Slashdot Mirror

I have a lecture I give every now and then to various public audiences on tissue engineering (I'm faculty at the University of Calgary). On one of the first slides I show a picture of Dolly the sheep, and also some mice from Wakayama et al, Cell Stem Cell 12(3): 293-297 (2013) (TLDR: they cloned a mouse, then cloned that mouse, etc - 25 generations at time of publication, of which the first 16 had aged through their normal lifespans by that time with no detectable abnormalities).

Lots of interesting things come out of that work, but the key one for this discussion is that a single cell, from an animal that may be old, or sick, or injured, contains the information necessary to recreate the entire body of that organism when it was young, healthy and whole. There's the proof-of-concept - now we just have to figure out how to implement (which won't be trivial).

I think the word 'invented' gives too much credit as is.

They merely released an app that does what others have done before;
http://rnd.azoft.com/mobile-ap...
http://petapixel.com/2013/09/1...
http://dspace.ucalgary.ca/bits...
http://circlewithme.tumblr.com...

But it's Google, so it gets eyeballs anew.

cutting-edge GPS receivers can pull satellite signals out from all the way down to a few dB above the noise floor now, even in "urban canyon" locations where signal is blocked by buildings as well as being muddled.

I'd certainly hope so, considering that the satellite signal is considerably below the noise floor once it reaches the ground... (sources vary between 20dB to 26dB below the noise, I didn't do the math myself)

Canada has concerns about protecting the sovereignty of its arctic territories. Snowmobiles could prove useful in that.

Battle for the Arctic heats up
Defending our sovereignty in the Arctic
Why everyone wants a piece of the Arctic

Here's how crazy of an effect nuclear bombs have had on our atmosphere. Basically, artifacts from the latter half of the 20th century and much of the 21st century will not be able to be reliably carbon dated in the future. Even if you want to include a compensation factor, the concentrations for a given location at different times over the lifespan of an organism and the organism's uptake at different points in its life aren't readily quantified.

Well, not quite. There is useful post-bomb carbon dating. Basically, we put a lot more C14 into the atmosphere in the 1950's than the natural background. It's largely gone from the air, but it will be decaying in trees and the like for some time to come, and that, too, can be used for dating.

"Same way those who support murdering doctors who perform abortions rationalize away "thou shalt not kill."

It's "thou shalt not MURDER", which distinction turns the discussion into a mere matter of personal opinion instead of an absolute rule.

http://people.ucalgary.ca/~elsegal/Shokel/001102_ThouShaltNotMurder.html

The Bible was not originally written in English and all Englsh translations should be take with a grain of salt.

Not THAT Gibson... Bob Gibson. Read this link:

http://devel.specialcollections.ucalgary.ca/books/gibson

To my knowlege there are plugins for hudson that are decent trackers, though I haven't used any of them. Krymson is a project that will be hitting the market soon from Mya Software which I think will eventually be a strong force in the market.

As too planning I am involved with a distributed Story Card planning tool available for download at http://ase.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/ it, being an Academic OS project, is at times unstable though that is changing. You should also check out the Digital Table version which requires a license.

Indeed, bats that fly at night, relying on echolocation, fly too close to the blades. The pressure drop (which their sonar doesn't let them detect) tends to make the capillaries in their lungs go pop.

Here's a press release, or else a radio interview with the authors (second story down - OGG available!)

Environmental impact? You mean like climate change?

Hint: when you change the energy in a complex system, you change the system.

This article is biased towards Phillips' contribution... Shouldn't there at least have been a mention of the "Light Up the World Foundation" and Dave Irvine-Halliday (U of Calgary)?

http://www.ucalgary.ca/oncampus/weekly/nov4-05/schulich-lutw.html

http://www.google.com/search?q=philips+lutw

http://www.ucalgary.ca/news/aug2008/batdeaths

Apparently bat lungs are sensitive to sudden pressure changes.

we are all going to have to get over seeing them as ugly or migratory-bird killers ...

A lot has been done to make wind turbines safer for birds. Bats, on the other hand:

"...wildlife fatalities at wind turbines are now a bat issue, not a bird issue."

It seems that bats, for some reason, are flying so close to the blades that the get caught in a vortex and suffer explosive decompression in their lungs. Yikes.

Even worse - bats tend to fly more frequently at low wind speeds. Note that this invention allows wind turbines to operate more efficiently at low wind speeds. Unfortunate combination.

I'm not saying that wind energy is bad - far from it. But regardless of what we do (i.e. seek 'clean' energy sources), there's going to be complications and a big, steep learning curve.

Here's a radio interview with one of the bat researchers

On Cable they the Discover Channel had a show in HD where they build a CO2 scrubber almost identical to the ones describe in the papers from the University of Calgary's David Keith that the article was about.

Discover Channel
http://dsc.discovery.com/tv/project-earth/explores/carbon.html

David Keith Home page
http://www.ucalgary.ca/~keith/CO2%20Capture%20and%20Storage.html

I don't know about the whole caustic soda CO2 sequestration seems complex. David Keith papers have the whole chemistry capture and extracting the CO2 from the working fluid to reuse them.

The whole thing is like a glorified swamp cooler, and if they were smart, they could just retrofit existing cooling towers and swamp coolers to serve dual purpose of evaporation cooling and CO2 extraction.

I had an interesting though here, which is this is the first steps of terraforming.
We could store CO2 underground when it's too hot, and expel CO2 if we start to get an ice age.

Anyhow I think at this time, methane hydrates warming up on the sea floor and releasing methane in to the atmosphere is starting to occur. Or at least we are just beginning to notice anyhow.
This could end up becoming a much larger problem then CO2 soon.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/hundreds-of-methane-plumes-discovered-941456.html

or, you could stop pulling numbers from your anus and go rtfa - then follow the links to the published papers. Or read this synopsis: http://www.ucalgary.ca/~keith/Misc/AC%20talk%20MIT%20Sept%202008.pdf

The Discovery Channel ran a show on this technology... See more here. http://www.ucalgary.ca/~keith/AirCapture.html

Five years ago, back in 2003, the University of Calgary offered a similar course. I wonder if we'll see the same reactions and tired old positions as last time.

I wouldn't consider Timur Lenk a good example of a ruler following Islamic guidance. He was a warlord who attacked Muslims and non Muslims alike. For example he waged battles with the Mamluks and Ottomans.

I recommend you read more on him. Here are some quotes from that article:

Islam had first reached India in 711 [...] Just as the Muslim rulers of other regions were relatively tolerant of Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism, the Muslim rulers of northern India were similarly tolerant of Hinduism, a religion which originated on the subcontinent, and to which the majority of Indians adhered.

Timur launched his attack on India in 1398, claiming that the Muslim Delhi Sultanate was too lenient towards its Hindu subjects. In reality, Timur probably cared more about looting this wealthy Muslim region than about punishing its religiously tolerant Muslim leaders.

As for source on Islamic tolerance, consider reading about Omar Ibn El Khattab or the well known fact that Christians and Jews lived in prosperity under Islamic rule in Spain.

http://ucalgary.ca/news/june2008/NEOSSat

What he's offering (it seems) is the infrastructure, the projects themselves should come from others. I'm a mathematician myself and often have calculations that are large enough to be impractical on a single machine, but not epic enough in scale to attempt setting up my own scheme like distributed.net or folding@home, if I even knew how. Fortunately I already have access to a cluster that I can throw such jobs at, but based on a conference I was at just last week, there are plenty of researchers who don't.

Although whilst there I also learnt of BOINC (and plans to use it for a crypto challenge), so we'll have to see if Nightlife offers any advantages - largely depends on how many machines it makes available, of course!

You can find some more info on this at.
http://www.ucalgary.ca/news/may2008/neuroArm
I think it will be interesting if a doctor can have less fatigue and sit in a chair and do operations more quickly and more precisely with this.

I understand that there are some operations where you would want the doctor to be on site to help with complications. But some of them like removing a brain tumor where its a procedure that you just need to cut something out it might be able to help the limited supply of doctors in the world be better utilized.

Just last week the University of Calgary announced they would no longer accept tuition payments by credit card.
http://gauntlet.ucalgary.ca/story/12288

Apparently $1,000,000 in credit card processing fees is too much for the top school in a province awash with oil and gas money.

Perhaps the forward-thinking university administrators read the 2008 forecast and decided to revolt against "the future."

Given that the University of Calgary offers degrees in Software Engineering http://www.enel.ucalgary.ca/undergraduate/, and that it is a protected term by APEGGA http://www.apegga.org/members/Publications/peggs/Web02-05/compliance.html/ (Association of Professional Engineers, Geologists, & Geophyscists of Alberta), I think the more accurate statement would have been "I don't have the credentials to call myself a Software Engineer, and I'm going to whine about it on the front page of Slashdot".

I just want to point out that:
They bring up the 6th commandment in the article. While it is often quoted as "Thou shalt not kill," this contains a mistranslation (this is how it is translated in the King James Version). The Hebrew word translated as "kill" here is "ratsah" (Segal). This should in fact be translated "murder." Rendering this passage "Thou shalt not murder." or "Do not murder". This is corrected in many or most modern translations of the Bible.

Here is the definition of murder of dictionary.com: "the killing of another human being under conditions specifically covered in law. In the U.S., special statutory definitions include murder committed with malice aforethought, characterized by deliberation or premeditation or occurring during the commission of another serious crime, as robbery or arson (first-degree murder), and murder by intent but without deliberation or premeditation (second-degree murder)."

So it would seem, the "Thou shall not murder" command is not really applicable to this situation, as Master Chief is certainly not murdering in the legal sense or even in the moral sense. I do not understand "the debate" over whether using this tool to spread the gospel is a good thing or not. Bring people in. Share the love of Christ. Play Halo. I think its a great idea.

My two cents.

Source: Segal, Eliezer. "Thou shall not murder." From the Sources. 19 October 2000. 9 October 2007. http://www.ucalgary.ca/~elsegal/Shokel/001102_ThouShaltNotMurder.html

What would you call it then? Accurate translation maybe?

One metric to tell how long the Northwest Passage has been closed off is by looking whale migration. When the Northwest Passage was open, whales could travel through the Arctic unimpeded. By dating whale remains, it has been about 3000 years since whales have been able to travel through the Northwest Passage. The probability is also high that the passage has remained at least partially cut off most of the year since 8000 years ago.

Depending on your discipline, some (probably most) Canadian universities allow you to substitute your high school French mark for Math (BA in Communications & Culture YES, BSc in Engineering NO). When I went into engineering 10 years ago this was common practice for the Arts guys; looks to still be the same:

http://www.ucalgary.ca/admissions/admission_requir ements/provinces/alberta_nwt_nunavut.html

See Communications & Culture under required subjects for: "Applied Mathematics 30 or Pure Mathematics 30 or Mathematics 31, or a 30-level language other than English."

If it is water, then perhaps there is something present that has increased the surface tension of the water.
According to this article

Certain inorganic salts (called strong electrolytes) that readily dissolve and completely dissociate into their separate ions in water can raise the surface tension by modest amounts. For example a 10.5 mass percent solution of sodium chloride in water will have a surface tension that is raised by about 3.3 mN/m from the pure water level (at room temperature). That is, the surface tension goes from about 73 to about 76 mN/m. Some organic solutes can have a similar effect (sucrose, for example). There is also some evidence that some kinds of highly charged particles, when well dispersed, can raise the effective surface tension.

Yet another "credit due" department post. But at least here is a video: http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~saul/wiki/uploads/P ress/07-mediaclip-icore-full.wmv U. of Calgary actually motivated a start up company called SMART technologies to commercialize this technology.

Secondly, "love thy neighbour" in the New Testament was definitely concerned with gentiles as well as Jews. It only meant Jews in the Old Testament (where it originated), though, so I can see where the confusion comes in. But if you actually read the Parable of the Good Samaritan, where Jesus is specifically asked who the "neighbour" is, gave an example in which the neighbour was a Samaritan. Around that time, the Samaritans were hated almost as much as the Romans, and definitely viewed as gentiles.

And finally, a significant proportion of Christians already accept gays and so on - even those who look on homosexuality as a sin. From what I've seen, the US seems to be anomalous in that it still has quite a lot of fundamentalist loonies, but over in Europe Christians tend to be pretty nice people. In England, for example, the debates over homosexuality tend to be focused more over whether or not they should be allowed to be clergymen within specific sects (by the sects themselves, not by law) rather than whether or not they should be allowed to exist.

I'm not saying Christianity is accurate, but I don't like seeing bad arguments against it either - it perpetuates the belief that all arguments against Christianity's truth are bad.

My personal fave are wind farms. Essentially you're converting the higher average kinetic energy circulating in the atmosphere into useful electrical energy thereby actively cooling the climate, while simultaneously reducing our dependency on fossil fuels via a renewable energy source. Wind farms also have the added benefit that the technology is here, unlike more speculative measures like plankton and sulfur. In fact, as cited in my mini-essay above, some research to this very end has already been conducted.

I totally agree with you here.
I'm a third year electrical engineering student at the University of Calgary, and I can say that classes are more about the knowledge base than about whether you can use them in a career. They teach you to learn quickly and efficiently, and that's what employers are looking for. To even become an accredited engineer you need to have 4 years of on-the-job experience, because learning in class is only half of the actual education. There are also programs such as internship that are highly encouraged (we have about 80%-ish of 3rd years apply to internship this year). It's during the experience phase that you learn the meat of what you need to know.

Without the knowledge base you don't have an engineer, you have a technician. The knowledge base is what defines the engineer. Plus, engineering grads get a lot of research done, and you can't do useful research unless you have taken all the basic courses first!

I totally agree with you here.
I'm a third year electrical engineering student at the University of Calgary, and I can say that classes are more about the knowledge base than about whether you can use them in a career. They teach you to learn quickly and efficiently, and that's what employers are looking for. To even become an accredited engineer you need to have 4 years of on-the-job experience, because learning in class is only half of the actual education. There are also programs such as internship that are highly encouraged (we have about 80%-ish of 3rd years apply to internship this year). It's during the experience phase that you learn the meat of what you need to know.

Without the knowledge base you don't have an engineer, you have a technician. The knowledge base is what defines the engineer. Plus, engineering grads get a lot of research done, and you can't do useful research unless you have taken all the basic courses first!

Indeed. And here's the other bullshit claim of his that I mentioned: Selection tool could revolutionize
hiring, online dating.

What's wrong with that? Well, the moment that you claim it does it in 1/1000 of the time, let's make one thing clear: it means doing in 2 hours what you could do in about a year (at 40 hours a week.) You have to throw away any attempt at interviews, checking references, etc. You just feed the computer the CVs or the dating profiles and it spits out the "Rambo employee" that'll wipe out the competition, or the perfect lover for you.

(Note that that by itself is a camouflaged way of touting "the formula for the perfect X". But let's not get hung up on that.)

The problem there: Garbage In, Garbage Out.

CVs range from 100% honest, to padded, to complete bullshit. We had one guy who couldn't even program, in spite of his impressive CV. After a while of obviously doing nothing, he started just randomly changing files and checking them in to look like he does something. Only to prove how stupid he was, his changes didn't even compile. Then he got fired. Then one of his team mates found his updated CV online, in which he claimed he was the chief architect of that project, single-handedly improved performance by an unrealistic factor, etc. Not only, as said, he couldn't even program, but he never had that kind of responsibility. I personally know the guy who was the actual architect of that project.

And most dating profiles are useless tripe. They'll tell you generic stuff like "likes to have fun", as if that many others would write "I like to moan and bitch and sob on someone's shoulder."

Even if you forced people to put everything into numbers, on a 0 to 10 scale, CVs will still include a random amount of padding (that guy I mentioned would certainly give himself 10s in a lot of stuff), and so will dating profiles. And different people will interpret that scale differently. Does for example 10 in "likes cats" on a dating profile mean they like to play with a cat, or total obsession, or being a furry, or what? Different people will interpret that differently. Does a 5 mean "I don't care about cats either way" or "I totally hate the fucking things"? For some people 5 is center, but there are a lot of people whose scale is basically logarithmic: anything they like at all must be between 9 and 10, and anything lower is interpreted as about the same as giving someone an F. See the many fanboys sending hate mail to review sites if a game scores less than 90%.

So how _do_ you put such garbage in without getting garbage out? Traditionally the check was actually talking to that someone, checking if they really know their stuff, or in the case of dating, actually dating them and seeing if you really fit. How does a standardized computerized system do that?

And more importantly, what ever happened to it? Such a gold mine, you'd expect to see it being used by now.

It reminds me of a story about an alchemist in the middle ages, who tried to sell the formula for converting lead into gold to some king. So the king gives him an empty bag and tells him something like, "well, you already know how to make gold, so fill it for yourself."

Same thing here. If you have a standardized way of picking a Rambo employee that will wipe out several squads of the competition (his hyperbole, not mine), you take a loan, hire 20 of them, and be the next Microsoft or whatever. Ok, maybe he's not the risk taking type, even when the win is (or he makes it sound) 99% guaranteed. Who else used it and made a fortune then?

I think the poster doth protest a bit much.

Here's his resume:

http://www.ucalgary.ca/~steel/procrastinus/homepag e/homepage.html

Links to the sources:

• Dr. Piers Steel's home page
• Procrastination Central his site on procrastination, with links to his research.

BTW: A quote I saw on the latter site:

"One of the greatest labor-saving inventions of today is tomorrow." Vincent T. Foss

Maybe he should have worked there longer. Follow this link.

http://pubs.aina.ucalgary.ca/arctic/Arctic39-1-15. pdf

In 1984 this study was done in Canada. The first page kind of says it all.

" Between 1959 and 1974 a total of 48sqkm calved off from Milne and Ayles ice shelves. In addition, the Ayles Ice Shelf moved about 5km out into Ayles Ford"

Not quite 66 sqkm but close. And it sounds as if the shelf broke off rather recently within a few decades, and somehow reattached itself. No mention of that in the story, but there is a significant emphasis that the ice is 3000 years old and ancient. Making it seem as if this has been the same for 3000 years. Next at the bottom left of the first page.

"The largest observed ice calving occurred at Ward Hunt Ice Shelf (just north of Ayles) where almost 600SQKM, broke off between 1961 and 1962.

don't laugh, but we're on our way:

http://qis.ucalgary.ca/quantech/storage.html

This conflict arises because Eve was not the first woman mentioned in the bible, there was some imperfect revision work done to delete the earlier references to Lilith.

G'morning. Sorry for the long delay. Busy week.

Also, you made a very interesting point, one that I hadn't heard before. It did not square with my understanding of the textual chronology, so I gave you the benefit of the doubt and spent a while researching the issue. Unfortunately, the few references to this particular Lilith theory (that I could find) are based on either a discredited text, a nonexistent text, or both. I imagine that's not what you're referring to, so I would find it educational if you could provide a citation.

What I found is that the primary source for this form of the Lilith legend is The Alphabet of Ben-Sira, a document that has been dated to around the 8th-10th centuries AD. This is not a primary source for Jewish traditions by any stretch of the imagination; indeed, much of its content is satirical, and so unflattering that some propose that the Alphabet could be anti-semitic in origin.

Now, there is a midrash that hypothesizes an unnamed first wife for Adam, and the best that can be said for the Lilith interpretation is that the compiler of the Alphabet cleverly synthesized this midrashic theory with a preexisting, non-Jewish myth of Lilith. Note that much of the midrashim, and specifically this midrash, dates from about 500AD and later. Jewish thinkers obviously found no issue with the two texts for 1100-1800 years, depending on which dates you subscribe to.

Interestingly, a conflating of these two points has led to a persistent belief that there are actual Rabbinic or midrashic writings that mention Lilith. There are none. It is simply sloppy scholarship.

The upshot is this: the order of events is backwards. The text is historical; the superimposition of Lilith (or some other first wife) is more recent. This is obvious in hindsight, as the very form of the Ben-Sira Lilith text is parasitic upon the pre-existent Genesis text, whereas there exists no clear route by which a hypothetical Lilith text could be redacted to produce the Genesis text -- even if this hypothetical text were to be found.

Now, I did find one website which amusingly mistook the Alphabet's date as being 8th-10th century BC, which could have possibly predated the authorship of Genesis if you accept the "assured results of modern criticism" that the book was compiled and redacted around 600BC rather than written by Moses around 1300BC. Again, I will assume that this is not what you were referring to.

But it's worth mentioning, of course, that this "modern criticism" or "higher criticism" of Graf and Wellhausen (a.k.a. the "JEDP" theory of multiple authorship) was conceived nearly 200 years ago, long before the advent of fields such as, say, archaeology or comparative linguistics. The methods of textual criticism are quite valuable in providing interpretive insights to a text, but to extrapolate such nuances into a challenge of authorship is to exaggerate their significance, under most circumstances. Textual criticism often produces absurd results when applied to nonreligious texts with the rigidity and vehemence that it is applied to religious texts. As one essayist concluded: "My professor of classics at Cornell University in the 1950's observed wryly that after seventy-five years of that sort of thing in Homeric scholarship, 'we have finally jettisoned that approach and have concluded that if Homer didn't write the Odyssey, it was written by someone of the same name who lived about the same time.'"

Surprisingly, the immense popularity

GPR is a pretty common geophysical technique. Yes, it can be used to find meteorites, and yes it can (and will) be used for a future Mars rover mission. Such a system is already in development.

GPR is also used for many other things, like:
- groundwater contamination
- finding buried garbage
- finding voids under roads
- finding corpses
- determining stratigraphy of surficial sediments

Colour analysis is interesting but it's well known that an artist's colour usage changes over time (a famous example being Claude Monet and his eye cataracts). Brush stroke patterns, on the other hand, seem to change less. There was an interesting paper in 2004 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on using wavelet analysis of brush stroke marks to separate originals from imitations and to detect areas of paintings that had been reworked.

Of course these are all just tools that add evidence either way, not proof of originality or forgery. I suspect that using both colour and brush stroke analysis would do a better job than just one or the other.

Boy, do those jokers get a lot of mileage out of inventing gun powder. What a crock.

you aren't kidding. The Fire Lance, a precursor to the firearm was first seen in the 10th century in china. Also showing up around the same time was a cute little number called the Fire Arrow. By the time of the Ming dynasty, gunners were widely employed in its infantry. By the 16th century, the armies had transitioned to almost entirely gunpowder based weaponry. Can you imagine back in those days facing up against a highly organized army with cannons, hand guns, grenades, rockets, and a napalm like substance similar to greek fire!

My personal belief is that if it weren't for geography, the chinese would have expanded all the way across europe. Of course the corruption of the ming dynasty eventually led to the downfall of china. That corruption still looms today in the chinese communist party. Open societies are like kryptonite for corruption. If there was a more open society during the Ming dynasty, it's entirely possible that it would be them talking shit about our space program.

More university support for Plan 9 sounds like an excellent idea to further some of the innovative ideas in the OS. U. Calgary has some support as detailed here: http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~mirtchov/lanlp9/

First of all there is Charon from Inferno. It supports html, EMCAScript (1.1 IIRC), CSS, DOM (level 1 IIRC) and https. (See screenshot however this one is a bit outdated)

Abaco is the most actively developed Plan 9 web browser. It supports most of html. DOM level 3 development has been started. Mozilla's Javascript engine has been ported to Plan 9 and can be used today for a Javascript shell. This will provide abaco with Javascript in the future. Work on CSS has started but I do not know what has been done or where it is heading. Abaco has been ported to Linux and friends via Plan 9 from Userspace. Package managers are encouraged to make packages of abaco for their systems. (See screenshot)

Then there are webpage, links, mothra, and htmlfmt.

Finally there are text web browsers for acme (htmlfmt for Plan 9 and see this for Inferno)

In other news, SDL now works on Plan 9.

http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~mirtchov/p9/plan9-g uru.gif

I guess many years of using a supposed "better" OS and not having the world recognize it can make you a little cranky, eh?

Somewhat interesting but not nearly as interesting as the theory that an eye problem or digitalis poisoning was the main cause of his use of color and the halo's he painted around light sources. See -> http://www.psych.ucalgary.ca/pace/va-lab/AVDE-Webs ite/VanGogh.html

Seems the author did some other research involving moving things around before this publication:

http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~anand/581site/ass1/ watch.html

Another Comment from http://paradynexus.blogspot.com/

A question from Rob "Xemu" Fermier regarding the lag in scrolling gestures.

[Rob] Very cool technology and a nice approach for demonstrating it. Using contemporary examples like Google Earth and Warcraft 3 is an excellent way of taking relatively abstract concepts and making them real for people. The gap between academia and "real world" software development is often pretty huge and it's great to see more approaches like this that can bridge that gap.

[Ed] Thank you. One of the things that I like most about my research is that computer games such as Warcraft III allow it to appeal to a larger audience. That is, my research is not only of interest to academics, but to the general public.

From http://paradynexus.blogspot.com/ I've been recently reading some forums commenting on work that I did at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories. Most of them are postive (there's usually a couple 'If your system could play some game I'd wet my pants' type comments) . A few conspiracy theorists seem to think that my demo is too good to be true - and someone calls me to task on my Warcraft skills.

First, I'd like to dispel the myth: this work is NOT fake, if you'd like to see exactly how we built this system please read our research paper. When you look under the hood you'll see that this system is really just a simple conversion of gestures and speech to standard keyboard and mouse commands.

Second, people commenting about how this system is not as good as a keyboard and a mouse are totally missing the point of this research. It's not about being more efficient than a keyboard and mouse but rather this work is about making actions public so that others can
double check to ensure the best outcomes.

Many things in life are not like WarCraft III where you can die and play again. Think about safety critical applications such as real life military command and control or air traffic control. Here the collaborative decisions have a direct impact on people's lives. By making actions public on the tabletop others can monitor your activity and ensure that you are doing the right thing.

Warcraft III is really designed as an example of a military command and control situation rather than a replacement for the keyboard and the mouse in the game.

I hope this isn't lost at the end of the thread but if anyone wants to leave an imprint on these boobs who think it's that easy to "prove evolution". I have some email addresses you might enjoy.

Links that have emails for the SSHRC members who rejected Alters application:
http://www.english.ucalgary.ca/faculty/s_bennett.h tm
http://www.ucs.mun.ca/~lfelt/oldindex.html
http://www.uottawa.ca/academic/arts/history/prof_h eap.html
http://www.uqac.ca/aemeir/articles.php?lng=fr&pg=6 5
http://www.economie.uqam.ca/fich_profs_html/prof_r _ruth.html

I was tempted to paste the emails directly but I didn't want to get in trouble for that. If you care about this, send them an email and tell them how you feel and if you're Canadian cc your MP, you never know if your MP might get involved. I cc'ed mine, I hope he does something because this just hurts. I'm without words to convey how pissed I am.