to static values other than zero( eg, ptr != 3 )? In not doing it, we bring to light the fact that we're just using part of the domain of the pointer variable.
To make this clear, think of what you'd have to do to have a null integer. In C you'd likely do:
int * val = malloc( sizeof(int) );
And then you'd use "val" for the null comparison and "*val" for the integer. Funny how in doing that you're spending more memory than if you did:
typedef struct { int value; bool isnull; } NullableInt;
NullableInt a;
With this you'd spend 5 bytes per variable. With the other approach you spend 4 bytes per variable plus 4 bytes for the pointer, for a total of 8 bytes (on 32 bit architectures). :)

Obviously, these considerations are a bit pointless, and one benefits little from them in the context of C/C++ programming. :=)

On the other hand, some languages have specific support for nullable variables, without having to resort to pointers (at least syntactically). NULLs are famous in SQL, although they are also infamous for being used incorrectly many of the times. ;)

This is my Rifle, This is my Gun...:Gunlore in the Military

Pedantic shmantic ;)

The continuum hypothesis is a bit different though, and it is equally valid for it to be true or false. Maybe it is equally valid for P = NP to be true or false, mathematically, but that would leave us in a difficult position for the applied side of it, since we'd have to start thinking about which applied to "our world". I've just decided that I 'believe' that cannot be the case, on the grounds it is far too messy!

There are many undecided statements dealing with computation. In the real world, these statements either fall apart because of problems with how the math models the universe (infinite universe, ...) or experiments can, in principal, be performed to determine the truth. (If experiments are not possible, it is not a very useful statement.) In either case, our mathematical model of reality has some problems.

An interesting and related problem is the Church-Turing thesis [wikipedia.org] since it is too vague (as the Wikipedia article says) for it to be proved true using mathematics, but it could be proved false using a good enough counter example. I'm sure most computer scientists here strongly believe it to be true, though.

The Church-Turing thesis is an empirical statement. It depends on the laws of physics. Look at this paper by Warren Smith on the issue. He proves Church-Turing is false in a certain Newtonian system and true in a simplified relativistic system.

I didn't get that auto-URL thing right, here it is: http://cow.math.temple.edu/

OK, OK,

Sol Lewitt is known mostly for making instructions on how to drawing/paint things - he mostly never did this himself - he would "Sell" basically the blueprint of what he wanted drawn/painted.

For example:

His, "Four basic colors and their combinations" would be a group of drawings that someone else did of, well, four basic colors and their combinations.Another example would be, 'Lines from the Sides, Corners and Center of the Page to Specific Points.'

LeWitt was sort of a precurser to generative art as we know it today. Anyways, since he would never draw/paint these things, he had no individual style, thus this new tool would be worthless for him.

Cindy Sherman would take photos of herself that look eerly like they're from a movie that you've already seen. From what I understand, she would actually find a still of a movie and appropriate, say, the dress of someone and then make her own setting to photograph.

This ones a little off kilter concerning the device from the article, but her photos would be unique, but very similar to something you may have seen before. here's a fairly famous photo of hers

Levine would actually go to an art museum, take a picture of a famous photo, and exhibut it as her own work. Even though its a copy of someone elses, it's still her, "original". Thus if you made a device that would test the authenticity of someone's photo taking style, a Levine would fail as her own style? but pass as someone elses? (who knows) example of her work

Art gets a little weird in the 20th century :)

I STRONGLY recommend you read this article by Warren Smith of Temple University. (PDF 368K) He summarizes clearly what is wrong with our system of Government and how flaws in our voting system have led to the propagation of 50/50 elections, big-money spending and corrupt politicians. Excellent read. It lays things out so clearly that I was actually encouraged that changing our political system is possible!

Abstract: The USA has been and is evolving into an undemocratic state in which rich moneyed entities control politics to favor their own interests at the expense of the majority of the voting population. This evolution is a natural and inevitable consequence of certain logical- historical- economic- political laws that operate under the US's present system of government. The process is self-strengthening via "positive feedback." We back these statements up with evidence. We state and argue for the validity of several dynamical laws which underlie this. We then analyse the feedback process they cause. Six alterations in the political system are then proposed and analysed that could weaken the positive feedback and hopefully allow a renaissance of democracy. The most subtle, but perhaps quite effective, among our suggestions (and the only one to which we devote much analytic attention) is to replace the present "plurality voting system" with "range voting." It is argued that this will decrease both 2-party dominance and motivations for the major parties to try to appear identical ("Tweedledum and Tweedledee").

Come on... yeah 'a random walk down Wall Street' was based on similar ideas, as are all of 'the mathematician turns their glances to the stock market'... the academic purist view does not hold up in the 'real world' (just recently I've seen this this tome of crap which fails to demonstrate a basic understanding of what is being investigated, but succeeds in obstuficating it to attempt a technical superiority (note how this author also failed at data-mining a few years back when the likes of so many others, Google for example, succeed/succeeded).

Check out A Non-Random Walk Down Wall Street... it is not easy, it does not provide cut-and-paste trading strategies, but is does debunk all the BS (basic specification, whatever) 'proof' given over the last 50 years that says markets are random.

Don't you wish DEC was still alive putting out new versions of the Alpha? More registers. Really good compilers. The best chips (at the time) in the world.
(Just curious; did anyone use this or this? (I do not use Pascal (anymore) or C++.) )

If it turns out to be true, this will be super-duper-extraordinary - the man is probably in his 70s. G. H. Hardy wrote: "No mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man's game". Wiles proved FLT at 40, Perelman of the purported Poincare proof is in his 30s... this is similar-level stuff. The only thing I can think of that even comes close is Fred Galvin in his 50s (?) proving the Dinitz conjecture.

You can follow discussions on sci.math and fr.sci.maths. Or read about how similar asymptotic proofs about properties of primes failed. Remember, this is arxiv - in the age of electronic preprints, you get many good proofs like Perelman's along with almost-proofs like Castro-Mahecha's and Dunwoody's.

The Rete algorithim (Rete: A Fast Algorithm for the Many Pattern/Many Object Pattern Match Problem by Forgy in Artificial Intelligence 19, September 1982) is an efficient solution to a problems given in a specification that should never be used because of conceptual nastiness.

The attractive promise of declarative rule-based systems is that each "fact" (base or implicational) in the problem domain can be stated as a rule. But this is hardly the case in Rete based systems.

The Rete algorithm was designed to efficiently implement the non-monotonic forward chaining "blackboard" paradigm. A Rete inference system has a "blackboard" of facts that a large number of rules monitor, and when the some facts on the blackboard match the condition of a rule, the rule can fire and add information to the blackboard (monotonic) or change or delete information from the blackboard (non-monotonic). The main conceptual issue in this sort of system is what to do when the blackboard satisfies more than one rule. The problem is that firing one rule may change the blackboard so that another rule that could have fired can no longer do so. So Rete ranks the applicability or rules.

Thus a blackboard system winds up with rules whose meaning is not just contained in a rule but has to be inferred from all of the other rules that might be fired by similar input conditions. Most Rete based applications I've looked at wind up using the blackboard to essentially implement program counters to control program flow. And in general, adding a new rule may generate new solutions but it also may break prior solutions.

Pure monotonic systems (with forward and/or backward chaining) are conceptually very easy to analyze because all of the "facts" are truly independent.

One can add a form of non-monotonic behavior to monotonic systems by ranking their solutions. E.g. a monotonic system generates N solutions but ranking via some ordering prunes these down to say 1 or 2 best solutions. This external ranking is non-monotonic because adding new facts to the monotonic part may result in different "best" solutions.

So, basically I am advocating an inference system which is conceptually defined as results = rank(infer(facts, data)). If these functions have good mathematical definitions then it may be possible to implement their combination so that ranking controls or happens during the inference process but the results look as if it was external, and thus one avoids the computational horror of over-generation by the "infer" function.

Rete however explicitly and globally performs the ranking process during inference and an arbitrary Rete rule set is probably NP complete to analyze. But maybe a good implementation of a conceptual separation of "rank" and "infer" could be realized by a Rete-like network.

Overall, there are about ten times as many bacteria as human cells in the body, 100 trillion (1014) versus 10 trillion (1013), with bacterial cells being much smaller than human cells. Most of the bacteria live in the mouth, the small intestine, the colon, and on the skin. It is estimated that 500-1000 different species of bacteria live in the human body.

The celebrated microbiologist and geneticist Lynn Margulis has even floated the viewpoint that we vertebrates are an integral part of the ecology as determined by microbes... kind of like a habitat that they developed for themselves, with a big feast at the end of a plant or animal's life.

There are also geologists wondering if the archaea and nanobacteria found deep in the crust are so pervasive that they outmass all other life!

For a fun/alarming take on all this, read Greg Bear's Vitals.