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Close up of hand of God reaching out to Adam from Michelangelo's Sistene Chapel.

black and white picture of The Creation of Adam from the Web Museums page on Michelangelo.

color photo of The Creation of Adam.

Look at the eye contact remember George Clooney's glance in that scene.

Notice the unborn behind God. Isn't that a nice bit of paradox?

My first reaction was to dismiss the hand of God reference as pretentious, but it does add a lot of depth to the movie, and it was finely executed by Clooney and Soderberg.

Funny you mention that. I just heard a local public radio blurb about a Cincinnati company that is applying this to multi-perspon emergency worker and police radio communications and conference calling. Here's an article (not from the same comapny) about using this for cockpit displays. A PDF about NASA research on the subject. (Goes into exactly how we can fool the ears into spatial localization.) A chapter from a book about auditory cueing using spatial localization.

Most of this seems to be geared towards increasing Situational Awareness in the context of aircraft cockpits.

I mean, I know this is cruel and all, but I saw the professor's picture, and the first thing I thought of was that sticker on the side of the laser...

DO NOT LOOK INTO LASER WITH REMAINING GOOD EYE.

I'm sorry! I even went to UCF for a while!

Logitech came to a tech expo we had here at UCF. They had one of these on display and let us try it. Although I couldn't think of any personal need I had for this device, I do know that it seems to work quite well. In my experience with the pen, I didn't notice any wierd glitches that are often present in new technology like this.

Logitech came to a tech expo we had here at UCF. They had one of these on display and let us try it. Although I couldn't think of any personal need I had for this device, I do know that it seems to work quite well. In my experience with the pen, I didn't notice any wierd glitches that are often present in new technology like this.

The CFX-9850G is one I use all te time. The batteries last for years even thoug they are rechargeable. It has a nice BASIC like programming language, a serial port for communicating with a pc or other calcs. And there are millions of programs available on the intraweb to try out.

This strange neologism "midireview" has crept into many serious, even scholarly websites.

"It was the great Barbara Tuchman who pointed out the capital difficulties of writing about the Middle Ages: that medireview chronology is very hard to pin down, that contradictory facts are perpetually turning up in the sources ..." (book review).

"The medireview/Renaissance theme must be adhered to at all times to ensure the success of our event." (Renaissance fair rules

"Lectures on the Crusades and medireview society." (college course sylabus

It makes one long for the Dark Ages.

I doubt that the program will recognize the key though. Only a few keyboards have a Sleep key.

First off, it's bugging me at the moment so I think I'll just talk about definitions a bit. To me, what most people call "art" can be subdivided into two categories: true art and crafts (okay, technically I guess a work of "art" can be placed on a scale between those two points.) True art conveys a message that is impossible to convey through the senses or through language. Consider van Gogh's Starry Night . No matter how many words you speak, there is something conveyed by actually seeing the painting that goes beyond description. Crafts is the use of learned skills to create a representation of something. I always use the example of those copper-plate butterflies you see at craft fairs--most people call that art, but I say it's a craft. After searching the Internet a bit for an example, if I tell you I saw this rusty dragonfly on a rod that you can put in your lawn, then show you one, I think you'll agree it offers little more than its descriptive representation.

Now that I got that out of my system, I'm not sure why I did. I guess I want to focus on "true art." Yeah, that was the point ... When I say "art" from now on, I'm referring to things that are more like true art and less like crafts. That way, the primary value of a work is in its content, not its materials.

I want to focus on art that has similarities to music. Consider short films, for example--a group of people collaborate to create a short work whose value is defined by its ability to convey a message and the complexity of that message. Pretty similar to music. Also, consider stand-up comedy--an individual [or several individuals collaborate to] creates a joke whose value is defined by its ability to make people laugh and its complexity. Also pretty similar to music ... at least in that narrow sense.

What if I buy a collection of short films and make a copy of one of them for myself ... a copy that, despite the change of medium, would otherwise be considered identical to the original. Have I broken existing copyright laws? No, under the provisions of fair use. What if I give a copy to my friend? Well, yes, then--technically--but it's generally not enforced. What if I make a thousand copies and sell them? Well, then yes, I'm definitely breaking the law.

How about the peculiarities of stand-up comedy? What if a stand-up comic tells a joke like, "Aren't you glad plants aren't like people? I mean, how would you like it if some flower came over to you when you hit puberty and cut off your genitals?" [I hope nobody ever did that joke because I made it up ... it's not really very funny anyway.] This comic makes money because I either pay to see the performance or I pay for a recording of a performance. What if I tell that joke to a friend of mine and I didn't give credit to the author--would that be stealing? It's a bit different because the humor of a joke is often just as it's written ... sometimes the performance adds something but it's really just the writing or original idea that has value.

Now, why is it that even the most successful makers of short films and all but the top 20 or so stand-up comics are often on the verge of being broke? The most successful musicians--probably around a thousand of them--can make a decent living just making music. Why is there this disparity? Maybe if there were only a few well-paid musicians, I'd be willing to shell out cash for their higher quality performances. Hmm ...

The second [and much shorter] point I wanted to make is about fair compensation. I take artistic photographs as a hobby, and I think it would be great to make a living at it ... say a good living ... US$150,000 for instance. I doubt I'll ever get there, but I think that would be just swell.

What if a moderately popular artist wanted the same thing ... let's say they were popular enough that each year they sell a million CD's and they have four people in the band. To pay each member of the band $150K, it would work out to $0.60 per CD--and that's if they never performed live. If the material cost of the CD is $1 each (which is par with what you'd pay each for 1,000 CD's) and you've got to pay marketing people and some others (what?--maybe another $500,000 total or $0.50 each copy) and there's a 20% markup by the record stores, the end price is still only $2.52 ... now where does that other $12 to $18 go? If CD's were all three bucks, would that half-hour of tinkering around on your computer to make a copy really be worth it? Hmm ...

That's pretty much how far my thinking on the topic has gone in this direction so take it as it stands in all its conclusion-free and solution-free glory.

after wading through 30 posts telling this guy to get rid of it all, i feel i have to pipe in.

i have a weekend hobby doing video performances for parties and clubs. the environments i work in are probably similar to dorm life - dirty and prone to chaos. my setup involves a couple computers, projectors, playback decks, cameras, mix boards, switchers, modulators, amps, midi instruments, the occasional game console and roughly 281 linear miles of cable - all to be connected together, installed in a venue, run all night in a room full of drunken idiots, and torn down again before dawn. in doing this, i've learned a few tricks to deal with the rougly 40-50 connections that need to be made each time i setup.

CABLE TIES ARE YOUR BEST FRIEND

can't say it enough. buy em in bulk. get a couple pair of diagonal cutters to cut them off with. if you have a unit that has 2 or 3 or more cords, ties the cords together every few inches so it can be handled as 1 cord. go to your local hardware or auto parts store and buy some split loom tubing. it's that bendy plastic tubing with a slit run down the length of it that covers all the wires under your car's hood. if you are planning on it being semi-permanent, but still easily removeable, staple cable ties into the wall and afix your wires to the mop boards with those ties. and when you're not using a particular cable, wrap it up in a loop, cable tie it, and throw it in a box or bag. if every cable in that box is cable tied, you'll never have to deal with the rats nest it will otherwise certainly become.

if it's a complicated setup, and you have the time, try labling both ends of every cable. you can get a good and cheap label printer from target for $20. label the jacks the cable will plug into while you're at it so you'll be able to do it in the dark (or by black light, strobe lights, or bic lighters).

buy yourself a nice switch unit to run the whole thing. either a decent receiver or an outboard switch will allow you to have one source or one destination for every cable. i ebayed myself a 10x10 av switch for $100, but i'm running quite a few outputs in addition to inputs. having enough inputs will also prevent the frequent reconfigurations that take your nice cable setup and turn it back into the spaghetti it wants to be.

and i couldn't go without mentioning this site showing you how to cheaply make great looking and great performing audio and video cables. you can make cables 10 times nicer than monster cable for 1/10th the price.

I worked on a terrain database analysis tool, called ZCAP,
that was funded a few years back by U.S. Army STRICOM
and the Defense Modeling and Simulation Office
We distributed the application (and still do) in a complete package
that included a number of supporting free source applications, such as gnuplot
and tcl/tk. We handled the combination of free source, (no longer)export-restricted
software, and proprietarty libraries by loosely integrating
using system calls under a tk-based gui. Not very clean, but there
is a lot of good code in there, and I'm planning to gpl it in the near future.

(Hey you got to root for your school!!!) Nice to see University of Central Florida ranked on a list....even if there isn't a NCAA in the title. Go UCF virtros

I love that site very much. Fortunately, in the USA, there is no penalty for this picture. Wife like too! Come see pretty my wife at website: here click

Xin Bai

----

"The left side is bank and the right side is bookstore. What am I doing here?"

I think several (highly modded) contributors to this discussion are confusing
the concepts of information bandwidth and frequency bandwidth. Ultra-wideband
refers to the bandwidth in the frequency domain, which is only indirectly
connected to the concept of information bandwidth, in that a wide band in
the frequency domain translates to narrow pulse in the time domain. Coding
techniques also strongly affect the ultimate information bandwidth of the
system. UWB is nothing like IEEE 802.11b,
which operates in the narrow 2.4 GHz - 2.483 GHz band.

I have been working on a project for US Army STRICOM,
in which we are using 8 UWB devices manufactured by
Time Domain Inc. to perform position location. These devices
operate at 1.9 GHz center frequency with a 2 GHz bandwidth,
which translates to a 500 ps pulsewidth.
We have a short conference paper on UWB simulation, accepted for presentation
to the 2002 IEEE Antenna and PropagationSociety Symposium,
which you can access
here. Speaking in general and rather simplistic terms, the information
bandwidth of such a system would depend of the time frame over which you
will allocate these 500 ps slots to listen for the transmission of 1 bit
of information. For example, if we choose a 5 ns time frame, then we
could theoretically obtain 200 Mb/s information bandwidth, while (ideally)
allowing for 10 channels of operation. Of course, the previous analysis
neglects the need for redundancy, and you may want to choose a time slot
over which to listen for a pulse different than the pulsewidth itself, but
I think the discussion gives one a good idea about how to relate information
bandwidth to frequency domain bandwidth in a simple communication system.

After collecting 60 Gb worth of mp3s, I switched to almost strictly shn format
over 2 years ago. Here is my reasoning:

1. Stick with a lossless format if you can afford the bandwidth and storage
space. Plan for the future, when bandwidth and hd space will be much
more plentiful.

2. I can definitely hear the difference between lossless and any compressed
format at 128 kb/s (that annoying wavery sound), and even at 256 kb/s (barely)
on very delicate passages and high-end speakers.

3. Also, if you want to reprocess the music (dehiss, dehum, equalize, normalize,
respatialize, etc) you experience a much more noticeable degradation in the
sound if you start with a lossy format.

4. shn is the standard format for trading music.
It is a lot less work to store in shn then have to decode and reencode every
time you make a music trade.

For lots of good links on shn format, see my trading page at
http://www.vsl.ist.ucf.edu/groups/vtb/TradeList_ 20 01-11-25.html

(Now that I've come this far, what the hell, trade requests here

.
;-)

However, you may not need a degree with quite so much theory. From your question, you already have a job, and you're just interested in improving your salary. In this case, a lighter course of study (like MIS) would probably be sufficient.

However, if you're interested in moving to another company (and if your current employer is more interested in some vague measure of qualifications than your actual results, perhaps you should examine your options), you need to consider what potential employers will look for.

While many companies will hire you simply because you have a degree, many others are much more interested in your actual qualifications, as demonstrated in your experience, references, and even an entrance exam. (My current job was contingent on an entrance exam, administered by the technical lead of the project.)

Of course, while your current job is technical, you may be interested in a more managerial position. In this case, an MIS would be more appropriate, and more impressive to a potential employer. In fact, your technical experience and expertise, coupled with a managerial degree, sets you up for a technical management position.

Get the degree for your plan. (You do have a plan?) If you want to go into management, go MIS. If you like your current company, but just want to pump your salary with the least amount of hassle possible, go for a CIS. But if you really want to get down and dirty in a technical position for the rest of your life, go for the CS.

You could also talk to a school counselor. They love this kind of stuff.

Judebert

We're out of explosives. What we need now is a plan!

Real programmers don't eat quiche. Real programmers don't even know how to spell quiche; they eat Twinkies, Coke and palate-scorching Szechwan food.

Wassily Kandinsky was one of the pioneers of the abstract art. He made some very coloured paintings.

...reinforce the elite/idiot problem. The fact is, that until people all have the same brains and the same learning ability we will always have elites/ignorant. Just like there will always be rich and poor.

In most of the United States the only way you can graduate from college without taking a single science course is to major in elementary education.

Well, here in Florida the requirements for an elementary school teacher (K-3) are listed
here. In summary...

STA 1060C Basic Statistics using MS Excel or

STA 2014C Principles of Statistics

AST 2002 Astronomy or

GEO 1200 Physical Geography or

GLY 1030 Geology and its Applications

BSC 1005L Biological Principles Laboratory or

GEO 1200L Physical Geography Laboratory or

PSC 1121L Physical Science Laboratory

Granted, this cirriculum will not produce someone who is going to develop a cure for cancer, but it does introduce them to the scientific principles. Remember, the goal for teaching teachers is teaching them HOW to teach, not necessarily what to teach.

By the way, my wife is currently taking this program and is being told by the advisor that she needs to complete up to Calc 3, Physics (with calculus), and Chemistry 2 if she is going to meet the department's requirements. I've seen business majors get away with less.

And do we really want to train all of our kids to be engineers and scientists? That would be a hellish world, indeed.

The problem I have with your statement is... well, I could care less about assembler code! The fact of the matter is that the only people that should care about it, or need it are the people that are writing the compilers, assemblers, linkers and loaders.

Granted, you can learn a lot about the nuts and bolts of the computer through Assembler language, but it's all about abstraction level. I wouldn't even begin to be able to tell you how to write a binary search tree in Assembler. I could do it blindfolded in Java or C++. The bin search tree is a simple ADT compared to others.

It's like this, if i know there's a function(or a method), and I know the X number of things that I have to pass it, and I know what it returns, do I have to muck with HOW it does it? Hell no! That's the beauty of java and any OO language. In assembler, you're almost guaranteed to have to muck with it. And muck with it for each different type of architecture you build for. The higher level languages let you program without all the tedious details.

Basically, in order for anything to be admitted in court you have to have a clear chain of posession and be very sure of your methods. You do all of your work on disk images or clones whenever possible, using MD5 and SHA1 and other ways of proving the clone is identical before proceeding (more confirmation the better).
But, one interesting thing is that people seem to be a bit afraid of digital evidence. Most of the criminal cases apparently result in confessions if you find good enough evidence...

Basically, in order for anything to be admitted in court you have to have a clear chain of posession and be very sure of your methods. You do all of your work on disk images or clones whenever possible, using MD5 and SHA1 and other ways of proving the clone is identical before proceeding (more confirmation the better).
But, one interesting thing is that people seem to be a bit afraid of digital evidence. Most of the criminal cases apparently result in confessions if you find good enough evidence...

SNOWY is a system that "reads" the World Book Encyclopaedia and stores each fact about a concept into a hierarchic memory based on that concept. It's sufficiently sophisticated to be able to realise that "The bear digs up the nut" implies that the bear eats the nut, while "The miner digs up the coal" doesn't imply that. You can then ask it "what eats nuts" and it will reply correctly. (At least, this is my impression - I haven't used it, sadly.) As I remember it can fully understand 50-60% of the sentences in the bits of the encyclopaedia that it has been commanded to parse.

The language it works on is fairly simple, but is nevertheless text designed for humans as opposed to computers. Systems like this could be a good bridge between language and semantic based representations.

This is the best link I can find, unfortunately.

There are also, of course, dozens of systems designed to work on English text that has been specifically created to be computer-parsable, but still readable by humans.

I'm incredibly sceptical about all this sort of technology, but if the systems continue to evolve, the agents might be able to glean much of their knowledge from existing web pages.

... Another concept of interest on this topic is Null Convention Logic. Here is a report to the NSF who apparently paid for some level of research on this.

"In reality, there's very little difference between the two majors"
Nothing could be further from the truth. I have a degree in Computer Engineering. There is a great difference between CS and CE. The CS track would stress algorithm development, mathematical analysis, computational theory, etc. The CE track however varies everso slightly from the EE track. The differences between the EE and CE degrees are just a few classes. I did not have to take Tri-phase power, EM fields, Electronics 2, or DSP fundamentals. I instead took Computer system design 2, Engr sys software, Data Structures, and a couple of "computer" related courses as opposed to general "electral" courses. A CE is nothing more than a specialized EE. A CS degree lacks many if not all of the major engineering courses. The main point is if you want to program independant of the system or the solution, analyze the how efficient an algorythm is, etc. then CS is the route. If you want to work, engineering solutions, either for or with a computer, designing and or implimenting design, CE is the way to go.

The Unversity of Central Florida. We've been doing the ACM for about 15 years now. Regularly win our regionals or place in the top 3. We are also considered a top 25 school for Electrical and Computer Engineering according to the College Board (the SAT/GRE "guys").

And there we are, #15 this year (out of >>2,000 teams) -- right next to MIT, Carnegie Mellon and Virginia Tech. Plus, a brief history of UCF's world rankings ...

• 1997: #16 (out of 1,100 teams)
• 1996: One of the 43 world contestants (out of >1,001 teams)
• 1995: #19 (out of >900 teams)
• 1994: One of the 35 world contestants (out of 628 teams)
• 1992: #7 (out of >600 teams)
• 1991: #16 (out of >500 teams)
• And plenty of world rankings in the '80s (world rankings prior to 1991 not available on-line).

But people in Florida spit on us and, until recently, we used to get 1/10th of the funds of UF or FSU. We have more programs and students than Florida State (let alone 10x the graduate programs) and are barely behind Florida! Add in the fact that we have the 2nd largest research park in the US and it makes me wonder.

It wasn't until our Football team moved up to I-A (in 1996) and started playing big schools (and nearly beating them) that we finally got some money proportional to our size. Very sad that sports seems to drive everything.

Again, no respect!

-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith

Dammit that should be HERE

I guess it helps to hover those links in preview mode :|



mcrandello@my-deja.com
rschaar{at}pegasus.cc.ucf.edu if it's important.

All "Contemporary" Logic Design is OUT OF DATE!!!

Traditional, clocked Boolean logic is flawed as numerous design failures have begun to occur - e.g. the original designs of the AMD K5/6, IBM PPC620, Intel Coppermine, etc... which set back product releases anywhere from 6-36 months

Why? Synchronizing millions of gates at near-GHz speeds is next to impossible. As such, even the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) knows that the industry must return to asynchronous and "clockless" logic as laid out in its 2001, 2003 and 2005 milestone plans.

We at Theseus Logic have the answer. This post if VERY COINCIDENTAL since we just annouced a STRATEGIC ALLIANCE with Motorola (Press Release Here) to bring our patented Null Convention Logic (NCL) technology to Motorola's 8 and 32-bit product designs.

Like other async technologies, NCL benefits fro async's inherit no/low-power, low-EMI emissions and high EMF tolerance. But UNLIKE TRADITIONAL ASYNC DESIGNS, NCL not only can co-exist with clock boolean logic in the same circuit, but you can use off-the-self sync design tools to design in NCL (via the use of a post-processor for many industry tools like Synopsys).

And lastly, as clocked boolean designs have to be redesigned for each feature size reduction (e.g. 0.25um -> 0.18um, etc...) and voltage variations (e.g. 3.3V vs. 2.5V, etc...), NCL circuits require LITTLE OR NO REDESIGN when new technology becomes available! As such, we call NCL designs "Timeless Solutions(TM)" because they deliver on both the delay-insensitive nature of async *AND* NCL designs can be re-used over and over again for a log period of time!

Again, visit Our Web Site to learn more about NCL technology and design. Note, content is slightly out of date, but the technology is nothing new. The technology was invented in the '70s, researched in the '80s and has finally become viable in the '90s.

The University of Central Florida has graduate programs in NCL design and technology which usually involve Theseus sponsorship and/or employment at Theseus (both during and post-educational).

-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith